Until You Get There, Try This | Ask DS

Maybe towards the end, it’s possible to get to that level. Maybe after a lifetime of study and practice, a Stoic can come to not just understand but to live up to the insight that Marcus Aurelius writes about in *Meditations—*that things aren’t asking to be judged by us, that we always ‘have the power to have no opinion.’ Maybe Marcus Aurelius got there himself. If so, good for him. But most likely he didn’t. And most likely, you’re nowhere close either. In the meantime, why don’t you at least try to voice fewer of those opinions. If we can’t stop ourselves from judging things that aren’t asking to be judged by us, if we can’t stop ourselves from having thoughts about things that have little to do with us, we can at least try to keep those judgments and thoughts to ourselves.-In today's Ask Daily Stoic, Ryan talks Leadership / Obstacle is the Way to 200 HOLT managers and executive leaders from 50 plus locations in Texas and Oklahoma. HOLT CAT is a leader in heavy caterpillar equipment, engines, machines, caterpillar equipment product and provide rental services at holtcat in Texas.✉️ 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. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

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

• 0:06Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. While 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 happened to be someone there recording. But thank you for listening, and we hope this is of use to you.

• 0:49Ryan Holiday?

  Until you get there, try this. Maybe towards the end, it's possible to get to that level. Maybe after a lifetime of study and practice, a Stoic can come not just to understand, but to live up to the insight that Marcus Aurelius writes about in Meditations, that "things aren't asking to be judged by us," that we always have the power to have no opinion. Maybe Marcus Aurelius even got there himself. If so, good for him. But most likely, he didn't. And most likely, you're nowhere close either. In the meantime, why don't you at least try to voice fewer of these opinions? If we can't stop ourselves from judging things that aren't asking to be judged by us, if we can't stop ourselves from having

• 1:30Ryan Holiday?

  thoughts about things that have little to do with us, we can at least try to keep those thoughts and judgments to ourselves. We can just keep our mouth shut. We don't have to verbalize our yuck for someone else's yum. We don't have to voice our disagreement. We don't have to comment. We don't have to get offended. We can just keep quiet, focus on what we control, and not cause unnecessary trouble for anyone, most of all, ourselves.

• 2:15Speaker 01

  You talk about and you go into detail in your book, which, which after this, we do have Ryan's latest book, Courage is Calling, that I just listened to and it's phenomenal and very thought provoking. But in your book, you go into depth and you went a little bit into it today around preparation. And you talked a little bit about it, you know, eating the frog and how you do that. And you alluded to your morning, you don't actually eat the frog, but some, maybe some days. You, you go on your walk. Can you maybe share with this group? Because, well, and with me, when I think about soldiers, when I think about athletes,

• 3:00Speaker 01

  it's easy for me to think about preparation, right? With lifting weights, doing drills, scrimmaging, you know, battlefield techniques, right? But in the business world, or in maybe even your personal life with parenting, or finances, or death of family, it's hard to, in my mind, it's hard to physically think about that.

• 3:21Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, how you practice.

• 3:22Speaker 01

  Do you, you know, maybe how you do it, or how maybe you've seen other people and like, dang, that guy does it, or girl does it really well. Can you maybe share a little bit about that and then, and then we'll open it up for Q and A?

• 3:33Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, that's the tricky thing. I think a lot of, you know, games, whether it's chess, or sports, or music, or whatever, it's a constrained set of rules or a system so you can practice, right? I heard a great question. They're like, musicians get better by practicing their scales. What are the scales of what you do? That's sort of the million dollar question. And the people that can figure that out have the ability to practice and the people that don't, don't. For me, writing is a thing you get better at by doing lots of writing. And so, you know, obviously I write books, but I'm, I write a daily email, I have two daily emails. I write articles. I'm, I'm always trying to think, how is this thing that I'm doing over here making me better at the, the important thing that I have to do? But the other way to think about it is like, think about like a comedian, right?

• 4:16Ryan Holiday?

  A comedian gets great by the amount of stage time that they have, right? So it's, or an athlete, the amount of reps that you have. Reps in practice matter, of course, but so do reps like in a game. This is why they give players garbage time minutes. It's just to figure out how you perform when it's, when it's real, when the pads are off or on, or however you want to think about it. One of the things I think about is like, this pertains to obstacles, is like, let's say I have to let someone go, or let's say I have to have an unpleasant conversation with someone, or, you know, let's say I have to do something that I don't like doing. I just, one of the ways I get through that is I go, this is practice for those kinds of things, right? So this is practice for, I'm gonna have to have an even more uncomfortable conversation

• 5:01Ryan Holiday?

  about letting someone go 10 years from now. How am I gonna be prepared for that? It's gonna be because I've done it a lot of times before now and then. And so whenever I'm going through stuff, even, you know, something like a pandemic or, you know, you have some medical issue, it's like, hey, this is toughening me up. This is practice. And so the decision to be present, to really think about what you're doing, to not just sort of go through it in autopilot, is a way, I think, to become better at it, to actually use that time. You know, if you're a comedian and you have a thousand hours of stage time, but you're just sort of coasting through it, that's not gonna be the same as someone who for 500 hours, really consciously prepared and thought about it and debriefed and looked at it.

• 5:42Ryan Holiday?

  So I think we, while we don't live in such an artificial universe as an athlete or, you know, an artist or something, we can decide that what we're doing is practice for something in the future. At the very least, it's practice for a more difficult future. And by surviving this and getting through whatever this is, we're better for having gone through that experience.

• 6:09Speaker 01

  Thank you. How much time and energy then do you spend? Or do you see other greats spend looking at the past? How well did I do that conversation? How well did I write that book? How well did I make that business decision? Do you spend it? Because there's obviously a school of thought that says, you know, drop the past, right? Just keep moving forward. So do you or do you see others spend a lot of time? Or the Stoics, like, spend a lot of time on the past?

• 6:35Ryan Holiday?

  I interviewed a NASCAR driver, Brad Keselowski, on my podcast a few months ago. And he was, I was talking to him about this. And he was saying that he'd just been reading a book, which I bought, I haven't read yet, called Debrief to Win. The idea that you have to debrief after each thing. And I was asking him about his practice. He was like, I even watch every interview that he does. He watches the interview after not, because he likes watching himself. He's like, I hate it. But he's like, I watch film of everything that I do. And I think that's one thing you see across all sports. And then military, it's obviously not as filmed. But the idea of like, we're going to break this down to the millisecond. What could I have done here? What could I have done here? Look at how I screwed up there.

• 7:16Ryan Holiday?

  So the idea of watching film is really, really important. Pete Carroll talks about this too. He even, at the end of the year, he forces his coaches to watch film of them on the sidelines coaching games. Like, he forces them through the same unpleasant process that the players go. Because I think often we think of it going a certain way. But to everyone else, it was really different. So I think, yeah, breaking down what you're doing, really look at it. How could that have gone better? Where do we screw up? I think the premeditatio malorum is great. You know, the premeditation, the pre-mortem. But you also got to do the post-mortem.

• 8:10Speaker 01

  Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it, and I'll see you next episode.