The Daily Stoic - Ryan Speaks To The YMCA About Courage, Perseverance, And Showing Up Every Day

Episode Date: July 23, 2023

As a fan of the YMCA and avid user of its services, Ryan jumped at the chance when the Pennsylvania YMCA asked if he would like to come to their headquarters in 2022 and speak to a group of the organization’s Executives in order to help them navigate the shifting gym usage landscape in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. Ryan’s speech touches on a selection of the key Stoic ideas that he himself used to push himself through that time, including the importance of recognizing and embracing the positives of difficult moments.✉️ 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.

Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic podcast. On Sundays, we take a deeper dive into these ancient topics with excerpts from the Stoic texts, audiobooks that we like here recommend here at Daily Stoic and other long form wisdom that you can chew on on this relaxing weekend. We hope this helps shape your understanding of this philosophy and most importantly that you're able to apply it to your actual life. Thank you for listening. Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic podcast. Back in October of 22, I was asked to speak to the Pennsylvania YMCA.

They had a group of their leaders come together. This was a remote gathering. I didn't make my way out there. Although, I love YMCA, they had a group of their leaders come together. This was a remote gathering. I didn't make my way out there, although I love YMCA's. There's a great one here in Austin, right on Tal make that I like to swim in. My wife used to play volleyball at a bunch of different YMCA's and I'm going to work out or swim in the pools. So I'm a big fan of athletic clubs and cool places to swim and work out. And so I'm always been a YMCA guy. And they

wanted me to talk about the ideas and encourages calling. They'd lost something like 60 to 70 percent of their memberships during the pandemic. And, you know, there's problems in major cities and changes and, you know, people built gyms in their house people started indulging in bad habits and they've been trying to across the state of Pennsylvania like rebuild, rethink, regroup and they wanted me to come out. And so I had a nice chat about some of the ideas encourages calling what the Stokes could teach a great organization like that. There's about 58 different YMCA's across the state of Pennsylvania

and so they had a bunch of their executives and leaders, young and old come together and these are a bunch of the future leaders, the next generation of YMCA. So it was a really cool opportunity to come in and do that. I'm talking about so many of the stoic ideas we talk about here. It's starting small, following the process, not letting fear or anxiety or the magnitude of the problem overwhelm us. I talk about showing up every day and being brave enough to see the positive in the moment,

right, how the obstacle is the way. And so I thought I'd bring you this talk. It's obviously been a little while. So I let the ideas seep in over there. The YMCA, I'm grateful for them to invite me. And now I wanted to share it with a wider audience. So I'm bringing it here to the podcast. I hope you like it.

And I do the occasional virtual talk still. It's obviously cooler and better to be there in person, although there's something awesome about the scale that these virtual talks let you do, I do the occasional virtual talk still. It's obviously cooler and better to be there in person, although there's something awesome about the scale that these virtual talks let you do, because I can do a couple in a day. I don't have to travel all that. So you can email VaynerSpeakers

if you got an organization you want me to talk to. But in the meantime, here's me talking courage and stoicism to the YMCA, and now to you. to the YMCA and now to you. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wondries Podcast Business Wars. And in our new season, two of the world's leading hotel brands, Hilton and Marriott, stare down family drama and financial disasters. Listen to business wars on Amazon music or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you for having me. It's great to be with you.

I am coming to you from the Los Angeles Athletic Club in downtown Los Angeles. I am I'm here with my family. I just did a little talk in San Diego. A long time member swimmer at the YMCA there on Town Lake in Austin. So I love what you guys do. And it's an honor to be with all of you. If I could take you way back about 2000 years to a time in which the gymnasia was still a very familiar and popular concept, the Roman people experience in which the gymnasia was still a very familiar and popular concept. The Roman people experience a devastating plague.

It comes from the Far East. It's brought back by returning soldiers, it quickly overwhelms Rome's institutions. It's known as the Antonine plague. And it's named after a guy named Marcus Aurelius, who happens to be the emperor of Rome at this time. The plague is not his fault, but it's still his problem to deal with. Among many other problems, there's historic flooding. There's a coup attempt. Most of his reign is spent dealing with various wars or invasions. It's sort of one thing after another for this guy.

Basically, everything that could go wrong does, as I'm sure many of you can relate to these days. Marcus keeps a journal, sort of a diary called meditation, which just translates to to himself in Greek. So we'd write these notes to himself as he was dealing with the difficulties that life seems to be dwelling out one after another. And at one point in meditations, he says, you know, it's unfortunate that this happened. And in fact, in ancient historian agrees, he says that, this is again, almost 2,000 years ago, he says, you know, Marcus does not meet with the good fortune that he deserved for his whole reign was involved in a series of troubles. Again, this sort of reminds me of how things have been the last few years, just one thing

after another. But Marcus tries to catch himself. He writes in meditations, you know, is it unfortunate that this happened to me? Or is it fortunate that this happened to me? He's basically saying that we have a choice how we choose to see things. The last couple years for me, I don't know what your pandemic story has been like, I can imagine, but in February of 2020, I was in the middle of opening a small bookstore in rural Texas, which is probably crazy under ordinary circumstances, and then circumstances. And then turned out to be a lot that line in arrestive development. I think I've made a huge mistake. It cost more than expected.

It took longer than expected. And then when we could open, we weren't sure that we wanted to. In the middle of this pandemic. And I caught myself at one point, I wrote a note to myself, sort of thinking about this exact sort of dilemma that Marcus goes through. And Marcus writes to himself about this choice. And so I wrote to myself, as I stared out over this empty bookstore

with no customers that I'd sunk my life savings into. And I said, 2020 is a choice. What makes you a better person or a worse one? And to me, this is kind of the essence of stoicism when I wrote my book, The Ops goes the way it was sort of centered around this idea that we have the ability to see these things that life puts in front of us as a challenge. That's what The Stokes believed that although we don't choose what happens, we choose how we respond to what happens. We choose to see the opportunity inside the obstacle. We see the challenge that we can rise to me.

So today, I wanted to talk specifically about this idea of courage. The courage necessary to face what life has dealt us to face the economic environment, the cultural environment, the political environment, the public health environment that we are in, and to not just not be deterred by it, but to see the opportunities within it to be made better for the challenge that we happen to be facing. And I think for the, the, the, the first idea is that what we're doing is hard enough. Fear doesn't help. Like people, people think that the word Stoic means has no emotions, right?

That's the lower case meaning of Stoicism in the English language. That's really not what Stoicism was in the ancient world. That's not what the philosophy of stoicism is about, to me the philosophy of stoicism is about the absence of destructive emotions or the processing of destructive emotions before they take a situation and make it worse, right? Chris Hadfield, the Canadian astronaut, he talks about how in space, something happens, right? You're in some crisis.

And his first space walk, one of his eyes literally freezes, shut, he can't see. It's a life or death situation. He says, you know, there's a number of things you can do in any situation that will make it better, right? And he said, but it's worth remembering that there's no problem so bad that we can't make it worse also, which is so often what we do when we're afraid. Most Americans are familiar with FDR's famous speech, right? At the outset of the Great Depression when he's inaugurated, he says the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. We actually think about this. This isn't an abstract argument that he's making about fear in general.

He's talking about people making runs on banks, people checking out of investments, people pulling money out of the stock market, right? People, the economy requires buy-in, it requires engagement. He's talking about how in an economic panic when people have lost faith in institutions and government, fear is a self-fulfilling prophecy, right?

It's a downward spiral. And what he's trying to do in this moment is go, look, it's really bad. I'm not lying. I'm not gonna lie and say that it isn't, but fear isn't helping here. Fear takes a bad situation and makes it worse. Right? Panic doesn't help anxiety doesn't help feeling sorry for ourselves doesn't help feeling jealous doesn't

help feeling guilty or full of regret doesn't help the stoic the essence of stoicism is this idea that there's things that are up to us and things that are not up to us. And a lot of the emotions that we feel that we bring to bear on the situations or the obstacles that are in front of us are not constructive. They're emoting at the parts of things that are outside of our control. But courage, the belief that one can do something, that there's room to do something, that something is salvageable, these are constructive, positive emotions that allow us to move forward. I'm not saying that just because you believe you can do something, you can do it. But certainly, if you don't believe that you can do something, if you believe

a situation is hopeless, that you are helpless, that you have no agency over the situation that it's a done deal, it's broken things, I'll never come back, things can never be improved. Well, then, you know, that is true. So for the Stoics, then it's the first step is to get control of myself, not going to freak out, not going to get angry. I'm not going to make this worse. And then the next stage for the Stoics, I think, is actually a pretty small step. It's about starting small.

I think sometimes we look at the enormity of the situation we have to claw our way back through, the whole we have to dig ourselves out of the things that we have to repair, the business that we have to bring back, and we despair. And despair is also not a particularly productive emotion. As I was starting my last book, Discipline is Destiny, I had this sort of dark night of the soul moment, a moment of despair. I was on roughly my tenth book in 10 years. I was exhausted. I wasn't sure that I had the material. I wasn't sure I could pull off the material. It just wasn't there. I was starting this book in the mid-summer. And as I sort of looked at the material, I just, I had this moment where I thought, you know what, it would probably make sense to just call my publisher here and ask for a pretty

significant delay or just call it off altogether. And it's funny as I was sitting there, especially on my birthday, I just started flipping through the note cards that I had assembled. I write all my books on these sort of four by six note cards, all my research. And I was going through these note cards and I found this note card written in red Sharpie. And I don't know when I wrote it and I don't know why I wrote it, but what I'd written however long before it said, look, when you sit down to go through these note cards, it's going to feel like there isn't a book here. But if you show up every day, if you follow the process, eventually the book will emerge, just follow the process. And I don't know why I sent this message from the past to my future self, but it happened to be exactly what I needed in that moment.

It wasn't a no-car that said, here is the way forward, here is the magical solution to all of your problems, here is a singular idea that will do everything. Epiphanies are overrated. I tend to find that they don't exist. But what was there in that no card was a reminder of the idea of the process, right? There's still to say that we solve our problems action by action. Mark Sruis says, no one can stop you from that.

Doing the little task in front of you, the first thing in front of you, right? No one can stop you from that, doing the little task in front of you, the first thing in front of you, right? No one can stop you from that. It's actually funny to, the book didn't magically appear. It took weeks before I started to get some confidence back before I could see where I was going, but I did show up every day and I just started going through these nail cards.

And I got a little bit here and a little bit there and eventually pattern started to emerge and the book made itself clear. There was funny about 18 months later, as the book was about to come out, I was staring at a thing I'd massively over committed to I agreed to sign about 15,000 copies for the pre-order of the launch.

And as I deflated Chicago to a warehouse, all the books were laid out on this, you know, sort of in this enormous warehouse. And as I stared out over 15,000 books that I had to individually sign one by one, you know, dreading what my hand would feel like at the end, I sort of questioned how this was going to be physically possible and how this would be possible in the relatively short amount of time that I had. And then it was sort of that same idea again, right? The way to sign 15,000 books is by signing them one book at a time, right? This is how we solve all problems. Nikola Tesla once sort of sneeringly said of Edison that if you asked Edison to find a needle in a

haystack, he would lay the haystack down and go through a piece of straw by piece of straw till he found the needle. And I think Tesla was saying that, you know, a smarter person would just come up with some magical invention that would find the needle in the haystack. But going through a piece of straw, a piece of straw is one way to do it. And it's probably the trident and the truest way to do it. And when Edison, who's credited with inventing a light bulb,

does invent this, he does it not by understanding the technology of how it would work. This is pretty established science at this time. Edison, Edison discovers what the filament inside the light bulb will be. And he doesn't test 100, you know, it's supposedly says 1% perspiration, 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration. He tests 6,000 different filaments. We solve our problems one by one, testing assumption hypotheses, one after another, crossing things off, chipping away at it, following the process. And I love this from the

Stokes. They're saying, don't despair at the immensity of what lays before you. Don't let the crush of life overwhelm you as a whole. Mark's really just saying, and you can imagine, as you looked out after one problem after another, no end in sight, you know, the idea of how can I possibly go forward from this? What could I possibly do? The idea of just do the thing in front of you, chip away at this is, is really humble, but it's ultimately the only way forward. Zeno, one of the founders of stoicism who loses everything in a shipwreck and sort of washes up on shore and Athens, staring at the prospect of a totally new life. And he says, well being is realized by small steps, but it is no small thing. And that's what we have to realize that these little bits of progress

hiring one person solving one problem, moving the ball forward one little bit, right? Bringing one customer back, resigning, one member, renegotiating one lease rate, solving one thing after another. It doesn't seem like a lot, just like going through each note card signing one individual book.

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I want to actually pick up that thread there, this idea of getting back to where things were, because I think one of the few things that I have heard more in the pandemic that has bothered me most has been this idea of when things go back to normal, right? Can't wait for things to go back to normal. People have been saying this since March of 2020, right? It'll be two weeks. It'll be two months. Oh, two years. Everything will be back to normal. First off, normal doesn't exist. But second, normal is what caused the situation that we're in, right? Normal is why we were unprepared for it. Normal is all of the things that set us up to be in the position that we were.

And so for the Stoics, it's understandings having the courage to understand that normal doesn't exist. And in fact, the only normal thing in the world is the kind of disruptive, destabilizing, uncomfortable, challenging change that we've just went through. Right? People say, oh, this is unprecedented. The Stoics, again, marks the realist, a plague, civil unrest, war, problems at the border. He'd say, this is very precedent. This is the most precedent and thing that there is. And it's only our illusions about how things should be, and how we want them to be, that catch us off guard when they stop being that way, or they

radically change. And so, A Stoic says that the reason we train, the reason we embrace change, is so that when it does happen, it doesn't catch us off guard. Sennaka famously says that the unexpected blow lands heaviest. And his point was that we actually have to meditate on plan for the unexpected events of life. So when Chris had Phil saying there's things that you can do to make it better, there's things you can do to make it worse,

we was talking about as the kind of training that an astronaut goes through, the kind of preparation so that in high stress, fluid situations one can adapt and adjust and knows what to revert to. Obviously looking at the last couple of years, we're allmortem is far superior, right? Plan in advance for what can go wrong. Being willing to consider the worst case scenario, having wargaming, the kinds of scenarios where membership drops by half. We have to be closed, we have to explore virtual e-commerce elements. When I do talks, I think about, okay, what's my plan

if there are significant technical difficulties? What if I've been given the wrong brief about the audience? What backup plans do I have? What backup plans do I have for my backup plans? How have I practiced and set myself up so that when things are not the way that I want them to me, I am not at a loss. The whole purpose of stoic philosophy, Epic Tita says is that when things happen in life, we can be

able to say, Ah, this is what I trained for, right? This is why they pay me the big bucks. This is why I am in a position of leadership. It's for these kinds of things. It's not for when things are going well, it's not for when things are happening the way I want them to happen. It's when they get tough, when they get difficult, when they are destabilized, that's when we come in, that's when we do our work. Now, when we talk about this kind of idea of the stoke that embraces change, the kind of stoke that always focuses on what they can do, the kind of stoke that isn't afraid. I don't want you, though, to again revert to this stereotype as the unfilling, invulnerable robotic stoke, right?

The last couple years have been incredibly difficult, incredibly challenging. They forced us to question so many things. They've taxed us and over-taxed us and burnt us out in so many ways. And the the the stoic is fine admitting this, acknowledging this. They're brave enough to admit and address where they are struggling, where they are having a hard time. There I think you might you might say that the bravest thing in the world, certainly Brunei Brown talks about this in her books. One of the bravest things in the world to do is to be vulnerable, to ask for help. Marcus really says, look, we are like soldiers storming a wall.

If you fall and slip and you have to ask a comrade to help lift you up to extend your arm to pull you up over the wall, he says, so what? Right? And I love this idea of so what? Right? When your friends ask you for help, when your co-workers ask you for help, when people on your team say, Oh, I don't understand. Can you explain that to me again? You're never like, what an idiot, how dare you, right? You're glad you asked. You'd much rather someone asked for more instruction than do the thing improperly or admit far too late in the process that they don't know what's going on. If you remember that, that scene in the office where Jim is asked to do a rundown. But he has no idea what a rundown is.

And instead of just saying, hey, I don't know what a rundown is, he just waste weeks of everyone's time dancing around it, right? We actually don't mind when people ask for help. And then we turn around and refuse to ask for help, refuse to acknowledge when we're struggling, when we're having a hard time, when we don't understand something, and then we don't know something. And then we wonder why we don't get better,

why the team struggles. And then, of course, we wonder why the other people in the organization also are afraid to ask for help. Well, we're modeling the wrong behavior, we're not being brave enough to ask for help. One of my favorite quotes from the Stokes is it's impossible to learn that what you think you already know, right? If you think you know the answer to everything, if you're too afraid to ask things, you won't get any better. But I think this is also true for help. You don't get help,

you don't ask for, you don't learn things that you're too closed off for. And so you have to be brave enough to be vulnerable. You have to ask for support. You have to ask for resources. Most of the people who are above you or have been there longer, they've been through stuff like this before. And you have to be brave enough to ask for this. There's a book I like to read in my kids called The Boy,

The Fox, The Horse and the Mole. It's a credible, beautifully illustrated little book. There's a line in it where the horse says, asking for help isn't giving up. It's refusing to give up. And I think this so perfectly expresses why the courage to be vulnerable and ask for help is so important. The person who says, I just don't understand it's impossible. I can't do it. It's a kind of person who's frozen in place, who is stuck. The person who's willing, brave enough to ask for help to say, hey, I need more here. I don't know what to do.

That's the kind of person that can get better. And the problem with being the stoke that stuffs everything down is you're not actually avoiding paying that bill, right? It's like you just put it on a credit card. There's interest attached. Eventually that bill comes to, eventually the thing you stuffed down comes exploding out the, the closet's stuffed to full and the door blows open. And you know, it's not it's not good, right? So you have to be brave enough to do this. Now, the last thing I sort of wanted to talk about was this idea of being brave enough to be yourself, right? I think oftentimes in organizations, some of the reasons we don't have the tough conversations that we need to, some of the reasons we don't have the tough conversations

that we need to have, some of the reasons that people maybe don't get the shots that they deserve, is they're afraid to sort of put themselves out there, sort of dealing with what you might call a posture syndrome, dealing with confidence issues. There's a story about a young Margaret Thatcher, the Prime Minister of England. She is applying for her first job out of college. She wanted to be a chemist. That's what she went to school for. And she's sitting there interviewing. She can read upside down. And she can read what the interviewer across from her is writing about her in the moment. read what the interviewer across from her is writing about her in the moment.

And she sees this older man, right, this woman is too difficult to work here. Which of course is offensive and awful. But in a sense true, right? Like she was way too difficult to be constrained to this tiny, non-descript, relatively meaningless job. She was meant for bigger and better things. You know, John Lewis talks about having learned from Rosa Parks the idea of causing good trouble, right? The trouble that challenges sacred cows that maybe makes people a little uncomfortable when you're not afraid to say what you think, when you're not afraid to advocate for changes that have been long delayed, to address the things that other people are afraid to say, to push new ideas.

One has to have the courage to do this, to go for it, to put yourself out there, to ask the tough questions, right? And sometimes asking for help is that, sometimes admitting that something has happened is that, sometimes questioning whole assumptions about an industry, about a job, about the way things are done. And these questions aren't always appreciated, not in the moment at least, right? In retrospect, the changes that they bring about, the people that they bring forward, the

reckoning that comes along with them, the improvements that come as a result of them, these things are all appreciated later. But in the moment, it can be scary, it can be uncomfortable, it can be difficult, it can be met with backlash. But where would we be if people didn't do that? And so that's sort of where I wanted to wrap up and then I'm looking forward to talking about some

of these ideas with all of you. When we see people who are brave enough to face the uncertainty of the moment that we're in, people who find some constructive elements to put their energy and effort, people who start small, people who are brave enough to be vulnerable, people who cause good trouble. Like we see what the positive that comes out of that is. But also it's worth considering where we would be without those kinds of people. And that's why we have to be brave enough to follow in the footsteps of said people. One of my favorite poems is a poem called them a Song of Life by Longfellow. He says, the the lives of great men all remind us we can make our lives

sublime. And then he says, and leaving behind us footprints in the in the sands of time. He says, footprints that will inspire other people in the future to make their own sort of progress and changes and and and deal with their own problems of their time. So as we look out at the past and we see that people have been through things like we've been through and gotten through it, as we look back on our own lives, as we look back on these last two years and we see that we've been through and gotten through it, as we look back on our own lives, as we look back on these last two years, and we see that we've been through this moment of historical reckoning in so many ways, and yet here we are still standing, right? We have emerged from it. We should emerge from that with a certain amount of confidence. We just live through a moment that will be written about in the history books, we made it through the other side, right? That should give us so much confidence and belief in ourselves about what the, about what ever the future hands

us. And that, that's sort of where I wanted to wrap up with, with what Marcus really says, he says, you know, what will I meet the uncertainty of tomorrow with? He says, well, the same weapons that I met with the uncertainty of today, right? And when we think about what we've been through these last few years, and again, that we're still standing, it should give us a lot of confidence, a lot of courage to know that whatever the uncertainty of the next few years brings us, we know we can get through that. We know we've trained for it, right? We know we've been through a crucible that's given us a sense of our own capacities.

And that's the final reminder that I wanted to give all of you. Thank you very much, you guys. Keep doing your work. I'm very much a client and appreciative user. Thank you guys. Thanks for listening to the Daily Stoke Podcast. Just a reminder, we've got signed copies of all my books in the Daily Stoke Store. You can get them personalized, you can get them sent to a friend.

The app goes away. You go as the enemy, still in this is the key. The leather-bound edition of the Daily Stoke, we have them all in the Daily Stoke Store, which you can check out at store.dailystoke.com. 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 with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts.