The Daily Stoic - Will You Meet Your Moment? | Ask DS

Episode Date: October 3, 2024

Destiny taps each of us on the shoulder, will we be able to answer? Will we have cultivated the skills and virtues necessary to answer well? That’s what philosophy is about—preparing you for whatever fortune has in store, big and small.Ask DS: What is the Stoic way to process and receive compliments? What is Ryan’s advice to stop obsessing over what could go wrong? How did the Stoics approach parenting and creating a generational impact?🎙️ Listen to Francis Ford Coppola’s  interview on the Daily Stoic | Apple Podcasts &  Spotify🎥 Watch Francis Ford Coppola’s interview on YouTube 🎟 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. Will You Meet Your Moment? Cicero once wrote that the beginnings of things are small,

and in a way that was the story of his own life. How does a boy born to an up and coming merchant family in a region outside of Rome become one of the most powerful voices of the empire? How did Cicero earn his title as one of history's greatest orators and save the Roman Republic through the power of speech? While other young men of his position partied

and enjoyed their wealth, Cicero studied like a man possessed. He is said to have produced as many as 500 lines a night, just like Chrysippus, the Stoic philosopher, was primed to do, and he became a respected author by age 20. Then he'd camp to Athens to study under the philosophy teachers of every school

before making his way to Rhodes to study under the philosophy teachers of every school, before making his way to Rhodes to study Stoicism under Poseidonius. He worked his way up what became known as the cursus honorum, the ladder of offices, from one position to the other. He fought for justice and tried cases. He brought down the corrupt administration of a Sicilian governor and restored the rights of local farmers, merchants, and citizens, ending years of exploitation and abuse. Such were his abilities that was said that people would stop whatever they were doing

to hear Cicero speak. Many of his trial speeches survive, and they are as riveting as anything you might see on a television drama today. In 63 BC, Cicero took the office of consul after defeating his political rival, Catalina, in a contested election. The Republic was in the midst of an economic crisis and Cataline, who hailed from a great aristocratic family

like the Vanderbilts or the Mayfields in America, he was financially hurting and he couldn't afford to run in another election and so he schemed to take power by force. Maybe this is sounding familiar. Cataline traveled to northern Italy to meet with disgruntled farmers who were drowning and dead and prompted them to carry out acts of arson and terrorism including the assassination of notable politicians. He had Cicero in his sights. Once these seeds of chaos were sown, Catiline would march into Rome with an army he was gathering

and take over the Republic. But Cicero caught wind of Catiline's conspiracy and after quietly gathering evidence, he convened the Senate and gave the speech of his life. When, oh Catiline, he began, do you mean to cease abusing us of our patience? How long is that madness of yours still to mock us? Catiline soon fled Rome, proving beyond a doubt

that Cicero was right. Cicero was not a perfect man or a perfect politician. I tell his story more fully in Lives of the Stoics, but when it counted, he drew upon his talents, drew upon the virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom, and he saved the Republic, not with the sharpness of his talents, drew upon the virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom, and he saved the Republic not with the sharpness of his sword, but the power of his speech. All of that training, all of that study, all that work, it paid off.

That's what philosophy was supposed to be, training you for the big moments of life. Most of us will not be called to meet a moment like that, but each of us should imagine we are training for something. Destiny taps each of us on the shoulder. As another great speaker and statesman would say, will we be able to answer what we have cultivated the skills, the virtues necessary to answer? Well, that is the question. It's actually also something I talked about in the interview I did with Francis Ford Coppola, whose new movie is

all about the Catalan conspiracy, which you should check out. I'll link to the interview. But it's also one of the ideas I've been thinking about and talking about on stage. I did those talks in Australia, and then I'm coming to Europe and Canada this November. You don't think that writing books is going to put you in front of 2000 people in 100 year old theaters, but it's a surprising, strange position. And I've been trying to draw on some of my own training

and experience to try to meet that moment. I always think like, how has philosophy trained me for this? What do I need to draw on? How can I step up and meet this? How can I do my best? What do I need to bring from my life experiences to this moment? And anyways, I'd love to see you there.

London on November 12th, Rotterdam on the 13th, Dublin on the 15th, Vancouver on the 18th, and Toronto on the 20th. The ones in Australia sold out, so we are coming down to the end on these tickets. You can grab those at ryanholiday.net slash tour. I'll link to it. And I'm gonna be doing some Q&A's. I think

beforehand there's a few VIP tickets left and then we'll do a Q&A at the end of the talk also. But if you want to come spend some time with me, if you want to ask some questions, we can talk about Cicero. We can talk about whatever you want. I'm just pumped. I'm putting together my talk now and I'm going to bring my family me, so I'm excited about that. I'll have to draw on some philosophical training to get two kids across the ocean and to a bunch of different cities in relatively small amounts of time, but it's gonna be fun.

And I'm excited to see you, London, Rotterdam, Dublin, Vancouver, Toronto. I'll see you there, RyanHolliday.net slash tour. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another Thursday episode of the Daily Stoic podcast. I was telling you last time I was in Vancouver and I was thinking about after that, I was remembering the first time I went to Vancouver.

I remember I was with my parents. I just had this memory of walking along those sort of rocky, stony beaches. The ocean's so black up there. I remember I found a sweatshirt. My wrist was broken, I'd broken my wrist, so it must've been fourth grade. I just remember finding a sweatshirt.

But it was like, you know when you find stuff, and most of the time it's trash, and then sometimes you find something like, this is cool, something my parents would ever let me get. And so they let me keep it that we couldn't return it to anyone. And so I just remember that sweatshirt, it's funny. This has nothing to do with today's episode,

except today's episode came from the last time I was in Vancouver. I was doing a little chat at the Elevate Collective Mastermind. I'm going to be back in Vancouver on November 18. I'm doing a talk I'll be flying from Dublin where I'm doing a talk like two days before and before that London and Rotterdam. But one of my favorite things to do is travel, swim, experience the sites and then get to talk to many of you.

So I'll be doing those dates and I'll be doing Q&As like you hear on these Thursday episodes of the podcast. I think the VIP tickets, you come to a private Q&A first, kind of like this mastermind, and then later, obviously there'll be an audience Q&A. But I'm excited to answer your questions and hit the road and be traveling with the family. So that's all gonna be really exciting.

Thanks to everyone who came out to the Elevate Collective Mastermind. Thanks to Elevate for having me out. But in the meantime, let's get into some of those questions. These were entrepreneurs asking me the story of how stoicism applies to what they do. So hopefully that resonates with you and you can grab those tickets at RyanHoliday.net slash tour

and maybe I'll find another sweatshirt while I'm there. Hopefully I won't be there in a cast. First off, thank you for being here. And, you know, I read your book a while ago. I was like all of college, very like all of the philosophy classes, just in a much more approachable way. So first part, that's a compliment. How do you process for you? Is that like, oh, that was nice?

Or it doesn't matter what external comes to me because it's all inside, or do you actually process the compliment? Because it's very meta to ask you about external from internal. It's something I'm working on, but I try to take compliments and I try to remind myself like,

it matters to the person who's saying it, right? So someone's saying like, hey, they like something that you did. And if there's a part of you that's like, well, it could have been better. What about that? The part of you that's arguing is disagreeing with someone about their opinion, which is strange. You should just accept it. So I appreciate it. And it's what I was trying to do.

I was trying to popularize this philosophy and make it accessible to people. So when people say that I did it, that's what I was trying to do. So it's good to hear. It went according to plan. Yeah. It's like verification of the plan. My actual question, though, is you were just talking about family.

That was my question is, when I heard you say that, I heard you mention you can't outsource being a parent, or at least you shouldn't. And I'm very mindful to do that. But Stoics have like all of business is just kind of points on a board. It's fleeting. You're going to die. It doesn't matter. So which I very much appreciate, but being a parent, it's like reverberating what you do does matter. It's going to last through generations. And what is the Stoics and your mindset on being a great parent and

a great partner? Because that totally does matter and it totally but there's also no points on the board there's no bank account that proves that you're doing the right thing. Yeah, no it's funny everyone wants to have sort of multi-generational impact and legacy and that's why they're neglecting their family to go to the office right. It's kind of strange how we rationalize this stuff. A lot of times we say we're doing stuff for our family, but really we're doing it for ourselves.

So I don't know. To me, it's like the place that you have the most impact. And control sounds like control is not the word I want to say here. But it's the thing that is most up to you. And then we neglect that for these things that are so much not about us. And that's a strange thing.

And, look, the history of the Stoics is, I wouldn't say exactly a ringing endorsement of their parenting prowess. If you've seen the movie Gladiator, Joaquin Phoenix's character, that really is like what Mark Cerullis' kid was like. Is that his fault or was he a sociopath? Like, we don't know. But I think the idea that you should be involved,

that you should actually try to be good at this thing, that it's important. You know, they lived 2,000 years ago. They're not quite on the same page as us about these things. So I don't think we have to, you know, take that as the gospel necessarily. But to me, it's really important and very meaningful. And, yeah, ultimately, what are you gonna look back on at the end of your life?

Are you gonna be glad? You're probably gonna wish you spent more time with your family. You're probably gonna wish you were less hard on them. You know, you're probably gonna wish you said things more, certain things more, certain things more often and other things less often. So if you can sort of do that exercise

and think about how you're going to think about later, why not just do it now? Something that I really struggle with is what you mentioned about having, being miserable about something before it actually happens or overanalyzing all the negative things that could possibly happen and Actually fearing death a lot of times

So I'm wondering if you have any advice about that and potentially that's something that you have struggle with or not at all Or if there's a practice that you would suggest to not be so tied to What bad things could happen in business or life and being more still, I guess. Yeah, to me the main question that the Stokes asks is like, is this up to me or is this not up to me? And then I try to ask myself, is this emotion that I'm feeling impacting the situation in any way?

Or is it mostly just torturing myself about it? Right, like I'm quite concerned about what's gonna happen in America in November, but is me waking up and following the news every day about it, right? Like, I'm quite concerned about what's going to happen in America in November, but as me waking up and following the news every day about it influencing, I already know what I'm supposed to do, right? I already know if anyone asks my opinion, what I should tell them, what I would tell them to do, and I know it's going to be a narrow run thing, but just like biting my nails or being miserable about it for the next several months isn't changing. Now, depending on how I feel about it,

is there a plan that I need to take? You know, like, what can I do about it if this worst-case scenario happens? That would be a constructive use of my time. But following it in real time, day to day, if I'm not a decision-maker in any of those areas, you know, is not just a recipe for unhappiness. day, if I'm not a decision-maker in any of those areas, it's not just a recipe for unhappiness.

There's an opportunity cost to it, because I could be either proactively doing something about it, or I could just do what I'm supposed to be doing in my life with my family and in my job. And so I try to think about that. You could argue there's a similar thing about death. It's going to happen.

There are no amount of dreading it makes it more or less likely to happen. And whenever it happens, it's probably going to be too soon. But just wasting this minute in front of you, thinking about that, all that does is have the effect of meaning that one more minute of it is wasted or unused. Very easy to say, by the way, not so hard.

As I read the news this morning, yeah. 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.

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