The Daily Stoic - Don’t Be Scared By Things Like This | 10 Stoic Parenting Tips

Episode Date: October 31, 2023

You might think that the Stoics were above silly things like superstitions. After all, these were rational folks, serious people. Certainly, they wouldn’t believe in ghosts, right? They wouldn’t have time for something as juvenile as a ghost story, would they?--And in today's Daily Stoic video excerpt, Ryan talks parenting goals, the most important role philosophy can play in all of your lives is in guiding the example you set for them. In the principles you embody. In the standards you hold yourself to. This is the area in which you can have true multi-generational impact.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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first purchase of 20 dollars or more using the code daily stoic 20. What a life these celebrities lead. Imagine walking the red carpet, the cameras in your face, the designer clothes, the worst dress list, big house, the world constantly peering in, the bursting bank account, the people trying to get the grobby mitts on it. What's he all about? I'm just saying, being really, really famous, it's not always easy. I'm Emily Lloyd-Sainey, and I'm Anna Liang-Rofi, and we're the hosts of Terribly Famous

from Wondery, the podcast which tells the stories of our favourite celebrities from their perspective. Each season we show you what it's really like being famous by taking you inside the life of a British icon. We walk you through their glittering highs and eyebrow raising lows and ask, is fame and fortune really worth it? Follow Terribly Famous now wherever you get your podcasts or listen early and ad free on Wondery Plus

on Apple Podcasts or the Wondery app. Welcome to the Daily Stored Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. On Tuesdays, we take a closer look at these stoic ideas, how we can apply them in our actual lives. Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy. Don't be scared by things like this. You might think that the Stoics were above silly things like superstitions.

After all these were rational folks, serious people. Certainly they wouldn't believe in ghosts, right? They wouldn't have time for something as juvenile as a ghost story, would they? Well, as it happens, we do have a ghost story involving the Stoics, one that has been passed down for more than 2, 2000 years, in fact. It involves a Theonidorus, a fascinating but little-known man who I've profiled in lives of the Stoics. As an advisor to the Emperor Augustus, a Theonidorus was living in a large mansion that was purported to be haunted. On the very first night in the house, a Theonidis was visited by a ghost, was clapped in

the irons and dragging heavy chains. There it was, the exact apparition he had been warned about. What did he do? Did he flee? Did he fall to his knees and pray? Not this stoic. Instead, Athena Doris, in the middle of a writing session, motioned for the ghost to wait and returned to his work.

Only when he had finished did he get up and follow it into the courtyard where it suddenly vanished. Sensing that this was a message, Athena Doris marked the spot where the ghost had disappeared. He returned to tidy up his desk and then he went to bed. In the morning, he had workers return to the spot and ordered them to dig. Beneath the dirt, they found ancient bones in chains,

which Athena Doris had re-barried with honors in a public funeral. The ghost was never seen again by him or any other resident of the house. Did this really happen? Who knows? But there is a reason that a Theonadorus later told this story to the young Octavian, who is reportedly easily scared

and a big believer in the supernatural. He was trying to teach Octavian who became Augustus a lesson. Stoics must always keep their head. Don't be scared by things that go bump in the night. Don't even be thrown by unexpected or surreal situations. Even these can be resolved with reason and courage by calmness and fortitude and logic. And even if you believe in silly things like ghosts or superstitions, you can't let your life be ruled by them. You must be in charge, no excuses. We can't let anything rattle us today, tomorrow, whenever. Happy Halloween, everyone.

Nothing challenges you quite like having kids. If you were trying to sum up all of Stoke Fossey in one word, you could do a lot worse than presence. There's a story about Kobe Bryant, a journalist who had interviewed him a lot, had reached out to Kobe Bryant like maybe two weeks before he died. But Kobe Bryant texted back, no, I'm head's down with my girls right now. Just being where you are while you're there.

That's the thing that Marcus are really struggling with as the emperor that epictetus is struggling with as the emperor that epictetus is struggling with as a slave. It's Santa Caesstrugling somewhere in between and all of us here in the very busy modern world are struggling with too. But that decision, that decision is everything. The decision to say no to the extraneous, to the extra spend time with our family. That choice is everything.

You don't know if you're going to tragically die in a helicopter crash in two weeks, but you might, which is why you have to cherish these moments. Most of the stokes do have children. Not only that, I think some of their best insights come from having kids and specifically address how to be a better parent. I'm Ryan Holliday, in addition to writing these books about stokes we have spoken in the NBA and the NFL, special forces operators and sitting senators. I'm also a parent, I have two young children. And in today's episode, I wanna talk about what the stove can teach us about our most important job,

raising great kids, being a great parent. And it turns out there's quite a bit. And the book you highlight stories about the importance of modeling the behavior that you want your children. When I grow up and say, don do as I do do as I say. It should be the opposite. It should be the opposite. You have a quote from Robert Folgram. It says don't worry that children never listen to you. Worry that they are always watching you. The great John Wooden had a poem in his

office and it said a little fellow follows you and he tried to make all the decisions to his work with the idea that his son was always following behind him watching, observing, learning, how to be. So we can't just talk about our philosophy to say we have to embody it, we have to show it. It doesn't matter what we say if our actions show our kids that we don't mean it that it's not actually important. that it's not actually important. Oh. There's moments though that we have where you're like, oh, I'm so glad I was there.

Of course. For this. Yes. Daughter of becoming a teenager. Son. Hey, what's up, buddy? Oh, I'm not tough day to day. You did.

Well, you're already as a parent going. They told me they had a tough day. They shared. They let me see. They gave me access and they shared that. Oh my gosh. And then, I don't know, and then this, this, this, and all of a sudden, you're in a conversation where, forget me in a way. If it was 30 minutes later, you might not have got that.

Or if you were looking at this thing, yeah, five minutes later. Or if you were there and doing something else. And then they asked a question. You know, this beautiful and awesome questions that we get as parents, the ones that go into our ears and through our brain and tell us this is a great opportunity for a great answer because my answer is shaping the lens with which they will see the world through for the rest of life.

And we can pull off that answer. And a way is not pop, pop, pop, if they can go, ah, yeah. Consistency as a parent, I've found to be kind of the most rewarding things from a child's perspective. It's very hard to get into a mind of a four-year-old, of an eight-year-old, but when there's consistency at hand, like you can really see the response from them.

You can see if your kid's routine is disrupted. You see how disrupted they are. If you normally do things a certain way, or if your life is chaos, you see how it manifests in their behavior, we're not that different. I realize that if I don't have a routine, my behavior suffers and my willpower suffers and my equanimity suffers.

And so I think everyone should be on a sleep schedule, everyone should be on a routine. It's a human thing as opposed to a kid thing. I think letting them fail, that's a big deal, where you get these helicopter parents, a lot of people talk about that, everybody knows what that means. Letting them take some chances, let them fall down.

Even when you know you want to protect them a little bit, it's like, for instance, I used to wake the kids up in the morning to get them ready for school. Now, I'm like, no, wake yourself up. Set your own alarm. You're at that point. And this is my seven year old. Like, I want them to take control of their lives,

knowing that I'm there for them. I think you might have recommended the book to self-driven child, which is a great book. And that's another thing, too. I think as a parent, if you're not educating yourself, getting the daily dad and reading about parenting, asking great parents, asking people that love their parents, I had a big question.

I asked, how was your childhood growing up? They're like, oh, I love my dad. I love my mom, but you're why? I look at parenting just like I look at my job. It also being a husband too. Those are the three things in my life. I'm my job, my husband, and my parenting. I want to be really, really good at those.

And I'll educate myself. I approach it like a job. Like I want to do research on how right in my journal about it. I want to know how I can be the best I can be at it. I want to know how I can be the best I can be at it. If you think back to when you were a kid, what appeared to you to be the best part of about being an adult?

No more school. Our parents didn't have to carry around heavy books or do homework. We never saw them applying to get into this school or that one. It's sort of sad that by and large, we show our kids that education stops. That while adulthood isn't always fun, one perk is that you no longer have to go to class. That graduation is a final destination.

It doesn't have to be this way. There's the story of Epic Titus teaching one day when his students arrive or caused a commotion in the back of class. Who was it? It was Hadrian. The Emperor. Hadrian's example clearly had an impact on his successor and adopted grandson Marcus Aurelius. Late in his reign, a friend spotted Marcus heading out carrying a stack of books.

Where are you going, he asked? Marcus was on his way to a lecture on stoicism, he said, for learning is a good thing even for one who is growing old. I am now on my way to sexist the philosopher to learn that, which I do not yet know. If you want your kids to value learning, if you want them to never stop furthering the education you've been investing so much time and money and worry into, then we have to show them what an adult committed to lifelong learning actually looks like. We have to show them that we have not graduated, that we are not on summer break, and we have not arrived at the final destination

of education. Wisdom, they must learn, is an endless pursuit. I know this woman, her name is Dolores, she's 94. I call her my grandmother, and I was talking to her the other day, and she was telling her her big regret was that when her kids were little she took pride and how clean her house was and she said people used to come over and go it doesn't look like you have kids. And that meant something. Mm-hmm. Was her point that she didn't let her kids have a little room to play and her get dirty? Her point was how hollow that seems in my perspective.

Today people are going to be looking at Instagram Reels and get a false version of what people's houses look like. They don't realize that just out of frame is all the same toys that are on the floor in your house. When I look at my house, I want it to look like I have kids because I do have kids. And they're a central part of my life and existence. There's this great expression that any fool can learn by experience.

We wanna learn from the experience of others. And talk to people who've been through it around way on the other side. And you realize a lot of the things you're valuing is a parent, things you're feeling guilty about as a parent, things you're comparing yourself to against and other parents, they will not matter to you in the end. So the key to parenting is presence. You have to give them lots of presents. Not that kind of presents. The other kind, PR, ES, ENCE presents. You have to be present.

When you're with your kids, be with your kids. Don't be somewhere else. Don't be on your phone. Don't be thinking about something else. Don't be trying to rush through it. When you're with your kids, be with your kids. Presence is the key to good parenting. I think we talk about this all the time with just general parenting and like the longer we're in this the more that we realize it that every single thing is just a phase and

there's longer phases and shorter phases but the more you realize that it's all a phase like the easier it gets to get through the hard ones. It gets easier to get through the hard ones and it should make you take the ones that you're in a little bit more seriously, the good ones. You only get three years of doing this thing or three months of doing this thing. And like it's going to be gone. So if you resented it or you took it for granted or you were excited about what the next thing was, you only get the thing that they are for a day, a week, a month.

It's all transitory and femoral and changing. When your kids are babies, you say, I can't wait for them to start walking, but what doesn't occur to you because you're excited about the next thing is that that means they stop crawling. You don't realize that the thing you're excited about, being excited about it is inherently rushing you through the thing that's now that you will miss.

What's the best piece of parenting advice you've ever been given? When I went on BookTour for Steel Like An Artist, my wife was pregnant with our first kid, and I asked everyone for parenting advice. It was all different. Everyone had a different piece of advice, and I usually asked people on planes

when I discovered they were parents. There was one guy I looked over at me and put a seatbelt on and he said, strap in. And that honestly has been the best advice. It's a good metaphor because for me, the problem with a lot of parents and particularly fathers, if you start out with all these visions of what you think your child is going to be, like, I'm going to teach him how to throw a baseball and teach him a ride of bike and teach him all this stuff. All this wisdom you're going to impart to them.

You guys set yourself up for tragedy. Think less about imparting wisdom or like teaching directly and more that I'm going to create a healthy learning environment for them to become the human that they need to be. It's almost like don't think about being a classroom teacher. Think more of like being a librarian. classroom teacher think more of like being a librarian. Some parenting books I love, there's a self-driven child, there's a better man,

the good news about that behavior, how to raise kids who aren't assholes, to get to failure, reading for our lives, expecting better. They're all really good, but I found that reading them once wasn't nearly sufficient. What I needed as a parent was a thing that I check in with and read every day, seeing parenting as an ongoing process. And that's actually the idea in the new book. If you've read the Daily Stoic, this is basically the sequel. The Daily Dad 366 meditations on parenting love and raising great kids can pre-order it now at dailydadbook.com. And it is the collection of the wisdom of these books, plus the books in the philosophy section and all the books I've ever read, all the advice

that I've ever gotten, all the things I've learned as a parent. I hope you like it. Check it out. When I wrote The Daily Stoke eight years ago, I had this crazy idea that I would just keep it going. The book was 366 meditations, but I write one more every single day and I'd give it away for free as an email. I thought maybe a few people would sign up. Couldn't have even

comprehend it a future in which three-quarters of a million people would get this email every single day and would for almost a decade. If you want to get the email, if you want to be part of a community that is the largest group of stokes ever assembled in human history, I'd love for you to join us. You can sign up and get the email totally for free. No spam, you can unsubscribe whenever you want at dailystoic.com. Sasha email. Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic early and ad-free on Amazon Music, download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free with Wondery

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