Don’t Be Scared By Things Like This | 10 Stoic Parenting Tips

You might think that the Stoics were above silly things like superstitions. After all, these were rational folks, serious people. Certainly, they wouldn’t believe in ghosts, right? They wouldn’t have time for something as juvenile as a ghost story, would they?--And in today's Daily Stoic video excerpt, Ryan talks parenting goals, the most important role philosophy can play in all of your lives is in guiding the example you set for them. In the principles you embody. In the standards you hold yourself to. This is the area in which you can have true multi-generational impact.✉️ 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.

• 0:02Ryan 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. On Tuesdays, we take a closer look at these Stoic ideas, how we can apply them in our actual lives. Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy.

• 0:26Ryan Holiday?

  Don't be scared by things like this. You might think that the Stoics were above silly things like superstitions. After all, these were rational folks, serious people. Certainly, they wouldn't believe in ghosts, right? They wouldn't have time for something as juvenile as a ghost story, would they? Well, as it happens, we do have a ghost story involving the Stoics, one that has been passed down for more than 2,000 years, in fact. It involves Athenodorus, a fascinating but little-known man who I profile in Lives of the Stoics. As an advisor to the Emperor Augustus, Athenodorus was living in a large mansion that was purported to be haunted. On the very first night in the house, Athenodorus was visited by a ghost,

• 1:08Ryan Holiday?

  was clapped in irons and dragging heavy chains. There it was, the exact apparition he had been warned about. What did he do? Did he flee? Did he fall to his knees and pray? Not this Stoic. Instead, Athenodorus, in the middle of a writing session, motioned for the ghost to wait and return to his work. Only when he had finished did he get up and follow it into the courtyard where it suddenly vanished. Sensing that this was a message, Athenodorus marked the spot where the ghost had disappeared. He returned to tidy up his desk, and then he went to bed. In the morning, he had workers return to the spot and ordered them to dig. Beneath the dirt, they found ancient bones in chains, which Athenodorus had reburied with honors in a public funeral. The ghost was never

• 1:52Ryan Holiday?

  seen again by him or any other resident of the house. Did this really happen? Who knows? But there is a reason that Athenodorus later told this story to the young Octavian, who was reportedly easily scared and a big believer in the supernatural. He was trying to teach Octavian, who became Augustus, a lesson. Stoics must always keep their head. Don't be scared by things that go bump in the night. Don't even be thrown by unexpected or surreal situations. Even these can be resolved with reason and courage, by calmness and fortitude and logic. And even if you believe in silly things like ghosts or superstitions, you can't let your life be ruled by them. You must be in charge. No excuses.

• 2:34Ryan Holiday?

  We can't let anything rattle us today, tomorrow, whenever. Happy Halloween, everyone. Nothing challenges you quite like having kids. If you were trying to sum up all of Stoic philosophy in one word, you could do a lot worse than presents.

• 2:53Ryan Holiday?

  There's a story about Kobe Bryant, a journalist who had interviewed him a lot, had reached out to Kobe Bryant like maybe two weeks before he died. But Kobe Bryant texted back, no, I'm heads down with my girls right now. Being where you are while you're there, that's the thing that Marcus Aurelius is struggling with as the emperor, that Epictetus is struggling with as a slave, that Seneca is struggling somewhere in between, and all of us here in the very busy, modern world are struggling with too. But that decision, that decision is everything. The decision to say no to the extraneous, to the extra, to spend time with our family, that choice is everything. You don't know if you're going to tragically die in a helicopter crash in two weeks, but you might, which is why you have to cherish these moments. Most of the Stoics do have children. And not only that, I think some of their best insights come from having kids and specifically

• 3:37Ryan Holiday?

  address how to be a better parent. I'm Ryan Holiday. In addition to writing these books about Stoic philosophy, I've spoken to the NBA and the NFL, special forces operators, and sitting senators. And I'm also a parent. I have two young children. And in today's episode, I want to talk about what the Stoics can teach us about our most important job, raising great kids, being a great parent. And it turns out, there's quite a bit.

• 4:03Speaker 01

  In the book, you highlight stories about the importance of modeling the behavior that you want your children. When I grow up, they say, "Don't do as I do, do as I say."

• 4:11Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, it should be the opposite.

• 4:12Speaker 01

  It should be the opposite. You have a quote from Robert Fulgham. It says, "Don't worry that children never listen to you. Worry that they are always watching you."

• 4:20Ryan Holiday?

  The great John Wooden had a poem in his office, and it said, "A little fellow follows you." And he tried to make all the decisions, do his work, with the idea that his son was always following behind him, watching, observing, learning how to be. So we can't just talk about our philosophy to stuff, and we have to embody it. We have to show it. It doesn't matter what we say.

• 4:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 4:40Ryan Holiday?

  If our actions show our kids that we don't mean it, that it's not actually important.

• 4:49Speaker 02

  There's moments, though, that we have where you're like, "Oh, I'm so glad I was there."

• 4:53Ryan Holiday?

  Of course.

• 4:54Speaker 02

  For this.

• 4:55Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 4:56Speaker 02

  Daughter becoming a teenager, son. "Hey, what's up, buddy?"

• 5:01Speaker 02

  "Not a tough day today." "You did." "Oh, you're already as a parent going, 'They told me they had a tough day.'"

• 5:06Ryan Holiday?

  They shared.

• 5:07Speaker 02

  "They let me see, they gave me access, and they shared that. Oh, my gosh." And then, I don't know, this, this, the... And all of a sudden, you're in a conversation where, "Forget being away. If it was 30 minutes later, you might not have got that."

• 5:20Ryan Holiday?

  Or if you were looking at this thing.

• 5:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, five minutes later. Or if you were there and doing something else. And then they ask a question. You know those beautiful and awesome questions that we get as parents? The ones that go into our ears and through our brain and tell us, "This is a great opportunity for a great answer." Because my answer is shaping the lens with which they will see the world through for the rest of their life. And we can pull off that answer in a way, it's not "ba, ba, ba," but they can go, "Ah, yeah."

• 5:52Speaker 03

  Consistency as a parent, I've found to be kind of the most rewarding things from a child's perspective. It's very hard to get into the mind of a four-year-old, of an eight-year-old. But when there's consistency at hand, like, you can really see the response from them.

• 6:05Ryan Holiday?

  You can see if your kid's routine is disrupted. You see how disrupted they are. If you normally do things a certain way, or if your life is chaos, you see how it manifests in their behavior. We're not that different. I realize that if I don't have a routine, my behavior suffers and my willpower suffers and my equanimity suffers. And so I think everyone should be on a sleep schedule. Everyone should be on a routine. It's a human thing as opposed to a kid thing.

• 6:37Speaker 04

  I think letting them fail, that's a big deal. Where you get these helicopter parents, a lot of people talk about that. Everybody knows what that means. Letting them take some chances, letting them fall down, even when you know you want to protect them a little bit. So like, for instance, I used to wake the kids up in the morning to get them ready for school. Now, I'm like, no, wake yourself up. Set your own alarm. You're at that point. And this is my seven-year-old. Like, I want them to take control of their lives, knowing that I'm there for them. I think you might have recommended it in the book, The Self-Driven Child?

• 7:03Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 7:04Speaker 04

  Which is a great book. And that's another thing, too. I think as a parent, if you're not educating yourself, getting the Daily Dad and reading about parenting, asking great parents, asking people that love their parents. That's what the question I ask. How was your childhood growing up? And they're like, oh, I loved my dad. I love my mom. Okay, why? I look at parenting just like I look at my job and also being a husband, too. Those are the three things in my life. My job, my husbanding and my parenting. I want to be really, really, really good at those and I'll educate myself. I approach it like a job. Like, I want to do research on it. I'll write in my journal about it. I want to know how I can be the best I can be at it.

• 7:37Ryan Holiday?

  If you think back to when you were a kid, what appeared to you to be the best part about being an adult? No more school. Our parents didn't have to carry around heavy books or do homework. We never saw them applying to get into this school or that one. It's sort of sad that by and large, we show our kids that education stops. That while adulthood isn't always fun, one perk is that you no longer have to go to class. That graduation is a final destination. It doesn't have to be this way. There's the story of Epictetus teaching one day when a student's arrival caused a commotion in the back of class. Who was it? It was Hadrian, the emperor. Hadrian's example clearly had an impact on his successor and adopted grandson, Marcus Aurelius. Late in his reign, a friend spotted Marcus heading out carrying a stack of books. Where are you going?

• 8:22Ryan Holiday?

  He asked. Marcus was on his way to a lecture on Stoicism. He said, for learning is a good thing, even for one who is growing old. I am now on my way to Sextus the philosopher to learn that which I do not yet know. If you want your kids to value learning, if you want them to never stop furthering the education you've been investing so much time and money and worry into, then we have to show them what an adult committed to lifelong learning actually looks like. We have to show them that we have not graduated, that we are not on summer break, and we have not arrived at the final destination of education. Wisdom, they must learn, is an endless pursuit.

• 9:01Ryan Holiday?

  I know this woman, her name is Dolores. She's 94. I call her my grandmother. And I was talking to her the other day, and she was telling me her big regret was that when her kids were little, she took pride in how clean her house was. And she said, people used to come over and go, it doesn't look like you have kids. And that meant something to her.

• 9:17Speaker 05

  Was her point that she didn't let her kids have a little room to play and get dirty?

• 9:21Ryan Holiday?

  Her point was how hollow that seems in retrospect. Today, people are going to be looking at Instagram reels. They get a false version of what people's houses look like. They don't realize that just out of frame is all the same toys that are on the floor in your house. When I look at my house, I want it to look like I have kids, because I do have kids, and they're a central part of my life and existence. There's this great expression that any fool can learn by experience. We want to learn from the experience of others. And talk to people who've been through it who are on way on the other side, and you realize a lot of the things you're valuing as a parent, things you're feeling guilty about as a parent, things you're comparing yourself to against in other parents, they will not matter to you in the end.

• 10:02Ryan Holiday?

  So the key to parenting is presence. You have to give them lots of presence. Not that kind of presence, the other kind, P-R-E-S-E-N-C-E, presence. You have to be present. When you're with your kids, be with your kids. Don't be somewhere else. Don't be on your phone. Don't be thinking about something else. Don't be trying to rush through it. When you're with your kids, be with your kids. Presence is the key to good parenting.

• 10:28Speaker 06

  I think we talk about this all the time with just general parenting. And like the longer we're in this, the more that we realize it, that every single thing is just a phase. And there's longer phases and shorter phases. But the more you realize that it's all a phase, like the easier it gets to get through the hard ones.

• 10:43Ryan Holiday?

  It gets easier to get through the hard ones, and it should make you take the ones that you're in a little bit more seriously, the good ones. You only get three years of doing this thing, or three months of doing this thing. And like, it's gonna be gone. So if you resented it, or you took it for granted, or you were excited about what the next thing was, you only get the thing that they are for a day, a week, a month. It's all transitory and ephemeral and changing. When your kids are babies, you say, "I can't wait for them to start walking." But what doesn't occur to you, because you're excited about the next thing, is that that means they stop crawling. You don't realize that the thing you're excited about, being excited about it, is inherently rushing you through the thing that's now, that you will miss.

• 11:29Ryan Holiday?

  What's the best piece of parenting advice you've ever been given?

• 11:31Speaker 07

  When I went on book tour for Steal Like an Artist, my wife was pregnant with our first kid, and I asked everyone for parenting advice. It was all different. Everyone had a different piece of advice. And I usually ask people on planes when I discover they were parents. There was one guy, he looked over at me, put his seatbelt on, and he said, "Strap in." And that honestly has been the best advice. It's a good metaphor, because for me, the problem with a lot of parents, and particularly fathers, if you start out with all these visions of what you think your child is going to be, like, "I'm gonna teach him how to throw a baseball, and I teach him to ride a bike, and I teach him all this stuff, all this wisdom you're going to impart to them," you're gonna set yourself up for tragedy. Think less about imparting wisdom or like, teaching directly, and more that,

• 12:16Speaker 07

  "I'm going to create a healthy, learning environment for them to become the human that they need to be." It's almost like, don't think about being a classroom teacher, think more of like, being a librarian.

• 12:30Ryan Holiday?

  Some parenting books I love. There's The Self-Driven Child, There's A Better Man, The Good News About Bad Behavior, How to Raise Kids Who Aren't Assholes, The Gift of Failure, Reading for Our Lives, Expecting Better. They're all really good, but I found that reading them once wasn't nearly sufficient. What I needed as a parent was a thing that I'd check in with and read every day, seeing parenting as an ongoing process. And that's actually the idea in the new book. If you've read The Daily Stoic, this is basically the sequel, The Daily Dad 366 Meditations on Parenting, Love, and Raising Great Kids. You can preorder it now at dailystoic.com. And it is a collection of the wisdom of these books, plus the books in the philosophy section,

• 13:13Ryan Holiday?

  and all the books I've ever read, all the advice that I've ever gotten, and all the things I've learned as a parent. I hope you like it. Check it out.

• 13:22Ryan 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 3/4 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.