What Have You Managed to Get Done? | Whats Up to Us, What's Not Up to Us

“It’s been a strange year, hasn’t it? Our days have been disrupted. Our lifestyles changed. Plans have been put on pause. Whole projects made impossible. In one sense, this pandemic has been totally unprecedented. But in another sense, isn’t it all too common? We find ourselves laid up with a broken leg. We have to spend two months away from home, cleaning up a mess in the West Coast office. We get posted overseas with little notice. We get laid off. We get exiled, as Seneca did, or we find ourselves locked up, as Stockdale did.”Ryan discusses the importance of controlling our response, and reads this week’s meditation from The Daily Stoic Journal, on today’s Daily Stoic Podcast. Great news! The Daily Stoic is $1.99 as an ebook right now (UK discounted too)!***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 Daily Stoic: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 Daily Stoic Podcast. Each day, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, illustrated with stories from history, current events, and literature to help you be better at what you do. And at the beginning of the week, we try to do a deeper dive, setting a kind of Stoic intention for the week, something to meditate on, something to think on, something to leave you with, to journal about, whatever it is you happen to be doing. So let's get into it. What have you managed to get done? It's been a strange few months, haven't it? Our days have been disrupted, our lifestyles changed, plans have been put on pause, whole projects made impossible. In one sense, this pandemic has been totally unprecedented.

• 0:49Ryan Holiday?

  But in another sense, isn't it all too common? We find ourselves laid up with a broken leg. We have to spend two months away from home, cleaning up a mess in the West Coast office. We get posted overseas with little notice. We get laid off. We get exiled, as Seneca did. Or we find ourselves locked up, as Stockdale did. Stuff happens, and we find ourselves in some strange or unexpected situation. The question, as always, according to the Stoics, is what will we make of this time? What will we manage to accomplish within the constraints and the reality of where we find ourselves? Here is biographer Andrew Roberts, who I interviewed on the Daily Stoic Podcast recently. Here is his summary of the time Napoleon spent

• 1:32Ryan Holiday?

  in exile after his first defeat. Roberts writes, "During his nearly 10 months on Elba, he reorganized his new kingdom's defenses, gave money to the poorest of its 11,400 inhabitants, installed a fountain on the roadside, which still produces cold, clean drinking water, read voraciously, leaving a library of 1,100 volumes, played with his pet monkey, walked the coastline along the goat paths while humming Italian arias, grew avenues of mulberry trees, reformed customs and excise, repaired the barracks, built a hospital, planted vineyards, paved..." Parts of the road for the first time in irrigated land.

• 2:13Ryan Holiday?

  He also organized regular rubbish collections, passed a law prohibiting children from sleeping more than five to a bed, set up a court of appeals and an inspectorate to widen roads and build bridges. While it was undeniably Lilliputian compared to his former territories, he wanted Elbe to be the best-run country in Europe. Not bad. It was his fault, of course, that he had been exiled, and he was a flawed man in many ways, but still, it's impressive how Napoleon chose a lifetime. Those ten months were as productive as some people's entire lives. He chose to make the most of them. He chose to show up for them. He chose to do good where he could. No one knows what the next few months will hold.

• 2:58Ryan Holiday?

  No one knows what strange undesirable situation you might find yourself in a decade from now. What counts, what you control, is what you manage to accomplish within it. What counts is how you respond. What counts is that you show up and live it.

• 3:17Ryan Holiday?

  What's up to us and what's not up to us? Epictetus's handbook, the Inqueridion, begins with the most powerful exercise in all of Stoicism. The distinction between the things that are up to us, in our control, and the things that are not up to us. It is this, the dichotomy of control, that is the first principle in this entire philosophy. We don't control many of the things we pursue in life, yet we become angry, sad, hurt, scared, or jealous when we don't get them. In fact, these emotions, these reactions, are about the only thing we do control. And that is a lesson to remember for this entire year.

• 3:58Ryan Holiday?

  And if you could do that, you could consider it a year well and philosophically lived. The chief task in life is simply this, to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control and which have to do with the choices I actually control. Where then do I look for good and evil? Not to uncontrollable externals but within myself to the choices that are my own Epictetus's Discourses 2:5. Some things are in our control while others are not. We control our opinion, choice, desire, aversion, and in a word, everything of our own doing. We don't control our body, property,

• 4:38Ryan Holiday?

  reputation, position, and in a word, everything not of our own doing. Even more, the things in our control are by nature free, unhindered and unobstructed, while those not in our control are weak, slavish, can be hindered, and are not our own. Epictetus's Incoridion 1:1. We control our reasoned choice and all acts that depend on our moral will. What's not under our control are our body and any of its parts, our possessions, parents, siblings, children, or country, anything with which we might associate. Epictetus's Discourses 1:22.

• 5:17Ryan Holiday?

  So here we are, a new year. All of you who wanted 2020 to be over, well, it is over, and now you're in 2021, and guess what? Life is, uh, still exactly the same. Nothing magically changed, nothing magically happened. Here you are, still dealing with the reality of what Epictetus talked about, right? The things that happen to us are not up to us. What is up to us, what we do control, is how we respond. I think it's worth repeating today the Serenity Prayer. You don't have to be religious, and, you know, plenty of people in recovery are not religious, but the, but the prayer works. "God grant me

• 6:00Ryan Holiday?

  the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference." And what I love about that Serenity Prayer is, it feels like one of the most timeless observations ever, right? So this, it's a prayer, so it must go back like thousands of years. Like, who said it? Saint Augustine? Martin Luther? Was it one of the popes? Was it Jesus himself? No, it was Reinhold Niebuhr in 1932. It spread very, very rapidly, but 1932, I just love the idea that, that, you know, uh, think of all the things that had been invented before 1932. I mean, people are still driving cars from 1932.

• 6:45Ryan Holiday?

  They're classic cars, but, but like, all the thi- I mean- I'm talking to you from a building that was built in 1880 something. So it was 50 years old when that prayer was composed. But that's because the wisdom in it is timeless. And it's not just timeless in the sense that like, yeah, that's true. But it's like, it's an ongoing continual struggle, right? We always are focused on things that are not in our control. Sometimes we fail when something is in our control. We don't want to step up and deal with it. And it takes wisdom to know the difference, to know what is up to us and what's not up to us. And that's what Epictetus is talking about. He goes, really, what's up to you, right?

• 7:30Ryan Holiday?

  The things you own, you don't really own. Your reputation, not really you, you know, your money, even people you love. You don't control them. You don't control how long you have access to them. You don't control what they think of you. All you really control is what you think. You don't even fully control your own body, he's saying, right? And I mean, anyone who got COVID over the last eight months, anyone who's, you know, had a health scare or cancer or mental illness even realized like, you don't even fully control your own body or your own mind. But what we control for the most part is our own choices. We control how we react to these things, right? Even if you have a mental illness, right? Whether it's, whether you're struggling with depression or bipolar or, you know,

• 8:15Ryan Holiday?

  you don't control the illness. You control whether you seek treatment for it. You control whether you follow the treatment for it. You control the adjustments you make in accordance to the illness, right? We control how we respond. And that's just, it's a lesson worth repeating every single year because it's true every single year and it will be true as long as we are human beings. We don't control what happens to us. We control how we respond. That's Stoicism. And we should try to respond well. We should try to respond with courage and justice and wisdom and temperance. Now, This idea that we don't control what happens, we control how we respond. That's Stoicism. It's simple, but it's so hard.

• 9:00Ryan Holiday?

  I mean, it's so hard. But we've got to realize, look, when we're, I've been saying this on some of my talks recently, virtual talks, because again, I can't give in-person talks, so I'm responding by, you know, doing virtual talks. But it's like if you have 100 energy points and you spend 10 of those energy points blaming, 10 of those energy points feeling sorry for yourself, 10 of those energy points wishing things were otherwise, that's 30% of your available energy that you are not spending on doing something about the problem, moving the ball forward, or focusing on some new area or new opportunity instead. Right? I don't know about you, but I'm not smart enough, capable enough, brilliant enough,

• 9:43Ryan Holiday?

  naturally talented enough, that I can afford to waste 30, 40, 50, 80% of my energy, as people often do, on things that don't matter, where it's not making a difference. So we focus on what's up to us, and what is up to us are our ruling reason, our choices, our thoughts, our opinions, and then to a certain degree, the actions that we take. We control our response, not what happens. We don't even control necessarily the outcome of those responses or actions. But again, we control what we think about them, we control the willpower we bring to them, control the virtue that we try to apply. That's what Stoicism is about, and let's try to live that way here in 2021.

• 10:27Ryan Holiday?

  Happy New Year, everyone. Let's get at it. And also some exciting news here at the beginning of the year. The Daily Stoic is $1.99 as an ebook right now. The UK edition is also discounted, plus the Daily Stoic Leatherbound Edition, our limited edition, premium leather edition, is for sale in the Daily Stoic store, and you can order a personalized edition as well. Just go to store.dailystoic.com, and of course, check out the $1.99 ebook on Amazon. Love to have you check it out. Happy New Year, everyone. Let's make this a great one.