Can You Play Ball Like This? | Stoic Tips For Navigating Change & Disruption

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

• 0:05Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a Stoic-inspired meditation, designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life. Each one of these episodes is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women, help you learn from them, to follow in their example, and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. For more, visit DailyStoic.com.

• 0:55Ryan Holiday?

  Life throws stuff at us. We have to figure out how to catch it and throw it back. That's what Epictetus meant when he said, "We don't control what happens, we control how we respond." But he also liked that throwing metaphor, and clearly was way more than a casual fan of sports. Epictetus admired the way that skilled athletes caught a ball that was thrown to them and whipped it right back. They didn't complain. They didn't demand certain conditions be met before they dove for it. He admired their concentration, their coolness under pressure, their grace, their creativity. In his view, Socrates was such an athlete. Only the ball, in his case, Epictetus said, was life, imprisonment, exile, or execution, with the prospect of losing his wife and having his children reduced to the status of orphans. Those were the stakes of the game,

• 1:38Ryan Holiday?

  and still he played and handled the ball with aplomb. What about you? Are you such an athlete? Can you ball? Or do you make excuses? Do you prefer to sit in the stands and judge the people who play? Win or lose, what matters, the Stoics believed, was that we tried, that we did our best, that we dove for the ball, that we risked it all but played fair, that we held our head up high, that we didn't get intimidated or make excuses. Life is gonna throw you curveballs. Are you ready?

• 2:12Ryan Holiday?

  The world feels unstable. Technology is transforming the ways we think and work. Inflation is out of control. Companies are laying people off. There's political dysfunction. There's political upheaval. And I actually think this is the perfect opportunity for Stoicism. For thousands of years, Stoicism has been a philosophy designed to help us remain secure in times of instability, to remain stable in moments of change and upheaval. And that's what we're going to talk about today. What the Stoics can teach us about dealing with change and disruption, and how we not just get through it, but we turn it into a competitive advantage.

• 2:56Ryan Holiday?

  There's this species of pine tree that I think serves as a powerful metaphor for this moment that we're in. It's a species of pine tree called the lodgepole pine. And it looks like a totally normal pine tree, but its pine cone is different from basically all the other pine trees. It's got what's called a serotonous cone. Basically, what that means is that the pine cone is covered in this thick, waxy resin. And that resin has to be melted off by heat. And I don't mean like heat from a hot day. That's not remotely sufficient. It can only be melted off by the heat of something like a raging forest fire. So the one thing that's destructive and dangerous and generally to be avoided is, for this species of tree, exactly what it needs. The fire melts the resin off, and then the pine cone opens, and the next stand of trees can come.

• 3:40Ryan Holiday?

  And I think this is creative destruction embodied. It's also what adversity and difficulty is supposed to be to the Stoics. The Stoics have this concept of amor fatu, which means a love of fate. Like, you don't want it, you didn't choose it, but you can't be what you're capable of being without being exposed to stress and difficulty. And in fact, it's not till we're exposed to adversity or difficulty, till the change we dreaded happened and happens. Until then, we're not capable of being what we're capable of being. And sure, we wouldn't choose the adversity or the difficulty or the circumstances. It's not fair. It was quite possibly preventable. Maybe it was even something you warned It's definitely not your fault, but here you are. And so the question is, who are you going to be?

• 4:25Ryan Holiday?

  What are you going to do about it? What is it going to open up inside you? Again, I see this being the story of Marcus Aurelius, the floods and the famine and the plague and the wars and the disasters. This is what allowed him to be what he was. This is what made him great. He wouldn't have chosen it. It wasn't fair, but we admire him all the more for it. And so we are going to constantly be put to fire in our own lives. We are constantly going to be exposed to situations not of our choosing. And that can open us up or it can close us off, can make us better or it can make us worse. We can be changed by it or we can be changed by it while we get dragged kicking and screaming.

• 5:10Ryan Holiday?

  We can find the opportunity in it or someone else can find the opportunity in it. And the opportunity to me in all these circumstances is an opportunity to do great work, to get stronger, to learn, to be of service to others, to find something new and powerful inside ourselves. That's what this moment presents us. That's what change has always presented the Stoics. That's what we get to do and need to do in this moment. I think it's rather fitting then that Stoicism as a school of philosophy comes out of a disaster and how one deals with a disaster. Zeno is a merchant. He's a dealer in what's known as Tyrian purple,

• 5:52Ryan Holiday?

  which is this rare purple dye that makes the cloaks of wealthy Greeks. And later it would make the cloaks of the emperor. When Mark Schuris talks about not being stained purple, he's referring to the purple cloak of the emperor. So Zeno deals with this rare dye that's worth quite a lot of money. And he travels from port to port selling and trading. And all is well until he suffers a shipwreck, loses his ship, a convoy of ships. We don't know the specifics, but he basically washes up in Athens, Penylus. And there in the Athenian agora, he's walking through the stalls and he hears a bookseller reading a story from Socrates. This is the story of the choice of Hercules, which is actually The story that opens all four books in the Stoic Virtue series that I wrote. Choice of Hercules is the choice between the easy road and the hard road.

• 6:36Ryan Holiday?

  Getting everything you want and having to struggle for it. But it is this story that introduces Zeno to philosophy. It changes the course of his life. He would joke later that he makes a great fortune when he suffers a shipwreck because it drives him to philosophy. He founds a school there in the agora, at the stoa pochile, that's the painted porch, that changes the world. I mean, here we are talking about it 2,500 years later. It was fortunate for him and fortunate for us. But actually, no, it wasn't. It was objective. It was. He suffers a shipwreck, not good or bad. He makes it good in how he responds. That's what Stoic philosophy is. The idea that we don't control what happens. We control how we respond to what happens.

• 7:20Ryan Holiday?

  We control what we do about it. Marcus Trivias' passage that I build, "The obstacle is the way around." This idea that things can get in our way. Things can blow up our plans. Zeno thinks he's going to be a merchant. And life says, "No, you're not. I'm going to take away your means of making a living. I'm going to blow your life apart." But Marcus Trivias says, "We always have this ability to accommodate and adapt. We can adjust. We can make new plans." The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way. It becomes a new way. It's a chance for us to do something new. That's what "the obstacle is the way" means. When we say that, we mean that, yes, sometimes it's a chance to grow the business. Sometimes it's a chance to go into a totally new business because the business was exploded.

• 8:02Ryan Holiday?

  Marcus Trivias is saying that everything is a chance for us to practice a virtue. And that's how we have to see it. We see that the change that's happening, we see that the things that are occurring, we see that the disruption, we see the things that other people are seeing as negative. We see them as a chance for us to be great, for us to practice virtue, for us to be excellent. That's what it means to say that "the obstacle is the way." That's what Stoicism is about. And that's actually one of my favorite quotes in Meditations where Marcus Trivias says, "You want to cultivate this kind of adaptability that takes whatever life throws at you and you're able to say, 'This is exactly what I was looking for.'" In fact, Epictetus would say that's the whole point of philosophy. To be able to get to a place where anything and everything that happens,

• 8:46Ryan Holiday?

  you're able to say, this is what I trained for. I'm ready for this. That's what Stoicism is, a way of dealing with the shit that life throws at us. And you know what it throws at us probably more than any other thing? It throws change at us. Life is nothing but change. And that's probably the theme that Marx really hits on more than any in Meditations. Like, I'll give you some of my favorites on change. He says, "Constant awareness that everything is born from change. The knowledge that there is nothing that nature loves more than to alter what exists and make new things. All that exists is a seed of what will emerge." He says, "Some things are rushing into existence, others out of it. Some of what now exists is already gone.

• 9:30Ryan Holiday?

  Change and flux constantly remake the world, just as the incessant progression of time remakes eternity. We find ourselves in a river. Which of the things around us should we value when none of them can offer a firm foothold? Like an attachment to a sparrow, we glimpse it and it's gone." Look, Marx really says, okay, you're frightened of change. Yeah, sure, we all are. But he says, "What can exist without change?" And I think it's worth remembering that the things you don't want to change, how did they get like this? From change. We are the products of change. And the more we think we can cling, that we can keep things the way that they are, the crazier we're being. In Discipline is Destiny, I talk a lot about Queen Elizabeth II.

• 10:11Ryan Holiday?

  And you might think that a monarch like that, the head of an institution that has been there for hundreds and hundreds of years, is all about rigidity and tradition. And she is in some sense, and yet she was also the recipient and the bracer of unimaginable change. I mean, she reigns for 70 years. Think of the world at the beginning of her reign at the end. It literally remakes itself. Most of the countries on earth at her death did not exist when she was born. The world is constantly changing. She would actually quote an Italian novelist as one of the mottos for the royal household. It was that if things are going to stay the same, then things are going to have to change. If we rigidly- Think that we can keep them as they are, we're gonna be crushed, we're gonna be broken, we're gonna be very brittle.

• 10:55Ryan Holiday?

  But if we can be flexible, if we can adjust, if we can adapt, if we can be that adaptability that Marcus really said and goes, this is what I'm looking for, this is okay, I can deal with this, I'm gonna respond well to this, well then we're gonna be able to make it out. And again, Marcus comes back to the theme of change in Book Eight, Six. He says, "Nature is just doing its job, which is to shift things elsewhere, to transform them, to pick them up and move them from here to there." Says, "There's constant alteration, but we shouldn't worry because there's nothing new here, because everything is familiar and even the proportions are unchanged." And then I think most powerfully in Seven, Fourteen, and Fifteen, Marcus really gives us how a Stoic has to think about change.

• 11:36Ryan Holiday?

  He says, "Let it happen if it wants, to whatever it can happen to, and what's affected can complain about it if it wants, but it doesn't hurt me unless I interpret it's happening as harmful to me." Says, "I can choose not to." Then this is the next one, this is the important part. He says, "No matter what anyone says or does, my task is to be good, like gold or emerald or purple repeating to itself. No matter what anyone says or does, my task is to be emerald, my color undiminished." The point is that whatever happens, however life changes, whatever disruption occurs, our job remains the same. Our job is to remain good. Our job is to rise to the occasion, to step up and meet that thing in front of us.

• 12:19Ryan Holiday?

  He talks about this in Seven, Eight as well. He says, "Forget the future. When and if it comes, you'll have the same resources to draw on, that is, to say, philosophy." We have these tools, we have been through adversity, we have been through difficulty, we have a recipe from the Stoics. We have a mandate to be good, to do good, to serve the common good, to stay true, to stand upright, to persevere. That's what this moment is going to demand of us. Whatever it's bringing it about, whatever the particulars of the change or the problem or the circumstances are, we can take a lot of solace and security in that what we are supposed to do remains the same and remains clear.

• 13:10Ryan Holiday?

  It's so easy to romanticize the past, to round off the edges. The ancient world often looks to us like a peaceful time, like a golden age, right? We see the beautiful buildings. We see it through works of art. We read their thoughtful philosophical texts and we can forget that they didn't live in the past. They did not live in stable times. They didn't know what was going to happen next. Think of Socrates. He lived through a great power conflict between Athens and Sparta, a war that lasted for decades that he himself had to fight in and lost friends in. And then the war in which his country loses gives way to a time known as the time of thirty tyrants.

• 13:53Ryan Holiday?

  Seneca lives in the time of Nero, one of the worst leaders there ever was. Sure, he was rich and powerful himself, but he and so many Romans were constantly at the whims of a madman. And there is also a series of rebellions and financial crises and fires in Seneca's time. Epictetus lives through this same time, but from a very different end of society. He is a slave. He is tortured. His labor and his life is taken from him. Think about Marcus Aurelius. There's a flood and a famine, which leads to a plague and a pandemic and leads to wars and political instability. I guess what I'm saying is that history wasn't fun and exciting necessarily for the people living through it, right?

• 14:38Ryan Holiday?

  There's that Chinese curse, may you live in interesting times. Every time is interesting. Every time is confusing. We're always going, what's going to happen next? Is it good or bad? What we can take from the past, the one certainty we can deduce about the future is that it will be uncertain. There will be disruption. Our plans will be screwed up. Bad things will happen. And if we expect them to be easy, if we expect them to be calm, it's going to be even harder for us to deal with it. Seneca said, "The unexpected blow lands heaviest." One of the most important parts of our toolkit for dealing with change and disruption is to expect change and disruption. To reject the tendency to assume that things are stable, that they're going to be calm and good.

• 15:21Ryan Holiday?

  Never forget Fortune's habit of behaving exactly as she pleases, Seneca said, and he knew that from experience. So the more we can anticipate, the more we can be prepared, the more we can toughen ourselves up and be ready for what's going to happen, the better we're going to be able to deal with it. One of the most essential things we can do to prepare for the future is to do exactly what we just did, which is look at the past. Zoom out. We can take the wider view. Marcus Aurelius talks about looking how empire bleeds into empire, emperor into emperor, action into action, how history is the same thing happening over and over and over again, remembering that what happened then is going to happen again.

• 16:06Ryan Holiday?

  In meditations, what we see Marcus Aurelius doing is zooming out. He says, "You always want to take Plato's view." This is what he's doing in his journal. Actually, astronauts have talked about this. Almost everyone that's seen the Earth from a distance talks about how it calms them down. They call this the overview effect. Your petty concerns go away, petty distinctions go away. You feel a kind of connection to all humans. You feel a connection to the environment. You feel a sense of obligation to other people. Your anxiety is turned down. By zooming out, we see how insignificant most of the things we worry about are. Get that bigger view. Now, sometimes you zoom way in. That's an important part of changing your perspective.

• 16:50Ryan Holiday?

  But oftentimes, it's about zooming out. You think about the things that you were stressed about 10 years ago, 20 years ago. You think about the things you were worried about last week, last month, last year, a decade ago, how few of them came to pass, how you were able to deal with them, how they weren't as big a deal as you thought they would be. By alternating and changing our perspective, by thinking about what's happened historically, it gives us perspective. It lets us integrate this thing into our life. And the act of journaling is a really important place to do this. Talk about what you're going through. Talk about what you're thinking about. Work through your assumptions. Prepare yourself for what might lie ahead. This is how we integrate and deal with change.

• 17:34Ryan Holiday?

  In 748, he says Plato has it right. He says, "If you want to talk about people, you need to look down on earth from above. Herds and armies, farms, weddings, divorces, births, deaths, noisy courtrooms, desert places, all foreign peoples, holidays, days of mourning, market days, all mix together a harmony of opposites." And then actually, the next passage, this is 749, is powerful in this regard, too. He says, "Look at the past, empire succeeding empire, and from that extrapolate the future, the same thing. No escape from the rhythm of events." Epictetus said that a great athlete doesn't talk or think a lot about whether something was a good throw or a bad throw.

• 18:18Ryan Holiday?

  He says, "'Cause they're too busy catching it and throwing it back, catching it and throwing it back." And he believed that Socrates, who again, lived through a great power conflict, who lived through persecution and criticism, he experienced all sorts of difficulty in life. Epictetus believed he was one of the greatest athletes ever because of how he caught it and threw it back, caught it and threw it back, how he dealt with what life put in front of him. And that's how we want to see ourselves, as someone whose job it is to catch it and throw it back, catch it and throw it back. Not to say, "Oh, this is terrible. Oh, this is unfair. Oh, it should have gone differently. Oh, I hate this. Oh, I blame so and so." Because we're too busy catching it and throwing it back, catching it and throwing it back.

• 18:58Ryan Holiday?

  We're too busy doing what needs to be done, focusing on what part of it is in our control. And as I wrap up, I want to give you one more quote from Marcus Aurelius about change that I think is worth thinking about here. And it's Marcus Aurelius 523. He says, "Keep in mind how fast things pass by and are gone, those that are now and those to come." He said, "Existence flows past us like a river. The what is in constant flux. The why has a thousand variations. Nothing is stable, not even what's right here. The infinity of past..." Past and future gapes before us, a chasm whose depths we cannot see. And then this is my favorite. He says, "So it would take an idiot to feel self-importance or distress,

• 19:43Ryan Holiday?

  or any indignation either, as if the thing that irritates us lasts." This is just a few passages over from the reminder that things that get in our way present us the opportunity. The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way. We have a chance to embrace this, to make the most of it, to become something that we need to be, even if it doesn't feel that way. To me, that's what the Stoics teach us about these times. That's what I'm trying to practice in these difficult, uncertain times. And I hope you do also.

• 20:18Ryan Holiday?

  When I wrote The Daily Stoic eight years ago, I had this crazy idea that I would just keep it going. The book was 366 meditations, but I'd write one more every single day, and I'd give it away for free as an email. I thought maybe a few people would sign up. Couldn't have even comprehended a future in which three-quarters of a million people would get this email every single day and would for almost a decade. If you want to get the email, if you want to be part of a community that is the largest group of Stoics ever assembled in human history, I'd love for you to join us. You can sign up and get the email totally for free. No spam. You can unsubscribe whenever you want at dailystoic.com/email.