The Daily Stoic - You Have To Anticipate This Kind Of Behavior | Ask DS

Episode Date: July 13, 2023

In Richard III and in Othello, Shakespeare has two different characters utter the same line. Both Iago and a nameless orphan say, “I cannot think it.”In both cases, the news they are faced with—the conclusion they are being asked to accept—is simply too much. The Shakespearean scholar, Richard Greenblatt, calls this phrase a kind of motto for those who can’t wrap their mind around perfidy. He’s not being condescending, for it’s a very common experience. Our naivete, our willingness to assume the best about others, leaves us open to betrayal and disillusionment.Which is why the Stoics spend so much time on this very topic.---And in today's Ask Daily Stoic, Ryan answers questions from students of the Daily Stoic Stoicism 101 course. The topics that he covers include the need for balance when pursuing mastery of skills, how he walks the Stoic walk in daily life, the Stoics' take on the Law of Attraction, and more. Check out the full 14-day course, Stoicism 101: Ancient Philosophy For Your Actual Life, at https://store.dailystoic.com/products/101. ✉️ 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 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. We're 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 happen to be someone there recording. But thank you for listening and we hope this is of use to you. Do you practice for rejection? Part of the reason we're afraid of things is that we're unfamiliar. We don't know what it's like to bomb on stage in front of people, but it seems bad, so we avoid any scenario where something like that might happen. We've been turned down or blown off once or twice, asking someone out, asking for help, and it was unpleasant enough that we've decided that we do not want to explore those feelings any further. We don't know or don't remember what it's like to be living paycheck to paycheck anymore. So we make our financial decisions accordingly. The result is that this uncertainty, this unfamiliarity looms large in our lives.

It makes us conservative. It makes us keep to ourselves. It makes us struggle alone by ourselves. It turns us away from potential opportunities to meet someone new to do something cool to start our own thing. The famous philosopher, Diogeny's, the cynic was once seen begging for money from a statue. What on earth are you doing, someone asked? I'm getting practice and being refused, Dioge needs replied. We've talked to a couple professional baseball players on the Daily Stoke podcast, Ian Hap and Scott Oberg or both two muslims. We've talked to professional basketball players like Chris Bosch or Cotino Mowgli, entrepreneurs like Tim Ferriss and Rob Dirtick. And one thing they'll all tell you is that a person who is afraid to strike out, afraid to miss, afraid to fail, is a person who will not succeed.

Sennika actually practiced poverty once a month, trying to get up close and personal with want and deprivation. He said it was so that he could say to those fears of his, the fears that we all have of losing everything or taking the setback, so we could say to that risk aversion, is this what you so feared? When you practice deprivation or rejection, when you no longer fear embarrassment or messing up, then you have more energy to focus on the difficult tasks in front of you, and you are no longer hamstrung, and what you have is the most important virtue of them all. Courage. Obviously courage is the first of the four daily stoic virtues. It's also what I write about in the new book courage is calling, which came out as that in 2021. If you haven't checked that out, it's the first in the four virtue series. It's followed by

discipline is destiny. And I also also why I have the Four Virtues tattooed on my wrist courage being represented by the lion here on my left wrist. Anyways, courage, something I'm working on, something I hope you're working on. And talk to you all soon. Talk to you all soon. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wonder East 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. in a business wars on Amazon music or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to a Thursday episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. We're doing a Q&A today that's actually drawn from the Stoicism 101 course. I think it's one of the best courses we've done over at Daily Stoic. If you're looking to get introduced to Stoicism, you want to take your study of it to the next level. You want to go back to basics or you want to build a really good foundation of what stoicism is and how you can use it. That's what the course is about. I'll link to that in today's show notes.

But this is drawing from one of the many Q&A's we've done as part of the session. People got to come in and ask me a bunch of questions. We're talking about some of Marcus really says stuff about being tolerant with others and strict with yourself. That we can't hold people at the standards that they never asked for. And how you sort of think about your friend, how a stoic thinks about their friend group, and how you try to be a positive influence. So that's where today's Q&A is coming from. It's just a selection. And I hope you join us in Stoicism 101. You can ask some of your own questions. I'll link to that in today's show notes or just type in Stoicism 101 in the Daily Stoke

Store. Hello, everyone. Hi. Fun fact, I was able to go to the painted porch bookstore over the weekend and it's hard to find. Oh, I was wondering. Thank you. And I love your shirt.

Oh, thank you. I know you like yes to you too, you're on the podcast. So my question was, I was reading lives of the stoic and I noticed a passage where it compared Senika to saying as if Emerson had also been a philosopher, a writer, a politician. And in today's email, it was comparing or just saying how Senika was also a playwright.

Zeno, it was a merchant. And so all these people had other trades that they worked with. So where I'm struggling is kind of finding a middle ground between maybe David Epstein's range. Yeah, we could dabble in a lot of things and then Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hours

because a lot of us have so many interests, not just in work, but in life and how you double all of that. So two things. So I had David on the podcast and I think it's worth listening to. I love that book. There's also a handful of really good interviews with David and Malcolm where they sort of talk through their differences together, which they're like running buddies, which I think is hilarious. So I think it's a balance, right?

If you're sort of only specialized in one thing, it makes you sort of very, you can be very good at it, but you're also sort of very fragile and vulnerable, and you lack context. If you're doing a million things, you're lacking the ability to really get good So sort of very fragile and vulnerable and you lack context. If you're doing a million things, you're lacking the ability to really get good at any of those things.

When I look at Seneca, I see, you know, sort of being a politician, being a writer and being a, let's say being a politician, being a philosopher and being a playwright, as distinct but interrelated areas that we're making. So his experiences in the real world at the height of Rome's power and influence is obviously being informing his understanding of the philosophy just as the philosophy is informing his

sort of obligations as a politician. Then I would say on top of that, when you read his plays, it's very clear to me that what Sennaka is talking about in those plays are things that he's not free to talk about literally in his writing. So it's almost as if the plays were an outlet for what he's seeing and witnessing

that he couldn't express in any other medium. So I guess it's not like he was a playwright and doing some completely unrelated thing that all the tasks are feeding into each other in some way. So I think if you can get a synergy going, it's better than if you're doing things that are diametrically opposed to each other. So it's okay to do things kind of like in season, not everything at the same time. I think that's right. And then I guess the other thing to look at with Senaika would be where did he do those things at different phases in his life? A lot of his philosophical writings come

after he's been exiled from politics, right? And even his plays, again, seem to be things that he thought were important, but didn't have the ability to speak about, you know, because Nero was such a tyrant, that his plays were a way to sort of get those ideas out in the world as opposed to just being a totally ridiculous, unrelated, you know, side project. Awesome. No, this is great stuff to think about. Thank you. Yeah.

Hey, Ryan. Thanks for the big fan of work. So this parallels, I think, with today's email regarding success and also in the sense of learning the philosophy versus the daily application of the philosophy and since obviously we have you in the spotlight I'd like to ask where do you feel you yourself as a practitioner and obviously someone who probably does is better the most people that walk the earth where do you really struggle where do you really feel like you fall short and I like you and my? And I like you,

my father of, I've actually got a six-year-old and just turned eight-year-old girl. So I'm walking that path, you know, myself. So I know that's probably in there somewhere. No, I would say that. I'm going to share some of that with us. Yeah, I'd say that's certainly at the top of the list. I don't think anyone who studies philosophy top of the list. I don't think anyone who studies philosophy is then batting 100% with those ideas when you have kids, especially little kids. So, and this, again, I think goes to the point of like, like, let's say you study philosophy and then you decide to live this kind of monkish life where, you know, you don't have any responsibilities, you don't have any kids, you don't have relationships, you you don't have any kids, you don't have relationships.

You know, in some respects, that makes the philosophy easier because you're not being challenged at the same time. It makes a lot of the ideas kind of worthless because they're not actually rooted in any real experiences. And it makes it very hard for you to communicate these ideas with other people because again, you know, you don't exist in the same exist in, in the same reality, the same, the same shared experiences as most

people. So, um, I would say, yeah, certainly kids, uh, and then where with kids, probably being present, I would say is a struggle. And then, uh, temper slash, like, um, you know, sort of patients are probably the biggest challenges. And I was just, I was just working on something pertaining to Marx's release. And and the, the writer was noting that the theme of, of getting angry appears so many times in meditations that it's impossible not to assume that Marcus really has had a temper. Right? And so I think it is important to note that the stokes were not perfect. And perhaps the things they talked about most were the things that they were worst at. And you could probably deduce that from my writing as well. Anything you see that I'm talking about over and over again,

you could kind of safely assume I'm talking about my own struggles with that same thing because what's what I think you're really doing with stoicism is you're trying to get your own thoughts, your own beliefs, your own principles sort of restated and as clear a form as possible. And it's in that way, it's just, it's like a reminder, okay. Like here's what, here's who I wanna be, here's how I want this to go. And then you're dealing with a grouchy four year old who's running around like a crazy person. How can you actually sort of get those two things

as aligned as possible? That's the struggle that we're all in, for sure. Thank you very much. Of course. That's the struggle that we're all in for sure. Thank you very much. All righty. Joel asked about the stoics take on the law of attraction and creating as opposed to reacting and accepting life as it is. It understands that the secret is unrealistic, but I do think there's something to the quantum field.

I guess maybe just not enough information about this at the end time. So there is a line in meditations that maybe if you were really looking for confirmation of the of the law of attraction, which the law of attraction, as I understand, is that like attracts like. What we think about what we spend time sort of manifesting what you put on a vision board, you know, you're helping create into reality. So when Mark's really says, our life is died by the color of our thoughts. It might seem like he's talking about the law of attraction. I would very much disagree with that idea. And the Stoics believe that our perceptions mattered, of course. And when Marx is saying that our

life is is died by our thoughts, I think he means like, if you're a depressive, pessimistic, negative person, you're going to see everything pessimistically and negatively. If you're a cynical person, you're going to see a lot to be cynical about that doesn't have anything to do with what actually happens. And in fact, Marcus even talks about when he talks about sort of meditating on death. He says, you're not tempting fate. You're not manifesting death by thinking about death. faith, you're not manifesting death by thinking about death, you're quite the contrary. By thinking about death, you're creating a better life. To be flip about it, I think the law of attraction is worshiped. I think it's sort of propagated by people who realize that it's a lot easier to sell books

if you tell people what they want to hear rather than tell them the truth. And in the article, I tell this funny story about, I'm forgetting her name, but the woman who popularized the law of attraction in the secret several years ago, she was selling her mansion in Santa Barbara. It's like a $20 million mansion, which should give you some perspective on how much money there is in telling people what they want to hear. Anyways, she list the mansion for $20 million. It doesn't sell.

So she'd relicit at 18. She'd relicit at 17. It ends up selling for like $11 million. And a reporter asked her, and I think this is the point, because if the law of attraction was real, why didn't you just manifest that your house would sell for full listing price, right? The point being our thoughts don't make reality, but our thoughts do inform the actions that

we're likely to take. So, the stillings were big on the discipline of perception, how we see things, but that's kind of where the law of attraction ends things. The most important discipline for the Stelx is the discipline of action, what you actually do, and that's I think what's going to be the most important. Hey, Prime Members! You can listen to the Daily Stoic Early and Add Free on Amazon Music, download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and add free with Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts. When we think of sports stories, we tend to think of tales of epic on the field glory.

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