6 Hits of Stoic Motivation (Sports and Philosophy)

Today, Stoicism has been embraced by nearly every professional sport. Stoicism as a philosophy is really about the mental game. It’s not a set of ethics or principles. It’s a collection of spiritual exercises designed to help people through the difficulty of life. To focus on managing emotion; specifically, non-helpful emotion. In this episode of the podcast, Ryan breaks down 6 of the most important insights on sports and endurance training from the Stoics. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://DailyStoic.com/dailyemailCheck 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.

• 0:03Ryan 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. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another Sunday episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. One of the coolest perks of writing the books that I've written is getting to go talk to cool people in cool places, most of all, professional sports. This was kicked off for me. The first person I ever heard from who'd read the books in sports was a mental skills coach for the Colorado Rockies, Andy McKay, who's gone on to be just a complete guru and badass in the baseball world. But the next person I heard from was Mike Lombardi, then a special assistant in the front office of the New England Patriots, formerly a GM of the Browns.

• 1:29Ryan Holiday?

  He won a ring with Bill Walsh and the 49ers as well. Just a guru in the football world. He's the one that brought the book to the New England Patriots and then passed it along to the Seattle Seahawks. It's been really cool to watch this ancient philosophy that was popular with athletes back in the ancient world become popular again with professional athletes and coaches. And people were just masters of what they do. And I've been lucky enough to speak to all sorts of teams. And in today's episode, I wanted to talk about some Stoic motivation, some ideas, how we apply Stoicism to physical pursuits, to mastery, to athletics. It's cool that Stoicism is now embraced in All these professional sports and you would think that these sports don't have a lot in

• 2:13Ryan Holiday?

  common, but ultimately philosophy is a mental game as, as most sports are. In this episode, we're talking about managing emotions, particularly self-destructive emotions that will make you better at what you do, whether it's pushing through some physical limit or ignoring the jeers and cheers of the crowd. And I hope you enjoy this episode, which you can also see on YouTube if you click the link below.

• 2:41Ryan Holiday?

  Seneca said that the body has to be treated rigorously so that it may not be disobedient to the mind. I just did my Sunday workout. The idea of exercise is that, one, it's, it's good for the body, but two, it's good for the mind. It's training. It's a, it's a metaphor. Who's in charge? The little voice in your head that's telling you you have no further to go, or is it your willpower that's in charge? So the Stoics practiced sports, whether it's Chrysippus, who's a distance runner, whether it's Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, who clearly wrestled, clearly enjoyed hunting. Getting outside, doing hard stuff, treating the body rigorously is a philosophical exercise. It's training you to decide who's going to be in charge. It's training you to build up

• 3:23Ryan Holiday?

  your willpower. When you train in distance running, you train at your T pace, like 80, 90% of your fastest pace, you're trying to get your threshold up higher and higher. So as you go into competition, as you continue to push yourself, what used to be hard is now average. So Stoic is always pushing themselves. That's why we get outside and get active, sound mind and a strong body. That's the idea.

• 3:49Speaker 01

  First thing comes to my mind, KG, it was this one instance where we were playing each other and he, he was an avid trash talk.

• 3:55Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 3:56Speaker 01

  And not only do they use it to get in your head, but just something thrown out to where if you give it attention, now they're hyped up too.

• 4:03Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 4:03Speaker 01

  And so I took the bait. I took the bait this one time and I had one of the, not the worst game of my career, but I remember it. That's how bad it was. And he, you know, he gets into his zone and he pretty much dominates me. And I remember just like,

• 4:21Speaker 01

  Losing sleep, like having sleepless nights, like, he got the best of me. He called, he like, he called me a mama's boy. And ah, I lost it. Cause you know, that, that piece of trash talk, it really gets you if it's true, right?

• 4:33Ryan Holiday?

  Right, yeah, that's right, right. They're throwing a bunch of stuff out there and if 1% of it's true, that's the only thing you'll hear. It's because they wanna get in your head. They wanna rattle you, they want to upset you, they're trying to provoke a reaction. And I kinda think like, life is kind of trash talking us too. You know, like, like, life is, life is trying to distract us, upset us, throw us off our game. And you have to be that person who, who they can just like, lock in and tune it out.

• 5:00Speaker 01

  And if someone or something is trying to get, get you off of your game, just, just stay, just do what you do. Be the player who you are. I learned that there was another level that I had to get to, to be successful.

• 5:16Ryan Holiday?

  One thing you learn in endurance sports is that you always have further to go than you think is possible. Your body is telling you to quit, or your mind is telling you to quit, but actually your body is capable of more. And you have to override this, you have to push past it. And so for me, the endurance sports and philosophy have helped me even as a writer. Cause whenever I feel like quitting, whenever I feel like it's not working, whenever I feel like it's impossible, whenever I feel like I can't possibly go on any longer, I go, I know this feeling, I've dealt with this before. Epictetus talks about putting every impression up to the test. He talks about how a money changer knows what a counterfeit coin feels like, it sounds like. And when you do endurance sports, you get to that place where you know what weakness sounds like and feels like,

• 6:01Ryan Holiday?

  and what it's telling you to do, and how you don't have to listen to that. Because of your practice, you know that most of those limitations, most of that desire to quit, or stop, or slow down, is a lie. And you push past it, you push through it, and this gets you to where you wanna go. All growth is on the other side of resistance. Whether it's writing, whether it's in a relationship, whether it's in your work, whether it's in a creative pursuit, whether it's a business, all growth is on the other side of that resistance. And so having an endurance sport practice, something that you're trying to get good at. Whether it's CrossFit, or weightlifting, or running, or rock climbing, something where you're constantly testing those reservations. And the whole practice is learning when to push through and when not to push through. I can't recommend it highly enough. I know that getting outside and doing that stuff,

• 6:46Ryan Holiday?

  it might not seem like what the Stoics were doing, what philosophers were doing, but in fact, it was what they were doing. The Stoics were athletes. And this practice is deeply important into getting to that philosophical place of resilience and fortitude.

• 7:03Speaker 02

  As an athlete, I had the ability to grow physically with my skillset. And then also through competition of failure. So now, five years out of being an athlete, I'm missing that. So that's why we hired a performance coach to help us. Like, where do you find growth in your life?

• 7:19Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 7:19Speaker 02

  Like, it's one thing to read your books, and read all these books, but like, to be of action, and to have someone tell you you're wrong, or to do it in a different way, or try this. You know, that's the benefit, is there's people outside of you that if you can trust, or give yourself up to it, they can see it so much more clearly than you can.

• 7:37Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 7:38Speaker 02

  And that's where, I was not very coachable, because I grew up around coaching. I knew a lot.

• 7:42Ryan Holiday?

  That was like, too much like your dad to you?

• 7:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, and like, I probably knew either equal or more, because I've been in so many situations around the sport where I was not coachable. So I think it actually makes for me to be a better coach, because I understand that not everyone is receptive to coaching. But the truth of it is, if you really want to grow, you've got to have people in your life that are willing to tell you you're wrong, or to do it differently.

• 8:05Ryan Holiday?

  Sure. What was convincing to me about coaching, they're like, Tiger Woods has a coach. Like, he doesn't need one, but he has a coach, right? Yeah, when you look at Stoicism, most of the early Stoics had sort of Stoic tutors early on, who were sort of advisors their whole life. I think historically, not only should you have like, coaches, you should have advisors, you should have tutors.

• 8:27Ryan Holiday?

  Overcoming obstacles is really about persistence and dedication. It's also about following a methodical process. I talk about Nick Saban and the idea of the process which builds Alabama into perhaps the greatest college football dynasty in the history of the game. How does Saban do this? It's not about focusing on winning. It's not about focusing on the playoffs. It's not about the championship. It's not even about the fourth quarter. It's not even about the first game of the season. He wants players to focus on the immediate thing in front of you. The average down in football is like seven seconds. He says, "Focus doing your job these seven seconds. You accumulate it piece by piece." Zeno says, "Well-being is realized by small steps, but it's no small thing.

• 9:09Ryan Holiday?

  The process is small and humble, but it's ultimately unbeatable." And even, you know, writing "The Obstacle is the Way" was, "Okay, first I gotta do a proposal. Then I gotta sell. Then I gotta start the book. Then I gotta write, not the whole thing, but just the first sentence. And then the next sentence. And then chapter one, and chapter two, and chapter three." And even getting it to sell, you know, it doesn't sell when it first comes out. It's only six years later that it hits the bestseller list for the first time. It takes six years to sell a million copies. But that's because I never quit on it. I never got distracted by external results. I just focused every day on doing a little thing to make me and the book a little bit better.

• 9:52Ryan Holiday?

  If there's one thing that philosophy can teach any athlete, whether you're an amateur, whether you're a collegiate, prospect, whether you're a top-ranked recruiter, whether you're making millions of dollars in the pros, is something that I talked about to the Cleveland Browns this year when they had me talk about Stoicism. What I said, I started my talk and I said, "Look, everyone in this room controls one thing. They control how they play. You don't control what your teammates do, you control how you play. You don't control what they say about you on Twitter, you control how you play. You don't control the size of your contract, you control how you play. You don't control what they say about you from the stands." You control how you play.

• 10:37Ryan Holiday?

  You don't control what the ref says, you control how you play. You don't control whether it's snowing, you don't control whether it's raining, you don't control whether it's 100 degrees, you control how you play. You don't control whether your teammates get hurt, you don't control if your teammates are fair, you don't control if the guy in the position ahead of you wants to groom you and mentor you or not, you control how you play. You don't control whether your opponents cheat, you control how you play. You don't control if your coach is a bully and he screams at you, you control how you play. You don't control if people are doubting you, if they don't believe in you, you control how you play.

• 11:22Ryan Holiday?

  You don't control yesterday's game, you control how you play today. You don't control if you've lost to this team 1,000 times, you control how you play. You don't control if your team wins, you control how you play. You don't control if you lose, you control how you play. All you control, if it's not clear enough, is how you play right now, right this second. Whether there's doubters, whether you're being adored, all you control is how you play. The effort that you bring, the decisions you make, the principles by which you operate. And that's ultimately all you can judge yourself on. You don't control the outcome, you don't control the facts, you don't control anything but how you play.

• 12:04Ryan Holiday?

  But if we can focus on this, the Stoic said, if we can focus exclusively on what we control, not only be happier, we'll have way more energy and way more to focus on what is in front of us, while everyone else wastes time whining about, complaining about, worrying about, thinking about, bragging about what they don't control. Thank you so much for supporting Daily Stoic. Go to dailystoic.com/store and carry some of the products that I use on a daily basis. These are my everyday carries and I hope you check it out. dailystoic.com/store. Thank you for all the support.