The Daily Stoic - Don’t Underestimate This | Ask DS

Episode Date: October 19, 2023

We don’t know a lot about Seneca’s friend Lucilius. From Seneca’s letters though, we get the sense that he, like many of us, was often overwhelmed by his responsibilities. He was a Roman knight. He was the Governor of Sicily. He owned a country villa in Ardea. We can assume he had friends and family vying for his time too.--And in today's Ask Daily Stoic, Ryan speaks and answers questions for Signal Advisors on Stillness is the Key, Challenging people to do one thing each day that positively moves your life forward, and more stoic wisdom to a group of independent financial advisers. ⏳ You can view our entire Memento Mori Collection at dailystoic.com/mm✉️ 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.

I'm Rob Briden and welcome to my podcast, Briden and we are now in our third series. Among those still to come is some Michael Paling, the comedy duo Egg and Robbie Williams. The list goes on so do sit back and enjoy Briden and on Amazon Music, Wondery Plus, or wherever you get your podcasts. Bosch Legacy returns, now streaming. Maddie's been taken. Oh God. His daughter. Maddie!

He's in the hands of a madman. What are the police have been looking for me? But nothing can stop a father. And we want to find her just as much as you do. I doubt that very much. From doing what the law can't. And we have to do this the very way. You have to. I don't.

Bosch Legacy. Watch the new season, now streaming exclusively on Freevy. 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 we're 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 happen to be someone there recording.

Thank you for listening and we hope this is of used to you. Don't underestimate this. We don't know a lot about Seneca's friend Lucilius. From Seneca's letters though, we get the sense that he, like many of us, was often overwhelmed by his responsibilities. He was a Roman knight. He was the governor of Sicily,

he owned a large country villa. We can assume that he had friends and family vying for his time soon. One of the best pieces of advice from Sennaka was about how to manage it all. Each day, he told the Silius, acquire something that will fortify you against poverty, against death,

indeed, against other misfortunes as well. Just make sure to do one thing each day, Sennaka, was saying that positively moves your life forward. That's it. It's not a lot, but it adds up. That's the secret also of those who are highly productive. On the Daily Stoke podcast, the author Paul Kicks talked about how he wrote the saboteur,

an incredible book option by Steven Spielberg, while he was working full-time at ESPN and tending to two newborns. It worked for Seneca, it worked for Paul, it'll work for you. Just try to make a little progress each day. Don't underestimate the power of small but consistent contributions to your work,

to your relationships, to your family. Small things, as Zeno said, are truly no small thing because they had up. And look, if you're trying to be a writer and you struggle to make that time, you want to break through like Paul Kicks did, like all writers, including Seneca, including myself, if struggle to do, you might be interested actually in this school new course that Paul has been running. It's called the Storytelling You. People were staring at the blank page like you,

they've taken his course, they've taken the storytelling you and they've gone onto land and dream publications, they've inked big book deals, they've even won national magazine awards. It's not a magic bullet, but it can make you better. If you do the work day by day, step by step, actually someone from the Daily Stoke team, Kristen who is editing today's email took the course, she really liked it and they've been raving about it. So Paul's extending a special offer to Daily Stoke subscribers. He and his team will work with you until you earn back double your investment in the story telling you,

you can click the link in today's show notes or just go to dailystoke.com slash kicks and a redirect you over to the page. I recommend it. I love Paul's stuff. He did a nice profile of me for ESPN, the magazine a couple years ago He's been a great podcast guest and he's a big fan of the stoic So I think they will find some stoic advice in the course as well Check out the story telling you at dailystoic.com slash kicks K.I.X We're just click the link in today's show notes I had a grind. I was speaking schedule a couple months ago. I was in like three states in three days. I got in very late. I didn't know exactly where I was going. I just sort of go where the agent told the driver to go and I show up. And I'm at the lodge at Torrey Pines in the Holiak, California.

One of the most beautiful places I have seen in my travels and got up early. I went for this amazing run down to the water, looking out over these bluffs. I'm running. I've watched this guy pull a stingray out of the ocean, which is pretty nuts. And I face time with my kids, I'm showing him as he's reeling it in. Just a beautiful morning, and then I worked, I had lunch while I was reading,

swam some laps in the pool. And then I went and gave a talk. I was talking to signal advisors. It was a, it's a company that works with independent financial advisors. They wanted me to talk to, talk about the obstacle is the way, which I'm always happy to do. And then I answered some questions at the end. Let's just say it was in a good headspace. I talked a little bit about stillness during the talk. And I had, after all the craziness, after the travel, and just a great day, vibing in the right headspace,

performed well, I felt, answered some questions and then I got on a plane and then I made it home before it was too late and got back into the rhythm here at the office and so I'm bringing you my questions. Thanks to Signal Advisors for having me out. Anytime someone wants to bring me to the logit Tory Pines, I am game. And in the meantime, here are some of my answers

to some questions on stoicism and other topics for you to check out. Yes, the idea of renaissance Q&A, and we'll take some donation to the crowd. Cool. As I've mentioned, I've been a long time fan and read so much for what you've done, I've been a lot of time fan-read, read so much for what you've done.

So I know a lot about your past, you know, the fact that you've decided to drop out of college and be your director of marketing in America, parallel and then went on to be Robert Green's research assistant. And I'm curious, you know, we talked a lot today about how success is in a straight line. Sure.

And I'm curious about, you about, did you always know you wanted to be a writer and how did you kind of will that into existence? Like, what was the path that took you to your yard today? Yeah, that's a great question. I do think what sometimes the mistake we make is we look at people end up at a place, and then we look at the path that led them there,

and we ignore all the other paths that they considered taking all the other things they were doing simultaneously go, okay, they got from here to there and obviously it was all meticulously planned and then we try to reverse engineer it from there. So, you know, when people look at micro and they go, okay, you have this marketing thing and and then he switched to ancient philosophy. Obviously, that must have been a dramatic turn. It didn't go that way at all. I knew I wanted to be a writer for a long time. That was one of the things I wanted to do with my life. Then I got really interested in marketing for a while. I had a fascinating and cool career in that world. Meanwhile, I was informed by these philosophical ideas that we're talking about, but I didn't know if I could or how I would write about them. Then I wrote three books while I was still at American Apparel,

then I wrote several more while I had my own marketing company. So in retrospect, it seems clear. One leads to another, leads to another, but in fact, it's doing a lot of things sort of concurrently, and then it's only with time that, you know, and success in one field or another that you sort of winnow things down. And so, I'm, you know, just like an investor

has a diversified portfolio, you wanna have a bunch of different things that you're doing. Obviously, mastery requires a certain amount of concentration, but at the same time, you know, as long as of different things that you're doing. Obviously, mastery requires a certain amount of concentration, but at the same time, as long as these different things that you're doing are informing the main thing, making you better in that way, that's how I think about it. We should be really careful that we don't just buy the narratives of certain people that it's like,

I set out to do this and that's how it happened. It's like more often than not, it was a total surprise to them and the clarity and certainty about it was later, right? Even the decision to drop out of college, I remember, now it was like 51, 49 about it, right? And in retrospect, it worked out, but if it hadn't worked out,

I would have just gone back to school and be talking about how I took a semester off or something, right? Yeah, yeah, super interesting. I'm curious, you know, sometimes the idea to change something or make a certain decision, you know, it comes out of like frustration or a moment where you know, you really feel like you need to make a change. But I'm curious about making decisions when things are going great. Like, you know, your research assistant

for Robert Green, big mentors, like how do you decide to, you're in that situation? How do you decide, okay, if time for me now to part ways with this moment in time? Yeah, no, that is a good point, right? Oftentimes, if you're well paid for something, if something's going well, people are recognizing you for something.

It feels like suicide, like career suicide, it feels crazy to be like, I'm going to stop doing this thing. But if you have a sense of what you want your life to be, where you're trying to end up, what's actually important to you, those things become, I think, a little bit less important, right? So I think sometimes, because people don't know what they want. They most specifically don't know what they want, like, their days to look like, or their life to look like.

It's very hard for them to make decisions, right? Should I keep doing this? Should I stop doing this? Should I say yes to this? And this is also very hard, this is particularly hard when you are successful. You have a lot of inbound, right? And those decisions are, let's say financially lucrative, right? So if you don't know what you want and someone's offering you money to do this and not money, like this thing is risky, there's no money,

and you just sort of end up defaulting or going towards that. And that can end up taking you very far from where you deep down wanna end up, but you haven't spent a lot of time thinking about. I think about those questions. Yeah, I think about lots of sort of offers that I've gotten to do things, things that would have been cool,

things that would have been cool, things that would have been cool in a resume or on a biography, but I go like if I had said yes to this, all these other doors would have been closed, right? And all these other things that are so important to me day to day wouldn't be possible or would have gone away. And so, you know, not just doing things because A pays more than B, or not just doing things because lots of people you know are more excited about A than B, right?

Like when I decided to write this book about philosophy, pretty much no one was excited about it, but me. I, it was meaningful to me, it was the direction I wanted to go. For a second. This would be my third book. The first book about philosophy. Yes, this was the first book that you wrote about philosophy. It was like, what are you doing?

Yes, exactly. My publisher later told me that the only reason they even gave me an offer was they hoped either one. It would be so low that I would be insulted and not accept it. Or that I would do it. It wouldn't work. And then I would go back to the other thing. Go back to being a marketing guy. Exactly. But I knew that wasn't what I wanted to do day in and day out. That wasn't what I wanted to talk about.

I just felt like if I didn't do that, someone else would do it. And I felt like this other stuff that I wanted to do, I felt like maybe I was the only person that could do it. Why obscure Roman philosophy? Like, well, how did that, like, you heard that somewhere or you read a book and you're like, this is the thing that I'm gonna dedicate a lot of my life to, like, watch those.

I mean, I think when you find the thing that, like, turns on a light for you or that, like, really gets you going, that is a rare and special thing. And so, when I first read the Stokes, I was like, what, you know, where has this been? I mean, I was pretty young, so it's not like, it was, it had to be so, I mean, like, what, where has this been? I mean, I was pretty young, so it's not like it was it had to be so, I was probably easily impressed

to a certain degree, but it very much was like what I was looking for, I hadn't found or seen anything like it, and really still haven't. And so it did something for me, and I sort of was motivated by the idea of doing that for other people. And so when you find that thing, I'm not saying it has to be the only thing that you do, but when you find the thing that sort of only you can do,

that's a pretty powerful thing. Or the way that you can do, how do you think about that? Because like, you know, other people can write about so it's lost to you. Like, how do you think about it? I've been thinking about this. So like, every person is by definition totally unique, right? Your, your combination of DNA, it's never existed the moment and time that you were born

has never existed before. You know, the experience that you've had has never existed before. So you are, you know, a black swan, a black swans, you're totally unprecedented in all of human history. There will never be anything like you again. And then what do we do is we do what everyone else is doing, right? We just make ourselves, we dress like other people, we talk the same ways other people, we, oh, you got to go to this college like everyone else, then you got to do this. And then I wrote a book a couple of years ago about the billionaire Peter Tiel, who's this sort of unique character,

who I don't agree with on many, many things, but is clearly a sort of a brilliant mind. It's the first investor in Facebook, I found it, PayPal and Palantir. Anyway, he has this line in his book, zero to one. And he says, I think about this all the time, he says, competition is for losers. And the idea is that if you are competing with other people, one of you will win and the other will lose.

If you are doing something for which you are, only you are suited to do, you're the only one doing it, you by definition win. Right? And so do you want to be better or do you want to be the only? And I think when I, yes, other people have written about Stoke Philosophy clearly, other people write books. But when my book came out, people were like, what is this?

It was like my publisher didn't quite know what to do with it. The market didn't quite know what to do with it. I leaned into what I was interested in, what lit me up, and I tried to do something that if I didn't do, it wouldn't have happened. And so I think that's what you want to think about within the market or industry that you're in. It's not like you have to go be this sort of crazy weirdo, but you have to be, you know, unique inside the space that you are in. I know that, I mean, in For War and For War it's worth me not to tell you this, but I mean, if I read your book, if your name was about a front cover, I would know it's you.

Oh, that's awesome. Yeah, that's what I'm trying to do. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You're hitting it out on the head with that. Yeah. You know, but I think that's true about like artists, like, even like, I think about, this is kind of a funny one, but it's like, when I hear someone on the radio and I know who it is, just by listening, like, you're in the voice, I'm like but it's like when I hear someone on the radio and I know who it is just by this like your voice, I'm like I feel like that's why they're famous. Yeah, that's why people like that's why they're easy to take off like little Wayne you know when little Wayne's rapping in a song. That's why they call him the alien right? He seems like he came here from somewhere else. He's fully formed and he's just different than anything that's ever existed and that's

That's what you want. Actually, I'm wearing Iron Maiden socks right now. The band Iron Maiden has this great quote, the lead singer of Iron Maiden, which is a band, most people in this room haven't heard of or you heard of, it's like this band from a long time ago. And they saw the hundred million albums, the jurist stadiums all over the world, even though they're never on the radio,

they're never in pop culture. But the lead singer had this quote that I think about, he says, he's like, you can only plow one feel at a time. And his point is, we have our field. And that's what we're in charge of cultivating. And, you know, I don't, he says, I don't care what the other farmers are doing. And I heard this story once about Ironman's manager. Somebody came up to him and he said, you know, like, you're one of my heroes in the music business. And he said, I'm not in the music business. Look, I was like, what? He said, I'm in the fucking iron maiden business. And the idea is like, you're not in this space, right? You're in your own space. That only you are

in. And that is why you stand out. That's why you get media attention. That's why you can charge your own prices. Right? If you are doing what everyone else is doing, then it is a commodity and it is a race to the bottom to see who can charge the least amount. But if you're the only one doing it, 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 add free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts. We can't see tomorrow, but we can hear it. Tomorrow sounds like hydrogen being added to natural gas to make it more sustainable.

It sounds like solar panels generating thousands of megawatts, and it sounds like carbon being captured and stored, keeping it out of our atmosphere. generating thousands of megawatts. And it sounds like carbon being captured and stored, keeping it out of our atmosphere. We've been bridging to a sustainable energy future for more than 20 years. Because what we do today helps ensure tomorrow is on. And bridge, life takes energy.