4 Strategies For Achieving Calm In Troubled Times

On today’s episode, Ryan talks about four strategies he has for finding stillness in his life. Now, more than ever, we are being forced to recognize how complicated and stressful life can become. It is in times precisely like these that Stoicism is most powerful. The teachings of Stoic philosophy are a very helpful guide to achieve calm, even in the most troubled of times. The Jordan Harbinger Show is one of the most interesting podcasts on the web, with guests like Kobe Bryant, Mark Manson, Eric Schmidt, and more. Listen to one of Ryan's episodes right now (1, 2), and subscribe to the Jordan Harbinger Show today. Athletic Greens is a custom formulation of 75 vitamins, minerals, and other whole-food sourced ingredients that make it easier for you to maintain nutrition in just a single scoop. Visit athleticgreens.com/stoic to get a FREE year supply of Liquid Vitamin D + 5 FREE Travel Packs with subscription. Watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOL2dG7lBtw Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow 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. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Weekend Edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these Stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space, when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal,

• 0:46Ryan Holiday?

  and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring.

• 0:52Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another Weekend episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. We live in tumultuous, strange times. I mean, the last year and a half have seen so much, not just a pandemic and wildfires and earthquakes and plane crashes and freak storms here in Texas, but an impeachment, an insurrection, just weird shit, right? I heard a great expression, that life is getting weirder. As we solve the easier and easier problems of life, more vexing, difficult, strange problems emerge. And that's just, you know, how it goes.

• 1:35Ryan Holiday?

  One of my favorite books is Nassim Taleb's The Black Swan. Black swans are real, they exist, they catch us by surprise. But even, it's not just being prepared for totally freak occurrences, just day-to-day stuff, right? "May you live in interesting times," goes the old expression. Well, we live in interesting times. And if you let chaos stick around, like standing water, it festers. You actually have to deal with this. You can't just let it lie. A few years ago, when I was doing the marketing for Stillness is the Key, I went and I talked at Google, and I gave some strategies that anyone can use. To avoid stress or deal with chaos as it surrounds you. If you plan for stress now, I think you can be prepared for it. You'll be better able to deal with it when you encounter it.

• 2:19Ryan Holiday?

  This is obviously one of the things we talk about in the Daily Stoic Course, Slayer Stress. But in this episode, we've got some great strategies. One, I think your information diet is key. Two, the relationships, the people you bring in your life. Three, your daily routine, when you get up, journaling, tackling the difficult things early before the entropy of the day sits in. So there's some great strategies here for you. I can't wait for you to check this out. These are four strategies for achieving calm in troubled times. I think you're gonna like this episode. Enjoy, and I'll talk to you soon.

• 2:55Speaker 01

  Something I don't do on purpose every day is I don't watch the news. I don't watch the news for a lot of reasons. I was traveling recently. You know, you walk through the airports hard not to watch the news. Why? Because CNN pays the major airports to run CNN. It's a special version of CNN that never shows anything about airplane crashes. But the point is, the news is not there to inform you. The news is there to make you watch more news, right? I think it's important to be an informed citizen, but I think the news is often the worst possible way to get informed, at least consuming news in real time, right? This is, I think, encapsulates where we are. I don't know. Why are headlines still taking Trump at his word, right?

• 3:37Speaker 01

  If only you worked at CNN, Brian Stelter, and had something you could do about it, right? But the point is, so much of the news is not even news. It's people speculating about the news or giving you their opinion about the news, right? There's a reason that the news is always developing. That's so you keep watching. There's a reason they're never like, here's the conclusive end of this story. You can turn off the TV or walk away from your computer now. No, that would be very bad for business, right? It has to always be ongoing and always be breaking. And so I would like to catch up on that story at the end of it. I'm not just picking on political journalists, although I think it has become increasingly toxic. Sports, right?

• 4:20Speaker 01

  Here's a real discussion from First Take. Which team wins tonight? I don't know. If only we'd just wait a little bit. Then there'd be an answer, right? But this is the quality of discussion that we get in most sports shows, right? It's like, are we being too hard on so-and-so? What will happen to so-and-so? Is so-and-so gonna play tonight? You know, these things have a way of working themselves out. Trump will be impeached, or he won't be impeached. Following it daily on the news is not making it any more or less likely. In our system, we elect people whose job it is to take care of that. So we go back and do what we contribute to society. But too many people completely take their eye off the ball to follow news in real time, when they'd be better off, you know, reading history,

• 5:05Speaker 01

  or reading even like a work of fiction. I think it's interesting, like, if you wanna know what's going on between the US and China, don't follow what the sort of pundits are talking about on Twitter. I think you're better off picking up Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War, reading a 2,500-year-old book that stood up really well about the timeless jostling between an ascendant power and a dominant power, right? I would like to read psychology, and history, and political philosophy, and find out what's going on at the sort of core, universal, timeless level, not the trivia of the present moment.

• 5:46Speaker 01

  The power of relationships. I think one of the weirdest parts when you study Buddhism is this idea that to seek enlightenment, Buddha walks away from his family. He had a young son, and he was married. To me, that doesn't really seem like enlightenment. It seems like the opposite of enlightenment. It's like, oh, Buddha's a deadbeat. That's interesting. But the power of relationships. People I hear that say, oh, I don't have time for relationships. I don't have room for relationships. I'm focused on my career right now. Actually, I think most of the successful people that you admire, that you look up to, had some sort of relationship that was foundational in their life. You think of Angela Merkel and her husband. You think of great writers who had sort of an endlessly supportive wife. The power of relationships, to me, is a source of still

• 6:30Speaker 01

  Because it's someone who knows you very intimately, but has the ability to give you perspective about your own life, your own habits, your own tendencies. Someone that you can bounce stuff off to in a very safe way. Churchill said that his greatest accomplishment was convincing his wife Clementine to marry him. And he's probably right because she prevented him from committing career suicide many times. Having someone who's totally in your corner, again, who understands you, who can calm you down. In Churchill's wilderness years, where he's basically exiled from political life, as a sort of a go-getter, a person who hated to be on the sidelines, there were many times where he wanted to rush back in, where he was going to force his way back into politics. And it was his wife who was able to talk him down off this ledge every time. And it turned out to not just be the right decision for his career,

• 7:14Speaker 01

  but like all of humanity is in his debt. If he had been in politics or in power while Hitler was ascendant, he would have been tossed out of office like everyone else. The power of waiting, the power of sort of having a home to rest in was deeply important. My wife's here today. She's been a huge part of my success. The idea of having a relationship, I think, cannot be overstated enough. And again, whatever form it wants to come in for you, the point is being an island is a really bad way to do it. And then ultimately, even if it wasn't, if it helped you get everything you wanted, I mean, what's the point? If you're doing this all for yourself and you have no one to share it with in the end, is that really what success looks like for you?

• 7:54Speaker 01

  The power of saying no, again, is a big part of it, whether it's saying no to the news or saying no to all the things that are coming your way so you can focus on the things that matter. A friend of mine gave me this framed picture of Oliver Sacks, which has Oliver Sacks framed picture in it. But he had in his office just the word "no", exclamation point, meaning you have to say no to almost everything that comes your way, right? Early on in your career, you had to say yes to everything. That's how you got where you are. That's how you got here. But to now do what you do and to do it well, you have to say no to all the things that are not that thing. I've talked to lots of sports teams and the performance coaches I talk about, I talk to, particularly in baseball, stress this so much. They're like, "Look, to become great..."

• 8:40Speaker 01

  Sports, particularly baseball, you get great by swinging at pitches, right? That's how you make a name for yourself as a hitter. But once you make it to the major leagues, now it's all about plate discipline. Can you not swing at a pitch that's almost good enough? So you're waiting for the perfect pitch, right? Can you not fall for the deceiving pitches? The pitches that are designed to get you to swing that you actually have no chance of connecting with? This is really important. So for me, it's all about saying, no, I don't say no enough. But I feel like if I'd said yes anymore, it would be a problem. But like, this is my calendar for today. Google Calendar, of course, the best calendar. I have two things on my calendar, that's it. I actually tell my assistant if there's more than three things in the calendar, something got messed up, right? Like, my goal is to have as few things in the calendar as possible.

• 9:24Speaker 01

  When I look at my day and it's scheduled from 9:00 a.m. to, you know, 9:00 p.m. or whatever, that's not only not my idea of success, right? That's not winning, is I have to go do a bunch of things that other people want me to do. But I'm not going to do well at any of those things. So I'm just going from appointment to appointment. And so my thinking is, if it's in the calendar, it means I'm not doing the main thing. I'm not writing. So it's awesome to be here today. But this take, this took one hour from writing from me, right? And so having to actually think about it in terms of cost is really important.

• 9:57Ryan Holiday?

  Got a quick message from one of our sponsors here, and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned.

• 10:06Speaker 01

  The earlier you wake up, the stiller it is. I love the sound and the feel and the quiet of the house before anyone else has awoken, before the phone has started ringing, before the emails have started coming in. This morning, I got up at around 6:00. I do have a three-year-old and a five-month-old, so it does handle the getting up early for me most mornings. But the point is, you want to get up early and you want to start whatever you're doing as early as possible in this stillness. So the idea of waking up early before the distractions, before the impositions, is really important. Slight tip, for instance, I'm very anti-breakfast meetings. I don't want to start the day doing something like that. I want to start the day with whatever my sort of creative practice or my most important work task is.

• 10:51Speaker 01

  So I get up early, and then my corollary to this rule is, let us... Start the day phone-free. So my rule is that I don't touch the phone for the first 30 minutes to one hour that I'm awake. I use an app called Spar. I started, it was 10 minutes, and then I worked my way up to 20 minutes, and then 30 minutes, and then an hour. This morning, I didn't touch my phone for the first two and a half hours that I was awake. The first thing I had to use was Google Maps to figure out where I was going. I feel like that doesn't totally count. But the point is, the amount of people I know whose the quality of their day is determined by whether Donald Trump went on a tweet storm while they were sleeping, or whether somebody from work sent them a bunch of emails, or they got a bunch of unsolicited texts. We start the day too often from our back foot, right?

• 11:36Speaker 01

  Because instead of going into the day intentionally, we are reactive. So I use Spar. What Spar did for me is it gamified the idea of not using the phone. So basically, when you wake up, you don't touch the phone, and then you have to check in on the app when you use your phone for the first time. And if you check in more than, you know, you've not been up for 30 or 40 minutes, or whatever it is, it charges you money. And then, so the idea was, all the winners of the challenge who made it all the way through split the pot at the end. So I found, I'm using technology to help beat my technology addiction, but that's fine, as long as it gets me where I want to go. But the point is, I don't want to be reactive. I don't want to be responding. If I'm waking up early so I can be in the right place, so things can be still and quiet,

• 12:17Speaker 01

  the worst thing I can do would be to pull up technology that's telling me that that's not a good way to be, right? So I want to start phone-free. But what do I do if I'm not using my phone, right? This is crazy. The first thing I do in the morning is I go outside. So we waited for it to be light this morning, and then I took my son for a long bike ride. We were out for about an hour. We go outside, we live on a dirt road not far from Austin. I don't even take the phone, which means sometimes I experience things that I can't take pictures of, and I just have to be present for it, like every other human being, for all of human history up until a few years ago. But, but the point is, I want to just actually be. And we talk, sometimes we don't talk, we see things, we watch the sun go up.

• 13:01Speaker 01

  It's just quiet and still and wonderful, even though, paradoxically, we are in some form of... So I go for this bike ride, or I go for this walk, and it's wonderful. And then I return home, and the first thing I do with this energy again is not go straight to the phone. I don't want to waste this on email or social media. I want to use this, I want to start putting this energy into something productive. So the first thing I do is sit down with a journal. I have two or three journals that I use. I use one called the One Line a Day Journal. And you write one sentence each day for five years. So you can see on the page what you've been doing on this exact date for the last five years. I've been doing it for like three and a half years. So I can see where I was on this day in history, the day before, the year before that. It's really wonderful.

• 13:44Speaker 01

  Then I go in, I just write in a random moleskine, just things that I'm thinking about, things that I'm working on, things that I'm struggling with, things that I want to get better at. And then I do the Daily Stoic Journal, which is my journal, so it's somewhat weird. But it's just giving you a prompt. It gives you a sort of a philosophically inspired prompt for the day that you sort of set your intention for. And then the idea is that you revisit that in the evening or the following day, just to see how you did. So I want to start my day sort of intentionally. And it might seem weird as a writer that I would start the day by writing, but it's actually kind of just a warm up. What's really interesting about philosophy is that that's what Marcus Aurelius's Meditations was. It's one of the few philosophical books that we have that wasn't published as a book. He wasn't, the most powerful man in the world wasn't writing what he thought.

• 14:29Speaker 01

  He was writing what he felt he needed to know for himself. And it's only a complete accident that this work survives to us. He'd probably be mortified that we're reading his diary or journal, but he's dead, so it doesn't matter. The point is, philosophy is not just this thing you read about one time and understand. It's an active practice. It's something you're doing with yourself. It's a dialogue with oneself. I talked about the missile crisis a little bit. What I think is so fascinating about the missile crisis is that we have Kennedy's doodles and notes from the missile crisis on legal pads. He would write these things to himself, sort of reminders. He would write missile, missile, missile, or he'd write consensus, consensus, consensus. He was journaling out, working out what he was thinking as he was thinking it. Journaling's not the only way to do this.

• 15:14Speaker 01

  I know people that doodle in the morning or sketch. But the point is to have kind of a creative practice where there are very low stakes. And it's just sort of getting the juices flowing. Julia Cameron calls morning pages a sort of a form of spiritual windshield wipers. And I really like that analogy. Kennedy really liked boating, and so he drew these pictures of sailboats. You can imagine the entire world is about to blow itself up. And if he's not careful, he's going to contribute to that. The idea of just getting out of that, zooming out, sort of calming his mind. You can see what, how valuable and important that would be. Anne Frank writes that paper is more patient than people. And so when you think about the stresses of the missile crisis, it makes sense why he's writing on.

• 15:57Speaker 01

  He wants to dump out his anger and his frustration and his fears and the ideas that he's workshopping where there are low stakes. So he can perform better where there's really high stakes. So I think journaling is a really important part of it. My rule is you do the main thing right away. So the point of not using the phone, going outside, journaling. This is all about warming up for the most important part of the day, whatever that is. So again, probably a breakfast meeting, not the most important thing of the day, right? Responding to emails, not the most important thing to the day. Calling the airline to move your ticket. The sort of painful, frustrating things, going to the bank. These are not the things you want to start the day with.

• 16:38Speaker 01

  You want to get the most important thing out of the way as soon as possible. So my to do list, I write them on four by six note cards. It's really just a handful of things. So I have six things on my to do list. I think when you find really successful people who do a lot, you find that they're not actually doing a lot. They're just doing a handful of important things. So if I do these six things today, that will be a successful thing for me, a successful day for me. Some of these are really important. Some of them are like administrative. So the first thing I did this morning when I got up and did all my stuff was then I had an article to write. I had an email for Daily Stoic to write. And, and I crossed those off early. If I showed you my to do list now, you would see that all the important things of this list are finished. And the reason for doing that is that I feel like you control the early part of the day.

• 17:22Speaker 01

  But as the day goes through, your grip on the day is losing. Right? Because things, things happen, you don't feel good, you know, somebody comes into your office with a problem, you get stuck in traffic, whatever, right? The complexity of the day, entropy enters the longer you're at it. And so if I can win the morning, if I can do the most successful things early when I'm coming at it from a good place, then the rest of the day is extra, right? I could write at 2:00 PM in the afternoon, but the chances of me being in the right headspace, me having that unprotected time at 2:00 PM in the afternoon is much lower. So I want to do it at 9:00 AM or 8:00 AM, get it done, get as much of it as possible done.

• 18:06Speaker 01

  And then if I have a great window at 2:00 PM, maybe I'm going to keep going, but I want to get the important thing done as soon as possible. And I like to not have a list of 100 things, but like a couple of core things, consider that a win. You keep going, right? You want to run up the score as much as possible, but you have to win first.

• 18:26Ryan Holiday?

  Thanks for listening. We just crossed more than 50 million downloads with the Daily Stoic Podcast. Thanks to you. Please leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Please share it with your friends. Send an episode you liked. If you liked today's episode, send it to someone you know. We're always trying to reach more people and we appreciate it. Thank you for helping us keep the lights on here at Daily Stoic.