The Daily Stoic - Do You Really Have Time For This? | GitHub Q&A

Episode Date: May 30, 2024

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Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. Well, on Thursdays, we not only read the daily meditation, but we answer some questions from listeners and fellow Stoics who are trying to apply this philosophy just as you are. Some of these come from my talks. Some of these come from Zoom sessions that we do with Daily Stoic Life members or as part of the challenges. Some of them are from interactions I have on the street

when there happened to be someone there recording. Thank you for listening. And we hope this is of use to you. Do you really have time for this? It's amazing how much time some people think they have. They're so sure they're going to live into their 80s, so sure that next week that tomorrow is coming that they're willing to spend today arguing with strangers on the internet. They'll hand over an hour and their brain to talking heads on the television outrage factory.

They'll seek out conflict and arguments, going back and forth over text and email, passing up time with family for a fight with a co-worker. We've talked about Elon Musk before, the embodiment of this modern ethos. The guy has more money than God, more actual problems than any human can handle, and he's volunteering to fight in the culture wars? Let's contrast this with the bit from comedian Tom Segura that we've talked about over at Daily Dad. When he had kids, he said he gave up arguing with strangers.

He gave up arguing with his own parents, too. He'll just tell people whatever they need to hear to end the conversation so we can go back to what he actually needs to focus on, his family, his career, his own issues. Epictetus said that if someone lives like a philosopher, they won't have any room in their lives for fighting because they've learned what's up to them and what isn't, what's their affair and what isn't.

And so it should go for us. Philosophy should teach us both the truth and the pointlessness of arguing with other people about it. Philosophy should equip us with the tools to get things right and the strength to not need to be right. To accept, to tolerate, to sidestep squabbles and intractable arguments. Philosophy gives us urgency and perspective. We know that time is short. We know what matters and we know what doesn't. Take the first step on the path to a calmer and more fulfilling future. Check out Taming Your Temper, the 10-Day Stoic Guide to Controlling Your Anger.

You can click the link below or you can just go to dailystoic.com slash anger. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another Thursday episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. So every once in a while as I'm recording these intros for these things, we're running like a talk or Q&A, like the date or the name, like I'll have totally forgotten about it. The date will just bring me way back. If you don't remember October, 2020, man, it really felt like what was gonna happen in the world. Things were falling apart, COVID was raging, we're about to go into an election.

I remember when COVID first happened, all these events kept getting canceled and then they rescheduled to the summer, then they rescheduled to the fall and then this is right when the Delta variant is happening. So COVID's now spring. So everything switched to virtual. And I was supposed to do this talk for GitHub,

which is a really cool company owned by Microsoft. It's a hosting platform for software developers. And they wanted me to talk about resilience and emotional leadership, you know, how stoicism could help us in this moment like this. I think I actually gave the same talk twice. It was like two different virtual groups, like different groups.

Anyways, I remember things were crazy. Now getting flooded back with memories of that as I record this intro. And afterwards I did some conversations. They were talking about high performance, talking about strategies for focusing on what's essential. And then someone asked a question about preparing for the worst without losing your grip on joy,

which to me is one of the most essential stoic questions there is. And I'm excited to bring that to you now. Thanks to the folks at GitHub for having me. I can't believe that was a little less than four years ago. I mean, my son just celebrated his fifth birthday on Tuesday. So yeah, it's just crazy.

The pandemic, I don't know about you, but it totally screwed up my sense of time and space. It's weird to even feel nostalgic for it, but I do in a way. I remember who I was then. I remember what I was doing then. I guess I would have been working on Courage is Calling then. So it's also seems crazy that Justice is coming out here

very, very shortly, which by the way, you can pre-order at dailystoic.com slash justice. I'm almost done with this series and I guess my son will be six when I finish. And I hope you stick around until then also. So here is my Q&A with the folks at GitHub. There's a whole host of questions for us to work through and we do have the benefit of time. So I'm going to come around here and and because I'm

a bit of a fan boy myself I'm going to reserve the right for the first question. In my estimation, I mean, high performance so often, and we're talking about high performance and resilience for high performance, right? But high performance so often when you ask people, so can you describe it? Can you tabulate it? Can you put it down on a piece of paper?

And the things that they articulate really do sound a whole lot like just being an adult. And so for me, high performance can really also just be a part of removing layers of hyperbole and dysfunction and too much movement in the day and getting to this idea of doing things or doing simple things savagely over the long term and doing them really, really well. So simple things done over the long term almost always get you to great places. But from your perspective, what have you seen?

Like how does high performance arise out of simplicity? Yeah, it's interesting when you look at high performers, if you've ever had, you know, like lunch with a billionaire or gotten to you know See a professional athlete before a game. It's amazing how simple their lives are How few things they're actually doing they might have a to-do list for the day of three or four items Or an athlete might just have sort of a routine that they go through that prepares them for the game And then they kind of just go do it. So I've come to sort of express this whole sort of bucket as under the word of sort of stillness, which is an interesting concept that pops up in the Eastern

philosophy and the Western philosophy. Like when I think about when I've performed the best, when I go like where did that come from as far as like a chapter I wrote or a talk that went really well or an idea that I had. I wasn't doing 50 things at the same time. I wasn't multitasking. I wasn't busy, I wasn't rushed. And even, as I was saying, when I look back at like my output, which sort of objectively is probably more

prolific than most of my peers, it just comes from showing up and focusing on these core set of things every single day. And the good news about an athlete, an athlete has a brief amount of time that they're here on this planet. If you're a programmer, if you're a writer, if you're an executive, actually, you know, your work is compounding. The skills are accumulating, your sense of mastery is getting better as you go. And there's not that same expiration date.

So really setting these right practices into place and then benefiting from the passage of time, just showing up every day, is a really, really powerful force. Yeah. You gotta trust it. Yeah, I know that you've worked very closely with Robert Greene over the years, and his book, Mastery, was just instrumental

in my development of the idea of being patient and letting time do its work. And so many people, I think, we've sucked in the ideas of technology and neoliberal politics and getting there fast, especially this idea of a fast exit. And it's kind of like, what's my five-year goal for myself as though there is an exit plan for who I am as a person?

And people wanna like burn themselves in the process, but that becomes the very thing that undoes them. Everything from your contribution, the lives of the Stoics and of course Robert Greene's work and this pursuit of the idea of mastery is being patient and slowing down and monotasking our way to excellence. Yeah you get this question a lot like what's next for you? As if, like, for me, my answer has always been like, I want to be doing this, but in five years, I want to be 50 times better at it. Right?

So I think a lot of people are thinking about, like, here's where I want to be in the future. Here's this sort of arbitrary goal, like, for authors, I want to sell this amount of copies, or I want to be promoted to this, I want to be making this amount of money. Really, what I think about is like, what's a process that I love that I can commit to that like, hey, if I can get this kind of flywheel spinning, who knows what sort of can be the results of that?

So I think really falling in love with the process that you love, I think comedy can be the results of that. So I think really falling in love with the process that you love, I think comedy is a great example of this. You see these comedians who sort of come out of nowhere 20 years into practicing it. And that's because it's been the accumulation of skill and mastery and expertise and relationships. It's all of those coming together

in one sort of explosive thing. So, you know, obviously, look, there's certain things like sports or music or acting that that maybe sort of favor the young. But most of what we're doing actually favors time. So like, I've been lucky, you know, my first book came out when I was 25, you know, I hit number one for the first time at like 31, 32. It's been great, but that's not what gets me excited. That's not what I take pride in. What I think about is, hey, if I don't screw this up,

if I don't fall off, if I just let this natural process go, it's like, you know, you look at your retirement savings at 30 and you go, it's not that it's impressive. Now you go, hey, if this math holds up at 62, all have X. And so I think about it's like, hey, if I let this run its course, what's gonna be happening then?

And then that's what I think, that's what I'd like people to think about. And that's what I was trying to talk about with habit. Yeah, yeah. And you did, you nailed it. And this is why there's so many of these questions here that are aligned to this. Ana Amas Romero, she nailed the question really

succinctly. So, I'm going to use hers. It says this for this idea of essentialism and habits and doing less better. The red thread that runs through it is just boiling things down to what is most meaningful to you. Now, it was an Australian geriatric nurse, Bonnie Ware, who really famously has kind of published the top 10 regrets of the dying.

And again, not to be morbid, but it's these ideas of like final chats and no one says stuff like, I wish I'd burn more hours in the off it. I wish I oriented all of my decisions around what other people thought of me. They always boil things down to the most simple aspects of life. Her question is this, if that is the case,

what are some strategies for focusing on what is most essential? How do I work it out and how do I practice that? Sure. So one of the things I think about is not like, where do I wanna end up as far as like, here's what I want the end of my life to look like but I think actually like the good life is made up Of good days, right? I think everyone would concede that so I try to think about what do I want my day to look like? Right. What do I want my life to look like day to day and I try to build my life around that and then I go

Does this thing get me closer or further away from that day? So you know, as you get more successful, you get all sorts of opportunities, you have all sorts of obligations, you have all sorts of distractions and interruptions that come your way. I think about does this get me closer or further away from the life that I want to have? So I have a really good I have to find it. But I but I also have just a good intuitive sense for like what a good day in my life is like.

The point is, if you know what you if you like, don't have a life that you want that you don't like. So you're trying to take these vacations all the time. Have a life you like. So you don't want to take breaks from it. And that's actually been a weird thing for me with books. Like I actually so like writing that as I've as I've become more successful as a writer, I've liked publishing less because publishing blows up the life that I like.

You know what I mean? It's actually taking me away from the work that I like. And you know, I think about you know, that story about Bob Dylan not wanting to accept the Nobel Prize. He's like, I like what I'm doing. I don't want to fly to Sweden. And you'd think that that would be this wonderful honor. But actually, if you if you like your life, you don't want to go do this thing you don't want to do. Yeah, it bubbles up in my thinking that the moment as well, this acceptance of who you are as well. And there's something that has occurred in my life

is that it's less a process of choosing for myself and also settling into the things that have always been there and coming to terms with who I am and finding the balance between making myself and accepting myself. There was this moment when you talked about Dylan, this really seminal moment that I think about often where Bono and I'm going to go to the chat because

some people might know the answer to this. Does anybody know Bono's real name? What's Bono's real name? Somebody like Google that real fast for me. And the fact that I don't know this, I think, is demonstrative of the story itself. So Joshua or Paul or let's call him Greg, right? Because there's this guy from Ireland who grows up and has a hunch about what is possible for himself. And then there comes a point in time where he says, you know what, the person who I've been is not up to this task. I'm gonna have to become somebody new. He changes

his name and in my mind there's this moment where he says to his mom and his dad and to all his friends, hey from now on call me Bono and he puts sunglasses on and he wears sunglasses around the town. And you could imagine there's this moment where people are like, you're an idiot, but there is this moment where you have to choose for yourself, even if it means stepping outside of the pattern of all of the people around us. Where do you find the strength

to make those decisions for yourself? That's a beautiful story. The Greeks had this idea of a daemon, that you had sort of a guiding genius, you know, an angel, whatever it is, something that was sort of calling you to be who you were. But most people ignore this.

And so I dropped out of college when I was 19 years old. So it was the scary thing. It was the thing my parents didn't understand. It was a thing my friends didn't understand. It was a thing, you know, you weren't supposed to do. But what I learned doing that was, well, it worked out, obviously, but but what I learned doing that was like, Oh, you can step off this train anytime you want. And and not only can you step off, you can step back on anytime you want

to that the risk of these sort of experiments or changes are mostly in your head. And, you know, we talked about ego, the flip side of ego is confidence, right? And so I've got to imagine that that wasn't the first time that Bono experimented that tried something or just that, you know, the ability to be a little bit foolish and try something like that is what allows for the artistic expression down the line. So the point is you have to kind of practice and cultivate those sort of experiments, those

trials, you know, those risks of putting yourself out there. It takes courage to do that. But what you learn is that it actually takes less courage than you think, because the more you do it, the more confidence you have in yourself and your ability to say, I'm going to be able to figure this out. Even if it blows up in your face and everyone laughs at you, you go, oh, the worst case scenario is people I don't care about are laughing at me.

I can deal with that. Yeah, yeah, and again, it returns us to your point around small things or small steps relentlessly made rather than major chess moves, because everybody feels like it's gonna be some major chess move that's gonna transform their life, and they overlook and underestimate the power of small daily habits.

The line from Jeff Bezos is like, I don't believe in bet the company bets. The idea is like, I'm gonna take risks every day, rather than play it safe and then get to the point where I have to put it all on the line. It's actually riskier to be risk averse than it is to take some of these ordinary day-to-day risks and get comfortable with doing that.

Yeah, we were musing with this idea as we set up our conversation with the idea of full stack resilience is that resilience isn't resilience until resilience is tested. And I find that to be the case for so many of the truer virtues, right? Love isn't love until love is tested and faithfulness isn't faithfulness

until faithfulness is tested and so on. But it's one of these things that you just, you don't know whether it's there until you put in the heat. Ironically, it's the heat that also produces the resilience that people need. And so this mix to bring us back to the conversation of resilience in a really defining way about how do we use our life and our daily small steps and habits and practices to orient us.

I mean, Brianna, she asked this question and it kind of captures a line that runs through so many of these chats is in the preparation, you said this that we hallucinate, you know, even using memento moris, like how does one prepare for the worst without losing group of joy? And some people are also asking about this classic stoic question around like,

were they just depressed? Like, did they go around like bemoaning all the things that could freak out and all the worst things that could happen? It doesn't seem to be the case. But how do you walk that line? No, it definitely wasn't the case. I mean, the Stokes were still ambitious.

You know, Seneca is one of the great writers of his time. Marcus Aurelius is the most powerful man in the world. Zeno creates this new philosophy out of nothing. Epictetus was a slave. You know, he endured like like Roman slavery, one of the worst fates you could ever have. But he comes out of the other side of it. He has a family. He he finds freedom.

You know, he becomes this great philosopher and an influential man of history. So although there might be some depressive elements in the writing, really the journaling of the stoics, the reality is that their lives show us that these were people who lived, who loved, who took risks, who had fun, who enjoyed things. So I think I think there's a couple of things. So one, again, the stoic is is going to be pleasantly surprised that it didn't go south, rather than aghast and appalled

that the world doesn't care about your plans. You know what I mean? So I think what we're talking about is how an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. You know, it's being ready is a better strategy than being delusional. I think the other thing that I would tell people that I think is important is like,

look, what we're going through right now is real and it's in many ways unnecessary and frustrating and heartbreaking and challenging in all these ways. But what it should remind us is of two essential things. One, do we have what it takes to get through this? Absolutely, because look at what our ancestors got. We are the descendants and heir to a tradition of people who survived horrendous things or we wouldn't be here.

Right? Figuratively and literally, we are the descendants of those people. The other thing I would think about is you survived it so far. What is this telling you about what you're made of, the kind of adversity you've got. Like sometimes a team has to be dealt a few, you know, heartbreaking losses to really come together and develop that grit that they need to be great, right? Sometimes you need a failure.

Sometimes you need to get yelled at to really figure out what you've got, get a sense of your metal and then be able to proceed. So I think one of the things we should take from this is, is like, look, things have been good for a while, and now they're not so good. But if, you know, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger as the line goes.

But if we can endure this, what are we not able to endure? And I think that that, you know, the silver lining here is that this is making us stronger. We are lifting a very heavy weight for a very long period of time and that's making us stronger. Yeah. Yeah. There's so many powerful concepts here. Some of the hubbers have been talking about this concept of hormesis and the deliberate

act of almost microdosing tragedy and trials and or figure like figuratively, but you know, actually for some like microdosing poisons so that if calamity came that it wouldn't ruin them. But also for the hubbers on this particular call from beautiful parts of the world. And this is what I raced over to the bookshelf for. We've only got a minute left, but I picked up, you know, Carl Jung's work and over there is the

Dao De Ching and we've got the Book of Five Rings. There's the Bhagavad Gita there. And for across this region of the world, I think this is the way that this philosophy and approach to life is really important distinction to make is that it's not just something that a bunch of Greek dudes wearing sheets, you know, like conjured out of thin air,

but it's something that is reverberated through the human condition and it's found its way through all cultures and it's bubbled up in the lives of people. Where I like the fact that it sits most is that it's just in normal life and it locates resilience as a true part of the human condition, not some extraordinary feature of the magical or water dipped few. Round us out with the fact that, you know, resilience is more or less a natural state for humans. Well, I love your point. And look, I think the fact that a lot of these ideas appear independently in all these schools is sort of proof of their validity. To your point about hormesis, one of the things that I would say a great way to end end because we've been talking about habits is to me, one of the best ways to practice

this is in a physical practice in an endurance sport, in martial arts, in CrossFit, whatever it is for you. If you're not actively training your body and if you're not in the process of training your body, training your mind to be able to be in charge of your body, I think you're doing yourself a disservice and you're making yourself weaker and more vulnerable to the twists and turns of life. So I'm not saying you do this to get six pack abs or to lose weight, although all these things would be nice. But the point is, you know, having something that challenges you every day, whether it's, you know, I take a walk in a weight vest in the morning, I run and swim and exercise in the afternoon, but

part of this is just a practice for preparing me for a really hard set of months on a book. It's to prepare me for a bad review, it's to prepare me for working with no sleep, it's to prepare me for all the difficulties of life and to know that, hey, I know what I'm capable of because I've tested myself and actually I'm actively testing myself every single day by pushing myself to get better, to push myself past my limits and have that practice in your life is really important. And I think that's why you see it, you know, in CEOs and leaders. If you're not exercising, you're not taking care of yourself, you are both physically but also mentally and spiritually weaker than someone who is. If you like The Daily Stoic and thanks for listening, you can listen early and ad free

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