The Daily Stoic - It Was Terribly Unfair…Yet | Ask Daily Stoic

Episode Date: December 30, 2022

In 41 AD, Seneca was exiled from Rome. He was at the height of his senatorial career but found himself facing trumped up charges from a petty emperor who was driving him into the wilderness. He was reeling from the loss of a young child, he was leaving behind a grieving mother. But what could he do?Nothing. All he could do was try to survive and endure it, to not be broken by it.---In today's Ask Daily Stoic, Ryan presents part 2 of his 2020 Q&A at the Young Presidents Organization of Michigan - West Chapter in which he discusses how the Stoics battled plagues that can destroy one's character, and the traits of ego-driven leaders.🎓 Sign up for the Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge to create better habits in 2023: https://dailystoic.com/challenge✉️ 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.

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. [♪ Music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wonderree'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 or wherever you get your podcasts. It was terribly unfair. And yet? In 41 AD, Seneca was exiled from Rome. He was at the height of his senatorial career, but found himself facing trumped up charges from a petty emperor who was driving him into the wilderness. He was reeling from the loss of a young child. He was leaving behind a grieving mother. What could he do? Nothing. All he could do was try to survive and endure it to not be broken by

it. In 1895, Oscar Wilde struggled under a similar fate. He had been ruined and persecuted. He had been humiliated and broken for a crime that was not a crime. But what could he do? As he wrote in his beautiful book, Day Profundus, the laws under which I am convicted are wrong and unjust laws, and the system under which I have suffered a wrong and unjust system. But somehow I have got to make both of these things right and just to me.

I have got to make everything that has happened to me good for me. The plank bed, the lonesome food, the hard ropes shredded into oakum, into one's fingertips grow dull with pain. The menial offices with which each day begins and finishes. The harsh orders that routine seems to necessitate the dreadful dress that makes sorrow look grotesque to look at it. The silence, the solitude, the shame. Each and all of these things I have to transform into a spiritual experience.

Our circumstances can be unfair, unjust, and unexpected. Yet, this doesn't absolve us of needing to figure out how to navigate them, to make good use of them. Senika could not change the fact of his exile, but he could transform it. And the same is true for us. Whatever life hands us, or a tyrant hands down for us, we have got to make it right. We have to create justice and progress and good from it. It's not fair, but it is fate. And we can turn this misfortune into a better future. It is the only way forward.

forward. Can you speak to that? Well, I mean, Mark's to really talk about this, Mark's to really writes during the Antonine plague, you know, which would have made COVID look like nothing. But he says, you know, and at first, I thought he was being metaphorical.

I really didn't hit me this year until I, you know, last year, sorry, to really get what he meant, but he said, look, he's like a plague can take your life. But he says, what you should really be worried about is the pestilence that can destroy your character. And I think a lot of the smart people that I know, we sort of, as we talk, it seems like this topic keeps coming up where you go like, man, what happened to so and so, right? You go like, man, did you hear about, you know who?

And we're just like, we thought we were all on the same page and it turns out, you know, so and so got infected with something worse than COVID, basically. And so and so got infected with something that hopefully they'll come out of at some point, but it's going to be hard for them to undo the damage that they've done to relationships, to the country frankly, to their reputation. And so I guess what I'm saying is that COVID is a virus, but there are other viruses out there. There's the virus right of conspiracy theories.

There's the virus, you see in smart people who it's like a virus of callousness. It's like open it all up, it's just old people, right? Like these are horrible things that people are saying or we heard this early in the pandemic. It's not any worse than the flu. And it's like, okay, a half a million people are going to die. What are you talking about? So there's that, but then on the other side of it, there's also like some magical thinking, right?

There's people have been like, oh, it'll be over in two weeks, so it'll be over in a month. I've seen this with events that, you know, have planned where it's like, it was supposed to be in March of 2020 and then they're like, we're rescheduling to June. And it's like, it was supposed to be in March of 2020 and then they're like, we're rescheduling to June. And it's like, okay. And then the second time they're like, we're rescheduling to July. And then they're like, we're rescheduling to August. And it's like, maybe you just don't reschedule and you wait, you know, like, there's this like, well, it's important to me. It's obviously magically going to get resolved soon. It's magic going to go away because it's important to me, because it's my wedding, because it's good for my career.

What there's this sort of magical thinking I've seen a lot of people do. And they've gotten wrecked by it. I had Jocco on my podcast a couple months ago, and he was saying like, of your clients of the sort of leaders you advise, he's like, I was like, who's handled it best? And he's like, the radical realists. He's like, the people who looked at it from day one, and they were like, this is serious,

this is gonna be devastating. I'm gonna take every precaution, I'm gonna make every, the people who made the hard decisions were the ones who have gotten through it their business intact the people who kept going well this is just Matt is going to solve itself in a couple weeks so you know even people as recently as as the election were like oh as soon as the vaccine comes is all going to and it's like the people who did their research knew like no this vaccine rollout is going to take take a long

time so I think the the big thing I've taken from COVID is just like the mind is not your friend. You've gotta be in charge of the mind or the mind's gonna take you either to a dark place or a naive and foolish place and that rationality is really important. Stockdale comes to mind in this moment, right? Yes, yes, the stockdale paradox is the optimists are the ones who get destroyed.

But if you don't believe you can persevere and make it, you also get destroyed. So there needs to be this kind of, for me, the Stokes have kind of a, a pragmatic optimism. Like it's going to be fucking awful, but I'm going to gut it out. You know, it's not, not this is going to be a walk in the park and of course I can do it. It's going to be like I am prepared for the boat, the blows of fate. Yeah, awesome. All right. Do you, do you have an example of a leader that has flipped turn from ego driven to others driven. That's a great question. There's not a lot of examples. Ego tends to be an infection that's very hard to kick. I mean, look, if Steve Jobs had not gotten fired, he would not have, and he needed to be fired. In retrospect, some people go,

can you imagine firing Steve Jobs? It's like if you were Steve Jobs's boss, you definitely would have fired him and you would have been right to do so. He was totally unmanageable, he'd lost his mind. I don't think Steve Jobs manages to come back without that. I talk in the book about these sort of moments

where everything is destroyed. Our life implodes, we fail publicly, and we sort of have two choices in these moments. Do we face and accept that uncomfortable truth and learn from it or do we deny it and double down? And you know Lyndon Johnson was this sort of you know cocky kid who thought he was better than everyone else who thought he would never you you know, it gets his ass, literally gets his ass kicked like this kid who's, you know, dating the girl that, you know, that Lyndon Johnson wanted to be with basically just beats the crap out of him on a public

street in front of everyone in his small town. And, you know, Lyndon Johnson decides to go to college a few days later. It changes the course of his life. So there are moments where we experience these sort of humiliations or these losses and we build ourselves back up. I think that's common, but the problem with ego is it makes it very hard to face that truth. And then we bury it underground and it only becomes more potent. I don't know if you've read Jim Collins, you know, re-skin on, but he really writes about the 20 year old Steve and the, you know, the older Steve and really captures that. Well, which kind of leads to the next question.

I would just say, sorry, Jim Collins also has a great book called Why the Mighty Fall. Awesome. And it's sort of the count. It's like, good to great is like success and why the Mighty Fall is why successful people fail. And I think we learn, it's great to learn by trial and error. But one of the things that reading allows us to do is to learn by the trials and errors of other people. And really studying failure, there's a great book I love called billion dollar lessons. That's all about these catastrophic failures of companies

over the years. There's a great book called the what I learned losing a million dollars, a million dollars when this book was written was more like 30 or 40 million dollars. But you know, studying failure is really important. It's easy to learn the wrong lesson from success. Failure teaches us just as much and ideally, you wanna learn from other people's failures so you don't have to do it yourself. Yeah, leads to a Jim Collins question around five, level five leaders.

Do you see that as a quantifiable evidence that humility and low ego driving long-term greatness in companies or organizations. So I'm not a, you know, an analyst. I don't, I'm not a researcher in that sense. I like to look at sort of timeless philosophical themes and illustrate them. I like to tell stories. But there's a reason that ego is hubris, as they call it in the ancient world,

is the theme of like every ancient poem, every ancient play, every ancient myth or fable. There is almost no piece of art or story or religious tradition or philosophical school that says ego is a good thing, right? Ego will make you better. It is that probably the most pride goeth before the fall, it is the most timelessly warned against, you know,

sort of trait of all the, you know, the sort of human inclinations. Ego is the one ego and arrogance and all of its sort of components is a reason it's worn against. I think when you look at what one of the reasons you're seeing in the pandemic, a lot of sort of female lead countries have done quite well. I think in some aspects it's an absence of ego. I think not only have countries run by women tended to fare quite well during the pandemic, but women who are scientists have like knocked it out of the park and that's because you know the scientific mind is about you know the sort of admission of ignorance. It's about hypotheses rather

than certainties. So, you know, I think there are certainly many, many examples that we could point to. My argument is, is there are many successful leaders who are egotistical. I think you'd be hard pressed to find one whose sustained success was caused by their ego. Just as when you look at art, it's been a lot of artists who have struggled with impulsive behavior or addiction. And so on, you know, Jimmy Hendrix was not a great guitar player in musician

because he was a drug addict. He was such a great musician and guitar player that he was able to carry that drug addiction for a time until eventually, you know, he destroyed it. guitar player that he was able to carry that drug addiction for a time until eventually, you know, he destroyed it. Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it and I'll see you next episode.

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