This Will Help You Calm Down | Ask DS

If you read the news, it feels like the world is falling apart. Zoom out. Take a sideways glance. Get the outside of the issue, the problem, the day’s events. Seek perspective. Ask DS:How do we know when we are sticking to our values versus leaving them behind? What can we learn from President Carter’s campaigning versus his leadership while in office? Does Ryan Holiday think there are any major pitfalls or flaws in Stoicism? 📚 Grab a copy of In a Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson at The Painted Porch: https://www.thepaintedporch.com/🎟 Ryan Holiday is going on tour! Grab tickets at ryanholiday.net/tour✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and 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.

• 0:02Ryan 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. Thank you for listening, and we hope this is of use to you.

• 0:44Ryan Holiday?

  This will help calm you down. If you read the news, it feels like the world is falling apart. Political incompetence, political corruption, rising crime, depressing economic news. The future looks dark. People seem awful. And worse, it's happening near you. Are you in danger? Should you be scared? Is there really nothing you can do about it? In the hilarious book, In a Sunburned Country, and you can grab a copy at The Painted Porch, it's wonderful, Bill Bryson speaks about the joy of reading the news in Australia, a country many thousands of miles from his own. "It always amazes me how seldom visitors bother with the local paper," he writes. "I personally can think of nothing more exciting, certainly nothing you could do in a public place with a cup of coffee than to read newspapers

• 1:29Ryan Holiday?

  from a part of the world you know almost nothing about. What a comfort it is to find a nation preoccupied by matters of no possible consequence to oneself. I love reading about scandals involving ministers of whom I have never heard, murder hunts in communities whose names sound dusty and remote, features on revered artists and thinkers whose achievements have never reached my ears, whose talents I must take on faith." What he was experiencing, of course, was the wonder of perspective. He was taking Plato's view, the 10,000-foot view, the one that Marcus Aurelius talks about in Meditations. Two armies battling each other is horrible thing up close. From the top of a mountain, it looks like ants going after a piece of food.

• 2:11Ryan Holiday?

  News near us is alarming, frustrating, disappointing. News from far away is funny, absurd, and riveting. The turmoil of ancient Rome provides us moral lessons. The turmoil of our own time simply makes us queasy. Bryson, who no doubt had problems with politicians at home, noted the hilarity of two feuding Australian ministers who were literally named Abbott and Costello. The point is, how we look at things matters. And sometimes by noticing how we might look at something while we're on vacation, or through the lens of a foreign language or a culture, can give us a better insight into how we might better look at things at home. And by the way, the reason I'm reading Bill Bryson's book on Australia is I'm heading

• 2:54Ryan Holiday?

  to Australia because on July 31, I'm doing a talk in Sydney, and on August 1, I'm doing one in Melbourne. I loved the book. We started caring at the painting board. It's one of my favorites. But anyways, if you want to come see me because you happen to be in that part of the world, you can. You can grab tickets at ryanholiday.net/tour. And then I still have to figure out what books I want to read about another part of the world because I'm doing talks in Toronto, Vancouver, London, Dublin, and Rotterdam in November. I'll link to those also. You can come see me at some wonderful venues and ask some questions and all that. Ticket info at ryanholiday.net/tour. And I can't wait to see all of you there. And I'm very much looking forward to spending a few days in Australia as well.

• 3:49Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another Thursday episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Back in April, I was at the Naval Academy. I flew there. I was supposed to do this talk to about 1,200 sophomores there at the Naval Academy. I was giving this lecture on Jimmy Carter, right actually next to Jimmy Carter Hall there at the Naval Academy. I was talking about the virtue of justice specifically through the lens of one of their most famous graduates. I was really honored to do it. I'd sort of packed in a hurry the night before and I grabbed this white pair of vans that I have. There are these zip-up vans that I really like. I fly in that morning, check into the hotel, prep for the talk. I've never done this talk before. I go for

• 4:29Ryan Holiday?

  a long run there along the water, get showered, start to get dressed, go to put on my shoes and they don't fit. And I realize my wife and I have the same pair of shoes and I grabbed her pair. My running shoes are disgusting. I definitely not can not run in them. So I have to run up the street there in Annapolis. I'm staying at that waterfront hotel right there if you've ever been. And I have to buy a pair of shoes to put on and walk out with, straight to the talk. So I'll bring that talk to you at some point because I was really proud of it. I think it turned out great. But I had a little Q and A after. That's what I wanted to bring you today. There were some great questions. The midshipmen are always incredible to talk to. And I think

• 5:12Ryan Holiday?

  you're really going to like this. This was part of the Stutt Ethics Lecture Series at the Naval Academy. The Stockdale Center has been a great supporter of my work and of course Stoicism. And so here we go. The first thing they were asking me about was this, how do you adapt to the time you're in, but also stick to your values? How do you know when you're sticking to your values versus leaving them behind? Yeah, it's tough. I think it would be wonderful if there was some... You know, clear, uh, step-by-step test or rule. Um, maybe one way to think about it is like, what's actually the harder thing? You know? What's the harder thing? Uh, when we're telling ourselves, oh, this is the expedient thing. Oh, this will help me do this in the future.

• 5:55Ryan Holiday?

  Are we actually just fooling ourselves and it's, it's allowing us to get away with not having to do the tough thing? But the decision to wait, to be strategic, to build relationships, you know, if that's the tougher thing, maybe that's a way to think about it. But I do think it's important, you know, it can be easy to think, you know, hey, this is going to succeed because it's right. Or this is an idea whose time it's come. Um, that's not where change typically happens, right? Usually change, uh, progress, righting old wrongs. You know, it's a knife fight. Uh, it's a long, hard slog. And, you know, Carter doesn't just decide, hey, we should, you know, do something about the Panama Canal.

• 6:38Ryan Holiday?

  He has to schmooze all 100 of those senators. He has to convince them. He has to work the press. He has to work the State Department. You know, it's a tough thing, right? And so I think, I think we want to think about doing the right thing as not just a moral issue, but also an issue of competence and an issue of acumen. And the ability to figure out how systems work and how to get things done is just as important as, uh, doing the right thing. You know, Kennedy gives much more beautiful and inspiring speeches about civil rights. It takes Lyndon Johnson, the so-called master of the Senate, to actually ram those things through.

• 7:22Ryan Holiday?

  So this tension between knowing what's right and then getting that thing done, that's, that's the competence we have to cultivate. Uh, and that takes, that takes a lifetime. But it is tough, right? You think about who becomes the CEO of companies, who makes it all the way to Admiral or President? It's usually not a disruptive person. Right? You get to that level by going along. Not in all things, but if you're a radical, if you are disruptive, if you are constantly challenging the status quo, it's going to be hard to get promotions.

• 8:04Ryan Holiday?

  It's going to be hard to make friends and fans. That's why Carter has to say, you know, you're not going to like my campaign. This is what I have to say to get elected. But when I'm actually president, I'm going to do it. And I think the problem is most people say to ourselves, that's what I'm doing. But then we get there, we get there, and then suddenly we become risk averse or we start thinking of the next office. And that's why we don't ultimately do the hard right thing then. Because now we can see, oh, if I stay at this five more years or I, you know, make this or make that, then I'll get to the next level. Then I'll really be in a position to do good. And so this constantly delaying the time when you do the hard thing,

• 8:49Ryan Holiday?

  you never end up doing it because you think you'd become more empowered as you go. But in fact, you become more risk averse because now you have more to lose. Someone asked me to expand on Carter as a campaigner versus a leader because you have to win office to be able to be a leader and the tensions there. Yeah, I think what Carter was talking about, although he didn't run a racist campaign, he had to convince a number of pretty conservative in the lower C sense voters to give him the keys to the governor's mansion. Right? And so we see this politically now all the time. It's there's the things that one part of your constituency wants to say,

• 9:33Ryan Holiday?

  wants you to say or do. And then the cost that comes over here to a different constituency. And so it's a, it's a tightrope that you're watching, you're walking. And I think Carter was saying that, that you might not see me as a progressive candidate on these important civil rights issues. But he was saying to them privately, I will do those things once I am in power.

• 10:01Ryan Holiday?

  What I think is beautiful and inspiring about Carter, again, is that he actually did that. It wasn't just lip service. I think that that tends to be unfortunately what leaders say is they tell a lot of different people what they want to hear and then they just do what they want to do. But but he's saying, you know, you can't change policies if you don't win elections. You can't reform or change or update or, you know, do the things that you need to do in a specific spot, in a specific industry, in a specific moment in time, if you don't have power or influence, right? That's what he's talking about. Someone asked me about some pitfalls or flaws in Stoicism, which is a question

• 10:45Ryan Holiday?

  I think we should think about. Stoicism isn't perfect and we should critique it and try to ask ourselves questions about where it's working and not working. Yes, certainly. I actually just did a video on what the Stoics get wrong. The Stoics, like Jimmy Carter, like all of us, we're all products of our time. We can question certain assumptions, but then we all have blind spots. We have things that we don't understand or that we miss. So Stoics live in a time of slavery. They live in a time of vast inequality. They, the Roman Empire is a ruthless colonizer and conqueror. These are not great things. The Stoics don't question that. I think Stoicism was primarily a philosophy for people trying to be good inside a not-so-good world.

• 11:29Ryan Holiday?

  But they could have done more, they should have done more. I think one area that fascinates me that the Stoics, it's something they get wrong, but we have to remember, we only have some of the surviving writings from the Stoics. We have by no means everything they ever thought and did. But even just this idea that, you know, there's some things that we control and some things that are not in our control. Epictetus says it's either up to you or it's not up to you. Everything else that's not up to you, you don't care about. Well, the reality is there's some things in the middle that we can influence, that we have some control over. And what about those? And I think that's what I'm talking about even here with Carter, right? He did the right thing, but could he have been better at doing the right thing?

• 12:14Ryan Holiday?

  Was he ignoring some things that he could have had more influence over? Could he have greased more palms and schmoozed more and had more drinks with people? Could he have been more effective as a politician? Perhaps, maybe he saw that as not in his control, but I think you would argue it was more in his control than maybe he wanted to admit. So it's not so black and white. There's some things that are up to us, there's some things that are not up to us. I think it's not a whole, it's just it's an area that requires some nuance, which is there's some stuff that we have influence over. Ultimately, getting promoted is not up to you, but whether you do the right things to put yourself in a position to potentially be promoted or recognized is up to you.

• 12:59Ryan Holiday?

  And so that distinction is one I think about, not just philosophically, but I think about practically in my personal life. I can write the best book that I can write, and then I hope it succeeds. But there's also things that I can do in between, is what we call marketing, is what we call sales, to hopefully make that more of a reality. And that is something that Stoics don't talk about enough.

• 13:23Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. I just wanted to say we so appreciate it. We love serving you. It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple of years we've been doing it. It's an honor. Please, spread the word, tell people about it. And this isn't to sell anything, I just wanted to say thank you.