The Daily Stoic - No More Than This Is Required | Ask Daily Stoic

Episode Date: September 30, 2022

We are impressed by people who do incredible things–whether it’s creating some great work of art or pulling off some impossible athletic feat, bringing about social change or building an enormous organization. How did they do it? Where did that come from? Sometimes to excuse our own failures, we tell ourselves it was genius or genetics, inspiration rather than perspiration.📕 Ryan Holiday's new book "Discipline Is Destiny" is available for pre-order now! We’ve put together a bunch of cool preorder bonuses—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 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.

No more than this is required. We are impressed by people who do incredible things, whether it's creating some great work of art or pulling off some impossible athletic feat, bringing about social change or building an enormous organization. How do they do it? Where did that come from? Sometimes to excuse our own failures, we tell ourselves it was genius or genetics, inspiration rather than perspiration.

In actuality, it's rarely something so miraculous. Stephen Pressfield, whose books like Gates of Fire in the War of Art have sold millions of copies, explains in his new book, Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants To Be, The Rather Penal, and Low Key Process, of Creation. When I sit down to write in the morning he writes, I literally have no expectations for myself or the day's work. My only goal is to put in three or four hours with my fingers punching the keys. I don't judge myself on quality.

I hold myself accountable for quantity. The only questions I ask are, did I show up? Did I try my best?" Seneca famously said that the path the wisdom could be walked by finding just one thing a day, one quote, one story, one conversation that makes you better. That's what philosophy is about. That's what greatness is about. It might not seem like much, but it adds up.

Remember what Zeno said, well, being is realized by small steps, but it's no small thing. And so it goes with writing a book, getting in shape, or improving an industry, or winning a championship. Ryan, thank you so much. Of course. And I really appreciate your talks and stillness. Is there a takeaway we can all walk away with today for next week? One thing that we can start to work on our stillness,

you gave us a lot of stuff to chew on. Is there one thing you find that can just give us that little nugget that'll get us to the next step? Yeah, I think the morning, if you can get the morning set right, so really think about the time in the morning, the way you're setting up the morning, what's the first thing you're doing out of bed tackling that hard thing first to me, if you own the morning, the rest of the day follows, and again, you stack that on top of each other, that's where you're success.

So I think it's all about the morning to me. Hi Ryan. Thank you very much. Kevin here, my question is, I agree with you, we get these thoughts and ideas when we're out of position, doing things like running or exercising, and it's not convenient to capture.

I noticed in your slides, your index, how do you organize those thoughts that come to you at the least opportune times to sit down and put them to use? Yeah, there's obviously all sorts of wonderful digital solutions from Rome to Evernote or Google Docs or whatever. I'm a big analog person. So I use four by six note cards. It's what I do, sort of all my research and brainstorming on. I have it to do list, obviously, also.

But I'm just writing, like, when I have a thought, I write it down on the card. I have an article you can, if you just Google my name and commonplace book. I keep what they would call a commonplace book. So a collection of thoughts or ideas, as you collect them, over time you organize it into themes. And then when you need stuff related to that topic

or you're thinking about something or struggling with something or you're writing a memo or giving a talk, or you have something to rely on. And there's a million ways to do it. I was, I gave a talk at the Reagan Library a few years ago and they let me go into the library and see, he would keep no cards in like a photo binder. And as you would write a speech,

you know, he, you know, a speech writer would come to him with a speech and then he's like, no, this needs an anecdote or a story or a stat and he'd go to his book and he'd find the perfect thing that he might have written down 28 years ago, right? And so to me, it's about collecting and accumulating information that you can then use. I definitely see the advantages to the digital system, but I tend to find that if I'm just highlighting stuff or copying and

pasting, it's kind of just going in a black hole somewhere. The actual engagement with the material being forced to write it down, think about it, have it in a place. To me, it creates a better recall and relationship with the idea, so that's why I do it that way. Hi, my name is Haley. I like these principles. I find it's a lot easier to set boundaries for stillness when you're in a job where you have a lot of power. Yes.

Or when you have a more strategic, analytical role. If you have less power, you're in a job where in the middle of a chaotic operation, it's harder. How would you help create an organizational culture where it's easier for middle managers to set the boundaries they need to sometimes pause and focus? Yeah, it's funny. Like, managers know how important this stuff is and then because they have the power, they give it to themselves, but then they want to sort of micromanage the time of everyone else

or they want to see them or they don't, we don't give the freedom to the people who work for us. And that's something I've been thinking about with my employees, it'll be like, man, I'm calling this person the middle of the day every time a thought pops into my head and I'm probably breaking up their time or their focus. So I think one, just being considerate, thinking about, if it's good for you, it's probably good for them. But I think culturally we have to Google famously used to have

like 10 or 20% of an employee's time was allocated for exploration or free projects. I don't know if it has to be that explicit, but we do have to give people time and space for reflection. I was, again, just thinking about this with someone who works for me, I'd thrown so much stuff on their plate, then I started to notice the quality

of the work diminishing, and then it's this fish's feedback loop, where you're upset and they're nervous. You got to figure out the right amount of balance for each person, so we have time, and some level of autonomy to set up our day and our practices that get the best work out of us. My name is Kurt. Question for you is more. I don't very often get a chance to ask a question directly to the author,

but I'm going to sales leadership role. My team is global. I am a morning person. I do try to set away time, but it's very hard. It came from the one thing, and then also from your discussion is setting time aside. Well, regretfully for me, I've got time zones that that window in the morning allows me to kill some of the chaos. My reps are dealing with globally. So I don't have the opportunity to plan out that perfect two or three window. What would your thoughts on that be? Yeah, I remember I worked in American Apparel for many years and the CEO had this open door policy, which worked great.

Any employee with any problem could come to the leader with it. And that worked great when it was a small company, but as the company got bigger and bigger, it became a thing where there was always somebody in the world with a problem and access. So I don't know if there's any way to do it, but setting aside some time. I mentioned General Mattis at the end of the talk, and I was reading a book about him recently

and in his calendar, he had time scheduled out, usually like around lunch, where he would eat and read. So they knew he doesn't do lunch meetings, you know, he has to be back to the office by this time, because that's when he sits't do lunch meetings. He has to be back to the office by this time, because that's when he sits and reads and thinks. And I know this is hard to do. And it never feels like, you know, if you came in and you saw someone sitting at their computer,

you assume they're working, you come in, you see someone reading or just sitting there thinking or going for a walk, that doesn't seem like work, which goes to her question. But you have to understand if it makes you better at the job, it's work, and it's not running away from problems. And who knows, maybe being more disciplined, setting up that time would not just

solve those problems day to day, but it might help you come up with a permanent solution to those problems. So I think about it like, it's not just, hey, this is what I need to be well-rested, but I might have a breakthrough that accomplishes weeks or months of work in a single stroke because I was disciplined. I had the idea for the book that I have coming out later this month on a hike with my kids, you know, on the weekend. I had to put the work aside to agree to go do the thing, but if I hadn't done that, I don't know if that idea ever would have occurred to me. You almost have to be disciplined about your work discipline to set up time to get lucky or serendipity like that to happen. Excellent.

You have so much discipline in your life. That seems to be a massive value when it creates a lot of freedom and within the form. Can you tell me about, like, has that always been your outlook or was there a defining moment where this became your approach? I don't know if it's always been that way. I think discipline is something you accumulate.

It's something you build on. I'm actually in the middle of doing this series of four books. So the Cardinal Virtues, Christianity and Instausism are Courage, Temperance, which is self-discipline, Justice and Wisdom. And I think these four ideas are sort of the framework, actually, Cardinal comes from the Latin word, Cardos, which means hinge.

The like success, life, being a good person, hinges on Courage, Self-discipline, Justice and Wisdom. So I sort of see them as being related to that. But I find that chaos is way more stressful and harder than order and discipline. So by creating structure, and again, as we move into a more remote sort of work world, or where things are in flux or chaos, if the discipline is not being imposed on you, it's gonna have to come from you. So it's this internal thing that you have to work on.

And I think it's good, but it's just a challenge. And I've seen so many people struggle to adjust to, no one's telling me what to do. This is so wonderful. And then the break, they're like, oh shit, I have to tell myself what to do. This is so wonderful. And then the break, they're like, oh, shit, I have to tell myself what to do. And that's the struggle. Right.

And that structure and some of those guide posts are so key to being able to stay with it when we aren't, because motivation doesn't always come from within. And especially as all the days blurring together, I have no idea what day it is, how long this has been happening. As the sort of world stopped, the world stopped operating on the structure

that we commute, office, weekends, planned vacations, it just all got blurred together. So in that sense, discipline becomes even more important just to like, you know, time is an invention, right? Just as discipline has to create structure from a fundamentally unstructured thing. Definitely. I saw that Andy Silvernail had a question.

Hi, Ryan C. Hi. Very early in your presentation, you talked about a very important inflection point and you didn't elaborate. I wonder if you could just talk about the experience of that inflection point and what made you decide to change. I don't remember that. What inflection point was I talking about?

You were talking, you said you were in a job, it was kind of miserable. Oh. And you've all said something changed and you become the writer and the speaker that you become. Yeah, so I was at American Paral, I was a director of marketing and was going well and I liked it, but I felt called to write and I wanted, I had this idea for a book and I wanted to work on it. And what Robert was talking to me about is like, I couldn't leave for like a year or a year and a half, there's a bunch of reasons why. But his question was like, what, how are you going to spend that time, right?

Are you going to show up every day and kill time? Are you going to be resentful? Or are you going to, you know, focus and use that time? The irony is, as soon as I decided to leave, the year and a half went by like that, and I was much better at it, because I wasn't stressed, I wasn't catastrophizing, I wasn't thinking about, I can't do this forever, but I also forced me to think about,

what am I gonna have, like if I wanna write this book in a year and a half, what can I do now? So on day one, I have all the things that I need, right? And so for me, it was just, you know, I think this goes to what the essence of the talk was, is really thinking about like, what do you want your life to look like? What do you want a day in your life to look like? And a lot of times, we just have these kind of vague ideas of what success is, and it's usually more responsibility, more money, more recognition. But if you haven't really thought about what you want your data look like, it's hard to evaluate opportunities as they go. And so I found

increasingly I enjoyed writing, I enjoyed thinking, I enjoyed having more autonomy over my life, all those things. And I hope this isn't a bad thing to tell a bunch of people out of company. But I wanted but I just was really thinking about what I wanted my life to look like, and that gave me a lot of clarity about the decisions that I needed to make. Because oftentimes we just took, again, we unfinckingly say, yes, because somebody offered, because it sounds cool, because it is more lucrative.

People do this all the time. They really like their job, but then someone wants to approach them to a company company and the only improvement is that it's more money. And it's like, what are you going to do with that money? Maybe you actually really like the freedom or structure that you have in this, or it's wonderful. They only have a 10 minute commute.

And now you're going to have an hour of commute. We don't really think about how these things fit in the larger context of our life, and the sort of stillness or happiness or productivity we need to be great at what we do. And so I think we evaluate decisions or opportunities on the wrong set of criteria. So that's what that breakthrough was for me for sure. 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 the couple 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 ad-free on Amazon music, download the Amazon music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free on Amazon Music, download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts. Celebrity feuds are high stakes. You never know if you're just going to end up on Page Six or Du Moir or in court. I'm Matt Bellesai. And I'm Sydney Battle, and we're the host of Wondery's new podcast, Disantel, where

each episode we unpack a different iconic celebrity feud. From the buildup, why it happened, and the repercussions. What does our obsession with these feud say about us? The first season is packed with some pretty messy pop culture drama, but none is drawn out in personal as Britney and Jamie Lynn Spears. When Britney's fans form the free Britney movement dedicated to fring her from the infamous conservatorship Jamie Lins lack of public support it angered some fans a lot of them It's a story of two young women who had their choices taken away from them by their controlling parents

But took their anger out on each other and it's about a movement to save a superstar Which set its sights upon anyone who failed to fight for Brittany. Follow Disenthal wherever you get your podcast. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wonder App.