This Thing Predicts Everything

On today’s Sunday edition of the Daily Stoic Podcast, Ryan talks about the one thing that predicts everything—character—and why it’s so important, no matter our goals. Read “This Thing Predicts Everything”: https://ryanholiday.net/character/***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicSee 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.

• 0:04Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Weekend Edition of The Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something that can help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, wisdom, and temperance. And here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers, we reflect, we prepare, we think deeply about the challenging issues of our time, and we work through this philosophy in a way that's more possible here when we're not rushing to work or to get the kids to school, when we have the time to think, to go for a walk,

• 0:46Ryan Holiday?

  to sit with our journals, and to prepare for what the future will bring.

• 0:53Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another Weekend episode of The Daily Stoic. We're going to get into something I've been thinking a lot about lately, both in my own life and as I watch events of the world play out. And it's one of the things that when I've been lucky enough to talk to or consult with sports teams, just one of the things that seems to be top of mind for them. So we'll get into it. We're calling this "The One Thing That Predicts Everything." Something went wrong for Kyrie Irving in Cleveland, despite three trips to the finals and one championship. Then, what could have been a great team fell apart in Boston. And so far, Brooklyn has been a dud.

• 1:37Ryan Holiday?

  One coach has already been driven away. And now, the most recent, just hired, is already being set up to fail with heavy-handed assertions about who is actually in charge. Who could have seen this coming? Well, Kyrie could have, by looking in the mirror. Indeed, just about any casual observer knows what to expect at this point. And the secret is explained by an old Greek saying popular with the Stoics: "Character is fate." Not simply that good people do well and bad People fail. We know life is way more complicated than that. The proverb means that character traits predict what kinds of actions we'll see.

• 2:20Ryan Holiday?

  The selfish person may succeed, but it will be lonely, isolated success. The corrupt will end up corrupting the institutions and the people around them. The ignorant will end up missing some critical piece of information that cost them. The paranoid will create the enemies they worry are out to get them. And the egotistical will ignore the warnings that could have saved them. Who we are, what we believe, the standard we hold ourselves to, the things we do regularly, our personality traits, ultimately, these are all better predictors of the trajectory of our lives than talent, resources, or anything else. Kyrie is, from all reports, sweet and serious and often generous. It's just also not surprising that a guy who at one point believed that the world was flat,

• 3:03Ryan Holiday?

  despite literally all evidence and information in the contrary, would be a difficult guy to coach. The impulse that broke apart a relationship with maybe the greatest basketball player of all time, it's not a singular one. It's one that will repeat itself over and over and over again. What should surprise us is how many people failed to see this or managed to convince themselves that it would be different this time. It's a phenomenon we see play out in the market, in politics, in relationships, all the time. We want to see the best in someone, so we ignore the obvious. We really want something, so we deny the contrary evidence or the risk factors. Sports is just such a great example of this. Antonio Brown being the most recent bit of proof. "When people show you who they are," Maya Angelou once said,

• 3:48Ryan Holiday?

  "believe them," but we don't, and it bites us in the end. I remember at American Apparel being amazed that these financiers kept giving the company more money, expecting it to be different, thinking that their investment would be the lone exception, believing the CEO when he explained that he had changed. At the same time, I stayed longer than I should have because I often blamed fate or circumstances for problems at the company that were, in retrospect, obviously rooted in character and cultural flaws. I kept my stock longer than I should have too, and it cost me. Funny, I was right in the middle of researching ego as the enemy. And even I didn't quite get it. But Cyril Connolly was correct. Ego sucks us down like the law of gravity. Character is fate.

• 4:32Ryan Holiday?

  But it's important that we don't just use this rule to judge other people. As Seneca said, "The purpose of philosophy was to scrub off your own faults, not the faults of others." The bad news is that we are all like Kyrie. The good news is that we also have the ability to determine our own character, to address our traits and change them, and therefore chart the course of our destiny. Are you going to be someone that values the right thing? Are you going to be honest with yourself? Are you going to keep your ego in check? Are you going to respect your fellow human beings? Are you going to take responsibility? Are you going to be someone others can depend on, trust and believe? Or are you only going to look out for number one? Are you going to make excuses for liars and cheats and egomaniacs because they agree with you?

• 5:15Ryan Holiday?

  Or because it might benefit your business or help your cause in the short term? Are you going to blame fate or the gods or the Chinese when things don't go your way? The answers to these questions influence more than just whether you're pleasant to be around. If you get them correct, you'll be resilient, reliable, adaptable. You'll learn, you'll grow, you'll be able to collaborate with others. If you get them wrong, you'll be fragile, stupid, selfish, incapable of integrating feedback, shifting course, generating sympathy. One gives you a chance of success. The other guarantees that on a long enough timeline, you'll fail and quite possibly in a catastrophic way. You know, it's funny, I wrote this piece and I was very much just thinking about the idea of character's fate

• 5:56Ryan Holiday?

  because it's something that has dogged me in my personal life, it's dogged me in business scenarios. We get so surprised when people behave exactly the way that they told us they were going to behave because we ignored character. And even sometimes when we look at our own failings or flaws, when we trace back their source, it's quite obvious that what was going to happen because there was the root cause that we'd left unaddressed. So to me, this is a, you know, just a philosophical thing and something very much rooted in, in what the Stoics talk about. But it's funny, literally the first response. That I got when I posted the piece and emailed it out to my list. It said, this is from someone named Christopher. Christopher wrote, "Thank goodness Trump is your president!" Exclamation point.

• 6:41Ryan Holiday?

  "You could learn a great deal from studying this stoic leader." So, you know, it is, when we talk about character as fate, I mean, of course, you can't exempt politics from this discussion. And when we look at why we're in the middle of the pandemic that we're in, why the response has been so inadequate, why trust in our institutions is such, is at such an all time low, why, why the President of the United States came down with COVID-19? What's at the root? Well, it's arrogance, it's a denial of science, it's magical thinking, it's selfishness, it's a belief that one is exempt from the rules or the realities of a situation. You know, it's Shakespearean.

• 7:26Ryan Holiday?

  And I don't, I think you can see that it's Shakespearean regardless of what specific political policies you support. So, you know, in a sense, Trump is the sort of ultimate character as fate story. And it's ironic because actually during the campaign, he told this, this story, one of Aesop's fables about the frog and the scorpion. The scorpion needs a, a ride across the lake. And he asks the frog, and the frog says, "No, you'll, you'll sting me." And he says, "No, I won't." And, and ultimately, the scorpion convinces the frog to take him across the pond. And halfway through, he stings him. And as they're both drowning, the frog says, "Why did you do this?" And he says, "'Cause I'm a scorpion." Right? That's what character as fate is really about. That's what that story is about.

• 8:11Ryan Holiday?

  I think Trump told a slightly different version of it where it's like a snake or something. But the point is, even ironically, he knows this, right? You know, character is fate. It's just sort of tragicomic that it, you know, continues to play itself out at the world stage. And it, it comes at the cost of hundreds and hundreds of thousands dead. And, and it comes at, you know, potentially the collapse of, you know, the, the American dominance and American excellence, which the world has come to depend on and expect.

• 8:47Ryan Holiday?

  So when we talk about character's fate, the Stoics wanted you to understand how this goes. Which is why Marcus Aurelius, over and over again, would look at the cases of Aeneo or a Vespasian or any of his predecessors and how it went for them and where it went and all the people who were complicit in it and where it ultimately led them. So, you know, this idea of character is just such an essential Stoic idea. But more than that, I think we're also losing track of a subset of character, which is competence, right? Competence eventually succeeds because it figures stuff out, it can learn, it can adapt. Incompetence, arrogance, you know, a disbelief in science, whether you're talking about a Kyrie Irving or a Donald Trump, eventually comes back to bite you

• 9:31Ryan Holiday?

  because you stop living in reality. You know, you can't make your own facts, even if you can convince some people that your facts are superior to the actual facts. What did they call it after the inauguration? The alternative facts. Believing in alternative facts is a character's fate kind of a thing that eventually comes home to roost. So, look, I'm not, I don't, I don't want to get into a whole political argument here. But what I do want to say is we are at a pivotal point here in American history. Character is on the ballot. Decency is on the ballot in the United States. But not just in the United States. I mean, I think you're seeing a number of these populist leaders pop up across the world.

• 10:15Ryan Holiday?

  And in the rare instances where the people get to say, I support competence, I support character, or I reject these things and I choose my own delusions and my own vices instead. Well, we know how that works. And so I would just urge you to think about that a little bit and hopefully go vote, be safe, be smart, keep reading, keep studying. And if you want to work on your own character, what is good character made up of? Well, the Stoics would say it's the four virtues. Good character is courage. Good character is self-discipline, moderation. Good character is justice, caring about other people and the common good. And good character is rooted in wisdom and study

• 10:58Ryan Holiday?

  and learning and a desire to grow and improve. Be well, talk soon. If you like the podcast that we do here and you want to get it via email every morning, you can sign up at dailystoic.com/email.