The Daily Stoic - Life is a Team Sport | Ask Daily Stoic

Episode Date: August 5, 2022

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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. 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 Wundery'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. Music

Music Life is a team sport. Justin Heron was one of the best players on his college football team and thought for sure that he should be voted a team captain. But when the votes came back, his teammates selected six players ahead of him. As Ryan Hawkinsmith details in a great ESPN piece, Heron was crushed. He went in and talked to his coach. Coach, I do everything right.

I get there early. I watch more film than anybody, I do everything right. I get there early. I watch more film than anybody. I do everything right. Why didn't I get elected as captain? What else can I do? Justin, he said, you do do everything right. We always see you doing extra work. You're a tremendous competitor and a very good player. Football is a team sport. You need to set a good example and bring other guys with you. From then on, Heron put the team first. He mentored younger players, even the ones competing for his position. When he got injured, he typed up analyses of his opponents for his replacements. When he went to

watch film, he brought others along with him. And nearly a year to the day, he got that devastating news he got a phone call. Congratulations, Justin, his coach said. Your teammates have named you, team captain. Over and over again in the stoic writings, we see reminders nudging us to realize that life is a kind of team sport. Its Marcus' reminder that what's good for the hive is good for the bee, and not necessarily vice versa. Its epictetus is lying that a citizen is a person who never acts in his own interests,

what thinks of himself alone, all its actions and desires, aim at nothing except contributing to the common good. It's Seneca's observation that there is a name for someone who is self-indulgent and doesn't care about how their actions impact others. You call them a tyrant. We do this work to become better teammates. If you're listening to this podcast to become a better permit, a better recluse, a better loner, you've really missed the point.

Not just of stoicism, but of life, because life isn't about just you. It is a team sport. Welcome to another episode of Ask Daily Stoke. You send questions to info at dailystoke.com. I answer them. We talk about stoicism. We talk about whatever you want. Thanks for letting us do this.

Our first question is, is there a stoic virtue to focus my energy on for removing lazy actions or keeping myself from allowing negative or hurtful thoughts from affecting my overall sense of self. So what are the four-stove virtues? It's courage, wisdom, justice, and temperance. So temperance is the virtue that this would fall under. Now temperance, when people hear that, they think, oh, isn't that like, you know, the temperance

movement, not having alcohol. Temperance means moderation. It means self-discipline. The stones believe that only the self-discipline are free. People who have no self-control are slaves. They're slaves, not just other people, but to their own desires and urges. And so I think the virtue for you to look at there would be temperance, moderation, the line at the oracle of delphides, one of the engravings, it was nothing in excess.

So that means not being too easy on yourself, and it means not being too hard on yourself. not being too easy on yourself, and it means not being too hard on yourself. It means, you know, doing the work, but not overworking. It means being ambitious, but not too ambitious, right? The other concept, I think, related to this idea of temperance is another concept. This is Aristotle's golden mean. There's a Wikipedia article about it. You can read it's pretty accessible. The golden mean says, like, like, every virtue is on the midpoint between two vices. So take courage. Courage is halfway between recklessness and cowardice. And so I think we're trying, it's not that we shouldn't do things at all, those some things

we shouldn't do. It's how do we do the right things in the right amount in the right way? That's the virtue that I would think about. So don't whip yourself for being lazy. Just think about what systems you want to set in place, what standards you want to set for yourself, and then operate along those lines. So these four virtues, it takes wisdom to know what the right amount of something, it takes wisdom to know what, you know, the right amount of something. It takes courage to, you know, do less when everyone is doing more, to do more when everyone is not

doing enough, but they all fit with each other, but of the four virtues, it sounds like the one that I would urge you to think about would be the virtue of temperance. Okay. Our question now is, do I think that other Greek philosophies can overlap with stoicism? For example, a pyrrhonist state that our thoughts are the main obstacle for achieving adoraxia, equanimity, and therefore we should suspend judgment. So it's a good question. I was just rereading Gregory Hayes' introduction to Marcus Aurelius.

And he says, you know, it's interesting. Marcus Aurelius never identifies explicitly in his writing as a stoke. He talks about the stokes a lot. His writing observes a stoke thought for the most part. But he never says, I am a stoke. And what Gregory Hayes takes from this is that, if you ask Marcus, do you identify with a philosophical school, he'd probably say stoicism.

But if you really asked him what he was studying, he would say, I'm studying philosophy. And I think, Santa Cah is a great example of this as well. Santa Cah not only in his boyhood, and I talk about this a little bit in lives of the stoics, which I'm writing now, he studied all different kinds of philosophical schools. In fact, his father didn't want him to be a Stoke. He just hired a Stoke philosophy teacher to teach his son everything.

But you know, Seneca quotes Epicus, probably more than any other philosopher. So he was always looking for where the school's overlapped. He was borrowing from other schools. He was familiar with his other schools. So I do think, even that concept of adoraxia, that is an Epicurian concept primarily. The stoic concept, the one that Santa Cooke talks about,

it's apothea, a little bit more. So there's lots of overlap. They're sort of all coming of age, in Greece, and in Rome at the same time. And there's different practitioners of different ones. But they were all familiar with each other. I mean, stoicism comes to Rome through Diojeny's, one of the early stoics, alongside a skeptic and other, like the philosophers were just these sort of

leading people who belonged to different schools and had different beliefs, but the concept of a philosopher was sort of a role in society. And we kind of lost that now we think, you know, philosophy professors. We don't think of just sort of philosophers as people that as a job really. But I think there's plenty of overlap. And I think I'm more of the camp of you, take what works from all the schools and you come up with something that works for you that makes you better as a person. So our last question for today is how does a stoic control their anger? I think this is what all stoic are struggling with all the time. I mean, one of the most brilliant works is Deira of anger. It's brilliant. I say, definitely encourage everyone to read it.

And I think when you read meditations, what you see quite profoundly is that Mark really says an anger problem. He would not be talking about temper and frustration and how stupid other people were all the time. If he was not getting upset quite often, and it must have been a very difficult job. So I think the Stks did struggle with their temper. They did get angry, just like the rest of us, but they work to, I don't want to say suppress it, but Nissim to Lebs line is to domesticate those harmful emotions. So we have this course for daily stoke called taming or temper. I'm just thinking of some of the strategies we run through. One is I think that they pause, right? And I know there's an early stoke who's an advisor to Octavian.

And he says, basically, like, whenever you want to do something out of anger, anger, like give it a minute, right? Like literally count for one minute. And so the pause, just waiting, is really important. One of the Lincoln strategies was to write angry letters and then sit on them and then decide if he wants to send them later. So just don't make it worse by rushing into it

is a big way we address our temper. One of the things we do as part of the challenge I think is really revealing is like, if you wanted to get some perspective on your anger, like sit down and catalog what anger has cost you in your life, like relationship, like literally, like almost like a budget or a P&L, like what has anger brought you and what has it cost you?

And really looking at the downsides of anger, having that sort of floating around in the back of my head helps me like realize that I'm going to regret getting so upset about this. And then for me, a big thing is like having some other outlet for the energy. So I think when we have the Stoics, you know, writing, hunting, writing, you know, boxing, they were doing, they had active physical hobbies that I think distracted them and calmed them down and gave them perspective. I think that's a big part of it. I'm journaling for me, like, if I can sit down and just write about what I'm angry about,

that helps. If I can write about what I'm angry about, then I write about what I'm grateful for, tends to cancel each other out. So I don't think the Stokes thought, hey, here's this magical thing that will eliminate your temper, but they were very aware of the consequences and the damage caused by anger,

and then they worked out strategies or little hacks, little ways to get at it from all these different angles that would help minimize it. And so definitely read SETA Quesad essay on anger. Check out our anger course, I think it's dailystoke.com slash anger. And then we've got some articles about it as well, but there's lots of great stuff from the Stoics on Tempor. And I think it's something you work on your whole life. My thing is, it's not that you have an anger problem, it's that anger is a problem for everyone, it's just a fact of life.

And who we are, it is really a result of how much we're going to work on that problem. And so I'm always working on mine. I don't think of many times that I'm proud of myself for having lost my temper. And so the stokes are always trying to work on theirs and I hope you will too. So thanks is another episode of Ask Daily Stoke. Thanks for listening. Thanks to Responsors for sponsoring it. And we'll talk next week.

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. 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. Raising kids can be one of the greatest rewards of a parent's life. But come on, someday, parenting is unbearable.

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