The Daily Stoic - Daily Stoic Sundays: Ryan Talks with South Carolina Football About How to Practice Stoicism

Episode Date: May 17, 2020

Today’s podcast features Ryan talking to the University of South Carolina Gamecocks football team, discussing how you can use Stoicism in a practical way to keep learning, make (and stick to) your own standards, and make the most of your defeats.This episode is brought to you by WHOOP. WHOOP is a fitness wearable that provides personalized insights on how well you’re sleeping, how much you’ve recovered from your workouts, and how much you’re stressed out from each day. It’s the ultimate whole-body tracker for someone who needs an all-in-one solution. Visit WHOOP.com and enter STOIC at checkout to save 15% on your order.This episode is also brought to you by GoMacro. GoMacro is a family-owned maker of some of the finest protein bars around. They're vegan, non-GMO, and they come in a bunch of delicious flavors. Visit http://gomacro.com and use promo code STOIC for 30% off your order plus free shipping.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better.Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/ryanholidayInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/ryanholiday/Facebook: http://facebook.com/ryanholidayYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoic, something that can help you live up to those four that can help you live up to those four stoic virtues of courage, justice, wisdom, and temperance. And here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview stoic philosophers, we reflect, we prepare. We think deeply about the challenging issues of our time. And we work through this philosophy

in a way that's more possible here when we're not rushing to work or to get the kids to school. When we have the time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with our journals, and to prepare for what the future will bring. Raising kids can be one of the greatest rewards of a parent's life. But come on, someday, parenting is unbearable. I love my kid, but is a new parenting podcast from Wondry that shares a refreshingly honest and insightful take on parenting. Hosted by myself, Megan Galey, Chris Garcia, and Kurt Brown-Oller, we will be your resident

not-so- so expert experts. Each week we'll share a parenting story that'll have you laughing, nodding, and thinking. Oh yeah, I have absolutely been there. We'll talk about what went right and wrong. What would we do differently? And the next time you step on yet another stray Lego in the middle of the night, you'll feel less alone.

So if you like to laugh with us as we talk about the hardest job in the world, listen to, I love my kid, but wherever you get your podcasts, you can listen ad-free on the Amazon Music or Wonder E-Ap. Ego is this sort of timeless force that is constantly getting in between us and what we want to do. And it's getting, it's taking this goal, this brass ring we're after, and it's moving in a little bit further away each time. And so if ego is so destructive, right? Why is it so common? My theory is that ego is sort of a defense mechanism. It's a, things are hard, things are scary. We don't have a lot of good examples of what a humble, confident leader looks like. And so because it's scary, because we're far from home, because we are trying to do things that we don't

have a lot of good examples for. He goes like a blanket. It's a it's a it's a shield. It's a way to make us feel less scared. Rather than owning that feeling, we put this sort of falseness in front of us. In alcoholics anonymous, they say that ego stands for edge in God out. The idea being that instead of sort of being humble, instead of being small, instead of appreciating

the reality of our situation, we take up ego as this sort of protective armor, but it's not armor because it makes us more vulnerable in the long run. Instead of ego, I want you to have confidence. Confidence is strong, confidence is earned, confidence is based on information. It's not based on that voice in your head.

What we're gonna go through is sort of the three phases that we happen to be in in life, right? We're either aspiring to do something, we're either in the middle of great success, or we are experiencing adversity. And every person is at one of those three phases at some point in the course of their life. And we're actually constantly rotating through all that.

You, it was, you were aspiring to play college football. Now you're here playing college football, but tomorrow you could be benched, you could experience some injury, you could struggle in school, you could struggle on the playing field. We're going to be at one of those three phases. And ego is distinctly different

at each one of those phases, but equally problematic at all of them. And so we're going to go through why ego is a problem at all of those phases. So equally problematic at all of them. And so we're going to go through why you go as a problem at all of those phases. So aspiring, this is when we are trying to do something in life. When we are starting out, when we're engaging on a journey, when we're trying to get better, when we're trying to improve.

And I think this begins with taking up what we call the student mindset. How can we learn? How can we, instead of thinking that we already know something, how do we focus on what we learn? This is Kirk Hammett right here. He's in this mediocre heavy metal band called Exodus. Maybe the name is familiar to some of you

who know heavy metal. But Kirk Hammett is chosen out of this band to be the lead guitarist in a band called Metallica. Metallica is like the up andand-coming band at this time. So basically this is like getting drafted, right? Or this is like getting recruited to play for a university like this one. You're pretty good, but now you've made it.

And so what does he do, right? He's made it, does he celebrate? Does he go buy a nice car? Does he party? No, he does the opposite. He goes out and he finds the greatest guitar teacher that he could possibly have. He's good, but he wants to get much better.

And he knows that the learning curve that he's on is about to get much steeper. So he hires this guy named Joe Satchriani, who himself is one of the greatest guitar players of all time. And what Satchriani says is that it's not that him it wasn't good. It's that he had this set of skills, but he couldn't quite weave them all in together.

And so for two years, he's like officially a rock star now, right? He's in this huge band, he's making a ton of money, they're recording an album that's going to go on to sell millions of copies. And every day, he's leaving the studio and doing what? Going to have more lessons and how to be better at this thing that he's already one of the best at. And this is an essential way to keep ego at bay. You focus not on how good you are, not on what

you've done, but on how much better you can get. And this keeps us, the student is humble, the person who thinks they've mastered something is not humble. Epic Titus, one of the Stoke philosophers, you would say, it's impossible to learn that what you think you already know. You guys were the best players in middle school. You were the best players in high school. You were the best players in college, right? But as you go up each level, what happens is the level of competition gets much higher. So if you think that you're great, if you think to go back to this epitome of school, if you think you know everything, if you think you've got it,

the problem is now you can't adjust to this reality where you actually don't quite have it, right? Where there's a lot left for you to learn. And so if we can say that actually, no, I don't know everything, there's so much left for me to learn, we have the ability to get a lot better. Ego is this sort of impediment to improvement

because it doesn't believe that it needs to improve. Ralph Waldo Emerson, every man I meet is my master in some point, and in that I learn from him. I've talked to coaches and teams all over the world, and what I think is always interesting is that the head coach usually sits in the front row just like this. Not because there's very, there's usually very little I can teach that person.

He probably knows more about this than than I do. But he's in the front row taking notes, not just because he wants to set a good example, but there is maybe a 1% chance that there is something that I could pass along. So what what grades have is not a sense that they know everything, but actually a hunger and awareness of what they don't know and an eagerness to go find that from any and every source. Socrates is considered the wisest man in the world, what's his secret?

He was aware of his own ignorance. He was aware of what he didn't know. And so again, this is what we want to cultivate in ourselves. So I don't like this idea of faking it till you make it. I think that another word for that is lying or fraud. I like doing the work. I'm going to make it happen with my own work, with my own effort. Bill Bradley, when you are not practicing, remember someone somewhere is practicing and when you meet that person, they will beat you, right? Ego thinks that it already is the best. Humility says, I'm going to work until I am the best.

So there's the innocent client, that's where we're all aligned. But then it's precisely when things start to go well, that now Ego says, well, I'm not getting enough credit. I'm not getting enough recognition. Why are they talking to me this way? Don't they understand all the things that I've accomplished? And so now Ego starts to tear at the bonds that once kept a team together.

The disease of me can strike any winning team at any moment. That's what Pat Riley was saying. So you have to be constantly on guard for this. And I think the job of a leader is to manage your own ego, right, to keep your own ego, right, to keep your own ego and check, to be aware of egos around you, to make sure that you're not bumping into other people's. You're not threatening them.

You're not overriding them. You're not making them feel small and insecure. The goal here should be egolessness, part of one larger unit, right? That's what a team is. If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, who am I? I think that's the essential question. And then of course, I think where Hugo really gets us

in trouble when we're successful is that it whispers in our ear that we don't have to do the right thing. That we can get away with anything, that we're special, that we're above the rules. This is certainly Tiger Woods' problem, right? He felt like the rules didn't apply to him, that it could get away with anything that were special, that were above the rules. This is certainly Tiger Woods' problem, right? He felt like the rules didn't apply to him, that it could get away with anything, that he was special because of how great he was.

This is Marcus Aurelius. I write about the ancient still looks a lot in my books, and he's the Emperor of Rome, but he's also this philosopher. And so when he takes over as Emperor, what does he do? The first thing he does is he anoints his brother, co-emperor.

So a matter, your name's Captain of the team. This is an incredible honor. Is your first instant? How do I share this? How do I bring someone up with me? But that's what he did. And this is a great line. He says, just that you do the right thing,

the rest doesn't matter, right? Whatever the conditions, whether you're tired, whether people are looking, whether they aren't looking, whether you're going to be criticized for it, what matters is that you do the right thing. Doesn't matter what he goes telling you, what matters is, is it the right thing? And then there's this moment where after Marcus becomes emperor, the empire is very heavily in debt. And there's a lot of things in emperor can do in this situation, right? He could levy taxes on the poor,

he could invade another country, could print more money. He could do things that would basically hurt everyone but him. And that's actually not what Marcus does. The first thing he does is he starts, he walks through the imperial palace, all his possessions, and he begins pointing at all the most valuable possessions that the emperor owns, and he begins pointing at all the most valuable possessions that the emperor owns, and he asks his men to sell them.

So he starts selling off the palace furnishings to pay down the debt. He says, why should the Roman people suffer if I'm not going to feel the pain first? And I think that's what a leader does. They do the right thing even when it costs them. And in fact, they're willing to take the hit first before anyone else.

And he has this great line in meditations. He says, let's waste no more time arguing what a good man is like. Let's just be one. And that's what we have to do. It particularly in our moments of greatest success, because that's what it reflects most on us. And then, of course, there are gonna be moments of failure.

We're gonna have success, and there's gonna be setbacks. Maybe setbacks inflicted by our own ego. Maybe totally unfair setbacks, right? That's the reality. Life kicks our ass. It just does. Murphy's law, what can go wrong will. We are gonna be publicly embarrassed. We're gonna be criticized.

We're gonna be attacked. Things are gonna go wrong. We're gonna fail. We're gonna lose. We're gonna to be criticized, we're going to be attacked, things are going to go wrong, we're going to fail, we're going to lose, we're going to mess up. Now here's where ego is really toxic, right? Because if your ego was there on the way up whispering in your ear, that you're special, that you're better than everyone else, that you winning a lot says that you're a great human being, or that having a lot of money makes you the best person around. Well, now what happens if those things are taken away, right?

If what you love is what people are saying about you on Twitter, do you actually love that they're saying things about you on Twitter and you love how nice they're being? Well, then how do you handle it with all of a sudden they turn on you, right? And so if ego is there taking a lot of this into being our identity were really fucked when things aren't going well. And so, Ben Harowitz is one of the most successful

investors of all time, Airbnb, Dropbox, Uber, multi-billion, billions of dollars in investments. He says, the hard thing isn't setting a big goal. The hard thing is what you do when you start to fail, when you start to experience difficulty. When the dream turns into a nightmare. And that is going to happen in life. We are gonna have setbacks.

We're gonna get hurt, we're gonna get benched, we're gonna get criticized, we're gonna drop a pass, right? Things are going to happen. And then, how do we respond? This is really where we prove who we are. You gotta be tough, you gotta stick with it. Of course, you gotta have determination and grit. And then it's also important to remember

that for the most part, these are very first world problems, right? We are very, like I think what we wanna do is practice gratitude. Ego is always about how can I have more, how can I be better than everyone else? But what humility and confidence can focus on is what we're grateful for,

that we're born right now, that we live in this country, that we live in a time of peace, that we've been given all the gifts that we've been given. We can focus on what we're grateful for rather than on what we've been deprived of in this very moment. But what Warren Buffett talks about is the idea of having an inner scorecard versus an outer scorecard. So an outer scorecard is winning, attention you're getting, social media followers, it's being promoted, it's being recognized, it's externals.

But an inner scorecard is a sense of, are you getting better, are you putting in the work, are you proud of what you're actually doing? Is this something that's in your control or is this something outside of your control? And for the richest man in the world, clearly very successful by any external metric to say that an inner scorecard is more important, I think that's something we should listen to. The Bahamas. What if you could live in a penthouse above the crystal clear ocean working during

the day and partying at night with your best friends and having a B-100% paid for. FTX Founder's Sam Bankman Freed lived that dream life, but it was all funded, with other people's money, but he allegedly stole. Many thought Sam Bankman Freed was changing the game as he graced the pages of Forbes and Vanity Fair. Some involved in crypto saw him as a breath of fresh air from the usual Wall Street buffs with his casual dress and ability to play League of Legends during boardroom meetings. But in less than a year, his exchange would collapse.

An SPF would find himself in a jail cell, with tens of thousands of investors blaming him for their crypto losses. From Bloomberg and Wondering comes Spellcaster, a new six-part docu-series about the meteoric rise and spectacular fall of FTX and its founder, Sam Beckman-Freed. Follow Spellcaster wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, prime members, you can listen to episodes Add Free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today.

Okay, here's Nick Saban raising a national championship trophy, right? What's he doing? He's not smiling. And is that because he's incapable of being happy? No, what he talks about is, even when he's winning, what he's thinking about is whether he did everything the way that he set out to do them.

Did he win not by the score board, but did he win by the team following through on the standards or the game plan that they set up? John Wooden, he said the same thing. He said winning is not determined by the box score at the end of the game. Winning is, did we play our absolute best game? And I know that's easy to say.

It's very hard to live, right? Can you measure yourself by an internal scorecard of your own standards, not your external ones? So this happened to me on one of my books, actually with Ego as the enemy. So the most copies out of any of my books, it should have debuted at number one on the National Best Cellar List, but it wasn't there.

What happened? We don't know, maybe you got screwed over, maybe you got edited, maybe just gotten forgotten, but I'd earned this thing, and then they didn't give it to me. So am I gonna feel like that book is a failure because I didn't get this piece of recognition? No, because what I take pride in is that I know

that I wrote the very best book that I was capable of writing in that moment. And so pride for me, where I'm putting my identity is not on the outcome, but on the input, right? And that allows me to never be knocked down by these external things. So it's like, we must establish our identity at everything we do.

Notice it's not about outcomes, it's about what we do, what we put in. And so if you can take satisfaction in that, it not only insulates you from bad times, but it prevents you from being puffed up by your success. So what if you do everything wrong and you still win? Is that really a success?

I would argue, no. I'll give you an example of this. So this is Tom Brady's draft card. It's drafted in 2000. It's probably in better shape now than he was in 2000, but he's taken the 199th pick in the sixth round. So in many respects, this is probably not just the greatest draft pick in the history of the NFL.

It's maybe the greatest draft pick in the history of sports period. It might be the best hire in the history of business. To take the greatest quarterback of all time to get him in the sixth round, you'd think the Patriots would be ecstatic, right? How great are we at drafting that we picked Tom Brady in the sixth round?

Well, actually, they're not ecstatic. I mean, of course, they're very happy that they get Tom Brady for so cheap. But what they focus on is the fact that they took this guy in the fifth round. This is Dave Stochelski. I'm sure he's a very nice person, but he doesn't even make it out of training camp.

So actually the director of personnel for the Patriots keeps a picture of Stochelski on his desk for many years as a reminder, not that he blew it, but to not let the ego go to his head, not to congratulate himself or to take credit for something, that if he was really being honest, he didn't fully understand when he did it. If the Patriots just sat there and said, yes, we're amazing, we drafted Tom Brady in the sixth round, they're not going to get better at scouting talent. If instead they sit there and they go,

how the hell did we wait through five rounds before we took this guy? Now they're going to think about this and they're going to get better draft in each year as a result. And so Marcus really would say what we want to do is accept success without arrogance and to let failure go with indifference. We want to let things go whether people are saying we're fucking amazing or whether people are saying that we're trash, right? Because they don't know what matters is what we know, what matters is the standards that we set for ourselves and what we're doing.

I think the other thing that's gonna happen in life is we're gonna have moments where we're not in control, where we have where we're stuck, right? Maybe you're red-shirting for a year, maybe your plane is delayed for two hours, maybe you're benched in favor of someone else, maybe you're forced to retake a class. These are going to be moments where we're not in control, where we have what you might call dead time. As an example, this is a guy named Malcolm Little. He was basically a little level criminal in Harlem.

And he ends up getting caught. He goes to jail, sentenced to 10 years in a penitentiary. He spends the first, basically, year of that sentence being very angry about the fact that he's in jail and not liking it, of course. But then he asks himself, well, what am I gonna do with this time?

He could become a better criminal in jail. He could sit there and watch the seconds of his life take away, or he could use this time. So he ends up, he goes to the prison library and the commissary, he buys a notebook and he checks out a dictionary and he begins to transfer word by word, the dictionary. Basically teaches himself to read this way, teaches himself a vocabulary this way, and then he starts reading everything you can get his hands on. He reads history, he reads philosophy, he reads religion, teaches himself a vocabulary this way, and then he starts reading everything you can get his hands on. He reads history, he reads philosophy, he reads religion, and it's in this process that Malcolm little is transformed into Malcolm X. He would say from then until I left that prison in every free moment I had, if I was not

reading in my library, I was reading in my bunk, he becomes Malcolm X. Why does Malcolm X wear glasses? It's because he actually wears out his eyes reading in the dim light of prison. People would ask him where he went to college because he was so smart and he said, books, that's where he went to college. He just read, he transformed himself.

He took dead time, time that he was not in control and he turned it into what we would call a live time. Right, he made use of every possible second. And so one of the thoughts I would leave you guys with is ego says this is unfair, I hate this, I don't want this, I just have to wait this out. Confidence, humility says, okay,

what can I accept about this situation that will allow me to move forward? Instead of spending one second complaining about the hit that blew out my knee or the fact that someone got chosen over me, what I'm going to focus on is how I can use this position that I'm now in to move forward to get better in some way. How can I turn this into a good thing that happened to me? They've done some interesting studies on elite athletes where actually after an injury, they come back and they're better in some way.

The academic term for this is post traumatic growth. And so the idea being that the athlete is injured, yes, and it would be better if they weren't injured, right? They never had a weak knee or they didn't blow out their elbow or whatever it was. But maybe they spend that time becoming a better teammate or reevaluating why they're playing the game in the first place. Or if you know what Tommy John surgery is, right, where they take the tendon from one elbow

and put it into another elbow. So the player actually, because they blew out their arm, they come back with a stronger tendon to begin with. This is post-traumatic growth. But also, how do they elevate or change their game to compensate for this injury that they have? How do they, you know, because now let's say they can't run this way, they change how they run and they get better in a new way.

As players get older, this is what they have to do. They don't have explosive strength any more but they're smarter, they're they know the game better, they're improving, they're in a different way. So how happens to be better for it?

The stoics, they have this a more faulty, which trans of fate. And Marcus really uses, the image he uses for it, he says it's like fire. He says everything you throw in front of a fire becomes fuel for the fire. The person who is hungry, who can make use of everything that happens to them,

that's the person who gets better and better. So the last thing I would say, and, is how do we keep ego in check? I think one of the things we gotta do is we gotta get off social media as much as humanly possible, right? So this is Glacier Bay in Alaska. It's very hard to be obsessed with yourself

when you are looking at the beauty or the majesty of something much bigger than yourself, right? Meanwhile, you're staring at the alerts of your phone and you do feel important and you do feel distracted and it's hard to think about the big picture. When you are meticulously monitoring everything that everyone is saying about you, that's a problem.

When you have this device in your pocket, where you tweet and say everything that pops in your head, particularly when you're angry, when you're upset, when you've been hurt, right? That's a bad position to be in. We often say things we regret out of ego, but instead of saying them privately, we've now said them in front of all of the entire world

on social media, and that's where we get ourselves in trouble. So I urge you guys to sort of step out of your bubble to step away from technology, to even step away from football, have something, the opposite of football that allows you to center yourself on a regular basis. I live in Texas on a small farm

and every morning I go for a long walk, I watch the sun come up. And in this moment, I'm not me, the author, I'm not someone who is ambitious, I'm just out there sort of equal to everyone else in the world. And this is an important

centering experience for me. And Neil deGrasse Tyson is saying, when we look up at the sky, we feel very small, but we also feel connected to something larger than ourselves. This is my donkey, his name is Buddy. I bought him on Craigslist, he cost $100. And when I walk out and I see him, he's just standing there, he just stands there.

He just doesn't do anything, he just stands there. And it's funny, when I walk out and I see him, he's just standing there. He just stands there. He just doesn't do anything. He just stands there. And it's funny. When I first got him, I would just sort of laugh. Like I thought he was just really dumb. That he just stands there. He doesn't do anything. And then I realized like, this is his job.

Like as long as he doesn't die, that's a pretty successful day for him. And so he's not beating himself up. He's not comparing himself against other people. He's not whipping himself. He's not comparing himself against other people. He's not whipping himself. He's not checking how many Twitter followers or Instagram followers he has. He's not fighting the other donkeys.

He's just fully being himself. He's experiencing sort of complete stillness and completeness, even if only for a few minutes. I keep this coin in my pocket. It's his memento, Mori. And there's a quote from Marcus Aurelis, he says, you can leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think. I think to me, that's the ultimate antidote to ego is remembering how short life

is to remember how lucky we are to even be alive in this moment. And then to sort of fully be present and appreciate all of it and to not waste the second of it thinking that I'm better or superior or worse than any other person alive. So thank you guys very much. Hey everyone, great news. The eBook edition of EGO is the Enemy Is On Sale

this weekend for just $2.99 on Amazon. And to make it even better, we're offering a discount on Ego is the enemy themed stuff in the daily stoke store. Get 20% off. Our Ego is the enemy pendants and challenge coins with the code Ego discount. Or you can get an Ego print for just 10 bucks

when you buy a matching pendant with a code Ego print. This is a perfect chance to take that reminder of why ego is the enemy of who we wanna be, of what we can do, of collaboration, of happiness, of wisdom. You can't learn that, what you think you already know is what Epictetus said, and he's right, you can go to store.dailystoic.com,

and just search ego, and you'll find that ego is the enemy. Challenge coin, pendant, ego and you'll find that ego is the enemy. Challenge coin pendant print and you get ego is the enemy. Number one best seller on Amazon for just $2.99 right now. Thanks. You well. Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoke early and ad-free on Amazon Music, download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free with Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts.