The Daily Stoic - This Saved Ten Lives | Routines are Fragile... Try These 10 Stoic Practices Instead

Episode Date: June 11, 2024

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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 Podcast. left school at 15 and devised an idea, a next level bra that remoulds the cleavage. An uplifting story, which gives you a real boost. I hate myself. She moved from business to politics, and when COVID hit, says she knows a great company to supply PPE. And the company, PPE MedPro, made millions of pounds

of profit from the contract. Oh, and a lot of the equipment was unusable. Oh, a minor detail. And having said that she had nothing to do with that profit repeatedly, she then goes on national television and says that HONOR children are actually in line to receive nearly £30 million as a result of it. To find out the full incredible story, follow British Scandal wherever you listen to podcasts or listen early and ad free on

Wondery Plus. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. On Tuesdays, we take a closer look at these stoic ideas, how we can apply them in our actual lives. Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy. This saved 10 lives. A man is walking through the streets of Amsterdam and he hears a scream and a splash. It's cold. He's going somewhere. He's not sure what he heard. So he ignores it. But with time, the horrific inescapable conclusion becomes undeniable to him. Someone had leapt or fallen

into the canal and he could have saved them. From his indifference came the death of an innocent person. This, of course, is the plot of Albert Camus' The Fall, his haunting 1956 novel about a Paris defense lawyer's fall from grace. Yet this fictional tale was also an allegory. Hadn't millions of Europeans, including many on those very streets of Amsterdam, turned a similar blind

eye to the plight of the Jews just a few years earlier. Is it not also a message that resounds today? Millions of people die every year of entirely preventable illnesses and accidents. Millions just perished in a pandemic, some percentage of them needlessly so. Were others and their leaders a little more willing to do something other than shrug their shoulders, they could have been saved. In meditations, Marcus Aurelius chastises himself for the injustices he is guilty of.

Not things he did so much as the things he didn't do. And you can commit an injustice by doing nothing, he writes. Marcus was a great leader and by all accounts a good person, yet like all of us, he could have done more. And it was this at the end of his life that haunted him. It will probably haunt you too. You could do more, you know you should do more, but where do you start?

You say to yourself that if someone went into the water near me, if someone was starving near me, I would help them. But they are, a plane flight away, a country away, and you so easily could do something. GiveWell.org estimates right now that for $3,000, you can save a human life in Nigeria. According to the World Health Organization,

something like 200,000 people die in Nigeria alone each year of malaria, a largely treatable and preventable mosquito-borne illness. Just a few thousand dollars buys enough monthly courses of preventative malaria medication to save one person. There are one million subscribers to the Daily Stoke email and tens of thousands more listen to the podcast each day. A significant percentage of these people could afford on their own to save a human from death

right now. How crazy is that? A few could afford to save many humans and the rest could come together, chipping in a little bit each to collectively do the same. This is something that the Stoics did not talk about enough. The way that a singular person could make a difference,

but also the way that people working together can do even more. We have all sorts of tools and insights that allow us to do this more effectively and efficiently than Marcus Aurelius could have ever even imagined. We should not turn away from that. We should lean into it proudly and loudly to be able to say, I saved someone's life.

In Right Thing Right Now, good values, good character, good deeds, and the new book, I tell the story of Rabbi Harold Kushner who had a ritual before writing each day. He'd take out his checkbook and scroll out a small donation to one of the charities that he and his wife supported. It was his way of doing something for someone else

before he sat down to do his work. Today, right thing, right now comes out. Now, I guess I could have written another promotional ask for the book I could be talking about, but instead I decided in Kushner's spirit, I would make an offering. I'm not writing a check, but I did fill out the form on givewell.org's website,

and I donated enough money to save 10 lives. So by listening to this, you help make that happen. And by following with a donation of your own, you can make even more of it happen. You can head over to GiveWell today and make a donation to the malaria consortium You just choose it from the drop-down menu and your donation will fund the anti-malarial medications that people need Medication that will make an immediate impact on the life of someone it won't be some pie-in-the-sky theory of justice

You'll be doing the right thing right now and that's what a stoic does give well right thing right now. And that's what a stoic does, givewell.org. Thanks to everyone who supported the book. Thanks for listening to the podcast. And I hope you can head over and do that. Make the stoics proud, make me proud. I'd appreciate it. Talk soon.

["The Star-Spangled Banner"] Almost everyone great has a practice. They don't wake up and wing it. They has a practice. They don't wake up and wing it. They have a practice. They have a system. There's an order or a routine to their life. Routines are everything. Seneca says that a life without design is erratic.

And he says it's a shame you look around in Rome. He says, it's funny, if you would ask the ordinary Roman who's leaving their house, like, where are you going? What are you doing? What's your plan for the day? They wouldn't know, they're just kind of winging it. How a lot of us go through life, and then it shouldn't surprise us that we're inefficient,

that we waste time, that we get distracted easily. We don't have enough structure or systems in our life. I'm Ryan Holiday. I've written about Stoke philosophy now for almost 15 years, talked about it everywhere from the NBA to the NFL, special forces, sitting senators. I'm a big follower of routine. I've also talked a lot here on the Daily Stoke about my daily routine. But in today's episode, I kind of actually want to blow that up, because there is something

a bit fragile about routine. Any parent can tell you this. You have your routine. You have your structure. You have the way you like to do things. And then you have kids and your life is blown up. Not just blown up once, but blown up every day, because you wake up and your kid is sick.

You wake up and you thought they had school, and it turns out it's a snow day, or it's a teacher work day, or it's spring break, or they didn't sleep last night, or they decided to fight you on. The idea that you're going to do the same thing the same way every day doesn't work, right? Whether you're a professional athlete or a stay-at-home mom. What you need is a kind of flexibility. And that's what I want to talk about today. As I have evolved and gotten older with the stoic idea of routines, I think about it less as a routine, more about routines plural, and I think less about this system and I think more about practices. What are the bedrock

practices, the things I try to do every day but I'm much more flexible, formless as Robert Greene says, about the order that I do them in. So that's what we're going to talk about today. Some bedrock stoic practices to do every day in whatever order you manage to make possible. You get up early. You just you have to get up early even though you don't want to. Marcus Serrillo says, what were you made to stay under the covers and be warm? No, you were put on this planet to do something. Dante says, under the blankets is no way to fame.

You get up early and you do something. You go for a run. You write in your journal. You sit quietly and watch the sunrise. You meditate. I don't care what you do, but it still gets up early. They own the morning because owning the morning is a critical part of owning the day.

The first thing I do actually is journal. I take a few minutes to sit down and put my thoughts on paper. This is what Marcus Aurelius was doing in meditations. You can imagine why the most powerful man in the world who had very few people to confide in, very few people he could complain to, very few people who could possibly even conceive of

or understand what he was dealing with, would need the space, the white space of the paper to work through what he was doing. So I sit down and I just talk about what I wanna do, what I'm struggling with, what's been going on. Sometimes it'll just be recording some things that I did the day before, again, just to sort of get the mind going,

and then the thoughts tend to pour out, oh, you're worried about this, well, does this really matter? The Stoics felt like what we were doing in this journaling is putting our thoughts to the test. So often we have thoughts, we have impressions, we have needs, we have anxieties, and they make sense,

but only because we haven't fully articulated them. And by writing them out, we often see that they're incorrect or not fully comprehensive, or in fact, they're preposterous, right? And by having a tiny bit of distance between us and our thoughts, again, we get perspective?

So I do the journaling, I use a couple different journals, sometimes I do it on note cards. I just take this time, it's quiet time just for me that I do my journaling. Anne Frank in her famous diary, she has this great line, and it's one of the reasons I always do this journaling,

once a day, ideally in the morning. She says, paper is more patient than people. So instead of dumping or vomiting these thoughts over on the first person you see in the morning or the first phone call you have in the morning, you've done it on the page. And it may be that some of those thoughts actually do need to be articulated to someone else. They do need to be worked out, but a good chunk of them don't. Nietzsche said that only ideas had while walking have any worth. I don't know if that's strictly true, but I do know I've had a lot of really good ideas

walking and that's just like an extra benefit. I mean, you're outside, you're active, ideally you're not on the phone, maybe you're with people that you care about, you're present. You're doing what human beings were evolved to do over thousands and thousands of years. So I try not to let a single day go by without walking. It rests, it relaxes the mind, it centers me. I try to start the day with the walk, I try to end the day with the walk. Because as Seneca says, the mind must be given over to relaxation to take wandering walks. It's part of the philosophical process.

It's part of my daily routine. It should be part of your daily routine too. So you're either a reader or you're not. It's not that you can read that matters. What matters is that you do read. One of the practices that I like to do is not just read books when I have time or whatever. I like daily books.

Obviously the daily stoic is a page a day book, but this is actually a really fascinating genre of books. I don't read the daily stoic, that would be weird, but I do read a bunch of daily books. One of my favorites is Tolstoy's Calendar of Wisdom. It's just a page a day from one of the smartest, wisest guys ever. Actually, he says in this book, I don't get it.

How do people not want to communicate with the wisest and deepest thinkers who ever live, which is what reading is? Like here, this book is Tolstoy's favorite quotes and ideas just every day a little meditation it's called the calendar of wisdom daily thoughts to nourish the soul and it was largely forgotten it was suppressed by the Soviets after his death and and then never really reached the audience that

it could it's it's actually one of the most popular books in the painted porch this is a year with real key which is another daily book that I really like. Obviously, The Daily Dad, which is my daily parenting book. Where's the daily laws? This is Robert Greene's. People go, where should I start with Robert Greene? Or how could I be meditating on Robert's ideas of mastery, strategy, understanding human nature better?

Well, instead of reading all those books, basically, the way to think about this book is it's Robert Greene's, you know, several million words of published writing compressed into a kind of a greatest hit. So sometimes I like to just start the day by seeing what Robert would teach me or say to me. There's a book called The Daily Drucker, which I have around here somewhere.

This is The Courage to See Daily Inspiration. It's just a passage from great literature every day. This is obviously the Daily Stoic email. This is like all the emails that we sent out in 2021. So that's a daily read. Oh, here's, uh, this is funny. Steven Pressfield, who wrote The War of Art. Like The War of Art is a book that changed my life, turning pro changed my life. I guess flip it open and read a random passage or Pressfield put together this awesome passage of a teaching a day from the author of The War of Art.

This is pretty cool. It says for Ryan Holiday who gave me the idea. But there's just, you know, just something for you every single day here. And I'm not even scratching the surface of all the different books that are in this genre. Find a daily passage or a daily book about something you're interested in.

There's ones about the Quran, there's ones about the Bible, there's the daily Zen. There's so many amazing daily books out there. My real message is that you should read every single day. We should always be reading. But one way to do that, one practice, is find some kind of daily read or daily book that gives you a tour of an idea.

So you're not just reading it once, but you're returning to it. You're meditating on it each day. It's giving you something to think about. It's forcing you to think about it every single day. I think this is an essential practice and I hope you've partaken it. You wanna seek out little challenges in life,

activities, practices that force you to push against the limitations where your body's telling you, where your mind's telling you, no, you're done, you can't go any further. You realize that that's not fully the truth, right? Your mind starts to wander when you meditate and you can pull it back.

You're practicing that control. You get in the cold plunge and your body tells you, you gotta get out. It's too freezing and you realize you push through and actually you come out feeling invigorated or better. In meditations, Marcus Aurelius talks about washing off the dust of earthly life. We know the Romans had bath houses,

they had cold plunges, they would alternate between the dust of earthly life. We know the Romans had bath houses, they had cold plunges, they would alternate between the hot and the cold. And it's hard to be anything but present when I'm sitting here in this cold plunge. This is a plunge, cold plunge. It's just one of the absolute best decisions I've made. And then getting in it every day, try to do about 11 or so minutes a week.

That's one of the best decisions that I make every day. If you wanna embrace all the benefits, mental, physical, spiritual of a cold plunge, you gotta check out Plunge. It's the one I have here at my house. And Plunge is offering $150 off your order right now. Just use code DAILYSTOIC150 at checkout. The rule for successful people,

for great writers, artists, creators, it comes from the poet William Stafford. He says, do the hard thing first. He's saying don't procrastinate, don't put it off, don't try to do piddly stuff, work your way up to it. He says, no, you tackle the hard thing first. That's what I do in the morning. I tackle the writing first before I check email, before I get sucked into social media,

before I have meetings, before I can come up with or life can make up excuses to not do that thing. Edison said that we pick up the heavy end first. That's the idea. You do the hard thing first. And then once you've done that, once you've crossed it off, once you've made progress on that, not only will you have momentum for the rest of the day,

but even if you don't, you've already won. You've already made a dent in things. So that's the rule for this morning, do the hard thing first. It's very easy for your day just to get filled up, right? To get filled up with stuff. There's a passage in one of Seneca's essays where he's talking about, you know, these busy Romans who are just running around town all day.

And he said, but if you ask them, like, what are they actually doing? Would they have a good answer? Right? It's easy. He calls this sort of busy idleness. I could very easily find my days just getting filled up with email,

getting filled up with phone calls, getting filled up with errands, getting filled up with errands, getting filled up with just stuff, right? But I know that I'm not doing my job, that I'm not moving the ball forward. I'm not doing a chunk of what's called deep work every day. This is a phrase from the great Cal Newport I've had on the podcast before and I've known forever.

Cal's basically saying that for knowledge workers, the ability to focus, to lock in, to have large uninterrupted blocks of focus is like the most essential thing that you can do. For me, I try to do that really early. So my morning routine, you know, it's waking up early, it's walking, it's journaling, it's spending time with my kids. Then I try to get here and I try to spend like one to two to three hours of uninterrupted work work. Not administrative work, not responding to stuff, catching up on stuff, but that's like the writing stuff. Which is the main thing that I do. That's the thing that I can't outsource. I can't fake. I can't do when I'm tired at the end of the day. I can't do in little five minute increments.

I have to give myself over completely to it. I have to focus. I have to stop being bounced around as Mark Surulis talks about, and I have to only be doing that thing. And so as you think about your day, as you think about your schedule, what is the uninterrupted focus time?

And how do you have chunk of that? When I interviewed James Clear, he talked about, he just said he needs a couple of magical hours every day. That's a great phrase. What's the couple magical hours that you schedule, I think ideally in the morning, but you know, maybe you're someone

who those magical hours is 10 to midnight or midnight to 2 a.m. I don't know, I don't really care. But the point is you need to have uninterrupted blocks of magical time, of deep work, of focus, where you are locked in and you're actually doing what it is that you do. It's funny, the biggest book project I ever sold,

I wasn't trying to think of my next project, I wasn't trying to make money, I was actually on a hike with my family, with my kids. I had one in a backpack, my wife was holding the other. We were outside, we were out in nature. I wasn't thinking about work at all and suddenly the idea for my next series, actually a series of four books, popped into my head and I've been working on that now for two years. It was lucrative but more than that it was creatively fulfilling and challenging. It's all these things. And that came because I took a few moments of stillness.

I decided to go on the hike. I put work aside. And as it happened, work popped into my head. I'm out looking at the sunset on my farm and you can hear the frogs and all of this. It's moments like this when you're actually not working, when you're consciously not thinking that sometimes your best work,

your best ideas pop into your head. That was true for the Stokes. It's true for the great artists of all time, and it's true for you and I and normal people. So you gotta have time for stillness and reflection and peace. Seneca talks about taking wandering walks, about giving the mind over to relaxation. It's more important than you think.

And in fact, it may be where the biggest creative, and in fact, it may be where the biggest breakthrough of your life comes from. It doesn't matter if you're cold or tired, if you're hungry or well-rested. It doesn't matter the situation at all, Marx really says. It's just that you do the right thing. He says the rest doesn't matter. That's your job. The Stoics say your job is to do right. That's what the virtue of justice is about. There's no excuses, there's no explanations. The stone's virtue was the main thing. That was what we were put here to do.

Does it matter what other people do or say? Mark Sreelius writes to himself in meditation, it's my job is to be good. Also to do good, to help other people, to be a force for good in the world, to leave this place better than you found it. That's the ultimate habit. That's the habit that trumps all the other ones.

And it's something you have to let guide and inspire all your actions and choices. For too long, we've been in the cities and cities are designed to mask you from our mortality. Here on the ranch and farm within nature, you are hitting up against that razor's edge. Everything is trying to survive, trying to live. Something dies and something else eats it. We know the Longhorn skulls that are on the wall in the bookstore. So we bought the place and then the neighboring guy

had the cows. He was like, do you want to buy my cows? So we got these cows immediately after we got them. They all started dying of old age and we called a vet and the vet's like, okay, I could come out like next week. Be like $250. I'll like put it down. He's like, you have a gun, right? You should take care of it.

Do I wanna let this thing suffer for an additional week while we wait for the vet, right? Not only is being in charge of your choice-making about your own life and how you be, it's also about what you take responsibility for. You took charge of that situation to be a protector, to be compassionate. I hope you liked this video. I hope you subscribe. But what I really want you to subscribe to is our Daily Stoic email. One bit of Stoic wisdom, totally for free to the largest community of Stoics ever

in existence. You can sign up at DailyStoic.com slash email. There's no spam. You can unsubscribe at any time. I love sending it. I've sent it every day for the last six years. And I hope to see you there at daily stoic dot com slash email. 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.

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