The Daily Stoic - Is This The Only Story? | Becoming An Expert In What Matters

Episode Date: April 14, 2022

Ryan talks about the question you should ask yourself before over reacting, and reads The Daily Stoic’s entry of the day.The Daily Stoic Leadership Challenge is a 9-week course that was built to mirror the kind of education that produced historically great leaders like Marcus Aurelius. It is now a recorded course, which means all participants will join the course and move through it at their own pace. Sign up at https://dailystoic.com/leadershipchallengeSign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/emailFollow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and FacebookSee 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 another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Thursdays, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from the book, the daily Stoic, 366 meditations on wisdom, perseverance, and the art of living, which I wrote with my wonderful co-author and collaborator, Steve Enhancelman. And so today we'll give you a quick meditation from one of the Stoics, from Epititus Markis, Relius, Seneca, then some analysis for me, and then we send you out into the world to do your best to turn these words into works. Is this the only story? Something happens. You have an emotional reaction. By now, you know that this is the basic starting point. The practice of stoicism, the

daily lives of us normal folks. Events are objective, our interpretations are not. They are a guess, a story, an opinion, as to what's happened and what it means. And whether or not our actions are to be governed by those instant interpretations is a good indicator of exactly how stoically we're behaving. I recently interviewed Dr. Lisa Barrett, author of How Emotions Are Made for the Daily Stoic Leadership Challenge, which if you haven't done, absolutely check out. I think it's one of the best things we've done.

Given Dr. Barrett's pioneering work and the study of emotion, we asked her to give us her view on epictetus's famous observation. Every situation has two handles or two interpretations that we decide which one to grab, we decide what story to tell ourselves, we decide how to react. Out of anger or with understanding, forgiveness or fear, lust or indifference, do we yell at our employees or teach them? Dr. Barrett liked the idea and added that there are usually more than two handles. She provided a slightly different lens by with which we might look at Epicthedus' observation. Instead of seeing the two handles, she said we might ask,

is this the only story? Is this the only interpretation that fits here? No? What are my other options? What are some other stories I could make up about what happened here? Now you don't have to have the imagination of an award-winning storyteller to look through this lens. As Dr. Barrett also talked about, you can reference your past experiences for guidance. The last time your kid spilled orange juice on you, you interpreted it as an accident and laughed about it. Instead of losing your temper this time, tell yourself that story again. The first time an employee used poor judgment, your first thought was to make this a wonderful opportunity to teach them something that you had learned the hard way also. So maybe go with that one again instead of letting your mind race towards paranoid assumptions about

insubordination or corporate espionage or violations of fiduciary duty. Maybe they just had a bad day and made another honest mistake. In every situation you can find a better way to tell yourself about the person who cut you off in traffic about the cashier and the checkout line you're stuck in, about the email you still haven't gotten or replied to, about the player who isn't performing the way you need them to. You just need to be aware enough of the circumstances and of your mind's own tendency to react in order to consider the other options. To see the other handles. To ask, is this the only story? And look, if you haven't checked out the leadership challenge, you seriously should, Dr. Lisa Barrett was just

one of some of the world-class experts we interviewed for it. We interviewed Coach Shaka Smart, formerly of UT. Now the head basketball coach, M. Arquette, we interviewed RC Bufer, the GM, and the architect of the Spurs Dynasty. We interviewed Dr. Randall Stumpman, one of the great leadership coaches of our time. We interviewed Annie Duke on better decision making. We interviewed major general Dan Cain on courage and routines and systems, all sorts of amazing stuff on how to be a better leader, plus hours and hours of conversation with me and some of my best writing on leadership and how to be a better leader and just how to be a better person in the world. And so I hope you check it out.

You can go to dailystoke.com slash leadership challenge, check out the challenge. A bunch of awesome stuff in there. I'd love to have you be a part of it. And remember, DailyStoke life members, if you're not a member, get this course and all of our other courses totally for free. So if you're thinking about signing up for that, this might be a great chance. 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

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to, I love my kid, but wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on the Amazon Music or Wondery app. Becoming an expert in what matters. And I'm reading to you today from the Daily Stoic 366 Meditations on Wisdom Perseverance in the Art of Living by yours truly. My co-author and translator, Steve Enhancelman, you can get signed copies by the way in the Daily Stoic store, over a million copies of the Daily Stoic in print now. It's been just such a lovely experience to watch it.

It's been more than 250 weeks, consecutive weeks on the bestseller. It's just an awesome experience. But I hope you check it out. We have a premium leather edition at store.dailystoke.com as well. But let's get on with today's reading. Believe me, Sena Kro says, in on the shortness of life, it's better to produce the balance sheet of your own life than that of the grain market. The things that people manage to become experts in, fantasy sports, celebrity trivia, derivatives, and commodities markets, 13th century hygiene habits of the clergy. We can get very good at what we're paid to do or adapt at a hobby we wish we could be

paid to do, and yet our own lives, habits, and tendencies might be a complete mystery to us. Santa Coo was writing this important reminder to his father-in-law, who as it happened, was for a time in charge of Rome's grainery. But then his position was revoked for political purposes. Who really cares, Santa Coo was saying, now you can focus that energy on your inner life. At the end of your time on this planet, what expertise is going to be more valuable? Your understanding of matters of living and dying or your knowledge of the 87 bears? What will help your children more your insights into happiness and meaning or that you followed

breaking political news every day for 30 years. I've said this before, but obviously being an informed citizen in a democracy is really important. But people seem to think that being an informed citizen means watching a lot of MSNBC or Fox news or spending a lot of time on Twitter. But what you see with these folks is they know a lot of trivia, but they fundamentally don't understand human nature. They fundamentally don't understand right or wrong or virtue or the things that actually matter in life. I think it was Heroclida who said, you know, these people study all these books for all these years and they failed to realize that day and night are

one. What I take from that is he's saying is that they're missing the big picture. They're missing the eternal deep truths of life in exchange for the trivia. You know, they run a great business. They understand these events in fiction or art or sports or whatever it is, but they've fundamentally not come to grasp the truths of existence. And I think even what I love about stoicism is that stoicism isn't big arcane abstract questions, but practical ones. It's about understanding the balance sheet of one's life, as Senaiko was saying. It's about understanding theirself, understanding their emotions, understanding people. Like, I've said this a bunch of times now, but like, you know, you could follow

breaking pandemic news, or you could read a book about the Spanish flu, which I recommended a bunch of times. If you haven't read a great influenza yet, you should, it's incredible. You could have followed one of Donald Trump's impeachments, or you could have read a biography of Nixon, or Andrew Johnson. It's better to go back further. It's better to look deeper. You could learn as much from Camus the plague as you could from the latest New York Times report.

So I think what Sennaka is saying is that we often understand everything but ourselves. We ask all the little questions instead of the couple big questions like, why am I here? What's important to me? What's right? What's wrong? And that's such a shame. Philosophy is supposed to be practical. Philosophy is supposed to push us to understand ourselves and humans, right?

Like the amount of people that focus on this or that and then just fundamentally don't understand how psychology works or fundamentally understand how like the very system of government works You know people who are talking about what's going on in Ukraine and going oh, let's put a no fly zone over it And then you're like well, what is a no fly zone? Or they go I'm mad about critical race theory. Well, what is critical race theory? They don't know. They're just tied up and stuff, right?

And they haven't thought about what the thing they're talking about would actually mean. So we talked about this before about how certainty and arrogance is the root of real ignorance. I also think it goes for what are you going to choose to know about trivial, ephemeral things? Are you going to probe the deeper questions? Are you going to probe yourself? Are you going to look inward? Marcus really says, throw away your books. He says this in meditations. I don't think that meant then go watch the gladiatorial games. I think he meant, throw away your books

and sit there and think, sit there and get in touch with yourself, sit there and really examine, think about the things you've already learned. That's what we're talking about. And it's just another sort of deeply powerful and question from Senaqa. As the Stoics tell us always,

become an expert in the things that matter, focus on the things that matter. Ask the questions that really matter. Lead the trivia and nonsense to everyone else. You know, the Stoics in real life met at what was called the Stoa. The Stoa, Pocula, the Painted Porch in ancient Athens. Obviously, we can all get together in one place because this community is like hundreds of thousands of people and we couldn't fit in one space. But we have made a special digital version of the stove.

We're calling it Daily Stoic Life. It's an awesome community. You can talk about like today's episode. You can talk about the emails, ask questions. That's one of my favorite parts is interacting with all these people who are using stoicism to be better in their actual real lives. You get more daily stoke meditations over the weekend, just for the daily stoke life members, quarterly Q&As with me,

cloth bound edition of our best of meditations, plus a whole bunch of other stuff, including discounts, and this is the best part, all our daily stoke courses and challenges, totally for for free hundreds of dollars of value every single year Including our new year new you challenge. We'd love to have you join us. There's a two-week trial totally for free Check it out at daily stokelife.com Hey, prime members You can listen to the daily stoke early and add free on Amazon music 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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