The Daily Stoic - No One Can Put This On You | What is Stoic Advice for Entrepreneurs?

Episode Date: September 12, 2024

They can love you or hate you. But really, the only thing that matters is who you are to yourself. What matters is whether you are living up to your standards, whether you’re following those virtues of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom.Ask DS:What did the Stoics say about balancing between personal and community trials?What is Ryan’s Stoic advice for a new entrepreneur?Why has philosophy from ancient Athens and Rome stuck and not philosophy from the Germanic tribes?🎙️ Listen to General Stanley McChrystal’s interview | Apple Podcasts, Spotify, & YouTube🎙️ Listen to Major General Dan Caine’s interview | Apple Podcasts & Spotify🎙️ Listen to Ryan Holiday speak at the Naval Academy | Apple Podcasts & Spotify🎟 Ryan Holiday is going on tour! Grab tickets for London, Rotterdam, Dublin, Vancouver, and Toronto at ryanholiday.net/tour✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/📱 Follow 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.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to the daily Stoic early and ad free right now. Just join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. We've got a bit of a commute now with the kids and their new school. And so one of the things we've been doing as a family is listening to audiobooks in the car. Instead of having that be dead time, we want to use it to have a live time. We really want to help their imagination soar. And listening to Audible helps you do precisely that. Whether you listen to short stories,

self-development, fantasy, expert advice, really any genre that you love, maybe you're into stoicism. And there's some books there that I might recommend by this one guy named Ryan. Audible has the best selection of audio books without exception and exclusive Audible originals all in one easy app.

And as an Audible member, you choose one title a month to keep from their entire catalog. By the way, you can grab Right Thing right Now on Audible. You can sign up right now for a free 30-day Audible trial and try your first audiobook for free. You'll get Right Thing Right Now totally for free. Visit audible.ca to sign up. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. Well on Thursdays, we not only read the daily meditation, but we answer some questions from

listeners and fellow stoics who are trying to apply this philosophy just as you are. Some of these come from my talks, some of these come from Zoom sessions that we do with daily stoic life members or as part of the challenges. Some of them are from interactions I have on the street when there happened to be someone there recording. Thank you for listening and we hope this is of use to you. No one can put this on you. No one likes to be insulted.

No one likes to be attacked or slandered. Feels great to be praised. We like being celebrated, renowned, and recognized. But the Stoic in us has to remember that these things are not worth very much, don't mean very much, one way or another. Why? Because they're not in our control. When the rapper and music mogul Birdman demanded that the radio host and Daily Stoic fan Charlamagne the God put some respect on my name.

He was asking for something outside his control, however powerful he was in the business. More important, what would it have been worth anyway? What matters is self-respect, not obligated acknowledgement. The Stoic understands that deserving a good reputation is what we strive for. Actually getting it matters so much less. It cuts the other way too. Another music reference in her song, But Daddy I Love Him, Taylor Swift, no stranger to gossip and criticism sings, we should remember that no one can demean or harm us with their insinuations or expectations.

No one can truly damage us with scandal or controversy. Our name is ours. Can we disgrace ourselves, though? Absolutely. You're only harmed, Marcus Riles wrote to himself, if your character is affected. Not impugned, but affected. Meaning, only you have this power. So remember, they can praise you, they can insult you,

they can raise you up or tear you down, they can spread your name far and wide, they can ignore you, they can love you or hate you, but really the only thing matters is who you are to yourself. What matters is whether you are living up to your standards, whether you are following those virtues of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. Are you putting respect on your name? Are you disgracing your name? That's what counts. Not what anyone else says or says you do. Hey, it's Ryan.

Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoke podcast. There's lots of great book clubs out there. I like anyone that gets other people to read. I like it anytime people come together to read. I mean, this is what reading is all about, finding something you love, sharing with other people, talking about it. Over the years, I've been asked to speak to a lot of different book clubs.

I'm always very flattered. It's cool. It's something you dream of when you're an author, but obviously most of the time I can't. I can't just swing by everyone's house and chat about the book. And a lot of times they're at night. And so I can't do it

because I want to be with my family. But a couple of months ago, I got reached out to by someone who had a somewhat unique book club. He was a Colonel in the Army Reserves at the Military Intelligence Readiness Command. They have about 8,000 soldiers. It's the largest intelligence command in the Army Reserve.

And they were doing a book club. And basically the idea of the book club is that leaders are readers. There was an army reservist named Harry Truman, talk about him in writing right now. He said, not all readers are leaders, but all leaders have to be readers. That's the idea. So I loved that. So I decided I would hop on and they asked a bunch of awesome questions and they recorded

it and were nice enough to send that recording over To me to run on the podcast now I'm gonna bleep out their names just for privacy safety reasons But I think stoicism resonates with soldiers because it's those sort of four virtues of courage Discipline justice wisdom are at the core of what they do and I would say no more so than the intelligence community I think you'll like this episode. It was an honor to talk to these men and women. And if you want an interesting episode

of the Daily Stoke podcast, I interviewed General Stanley McChrystal, retired Army general not too long ago. Also, I interviewed two-star Air Force general Dan Cain as part of the Daily Stoke Leadership Challenge. That one's awesome too. I'll link to that one. And I've been doing this series of address

at the Naval Academy, which you may have heard here on the podcast. So I'll link to that also. But in the meantime, let's get in to some stoicism questions from these fine men and women. What did our ancient stoics say about balancing between personal and community trials?

What I take from that question, something I think is important to point out, is that the Stoics were men and women who were in the arena, right? They're not what would later be called pen and ink philosophers, although many of them do write great works. They were active in

life in the problems and conversation of their time. So some starts, you know, like a lot of the schools are sort of this individualistic, it has its roots in the cynic school, sort of this disdain for public life, pretense, people, whatever. And over the centuries, it becomes integral to the running of the empire and to the functioning of the polis in the state. Seneca would say, you know, the difference

between the Stoics and the Epicureans is that the Epicureans retreat to their garden and pursue their individual self-development. And it says the Stoics get involved in politics unless something prevents them. And Seneca would be involved. And then, you know, probably in a situation General Mattis could relate to, he finds himself stuck in Nero's administration, and he's forced to sort of be the adult in the room and do the best he can in serving a person he almost certainly disagreed with on every major issue.

But eventually, Nero goes insane and Seneca leaves. And it's there that Seneca retreats from public life and does much of his best writing. So I see the, there's people who are active and engaged trying to contribute to public life. Some were soldiers, some were generals, right? Some were lawyers and some, you know, were powerful politicians in the Senate. Cato, the famous Roman politician, his daughter, Portia Cato, is the wife of Julius Caesar, or sorry, is the wife of Brutus, the assassinator of Julius Caesar. And she

plays a role in that. So it's not just, you know, the sort of men of the time, but the men and women of the time were engaged in the big battles and fights and conversations and, you know, roles and positions of their time. And so there's a tension. Sure, the Stoic focuses primarily on what they control, which is ourselves, but that doesn't mean the Stoic retreats like a monk into a monastery and just sort of works on their own private perfection.

I think the Stoic is trying to be engaged and trying to make a difference in the world. Hey Ryan, I'm a long time fan. I'm actually in the process of starting my own business. So I just wondered if you had any advice for a new entrepreneur. Yeah, talk about one obstacle after another. You think that we'd make it easy for people to start businesses and it's basically just

one problem after another. And so you sell it or it closes, right? That's just how it is. Number one, I think people are, and maybe your military background will help you with this, but I think people are trying to do a lot of things at the same time and they don't stop and get really good clarity about what they're doing and what their definition of success is. So obviously, look, part of the business is adapting and improvising and you iterate and change a lot, but you ask people,

they go, oh, I'm starting a business. They go, oh, what's your business? And then cue like 10-minute confusing answer and you're still not sure by the end of it what exactly it is that they do, or how one would support it or whether it's going to succeed or not. So I really think clarity and conciseness and strategic prioritization. We are an X that does X for X, you know, to be able to answer that question.

This is something I talk to authors a lot about, that, you know, I'm writing a book and I go, what's it about? And they're like, well, it's a little bit like this. And then it's a little bit like this. And then I'm talking about this and then this, and so, you know, and all of a sudden I'm like, I have zero idea what you're talking about.

And I'm not sure how you're possibly gonna write it if you don't idea what you're talking about. And I'm not sure how you're possibly going to write it if you don't know what you're talking about. So to me, that's the first thing, is some real clarity about what we're doing. And then the second thing, which I think people mess up on a lot of projects is like, what does success look like? So you can really keep your eye on the ball and you can really judge

between two choices or decisions. If you're like, hey, I'm doing this because I want it to be small and fun and make a difference, probably don't take a bunch of money from investors. If it's like, hey, this is supposed to be the next big thing, then maybe that is it. So I think having some strategic clarity helps not just so you can describe it and talk about it, but then you can actually know what you're supposed to do day to day. Thank you for your time today, Mr. Holliday. I just wanted to ask you, why do you think that I just wanted to ask you, why do you think that philosophy emerged, that we still use today in Rome,

versus maybe out of the Germanic tribes? I know we have a lot of religion that's preserved out of the Germanic tribes, but we don't hear a lot about ancient German philosophy. I don't know if I have a good answer that question. I look Philosophy as we know it comes to us from from ancient Greece that the joke is that Socrates brings it down from the heavens So the the common man but it but it begins it begins in Greece Specifically stoicism begins in in Athens also shortly after the time of Socrates

Stoicism begins in Athens also shortly after the time of Socrates. Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, washes up in a shipwreck after losing everything. And he later jokingly made a great fortune when I separate a shipwreck because it turned him onto philosophy. So there's something about, you know, Athens, probably it's a great military power, but it's also a trading and a naval power. So it's this sort of all source of all these ideas from all over what was then the known world. And then, you know, Greece is conquered by Rome, but you could argue that Athens wins the peace, Stoicism makes its way to Rome, you know, not long after Zeno's time as part of

a diplomatic mission. And it just becomes part of the sort of the toolkit of Roman leaders and Roman military personnel and politicians and artists just becomes part of the toolkit. So that's all I really know is how it came from, why it didn't come a different way, I don't know. Stoicism and many of the sort of Greek and Roman virtue ethics get absorbed into Christianity. Then we lose touch with a lot of this stuff

during the dark ages. And we're lucky that a handful of sort of lovers of antiquity preserved these works. We're also indebted to Middle Eastern scholars who preserved and translated and propagated these works again. And then we have sort of a rediscovery around them in the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries.

And then ultimately theenment brings them back. This is how they make their way to America. That's the course that it goes. Why it didn't go a different way, I don't know. Rome obviously conquers the Germanic tribes. Marco, Marks, Rulis fights in the Marco Manic Wars. It may just be, you know, that the victors write the history and it's their philosophy that sort of worms its way into where we are today, the sort of descendants of those civilizations.

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 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 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. If you like the Daily Stoic and thanks for listening, you can listen early and ad free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. Prime members can listen ad free on Amazon Music. And before you go, would you tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey on Wondery.com slash survey. What's up guys, it's your girl Kiki and my podcast is back with a new season

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