You Have To Major In Your Majors | What Can Go Wrong… Might

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

• 0:02Ryan 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.

• 0:43Ryan Holiday?

  You should major in your majors. Just like ours, the ancient world was filled with people who had ambitious goals and trouble prioritizing them. Seneca said it was "one of the hardest balances to strike in life." "We don't want to be the person who can never sit still. For love of bustle is not industry," Seneca said. "It is only the restlessness of a hunted mind." But we also don't want to be the person who's always sitting still. "True repose does not consist in condemning all emotion, all motion as merely vexation," he wrote. "That kind of repose is slackness and inertia." The work of the philosopher, Seneca said, is finding the perfect balance between those two tendencies. It's about working and relaxing, not working and work avoidance. When we had the great Matthew McConaughey on the Daily Stoic Podcast, he told us the

• 1:28Ryan Holiday?

  story of how he found that balance for himself. At one point a few years ago, McConaughey realized he was doing too much.

• 1:35Speaker 01

  I had like eight proverbial campfires on my desk, he said.

• 1:40Ryan Holiday?

  He had a production company, a music label, a foundation, his acting career, and his family.

• 1:45Speaker 01

  So what I did is I got rid of about five of the campfires.

• 1:48Ryan Holiday?

  He called his lawyer and he shut down the production company and the music label.

• 1:52Speaker 01

  And I was left with the three things that were most important to me, and those three campfires turned into bonfires. So I majored in my majors, and I got rid of five minors that I was majoring in, trying to major in. And I was kind of making C pluses in everything. And when I got rid of five classes and concentrated on the three that I really wanted, I started making eight.

• 2:18Ryan Holiday?

  Life is about trade-offs. It would be wonderful if we could do it all, but we can't. Not well, at least. As McConaughey and many others have learned the hard way, the more things you try to do, the less adequately you do all of them, and the more vulnerable you make yourself to the consequences of mediocrity, inadequacy, and failure. But as Marcus Aurelius put it, "When you pare down to the essentials, you eliminate the inessentials, you get the double benefit of doing the essential stuff better, and you become more resilient and stronger as a result." And we've actually had Matthew McConaughey on the podcast twice. We had him once for an hour remotely during the pandemic, and then we did it remotely again for two hours. I was in the studio, he wasn't. Both are great YouTube videos,

• 3:02Ryan Holiday?

  which I'll link to in today's show notes, and then listen to the episode on the podcast, however you listen to your podcasts as well. I think it's one of the best episodes. I think he's one of the best guests we've ever had. I think he's a fascinating dude, someone I'm glad to have gotten to know. I think you'll like it. "What can go wrong might," and this is from this week's entry in the Daily Stoic Journal, "366 Days of Writing and Reflection on the Art of Living" by yours truly. "We call people who dwell on what might go wrong pessimists. Some even think that bad thoughts attract bad events. The Stoics found this all to be nonsense. In fact, they had a practice, premeditatio malorum, premeditation of evils, that specifically encouraged musing

• 3:46Ryan Holiday?

  on the so-called worst-case scenario. Marcus would begin his day thinking about all the ugliness he would see on display in court, not for the purpose of working himself up, but precisely the opposite, to calm and focus himself, to be prepared to act in the proper way rather than just to react. Seneca too practiced meditating in advance, not only on what normally happens, but on what could happen. Epictetus went as far as to imagine losing a loved one every time he would kiss them. The Stoics believed that all we have is on loan from fortune, and that negative visualization helps increase our awareness of the unexpected. So don't shy away from this in your thoughts." And we have two quotes today from Marcus Aurelius and from Seneca. When you arise in the morning,

• 4:30Ryan Holiday?

  tell yourself, "I will encounter busybodies, ingrates, egomaniacs, liars, the jealous and cranks." They are all stricken with these afflictions because they don't know the difference between good and evil. Because I have understood the beauty of good and the ugliness of evil, I know that the wrongdoers are still akin to me, and that none can do me harm or implicate me in ugliness, nor can I be angry at my relatives and hate them, for we are made for cooperation. Before I get to the Seneca quote, I would say that the many first times I read this quote, especially when I read it young, I focused on that first part where you list just how awful and frustrating everyone will be. And I think that's sort of the rudimentary understanding. It's like, look, you know, don't go into the world all rosy-eyed and bushy-tailed, or you're gonna get your heart stomped on, right?

• 5:14Ryan Holiday?

  You gotta be aware, you gotta be prepared, you can't be naive. Marcus really says, "Don't go expecting Plato's Republic." But it's really the second part of that that's hit me more, right? Why is he doing that exercise? It's so when he's hit by it, when he's hit by a cheat, or a liar, or a person who is, you know, messing around on their spouse, or, you know, when he sees somebody do something wrong, he's not surprised by it, and it doesn't make him bitter, and it doesn't make him write off all of humanity as a whole. You know, he says, "Because I know better, I know that the wrongdoers are still akin to me." And he says, "And none can do me harm or implicate me in ugliness,

• 5:59Ryan Holiday?

  nor can I be angry at my relatives or hate them." That's something I've been working on. It's like I was just dealing with someone who I really care about, and they're just, you know, being, you know, not safe or smart, or who I know them to be. And I wanted to unload on them, and I had to go, no, I care about this person. I'm not gonna do that. I'm not going to... I should have prepared for this. I shouldn't have built them up in my head. They're a human being. They have flaws. They do the wrong thing sometimes. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna cast them out of my heart or out of my life for what they've done. And then this goes into the second Seneca quote. "Being unexpected adds to the weight of a disaster, and being a surprise has never failed to increase a person's pain. For that reason, nothing should ever be unexpected by us.

• 6:44Ryan Holiday?

  Our minds should be sent out in advance to all the things, and we shouldn't just consider the normal course of things, but what could actually happen? For is there anything in life that fortune won't knock off its high horse if it pleases her?" You know, I have the premeditatio malorum coin here on my desk, and I just look at it, I go, "Look, look, Murphy's Law is real, man. Things can go sideways fast." I mean, imagine where you were the first week of March 2020. Did you see the next 12 months coming? Very, very few people did. But we would have been better had we been more prepared, had we been more realistic, had we been less in our own fantasy world. You know, Seneca says, "The only unforgivable thing for a general to say is, 'I did not think it would happen.'" So of course, positive visualization is thinking

• 7:29Ryan Holiday?

  of all the good things that can happen. You can succeed. You can break through. You can make it. If it's humanly possible, know you can do it, Marcus says. The same time, the law of attraction is not real. If you think about negative things, you don't attract negative things. You actually make yourself more prepared to wrestle with and deal with and conquer those difficult things. And that is why we do our premeditatio malorum. That is why we think of all the things that can happen. That's why we meditate on the people we're likely to meet so that they can't drag us down. They can't implicate us in ugliness, and they can't make us unhappy.