The Daily Stoic - Nobody Won Afraid Of Losing | Ask DS

Episode Date: July 11, 2024

Courage is the mother of all virtues, Aristotle said, because in a world that’s not virtuous, it’s a brave thing to go out there and do what needs to be done. Ask DS: What does Ryan do with his journals once they are full? How can Stoicism be practical and relevant in today’s environment? Does Ryan try to teach Stoicism to his kids? (check out Daily Dad for more on this!) What is the best intro book to Stoicism? How does the concept of Antifragile intersect with Stoicism? 📕 Grab signed editions of the Stoic Virtues series: Courage is Calling, Discipline is Destiny, and Right Thing, Right Now at https://store.dailystoic.com/🎟 Ryan Holiday is going on tour! Grab tickets 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. I've been writing books for a long time now and one of the things I've noticed is how every year, every book that I do, I'm just here in New York putting right thing right now out. What a bigger percentage of my audience is listening to them in audiobooks, specifically on Audible. I've had people had me sign their phones, sign their phone case because they're like I've listened to all your audiobooks here and my sons they love audiobooks we've been doing it in the car to get them off their screens because audible helps your imagination soar. It helps you

read efficiently, find time to read when maybe you can't have a physical book in front of you and then it also lets you discover new kinds of books, re-listen to books you've already read from exciting new narrators. You can explore bestsellers, new releases. My new book is up, plus thousands of included audio books and originals, all with an Audible membership.

You can sign up right now for a free 30-day Audible trial and try your first audio book for free. You'll get right thing right now, totally for free. Visit audible.ca to sign up. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, for free, visit audible.ca to sign up. 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. And we hope this is of use to you. Nobody won afraid of losing. It might not work. It could go very badly. You could be laughed at. You could take a financial hit. You could come in second.

You could fail. You could even die. But is life without risk possible? Could you possibly hope to make it through the world to borrow a powerful rhetorical question from meditations? Could you possibly hope to do this without encountering any of these setbacks? Of course not and this is why courage is such a critical virtue to the Stoics because life demands it You cannot do anything go go anywhere, be anyone without it.

The Great Asthoics were defined by their ability to go out there and do what they thought needed to be done, despite the incredibly unlikely probability of success. Cato went against Caesar, his daughter, Portia, did the same. George Washington, in that winter of discontent at Valley Forge, drew on that that exact example putting on Addison's play about Cato to inspire himself and his men. Stockdale had every reason to think he would not survive, that he would not triumph over his captors, but he never gave in. We will not always win in life, but we will never win without an ability to face loss, without the courage to proceed anyway. Be not afraid, be brave.

Courage is the mother of all virtues, you could say. And in fact, Aristotle did say this because in a world that's not virtuous, it's a brave thing to go out there and do what needs to be done. The first book in the Stoic Virtue Series is Courage is Calling, it's about that. Will you answer the call?

And then those is followed by Discipline is Destiny. And then I just finished the next book in the series, Right Thing Right Now. You can head over and grab those at stuart.dailystoic.com. You can get them anywhere books are sold. Since you're listening to this right now, maybe like audio books, you can grab audio books of them as well.

Anywhere audio books are sold, check them out. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic podcast. I'm gonna bring you a Q and A today from a talk I did way back in November of 2020 to flash forward a little bit, by the way, I will be in Australia the last couple of days of July and August doing dates in Sydney and Melbourne.

And then in November of 2024, I will also be in Canada and Europe. You can grab all those dates at ryanholiday.net slash tour. But I was doing a virtual offsite. This was back in COVID days, talking about obstacle and stillness. And they had some great questions on journaling. Then someone was asking me how stoicism

can be practical and relevant in today's environment. Some folks asked me about my exercise routine, how I teach these stoic principles to my kids, and a great introduction to stoicism. So that's what we'll get into today. And I hope to see you, not virtual, in person, either later this month in Australia or in Europe and Canada in the fall. Grab those dates at ryanholliday.net slash tour. So if you're journaling freeform daily, it's not the first time I've been introduced to the concept, but so I know a little bit about it, but how how many journals do you go through

and what do you do with them? So I don't do anything with them because the value of them is the act, the process. These are not sort of records for history. These are not, you know, drafts of things I'm writing. It is the time with the journal that is the upside, that is that I get it having finished, not reviewing it later for the most part.

But I actually use three journals and this might be too much for any one person, but I think each one of the ideas might independently be valuable. So the first journal I use, it's at my house, I can't show it to you, but I have this little journal, it's called the One Line a Day Journal. And this is one of the ways I picked up the habit. It's a journal and it has five sections on each page. The idea being you write one thing about each day as the day happens. And then you have five years of what you did on that day. So I love like I was writing in it this morning and it was like, oh, I was finishing a chapter

in my most recent book on this day 12 months ago, that's cool, right? So the one line a day is like, I think a really easy way to start journaling and they make a bunch of different ones. There's like the one line a day journal for mothers and for college students. And there's all different ones like that that are cool. But then I just do some free form journaling

like in a blank journal, I just talk about what I'm thinking, what I'm going through. Sometimes I log like my workout or I just kind of, it's just whatever I want. It's just a few minutes on the page. And then the third one I do, I made a journal a few years ago called the Daily Stoic Journal that gives you a question that you respond to in the morning and at night. So the other form of journaling, and I'm not trying to sort of pimp my own is like, there are all sorts of great journals out there that have

prompts. And so if you have trouble journaling, finding a journal that gives you something to talk to yourself about question to answer, that can be a great way to form that practice. Thanks. Sorry for the digression, everybody. But I've always been curious about journaling. It's like meditating. I've tried it. I'm still wrestling with it because I have a hard time getting there and I'm still early, still early days in it. So super small question now, Ryan, this is probably a yes or no. You ready? Yes. How can stoicism be effective? Be practical, be

relevant in today's environment, economic uncertainty, social and political divisiveness? I'll just keep it simple and end there. Well, so I used to joke, I would say, you know, you think these ideas are are so distant. But I would say, you know, you think these ideas are so distant. But the reality is, you know, the stoics were, the ancients were going through divorce, and they were trying to make money, and they had civil, they had all our problems, plus the plague. The idea that the distant past was so different than ours is really ridiculous. And I think

really, when you read the stoics, especially, I mean, book five of meditations, speaking of what we were talking about, the opening passage in book five of meditations is Marcus are really is having a discussion with himself about not wanting to get out of bed in the morning. And he says, Oh, but it's so warm here under the covers. And you're like, this is he is me and I am him. Like we are the same, you know? So we tend to think of history as the thing in the past, but you know, we are living through history and it gives you a sense of, you know, people are people and things have always been this way. What is your typical workout?

I usually, so I try to run, swim or bike every single day. So I try to do one of the three. I usually try to do some sort of endurance thing. I like working out, I like CrossFit, I like those kinds of things, but as a writer, I think the sort of solitary long chunk of time doing one intensely focused thing usually has the best benefits for me. Do you try and teach these principles to your young children? And how is that going?

I do. They're a little young for it specifically. So we're not quite there. You know, I think I was just thinking about this the other day, when you really go back to the ancient literature, there's not really such thing as like children's stories. They were just stories. It's only, you know, later that we've decided that all children's books have to be about dragons who eat pizza and, you know, talking teddy bears and stuff. There used to be sort of fables and sort of epics that the poems that you would teach lessons to kids. So I spent a lot like a lot of the sort of bedtime stuff we do is, is like poetry or, or, you know, speeches or, you know, ASAPs fables, stuff like that. Best intro book to stoicism.

I'm a little biased. I mean, if you want to read, if let's do this way, if you want to read the actual stoics, like the original, like one book by a stoic, I think Marcus Aurelius, the Gregory Hayes translation is the most accessible. I did a book called the daily stoic that is one page of stoic philosophy every day. But I also do a free email version of it, which you can get at daily stoic.com. So I think it can be hard to just say like, Hey, I'm going to learn about a whole school of philosophy. I think doing it in a really

digestible way, like as a page a day or an email a day or a podcast episode a day is another pretty good way to do it. I think I just tell folks, and again, no one's making money on me doing this, but the obstacle is the way is the first of Ryan's books that I read of that trilogy. Someone on the line actually gifted me the Daily Stoic, which is where I sort of got started on on your work. And that was one of the things I like about your writing is it's incredibly accessible. Now, you said earlier that in part is because that's how stoicism is structured. Yeah. Um, but it's also the way you present it because these are old cats, um, and old things about old times. But, but the thing that struck me is so surprising is as you said,

how relevant so much of their teachings and experiences are to today's world. And you actually put it together in a way that really is quite understandable and accessible, and it's quick reading, and I would recommend it. So one of our colleagues asked how the concept of anti-fragile over your right shoulder intersects with Stoicism.

Yeah, that's a great question. So Nusim Taleb is actually a... I've gotten to know him over the years. He's a you'll see the stoic sort of interspersed throughout his work. So I certainly don't think they're inconsistent with each other. I think the idea of anti-fragile and the idea and just the phrase the obstacle is the way are essentially saying the same thing. You can be worse for what's happened or you can be better for what's happened.

And anti-fragile just means you're the kind of thing as he says that gets stronger from disorder or from difficulty or from challenges. And I think a person who lives the idea that the obstacle is the way that what stands in the way is the way that everything you experience is an opportunity to get better, to practice virtue. I think that's essentially saying the same thing.

I think Maseem's background is much more in finance and he has a mathematical analysis for a lot of what he's talking about. I tend to just look at history and go, look, almost every great person has been through some sort of adversity or difficulty in their life. It's inevitable running a business, running a family, being a human being that things will not go your way. Murphy's law, what can go wrong will. So are you going to be wrecked by those things or those things going to create opportunities for you? If it's the latter, you'll get better. If it's the former, I don't think you're going to last long. the word, tell people about it, and this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say thank 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

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