The Most Valuable Real Estate In The World | Ask DS

People spend a lot of money to buy nice land. They want to be in a good neighborhood with good schools. They want to have a beautiful view. Just look at what happened during the pandemic when people rushed to outbid each other for houses outside of major cities–because they wanted safety and space and change of scenery. For centuries, armies have clashed over territory–some of it valuable, some of it not–willing to pay in blood for control over a piece of dirt. Meanwhile, some of the most valuable real estate in the world sits, ignored. What’s that? We referred to it in The Girl Who Would Be Free as “the empire between your ears.” How many people spend an enormous amount to keep up their estates, but then let their brain fall into disrepair. How many of them protect their property, as Seneca said, but let people waste their time or influence their choices?-And in today's Ask Daily Stoic, Ryan talks stoics and answers questions in NYC on Obstacle is the way for 160 Hunter Douglas leaders from across the world. Hunter Douglas is the world’s leading manufacturer of window coverings as well as a major manufacturer of architectural products. ✉️ 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 who are 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.

• 0:48Ryan Holiday?

  The most valuable real estate in the world. People spend a lot of money to buy nice land. They want to be in a good neighborhood with good schools. They want to have a beautiful view. Just look at what happened during the pandemic, when people rushed to outbid each other for houses outside of major cities, because they wanted safety and space and a change of scenery. For centuries, armies have clashed over territory, some of it valuable, some of it not, willing to pay in blood for control over a piece of dirt. Meanwhile, some of the most valuable real estate in the world sits ignored. What's that? Well, we refer to it in "The Girl Who Would Be Free" as "The Empire Between Your Ears." How many people spend an enormous amount to keep up their estates, but let their brain fall into disrepair? How many of them protect their property, as Seneca said, but let people

• 1:32Ryan Holiday?

  waste their time or influence their choices? Yes, land is valuable. They aren't making any more of it, after all. And yes, you want to have a roof over your head. And yes, nations must protect their sovereign territory. But the Stoics remind us that the greatest empire is within us, between our ears, inside that mushy muscle that is our brain. You have inherited an incredibly valuable piece of property. Will you rule it and cultivate it? Will you rule over it? Let's hope so. This is obviously the idea in The Girl Who Would Be Free, which is about Epictetus, Epictetus having so much taken from him, having so little control, in some cases even over his physical body, that the greatest empire, the empire

• 2:14Ryan Holiday?

  between his years, is really all that's left. And that's what that book is about. It's a fable, supposed to teach this idea to young kids. I wrote it for my boys, but it's for boys and girls and all of us who need a reminder of this sort of basic premise of Stoic philosophy. You can grab The Girl Who Would Be Free at store.dailystoic.com. And I think if you get a signed copy, I'll link to this in today's show notes. If you get it, there's a thing you click, you get a signed copy, you can get The Boy Who Would Be King for like 75% off, or vice versa. The idea is these are two books meant to be read together, The Boy Who Would Be King, The Girl Who Would Be Free, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, their stories told in fable form for all ages. Really proud of these two books and check them out.

• 3:09Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another Thursday episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast, where we do our Q and A here. Back in September, I had a quick trip to New York. I was doing a talk for the folks at Hunter Douglas, the blinds and windows company. It's funny, sometimes a company can sneak up on you. Obviously, I'd heard the name Hunter Douglas. I think anyone who's ever owned a house probably has, but I don't think I would have pegged them as a 100-plus-year-old company. So one of the things we talked about is just the amount of adversity that a company would have experienced over 100 years and how the people there are the heirs to that tradition, right? They come from a long line of survivors

• 3:51Ryan Holiday?

  and adapters. They're by definition resilient, or they wouldn't still be in business. So anyways, it was a great talk. I may bring you the talk at some point, but I did a nice Q and A at the end, and I'm going to bring you some of those questions from the audience now. Enjoy.

• 4:07Speaker 01

  When it's enough thinking and you move to action.

• 4:12Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 4:12Speaker 01

  And when you have to stop action and actually think a little bit so that you correct course.

• 4:17Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, it's a loop, right? It's sort of you perceive it, you decide, you know, sort of where the opportunity is, you take the action and then sort of decide what you're going to bring to bear on that, what you're going to endure, what you're going to put up with, what you're going to go through. And then finally, you're presented with new situations, new information, feedback loop. There's a thing fighter pilots talk about called the OODA loop, which is the sort of loop of you're making a decision, you're seeing what the other fighter pilot is doing, and then you're making a decision and they're making a decision, and it's this loop that's going faster and faster. And the faster you can go through this loop, from orientation to action to decision to

• 5:00Ryan Holiday?

  action to orientation again, that's what separates the winners from the losers ultimately. And I think carving out time to do that every day and being fast-moving without being reactive is sort of what the Stoics are trying to cultivate.

• 5:17Speaker 02

  You speak a lot about the disciplines that we as individuals can exercise. And surely, I guess, if all of us came together each day at work, exercised all this, maybe it's quite a power for you. But have you seen anything at a company level, sort of at the corporate level, that promotes these disciplines or even from a corporate perspective, implements these disciplines less at the individual but more at the company level?

• 5:38Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, it's a great question. How does Stoicism help us with what you might call a collective action problem, right? Of course, every organization, every country, every family is a collection of individuals and ultimately, we mostly control ourselves, so let's just sort of start there. And I would say, you know, how the leaders model this stuff is probably the most important bit of influence we have as far as setting a company culture. I think one of the things that happens is, you know, the CEOs or the leaders or the coach or the star athlete or whatever we're talking about, whatever type of organization is, the trouble they get into is they talk. Talk about this stuff and they go, but of course it doesn't actually apply to me.

• 6:20Ryan Holiday?

  Or in their sort of personal, private decisions, they're not living up to it. So I think first off, we've got to start with sort of modeling. But I do think we can apply this stuff at the individual level. So, you know, we're talking about sort of carving out time for reflection and space. You don't want to be a company that's sort of constantly having councils and meetings and whatever. That can suck things down, but it is, I think, important that we carve out the space to work through this stuff as a group. To sit down and go, okay, what are we dealing with? Like, I talked about negative visualization. A lot of sort of culture experts and sort of decision-making experts have talked about like doing a pre-mortem as a team.

• 7:04Ryan Holiday?

  So you're launching some new product or going into some new market. You convene all the people who are working really hard to make sure it's a success. And you sit down and you go, let's pretend that it failed. Why did it fail? Right? And let's sort of work through that hypothetical. And so I think setting systems or sort of standing ways that you sort of work through these things as a group is. We're obviously all trying to do it as individuals, but we can come up with sort of rituals or set kind of meetings and exercises that put those ideas into practice as a group. And that reinforces it.

• 7:44Speaker 03

  If Marcus Aurelius was here today, what would he be telling us in how to handle social media? The 24/7 societies that we live in today?

• 7:55Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I mean, it's interesting to think that, you know, he's the most powerful man in the world. He's ruling over an empire of 50 million people, millions of square miles. We probably get more information in an hour than he would have gotten in a year. Just the sheer volume of information that we have access to. This is an extraordinary advantage in many ways, but, you know, political scientists today talk about what's like the CNN effect. Like, the job of leaders is to think big picture, to plan for the future. And yet they're besieged by this sort of 24-hour news cycle. Worse with social media that's forcing them to think about every immediate thing as though it's more important than that larger plan. I think that's what causes some of

• 8:40Ryan Holiday?

  the drift or the distraction I'm talking about. I always find it so interesting, yeah, whether I'm talking, I'm walking into a, you know, a military commander's office, or the coach of a sports team, or executive or CEO, and you know, they have like a TV in their office just running the news, whether it's CNBC, or ESPN, or, you know, Sky News, or whatever. They've just got the news running in the background on mute in their TV. And I go, how could you possibly be focused to have this thing that's designed by definition to distract you and suck your attention from what you're doing to look at that? And so I think, you know, he, one of the things he'd be talking about is how do you create a little bit of a bubble, or a little bit of space around yourself, so you can think

• 9:25Ryan Holiday?

  about what you need to be thinking about, not what everyone else wants you to think about. And we can think about our mind, this sort of command center, as this contested bit of territory, that advertisers want access to, you know, strangers on the street want access to, people you care about want access to, you know, your phone wants access. All these people are fighting for that. And you have to be disciplined and also put up some barriers that protects it, or you're going to be giving up the one thing you can, you're going to be giving up control of the one thing you have control over, to something that probably doesn't have the same interests as you in mind. And creating that is, I think,

• 10:06Ryan Holiday?

  really important. And we know, that's why he was writing in his little journal, was that exact thing, carving out that space to think about what he wanted to think about, not what all the messengers and, you know, sycophants and, you know, assistants wanted him to think about.

• 10:24Speaker 04

  From all the thoughts from the Stoics and of the learnings or what they believe, is there one that you think can summarize the essence or one that you like the most?

• 10:37Ryan Holiday?

  I mean, I think the big one is that it's everything is an opportunity for excellence, or the Stoics would say virtue, and the four virtues for the Stoics are courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom. So, everything's an opportunity to sort of be brave and to endure, right, to put yourself out there. Everything's an opportunity to be strong, right, to sort of do what you should do and not do what you shouldn't do. It's always an opportunity to do the right thing, to help other people, to be a positive force in the world, and then it's always an opportunity to learn and grow. The idea then, if we could say that the essence of Stoicism is that how do you find,

• 11:19Ryan Holiday?

  how do you start to see all the situations, big and small, you know, positive or negative, as a chance to apply one of those four ideas or all of those four ideas? Because they're really inseparable. To me, that's the core of Stoic philosophy.

• 11:35Speaker 04

  And how do you train or practice for that?

• 11:38Ryan Holiday?

  I think you just do it, right? You try to do it in the small situations to build the muscle memory so you can do it in the big situations. That's kind of how I think about it.

• 11:50Speaker 05

  You know, you talk about saying no, which to me is, I think, a very difficult thing to do in an environment where collaboration is so key

• 12:00Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 12:00Speaker 05

  in enabling you to get things done. How do you balance that?

• 12:05Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I mean, there are things we do want to say yes to and we have to say yes to, and I think that's why we have to practice saying no. Because if you're saying yes to everyone, if you try to be everywhere, you ultimately end up sort of being nowhere. So I think it's, that's obviously the million dollar question. If I could be like, here are the three rules of what to say yes to and what to say no to, you know, that would be very, very valuable. I don't think it's unfortunately that, quite that simple. But it is, you know, like, one of the questions I do have is like, is this a thing that only I can do? Right, like we know in economics, the law of comparative advantage, right? If you want to do what only you can do or what you are best at doing, and then you want to delegate, outsource, you know, collaborate on those other things.

• 12:50Ryan Holiday?

  And so that's one of the questions that I try to think about. Is this something that someone else could do? Ideally, is this someone, is this something someone else could do cheaper than me? And I'm trying to get to those things that only I can do that are really, really important to me professionally and personally. And that's one of the, one of the rubrics. Like, I love writing. That's why I became an author. One of the interesting things about being a writer is that it presents all these opportunities to do cool, potentially lucrative things that are not writing. And I have to be disciplined about what I say yes to, or I could end up in a situation where the reward for my success is that I don't get to do the one thing that I really like doing. And, you know, we say, hey, I'm doing this for my family.

• 13:35Ryan Holiday?

  And it's like, well, if you never see your family, is it really for them, right? And so, you know, knowing what's important to you, knowing what you can only do, I think these help you decide what to say yes or no to.

• 13:47Speaker 01

  Very good. Ryan, I'm so happy that you said yes to us.

• 13:51Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, it was an honor. This is very cool.

• 13:53Speaker 01

  Really, I mean, being here and sharing all this knowledge, all this, those insights is, is very important for us in this moment that we are going through. A lot of transformation, a lot of challenges, a lot of choices. And, and I think that having some insightful thoughts based on, on philosophy, based on real, important, amazing lives, it's, it's incredible. Thank you.

• 14:23Ryan Holiday?

  My pleasure.

• 14:24Speaker 01

  So much for being here with us.

• 14:25Ryan Holiday?

  Thank you. Appreciate it. Thanks.

• 14:49Ryan Holiday?

  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.