The Daily Stoic - Err On This Side | Ask Daily Stoic

Episode Date: October 7, 2022

One should understand, or at least empathize with, the difficult position a politician quite often finds themselves these days with the proliferation of divisive, hot-button political issues. Take Utah’s governor Spencer Cox and transgender youth in sports. Cox couldn’t easily decide what side to take on the issue–or at least he didn’t immediately act when the subject came before state lawmakers. Instead, Cox sought counsel from trusted mentors. He read books to understand both sides as best he could. He read books about figures he admired, who had to make tough choices in analogous situations. Then, after much circumspection, he decided to vote with his conscience:“I struggle to understand so much of it and the science is conflicting. When in doubt however, I always try to err on the side of kindness, mercy and compassion.”📕 Ryan Holiday's new book "Discipline Is Destiny" is out now! We’ve extended the pre-order bonuses for the next week—among them is a signed and numbered page from the original manuscript of the book. You can learn more about those and how to receive them over at Dailystoic.com/preorder. ✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and Facebook See 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 Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. But on Fridays, we not only read this daily meditation, but I try to answer some questions from listeners and fellow stoics who are trying to apply this philosophy, whatever it is they happen to do. Sometimes these are from talks.

Sometimes these are people who come up to talk to me on the street. Sometimes these are written in or emailed from listeners. But I hope in answering their questions, I can answer your questions, give a little more guidance on this philosophy. We're all trying to follow. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wunderree's podcast business wars. And in our new season, Walmart must fight off target, the new discounter that's both savvy and fashion forward.

Listen to business wars on Amazon Music Music or wherever you get your podcasts. Air on this side. A politician can't decide what side to take on a hot, divisive political issue. They seek counsel from trusted mentors. They seek books to understand both sides as best they can. They read books about figures they admire who had to make tough choices. But in the end, they must decide to vote their conscience.

I struggle to understand so much of it and the science is conflicting, one politician said, when in doubt, however, I always try to air on the side of kindness, mercy, and compassion. That's what Utah Governor Spencer Cox said after he vetoed a ban on transgender students in youths for its. Now, perhaps you immediately disagree with this decision, though it's worth reflecting on why something that affects so few people, listen, it's such a strong response, but we can all benefit from applying this general

rule. Let's go back to a moment in ancient Rome that many Christians might know about. In 165 AD, a philosopher named Justin Martyr is arrested after a disturbance. Justin had dabbled in stoic philosophy and then converted to Christianity, which was then a crime against the Roman state. Given a chance to repent by a judge, he declined, and so he was sentenced to a gruesome death by flogging. That judge was rusticus.

Marcus Aurelius' philosophy teacher, the one who introduced him to the writings of Epictetus. A slate. What the Romans knew and believed about religion was at that point conflicted in contradictory and difficult to understand. The concept of freedom of worship was foreign and difficult to understand. The concept of freedom of worship was foreign and strange to them. The law was clear and heavy. But still Rousticus could have been merciful. He could have seen the gross mismatch between his enormous power in the

single person who thought and lived differently. He could have been kind as Senka's brother Gaya was to St. Paul. He could have aired on the side of Liv and let Liv. Alas, he did not. He could not and would not bring himself to make the admittedly more difficult decision to be fairer and kinder, more just than was required by the letter of the law. And this tension between what is just and what is the law has always existed. But it is of particular relevance today with the bevy of laws related to personal liberty being passed in state legislators and adjudicated in the highest courts. The solution to the puzzle, the sword that cuts this gordia not is as it has always been to live and let live.

A modern prescription, as we have said recently, that we would all do better at following for the benefit of everyone. that we would all do better and follow in for the benefit of everyone. Hey, this is Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of Ask Daily Stoic. You send us questions about Stoicism. I answer to the best of my ability. I give you some of my personal advice and then, of course, some advice from the Stoics. So our first question today is according to Stoicism, we must work on things that we can control and not on the results, but when one is trying to be ambitious and sets goals, most of the goals are result oriented. How can I be ambitious and not worry about the results at the same time?

This is a great question because it is kind of a paradox in stoicism, but there's some really good advice for Marcus to realize on this. So he talks about how to tie your ambition to external results is to hand your sanity over to other people. This is a recipe for misery. What you want to do is focus your goals on things you control. So I can only really talk from experience here, but when I think about this as a writer, my goal is not

to write a book that sells a certain amount of copies. My goal is not to hit the best seller list or to win certain awards. My goal is to write the best possible book that I can. Obviously, I want to sell lots of copies. I want to reach lots of people. I'm not averse to receiving awards or recognition, but ego as the enemy came out, it should have debuted on the New York Times bestseller list, but it did not.

Still, this is the key came out and it debuted at number one. Am I calling one a success in the other failure, even though by the same objective criteria, they both deserve to be in similar places? No. I think stillness is better, not because it hit number one, but because I know that I was better as a writer. I put in more work. I put in more energy. I didn't leave any stone unturned that it was recognized that it externally noticed fantastic, but that's not why it was better. I'm focusing my goals always on the parts of it that I control. Think of a football player. If your goal is to win a Super Bowl, it's great,

but what if somebody drops a pass in the in zone? Your goal should be to have the best season you can to do as much as you can for the team to think about it in that sense. So I think I think the Stoics try to make it a, it's not that they're goal of verse. This is also kind of an Eastern concept, but it's when we're thinking about goals, it's like how do we make the goal primarily about things that we control, that things that are up to us to use EpicTidus' term. So that's how I think about it in my own career.

I wanna get better, I always wanna improve, I always wanna be making progress, but I don't want that progress to be up to other people necessarily. I want that to be extra, I want that to be bonus. And actually one of the things I'm proudest though, which is actually kind of part of my goal on stillness is the key was to be more indifferent to the external results. So my first book came out about 10 years ago. Trust me, I'm lying. Let's say I was 10% convinced I did a great job and 90% looking to see how it debuted on the best soloist. I think it debuted on the Wall Street Journalist.

Now I would say by the time stillness came out 10 years later or nine books later, it was precisely flipped. I was 90% inwardly focused on what I controlled and 10% looking for that external validation. And I think that's a stronger position to be in and that's a better way to live. All right, so somebody writes in, my sister has a bit of depression. I've been trying to encourage her to learn and practice stuicism. One day I introduced momentumori to her asking her to stop paying attention to criticism and trim-to-matters and she asked me, so if I'm going to die one day, why should I work at all? Why shouldn't I go and play and enjoy my life? She's not happy at work. And so how does stoicism and momentum worry answer this question? First off, I would say if you're talking to a depressed person who's not feeling great about themselves, letting them know they're going to die is maybe

not the best pick me up. But I think what the Stokes would say is not, they might not actually disagree with your sister. She's, you're telling her, look, life is fine that you don't get to do this forever. It's not, shouldn't I go and play and enjoy my life? You should absolutely enjoy your life and you should realize that life is too short to be spent at a job, living away, living in a place that does not make you happy

that is not getting the best out of you. So I do think part of Momentumori is designed to provoke the exact question that she's asking. I think it's not, oh, you're going to die. So let's go do heroin. Let's have an orgy, as I've said before. It's, let's make sure I'm fully living this moment. And I think when I feel a little bit depressed, that's something I think about.

I go, look, I'm not gonna be here that much longer. So I'm not gonna sit around feeling sorry for myself. I'm not gonna whip myself. I'm gonna get out and get moving and go do something. I'm gonna try to make a positive step towards where I wanna end up. That's what I control. That's up to me.

That's what I wanna do. So it's not that we think about death to stop paying attention to criticism. It's that we stop. We start paying attention to death so that criticism is put in perspective. So the frustrations with our job are put in perspective, the problems that we have are put in perspective. And what comes out of that perspective is a sense that life is short. You know, the things that a lot of people think matter don't really matter. And we should hone in on, hone in on what we really do think matters to us and what really is important to us.

So death is not what you want to talk to a depressed person about. That's a little glib and can be, you know, maybe the exact wrong thought you want to be planting in your head. But momento more for the rest of us, for people who are frustrated and unhappy, should help put some of our issues into contrast and help us make decisions that otherwise might be a little difficult. Someone is asking, what does the inner Citadel look like and how is it created and cultivated and used? So the inner Citadel is a concept

that comes to us from Mark's real estate. It's this, look, it's really good. It's by Pierre Hadoel. He, it's called the inner Citadel. He, let me see if there's anything we need here. good. It's by Pierre Hadoel. It's called the inner citadel. So the inner citadel for the Stoics is the idea that even if you're thrown in prison, even if you lose everything, even if you're attacked and persecuted, even if you know what life is throwing at you seems overwhelming, what you have inside you is this sort of indomitable spirit, this fortitude, remember that's one of the big virtues in stosism, the sort of courage or fortitude.

We cultivate this, I think, in a variety of ways. We cultivate it by meditating on the philosophical principles of stosism. Marcus really says not just writing these things in meditation for fun, he's writing them to toughen himself up, to remind himself of what counts and what matters. The stoics also cultivated that intersited out by going out and doing difficult things.

Marcus really says wrestling, he's boxing, you know, he's hunting, he's doing physical activities, we might call them manly activities. But the point is, he's active, it's not just this sort of, you know, mind or soul thing, it really is cultivated in doing what the Stoics call hard winter training. So this is why, you know, Sena is jumping in, and taking cold plunges. This is why he's, you know, fasting or eating, you know, rugged fare. He's toughening himself up for the world.

So the inter citadel happens that way. And then I think the chord of fence of the inter citadel is probably that idea from Epicetus. We don't control what happens. We control what we respond. What's up to us is our thoughts, our opinions, our emotions, the story we tell ourselves. So we realize, oh, they can do all these things to me.

Epic Titus says, you can bind up my leg, but I will still go on like being philosophical, I will still, you can't bind up my will. And that actually happened to Epic Titus, like he was a slave, his, his cruel slave owner, broke his leg. Epic Titus knew that people could do things to you physically, but no one can touch what's inside of you. No one can make you go against what you believe. No one can force you to change your opinion. No event is so bad that you have to say it is bad. The ultimately we control that.

So the inner Citadel to me is kind of made up of those things. It's the training, it's the exercising, and then it's remembering that inside of you, things can't touch the soul, as the Stokes would say. You have this sort of thing inside you that's totally up to you that even the worst situations in life can't touch. So thank you for listening to another episode of Ask Daily Stoic, sending your questions to info at dailystog.com. I like the more personal questions.

If you want to talk to us about specific things you're struggling with, specific questions, passages you have, you know, questions about inside, stoicism, if there's things you want us to talk about, shoot us a note, I want to talk to you about them. Thanks for watching, talk to you. Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic podcast. I just wanted to say we so appreciate it. We love serving you.

It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in a couple of years. We've been doing it. It's an honor. Please spread the word, tell people about it, and this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say thank you. Hey, Prime Members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic Early and Add Free on Amazon Music, download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and add free with Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts.

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