Ryan Holiday ON: The Importance of Being Disciplined With Our Ambition & How to Get Comfortable with Change

Today, I sit down with Ryan Holiday to talk about living a life of discipline. Ryan and I share our thoughts and opinions on the different forms of disciplines and how they are formed in different cultures, the value of your time and with whom are you spending most of it, and how to be more kind to yourself and make decisions that are more centered on your well-being. Ryan Holiday is an author, marketer, and entrepreneur. He is known for his writings on Stoicism and has written several books on the subject, including "The Obstacle is the Way," "Ego is the Enemy," and "The Daily Stoic." He has also worked as a marketing strategist for companies such as American Apparel and has written several other books on topics such as growth hacking and media manipulation. Ryan hosts the popular podcast, The Daily Stoic. You can order my new book 8 RULES OF LOVE at 8rulesoflove.com or at a retail store near you. You can also get the chance to see me live on my first ever world tour. This is a 90 minute interactive show where I will take you on a journey of finding, keeping and even letting go of love. Head to jayshettytour.com and find out if I'll be in a city near you. Thank you so much for all your support - I hope to see you soon. What We Discuss: 00:00 Intro 04:25 What is the real meaning of discipline in different cultures? 06:40 How do you overpower your own mind and learn to argue with yourself? 11:05 Discipline has to be balanced with sustainability, rest, and so much more. 16:22 If you look at your life calendar, whom are you spending most of your time with? 22:05 All the things we want in life are accidental byproducts of getting big things right. 23:38 What is the hardest discipline you’ve ever practiced? 29:21 Optimizing your personal life will make other things much easier to manage. 36:25 It’s never too easy to sit down with your thoughts but you can learn to get comfortable with it. 40:22 Are you getting better at becoming a better friend to yourself? 44:14 We can’t control what happens, but we can control how we respond to it. 48:25 How important is it for us to go through something difficult and grow the muscle to overcome it? 53:52 Ryan explains the importance of making choices that derive positive benefits in the most difficult situations. 01:00:40 You are bound to get disappointed by attaching to an outcome that is not yours. 01:02:41 Different people have different ways of consuming information and we should respect that. 01:09:44 When you create a lot of valuable things in life, the returns may double. 01:12:05 Why should you allow yourself to become different things? 01:17:16 Don’t be a copy of your former self, continue to take a leap whenever you can. Episode Resources Ryan Holiday | Website Ryan Holiday | Twitter Ryan Holiday | Instagram Ryan Holiday | Facebook Ryan Holiday | TikTok Ryan Holiday | Books The Daily Stoic Podcast Want to be a Jay Shetty Certified Life Coach? Get the Digital Guide and Workbook from Jay Shetty https://jayshettypurpose.com/fb-getting-started-as-a-life-coach-podcast/ See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Jay Shetty?

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• 2:19Ryan Holiday?

  If success is this lagging indicator of commitment now, how can you be sure that you are paying your dues?

• 2:27Speaker 02

  The bestselling author and host.

• 2:28Ryan Holiday?

  The number one health and wellness podcast.

• 2:30Speaker 02

  On Purpose with Jay Shetty.

• 2:34Jay Shetty?

  Hey, everyone. Welcome back to On Purpose, the number one health podcast in the world. Thanks to each and every one of you that come back every week to become happier, healthier.

• 2:44Jay Shetty?

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• 3:27Jay Shetty?

  That's indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. This episode is brought to you by Vinted. Value can be found anywhere, even in the clothes sitting untouched in our closets. That's where Vinted comes in. Vinted is a secondhand marketplace app where you can sell clothes you no longer want and get more value out of them, whether you're running out of space, moving, or simply updating your wardrobe. Listing items is a quick and simple process, and once something sells, Vinted creates a prepaid shipping label for you. And the best part? There are no seller fees, so you keep what you earn. It's a simple way to clear out your closet,

• 4:09Jay Shetty?

  be less wasteful, and maybe make some extra money along the way. Give your clothes a second life with Vinted. Download the Vinted app for free to start selling with no seller fees. So you keep every dollar you earn. This episode is brought to you by Mazda. The best habits are the ones we hardly notice. The ones that quietly shape the way we move through life, giving us the confidence to focus on what really matters. That's Mazda's approach to safety. Every Mazda is designed with proactive safety features that help keep you more aware, more connected and more engaged with your drive. So you can stay present behind the wheel. That commitment has earned Mazda recognition as Consumer Reports' safest new car brand.

• 4:50Jay Shetty?

  And as of July 2026, Mazda has won more 2026 IIHS Top Safety Pick Plus awards than any other car brand. Visit www.iihs.org to learn more. A lot can happen when an accident doesn't. Mazda, more of what matters to you. Visit MazdaUSA.com to learn more. Consumer Reports does not endorse products or services. And more healed. Today, I'm talking to a guest who I've had the pleasure of interviewing. I think, I think this is the fourth or fifth time that I'm getting to sit down with them. Probably the person I've interviewed the most in my entire interviewing career. And it's because he keeps putting out incredible work and incredible books that I hope you're going to read.

• 5:33Jay Shetty?

  I'm talking about Ryan Holiday, who's one of the world's best-selling living philosophers. Ryan's books, like his new one, Discipline is Destiny, which is available right now. Number one New York Times Bestsellers, multiple. Some of my favorite ones, The Obstacle is the Way, Ego is the Enemy, The Daily Stoic. And they've been translated into over 40 languages and sold multi-millions of copies. I'm so excited to talk to Ryan today about this new book, The Power of Self-Control. I know it's been out for a bit, but this is a topic I'm fascinated by. If you don't already have this book, go and grab it. If you have one, go and grab one for a friend. Ryan, thank you for being back on the show.

• 6:12Ryan Holiday?

  As always.

• 6:12Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, it's always great, man. It's great. I remember when I first met you, it was such an inspiration for me because seeing you uncover Stoicism for the modern world definitely was.

• 6:26Jay Shetty?

  Parallel to how I felt about what I wanted to do for Vedic knowledge and Vedic wisdom. And it's been exceptional to watch and and I love that. I hope there's more. I don't know. This is the end of the series, right?

• 6:36Ryan Holiday?

  No, this is two in a four book.

• 6:38Jay Shetty?

  Okay, good, good, good. Okay, okay. Yeah, you you keep finding a way of doing that. I need to figure that out. But no, it's it's great. We're talking about this and I love that you chose what I think today is considered as such an unsexy topic. And I don't know if you see it that way.

• 6:54Ryan Holiday?

  No.

• 6:54Jay Shetty?

  Of discipline, I mean.

• 6:55Ryan Holiday?

  I do. I mean, especially because the ancients, the word they used for discipline was temperance, which sounds even like discipline, we at least know like that there's like a kind of a coolness to it. But temperance feels like the opposite of fun, right? It feels like you're telling me what I can't do, all the things I have to avoid, or all the things I have to stop short on.

• 7:18Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 7:19Ryan Holiday?

  And people don't like that, even though when you actually think about the people who do whatever they want all the time.

• 7:26Jay Shetty?

  Yes.

• 7:27Ryan Holiday?

  Actually, some of the most unhappy, miserable people in the entire world.

• 7:32Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, and it's funny you say that now because I started thinking back to to Vedic knowledge and the word is tapa, T A P A, and and it means austerity, or that's the closest translation. And the idea that discipline is often compared to austerity.

• 7:46Ryan Holiday?

  Right, right. And austerity, the purpose of it is not deprivation. The purpose of austerity is to be not corrupted, to be sustainable, right? To to avoid what is superfluous or unnecessary. And and it's not even about think, it's not even about avoiding pleasure altogether. Like, in the ancient world, the big, in the Western ancient world, the big dispute is between the Epicureans and the Stoicism and the Stoics. And you'd think Epicureans are the lovers of pleasures and the Stoics are the haters of pleasure. But even the Epicureans believed that any pleasure taken too far becomes a source of pain or suffering.

• 8:28Ryan Holiday?

  So it's what we're really talking about, then it comes down to this idea of temperance or balance. What is the right amount? Some things, the right amount is zero. But for most things, the right amount is some sort of moderate or midpoint. And it you have to have wisdom and self-control to not only figure out what that is, but then to stop at that line.

• 8:48Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, yeah. And that's the hard part because I feel like Society has gone in the direction of becoming addicted to pleasure.

• 8:55Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 8:55Jay Shetty?

  Or pleasure-seeking. Where, from the Stoics' perspective, why did we even ever go down that road? Like, why did we leave wisdom and self-control? Or did we never have it at all? And we've always been trying to balance it?

• 9:08Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I mean, I guess that's the big question is like, why do we take something that we like too far?

• 9:14Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 9:14Ryan Holiday?

  Right? So the Epicureans would say like, look, drinking is great. But if you have a hangover the next day, was it actually so great? And so, you know, if you, if you push the pleasure too far, it becomes not pleasurable. But in the moment, that feels very far away. Right? Like, in the moment, you want the thing now. Obviously, sex is this thing for people. It's like, the thing you're attracted to in this moment, you're not thinking about the shame, or the regret, or the consequences, or the pain, or the loss, or the grief. You're not thinking of all those things. You're just thinking of right now. So I think a big part of this, this where the wisdom comes in, the ability to step back and go, what am I going to think about this after I get it? What am I going to think about this later?

• 9:57Ryan Holiday?

  And realizing that your mind is very good at tricking you. Just as your mind often tells you like, stop, you're too tired, you can't go any further. You actually have a lot less left in the tank. Your mind also tells you, you need this thing, you won't regret it. It's a, you know, whatever.

• 10:13Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 10:14Ryan Holiday?

  And it's, it's really good at putting those blinders on. And so part of, I think, any meditative practice, any philosophical practice, any journaling practice, is, is being able to argue with yourself a little bit, to step back and have that conversation about, well, is what I think about this true? Is the story I'm telling myself about this true? I think nowhere is this more important than for like ambitious people who have told themselves, I will be happy when I accomplish X. Right? Like, of all the things we need to be most disciplined about, ambition is one of them. Because it tells you this lie that, after I become a New York Times seller, after I make a million dollars, after I get a gold medal, then I'll be good, my parents will be proud of me,

• 10:58Ryan Holiday?

  I'll be happy, then I can relax. And you have to have the perspective, the wisdom to go, was that ever been true ever in my life before? Has that ever been true in history?

• 11:08Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 11:08Ryan Holiday?

  And then go, oh, okay, no, I can't tell myself that lie. That doesn't mean you don't work really hard to do stuff. But you're not doing it under the false pretenses that it's going to...

• 11:20Ryan Holiday?

  Be conditional to your happiness.

• 11:21Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, but there's a part of us that, and I, and I love what you're saying, but there's a part of us that always believes that we are the exception. That we will know how to spend money better. That we'll know how to have love in our life better. Like, we won't be the one who fumbles off the edge of a cliff. Like, we're smarter than all our friends, even if we don't say that. We're wiser than the people who came before us. And that's, and that's ego is the enemy. But of course, like, that, that idea, I think, is what misleads us so much.

• 11:48Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, yeah, it's, it's like, okay, you're on the medal stand, you've just won the gold medal, and you're not feeling happy for yourself. You're thinking, well, I could have done it faster. You're thinking, oh, I gotta do it again, right? Even in that moment, you're not able to think, I'm doing it to myself right now, what I will be doing to myself in the future. And that's this sort of insidious thing. And you can understand why, from an evolutionary perspective, it drives the species forward. You can also see the immense personal cost that it inflicts on us because it never allows us to be present or content or happy with what we have in that moment. And so I think, again, people think discipline is the, I always push myself to do better, do more.

• 12:33Ryan Holiday?

  Discipline can also be curbing that very impulse, right? Like, ordinary people, when we're talking about discipline, what we're talking about is getting off your butt, working out, resisting eating candy and needing nutritious food instead. It's, you know, managing your screen time. But I think for a lot of more disciplined people, or for people who have tasted the rewards of discipline, you have to learn how to be disciplined about discipline, which is maybe the highest level of, of the whole thing.

• 13:08Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. Now we're, I guess now we've started talking about discipline as a tool to achieve daily or weekly, monthly, yearly tasks. But you're actually saying that We need to go back a bit, like, how would you unpack that for how you're defining discipline there?

• 13:24Ryan Holiday?

  Well, it's like, what's the number one cause of injury for athletes? It's overtraining, right? So like, yeah, you're ordinary person, it's like, you're not training enough, you're not working hard enough.

• 13:35Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 13:35Ryan Holiday?

  But then at a more elite level, at a more accomplished level, actually, the trouble is, hey, the race isn't for six weeks. Like, do you want to peak now? Or do you want to peak at the right moment, right? Or this is just a practice session, you don't have to go all out. Or, you know, it's a long season, are you prepared for that? And so, you know, discipline has to be balanced with sustainability, with rest, relaxation, recuperation, recovery, all these other things. And that requires kind of a spiritual discipline on not just, hey, I can run an hour without getting tired, but like, can I stop myself from doing that? That's not what I should be doing in this moment.

• 14:19Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, and what I like about that is that I feel there's different phases and stages, like, in the first two years of my career, where we would have met in New York, and we went on a walk once as well, I think, and we were walking around the city, and I remember talking about a few of these themes, but it was, at that time in my life, I was working probably eighteen hour days.

• 14:36Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 14:37Jay Shetty?

  Because I had to, in order to kind of break through that first level.

• 14:41Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 14:41Jay Shetty?

  I was still disciplined in the sense that I would make time to eat to some degree, and meditate, and I would make some time to do a few things of rest, but generally, I was working seven days a week, eighteen hours a day. And I'm very grateful I did that, I don't look back and go, oh, I wasted two years, it was brilliant. But then, in the last couple of years, I've taken my evenings back. And so, I don't work after six PM, it's just a rule, I don't want to work, I don't want to be on the phone. And I was talking to a friend, and it's exactly what you said, he was saying to me, he was just like, well, don't you get less done? And I was like, no, I get more done.

• 15:11Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 15:11Jay Shetty?

  Because I know how much I have to get done, I'm far more attentive and focused, and then I'm not working at nine PM, when I can rest and recuperate, and now, the next day, I'm better for it. And so, I hear that idea, that that is also a discipline.

• 15:25Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 15:25Jay Shetty?

  Although it could be seen as you're being lazy in the evening.

• 15:28Ryan Holiday?

  And I think it's the question of, well, is it easy for you to do that? Yes or no, right? It's hard. It's actually harder for you, I imagine, to say, I'm stopping at six than it is to say, I'm going to work all night till I fall asleep at my desk. Right? Like.

• 15:42Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, I could do that. Yeah. If my wife's not around, I could work every weekend and evening.

• 15:45Ryan Holiday?

  And also, it's realizing that you have multiple things that you're trying to do simultaneously. So, yeah, sure, working, continuing to work 18-hour days may help you continue to advance in your career. But if one of the also, the other things you're trying to work on is to stay married, or to better yet, have a happy marriage, or you have children, or you have your health, or whatever, like you, you were telling me before we recorded that you like, you got in at 3 a.m. last night. Let's say you're a person who always wakes up very early. Like, I'm a person who wakes up early.

• 16:14Jay Shetty?

  Yes.

• 16:14Ryan Holiday?

  But then, I also have to understand that sleep is a discipline. And so, if some changes outside my control mean that I didn't go to bed till a certain time, the fact that I wake up at five, that's a bad idea. And it actually requires, you wouldn't think that sleep discipline would be a thing, but in the military, they talk about that, sleep discipline. You gotta get your hours because you make bad decisions when you're not rested. And other people bear the consequences of those decisions. And so, deciding, hey, I'm going to skip this thing that feels comfortable to me to do, that feels natural for me to do, that I feel like I'm letting some part of myself down by not doing, I actually have to be the bigger, more self-controlled person and say, in this moment, I'm not going to do that. Right?

• 16:59Ryan Holiday?

  And, and I think at the end of the day, self-discipline is the ability to have an emotion, an instinct of feeling, to do a thing, and then to catch yourself and go, is that actually the right thing to do? Yes or no? And sometimes it is. Sometimes it's, hey, it's cold outside, and it's 5 a.m., and it's still dark, and I don't want to get up. But I have to get up because I've made these commitments, I'm behind, blah, blah, blah. Then other times, it is to stay in bed. Right? Just like, you know, sometimes you feel.

• 17:32Ryan Holiday?

  Surge of temper coming on and you have to go, no, that's not a good like it's always the ability to step back, put the emotion, the instinct, the opinion to the test. And I think you learn this in meditation. I think you learn this for Stoicism in the journaling of going like, here's the thing, and I can choose it or not. I can choose to identify it or not. It is not me. The Stoics have this word ascent, right? Not like ascent up a mountain, but A S S E N T. Do you ascent to the feeling or not? Do you agree to it, rubber stamp it, approve it, go along with it or not?

• 18:06Jay Shetty?

  Do you subscribe?

• 18:07Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, that's what discipline is about. What do you ascent to and what do you not ascent to?

• 18:12Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, I wonder, I want to go out of a tangent. I want to come back to that because I actually really like that point. But a few words ago, there was something that you sparked for me. Sometimes I feel like with work, it's doable. Sometimes with even our partner, with friends, it's possible to say no, to be disciplined. I find like, and I want to ask you this from your perspective, what about a sense of dad guilt? Like, we talk a lot about mom guilt. And, you know, if I was speaking to mom, I'd ask about mom guilt in this scenario. But from a dad guilt point of view, like you're a dad, I, you know, and I see you wanting to be a good dad, and you're very involved with your kids. But at the same time, you're a writer, and you're in a bookstore, and you're doing activist work. Like, there's so many things that you do. Do you ever feel like that's like the

• 18:54Jay Shetty?

  hardest place where discipline? Because it's like, even if a dad comes home at 3am, and the kid wants him at 4am, like, does the dad stay up? Like, what does that do? How does it work?

• 19:04Ryan Holiday?

  Well, it's so insidious. What we do is we go like, I'm doing this for my family, right? And it's like, are you? Or are you doing it for you? Are you doing it for the money? How can you be doing it for your family if you don't see those people as a result of what you're doing? Someone told me many years ago, they said, love is spelled T I M E. And I think about that all the time. I mean, obviously, I always have things that take me away, more than I would like them to be. And I suppose I could do nothing, but that would also leave me unfulfilled. That would not be me setting the example I want to set for my kids. But at the end of the day, realizing that everything I say yes to also means saying no to someone

• 19:44Ryan Holiday?

  or something else. And in some ways, I try to use that dad guilt a little constructively. I try to go, okay, this person's asking me to do this thing, or this person's offering me money to do this thing, or this is some cool opportunity. They want me to go heli skiing in British Columbia or something. And I go, I don't want to say no to this cool opportunity. I don't want to miss this memory. I don't want to hurt this person's feelings. And then I go, but I am hurting a person's feelings. I am saying no to a memory, like I am taking something away from someone. And that person is a five-year-old, and they're going to feel it far more deeply. Someone else will take my spot on that plane to British Columbia.

• 20:25Ryan Holiday?

  No one will spend that time with my kids. And so I try to use that guilt constructively in the sense that I'm reminding myself always that saying yes to one thing means saying no to something else. And that conversely, saying no means saying yes, right? And then I always, as much as I can, I want to be saying yes to the things that actually matter to me. And I want to be putting my money where my mouth is. It's like, if someone looked at your calendar, you say, you put your family first, you say family is important, blah, blah, blah. But then if I looked at your calendar, what would it show, right? If there was a custody hearing, or, you know, if you were being investigated, if you were being audited,

• 21:08Ryan Holiday?

  what would the receipts show? Do you actually value them? Do you put them first? And like, it should be pretty, pretty obvious whether that's true or not.

• 21:19Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, no, I have an exercise in Think Like a Monk where I ask people to do their time audit for the week. And it's literally that where it's like, and it's against your values, because someone's values may be different. But the idea that you're Bank statement and your schedule show your values more than what you say.

• 21:37Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 21:37Jay Shetty?

  Right? The words that come out of our mouth are not actually our values. There are aspirations.

• 21:42Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 21:42Jay Shetty?

  Those are the values you wish you had. But the values that actually go, what do you spend your money on? And what do you spend your time on? Like, that's far more what your real values are.

• 21:51Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I think about that. I saw this interview with Jimmy Carter many years ago. And he has this sort of crisis of faith. And he goes like, if I was put on trial for being a Christian, would I be convicted? Right? So it's not what you say, not what you think, not what you wish, but like, what do the actions show? And I think about that with Marcus Aurelius, who I write a lot about, the Stoic emperor. Like, he never identifies explicitly as a Stoic. And one of his translators says, you know, he never even says the word Stoicism like in his writings. But he's considered this philosopher emperor. And he probably still would have been even if his writings had never survived. Because the deeds are there.

• 22:33Ryan Holiday?

  There's a Latin expression, acta non verba, like deeds, not words. And so you have to always think not what do I write about? What do I think about? What do I want to be true? But what do the actions show? And no one is perfect. And I think anyone auditing themselves is going to be, there's going to be some disappointments. But you want like the big statements of priority to be there. And to go back to the idea of guilt. When you're looking at it, you shouldn't like whip yourself and feel, but you should be like, okay, this is not the painting the picture that I want to paint. And that you're lucky enough in that moment to catch it now. Not when you're 80, you know, not on your deathbed. You're, you've caught it now. And so what changes are you going to make?

• 23:17Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 23:18Ryan Holiday?

  To get closer between the ideal and the reality.

• 23:22Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

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• 23:52Jay Shetty?

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• 24:35Jay Shetty?

  But I think we're living at a time where we're stuck in the feeling generation. So we do things because we want to feel a certain way, but then when we feel things, we don't know what to do with it. So I'll give an example of what I mean by that. If we feel guilt, most of us don't know how to shift from that feeling into thinking and doing something different in order to not feel that guilt again. Yes. And if we want to feel happy, we just try and feel happy, not realizing that you have to change your thoughts and what you do in order to feel happiness or whatever it may be. What I'm trying to get at there is like, that to me sounds like a discipline too, like, but we've gone so into feeling because I think for so long, thinking and doing were the only things talked about, and we didn't feel enough.

• 25:20Ryan Holiday?

  I think realizing that almost all the things you want in life are accidental byproducts of habits, processes, systems, routines, right? So Viktor Frankl famously said that happiness can't be pursued, it must ensue. It's the result of getting those big things right. And then you just feel this kind of feeling of happiness as a byproduct. You don't, as you said, you don't go, today I must feel happy, right? It's the result of having meaning and purpose and taking the right actions. And so people sometimes look at the books that I've written and they're like, what? Like, how did you publish so many books? And it's like, publishing is not what I think about. I think about writing. I wake up every day and write.

• 26:02Ryan Holiday?

  And the accidental byproduct of that is the publishing, right? And so good habits, good routines, like if you want a happier home life, it's like, are you spending more time there? You know, how are you setting up systems or processes that the result is that outcome? Right? You control what you put in, the outcome happens or it doesn't happen. And I think so often we just, you're right, we just want the feeling. So we try to cheat it or steal it, or we feel guilty that we don't have it. When really you could start small right now and, and just get yourself closer to it.

• 26:38Jay Shetty?

  What do you think is the best discipline you've built like over time? Like, is it writing? Obviously, that would be the obvious one, but is there another one that you think underpins that success? Like, is there a discipline you've worked on the longest?

• 26:50Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I think writing is such a sedentary sort of intellectual cerebral thing that I try to balance it out with like a physical practice. So I try to do something hard every single day, running, swimming, biking. I do a walk once a day, like I do something hard every day. And part of what that is, is transferable back to the practice, right? Cause again, it comes down to the, you don't want to do it. It's hard, it's not going the way you want it, but you've cultivated the muscle of being able to push through that, like. There's lots of claims about the health benefits of cold plunges. And they may or may not exist. That's not why I do it, right? The muscle for me is, is the cranking of the knob of the, looking at the cold plunge at my house and going,

• 27:35Ryan Holiday?

  it is going to be unpleasant to get in there. But I, I have the ability to force myself to do that. That's the muscle that you want to cultivate.

• 27:44Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 27:46Ryan Holiday?

  And I, I think, you know, people want to be the person on the other side of that. But they don't realize that the way you do it is by just starting it, just starting it.

• 27:55Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, it's so true. I, I can relate to so much of that in my own life. And when, when you're saying that it's, I feel like today, most of what I do, I'd say I spend a lot, I'd say I spend like 75% of my life outside of my comfort zone. I am constantly doing things that demand more from me than I believe I'm skilled and able to accomplish.

• 28:16Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 28:16Jay Shetty?

  And in a healthy way, in a, in a good sense, because I feel challenged. And I feel that challenge forces me to grow my skills, which then meet a new challenge and then that keeps growing. But then I find myself in my personal life, often resorting to comfort. Because I need to kind of cushion the amount of like

• 28:33Ryan Holiday?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 28:34Jay Shetty?

  pressure and stress. And so it's like this, for me, I'm at that, that place in my life where I'm like, okay, I'm pushing so much. I need my personal life to be super like, you know, cushioned to some degree.

• 28:43Ryan Holiday?

  It, it is interesting, right? We will take, and Seneca points this out in one of his letters, like, we'll push ourselves. We'll take risks to, to succeed financially, to succeed in business, to succeed in our careers, to buttress our reputations. But then we don't want to do it in the other places where most of us would admit it actually matters, right? My favorite passages in Meditations, Marcus Verroes is like, a better wrestler, but not a better forgiver of faults, a better friend in tight places. He, he's pointing out how we'll go like, yeah, I'm trying to like, You'll talk to someone that have this well laid out plan for how they're trying to increase their back squat

• 29:23Ryan Holiday?

  or their mile time, or how they're trying to, they've, they've, they've got these aggressive goals for their stock price, or, or, you know, how many copies they want to sell of this thing, or they have, we have really clear financial and professional goals. And then in our personal life, we just wing it.

• 29:42Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, I didn't mean that, but I know what you mean. Yeah, I love that point.

• 29:46Ryan Holiday?

  And I think the point is, like, you have to be challenging yourself in your personal life, also getting vulnerable, you know, getting outside your comfort zone, having the conversations that you, like, I think it's because our professional stuff is so much more quantifiable. And then there's, other people are looking at it, whereas the other stuff is private. And so we, we just, we hold ourselves to different standards. And you think about what that costs us in terms of a place you get to in your marriage in 10 years that had you thought more consciously about, or put one tenth of the focus on, maybe you could have got there in one year and then had nine years of enjoying it.

• 30:26Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, no, that I fully agree with. And maybe I didn't clarify, when I said comfort, I mean more, apart from like my sleep schedule, I have so many routines that are already set up, that I try and make my personal life more comfortable, as in my individual life of my own self-care, because I find I'm pushing myself in so many areas. But I love where you took it to, because I think that's the critical one, right? It's like, what you're kind of leaning towards is, most people will become people they don't want to be in order to achieve something. And that external pursuit often does that. By the end of building a billion dollar company, or whatever it may be, you end up going, well, I don't even like the person I

• 31:08Jay Shetty?

  am anymore, or I've lost the person who I thought I was. Whereas the pursuit of doing it inwardly with your family, with your friendships, the openness that's required, chances are you'll become the person you want to be. Like, chances are you'll become someone that you're proud of being. And I, I think that's such, I want to dive into that, that is such a powerful way of looking at it. And you're saying it's because of the quantifiability, which, which I think there's truth in. I also think it's the

• 31:36Jay Shetty?

  It's harder.

• 31:37Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 31:37Jay Shetty?

  It's harder because like you're saying, there's no external reward. There's no number that proves you did it. And it's fluctuating way more because people's emotions, like anyone in your family and friends, you can't control it. You could, you can control or master an algorithm or the stock market to some degree. But with a person, you can't do any of that because you can't set something up and then be like, you're gonna stay this way.

• 32:03Ryan Holiday?

  Well, it's like you get so used to the control and the power that you have from the mastery of your professional domain, right? Like when I sit down to write, I'm in control. I'm comfortable. This is a place that I have carved out for myself. When I'm arguing with my wife or I am dealing with a three-year-old who's having a meltdown, I'm not in control and I'm humbled by it and I'm struggling with it. And I don't feel like I've got it. Cause I have so much less, I've literally never done that before. And I'll, and I'll have such a short window where I'll ever have to do it, right? It's not, it's not like, oh, I've been in this place on a book 12 times, right?

• 32:47Ryan Holiday?

  Like I've only had one five-year-old.

• 32:49Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 32:50Ryan Holiday?

  And so, you know, it's just so much more challenging. It's just a much more multi-dimensional, you know, N of one, like difficult thing. And so it, it's gonna demand more of you. And I think, I think it's like, look, optimizing your professional life or maximizing your professional life, very unlikely to improve your personal life. But if you have optimized and maximized and improved your personal life, gotten your house in order, you're gonna be better at what you do. Or you're gonna care less in some degrees about things that used to bother you so much. And so which one are you gonna focus on, right?

• 33:30Ryan Holiday?

  Cause you can get, you can be a titan in your industry and then be a total amateur at home, right? And I think go where it's easy.

• 33:39Jay Shetty?

  Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. And that's, and that's the thing. I think discipline often gets applied to the titan in the industry, not the amateur at home.

• 33:47Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 33:47Jay Shetty?

  And. That's how we think about discipline. We think about discipline as what can I achieve through this?

• 33:52Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 33:53Jay Shetty?

  In, in an external sense.

• 33:55Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 33:55Jay Shetty?

  At least today, that's the language.

• 33:57Ryan Holiday?

  And you can get away with so much more. If you're really talented, you know, you can be a jerk, right? You can demand a lot of people because you're paying these people, right? Like, I'm not saying you should. I'm just saying that there's accommodations that are made for you. And, and sort of insidiously, the more successful you are, the more needed you are, the more accommodations you are. But there's none of that in the other area. And so you have to, there's some humility required, right? You, you're meeting equals on an equal playing field. And the discipline to say, like, yeah, I'm, I'm gonna wrestle with that. I'm gonna try to get better. I'm, I'm not gonna allow myself to, to do these following bad habits. That, that takes a, a certain amount of self-control and focus and, and discipline.

• 34:42Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, I guess, I guess one of the biggest challenges with discipline is that we're trying to destroy a habit that we hate. Like, there's this idea that it just has to break and go, right? If you have a habit that you don't like about yourself, whatever that may be, it's like you're just, or at least I've found when I'm coaching clients and working with people is that they have this, like, bitter feeling towards this thing that they have.

• 35:07Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 35:07Jay Shetty?

  And they want it to go at all costs. But that almost makes you hold on to it harder. Like, that makes you grip onto it.

• 35:13Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 35:14Jay Shetty?

  And wrestle with it more. And I remember when, when, when I lived in India, a lot of the time, the analogy that was given or the metaphor that was given to, to meditate on, because we'd see all the time was like snake skin. And the idea was that when snakes shed their skin, they just slither out. They don't, it doesn't like, they don't, one day just go, they don't even have.

• 35:33Ryan Holiday?

  It's not like the Hulk.

• 35:33Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, they're not like the Hulk where it's like, like, snakes just slither out and then their skin gets left behind and then it, you know, they'll grow more. And so the idea that it's, it's such a natural, organic process of if you just slither, if you just move forward, you naturally shed. Yeah, I want to get to.

• 35:50Ryan Holiday?

  That's the beauty of process, right? You don't sit down and go, I have to do this right now. What do I have to do today? What are the small steps? And, and you get great by minor improvements compounded on top of each other, day in and day out, showing up day in and day out. And. That's the same, hey, we were fighting like crazy six months ago and now things are awesome. Why is that? They made a change and you made a change and you made a response and it changed in response to their change. And it compounded and now you're here. That work can fall away at any moment, you have to rebuild it. But I think, you know, the Buddhists talk about willful will. Like, almost the more intentional you are about it, that's the irony too, is we're talking about how,

• 36:33Ryan Holiday?

  you know, being intentional in your professional life often pays off. Being intentional, having clear expectations, wants, desires in your personal life is harder because it depends on other people. People who are not like you, people who did not sign up for that. And I think one of the things you learn having kids and then also being married is that like, a sense in that same sense of like acquiescing to things, adjusting to things. Like, I'm a routine person. Kids don't care about your routine, they fall asleep when they fell asleep.

• 37:06Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 37:07Ryan Holiday?

  And you have to, you have to adjust. Like, you're no longer the center of the universe.

• 37:12Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 37:13Ryan Holiday?

  And that is such an important thing that you have to figure out and adjust and accommodate towards. You're the master of the universe here, but that you leave that behind when you walk through the front door.

• 37:23Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, absolutely. I was talking to Amar from Yes Theory. I don't know if you know the guys at Yes Theory, yeah, they're awesome. And we've had them on the show before, but I was talking to Amar the other day and they just released their project, Iceman, I think their documentary, if first time, like their feature documentary. But he was talking about this and he was saying that when they built Yes Theory, the goal was like, how can we say yes to things we would usually say no to, right? Like, that was the obvious point. And now he's learned that it's equally important to say no. But the part that really hit me when he was explaining it, and I think we both vibed with the idea. He was saying that, and it's something you said earlier, he said, I have to start saying yes to the things I find hardest.

• 38:05Jay Shetty?

  And so he was saying that today, no matter how many marathons he's done, no matter how many crazy expeditions they've gone on, no matter how many countries they survive with no money. He said the hardest thing for him to do is sit with his thoughts for 15 minutes.

• 38:18Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 38:18Jay Shetty?

  Like he was like, that's the hardest thing. He goes, I don't look forward to doing that. He said, if someone told me to train for something, he goes, I look forward to that. But if someone told me to sit down with my thoughts for 15 minutes, he goes, I don't look forward to it. So that's what I'm doing. And he was saying that's why he's trying to build that. And he was like, that's his new definition of seeking discomfort. Because he said, when people come up to him and say, do you want to build like a million dollar company, a billion dollar? He's like, I can get excited about that. But he goes, I don't get excited about it. Is that a good sense of people finding what discipline is for them? Or how do you see that?

• 38:48Ryan Holiday?

  I mean, I think restraint is the hardest thing, right? Blaise Pascal in the 1500s said, all of humanity's problems stem from our inability to sit quietly in a room alone. It was hard 500 years ago. It's harder now when you have a cell phone in your pocket, when you could get on a flight and travel anywhere you want in the world. And there's unlimited distractions, opportunities, things to get excited about. Like, it's hard to hold the mind still, to be physically still, or maybe not to be physically still, but have the mind still while the body is in motion. This requires like so much discipline, so much self-control, so much self-awareness, right? Even to understand that it's hard for you,

• 39:33Ryan Holiday?

  that it's something that you are naturally averse to or avoid, is a step in that journey to getting better at it. Because a lot of people are just doing, doing, doing, and they're not even aware they're running away from something. They're not even aware that it makes them uncomfortable to be still. So I think we have to understand it's this journey. And hopefully, as you go, you get more and more comfortable. Because at the end of the day, that's the one constant in life. Wherever you go, there you are, there you are, as the expression goes. Like, you're there. And if you can't get comfortable with that, can't get in touch with that, you can't see what's there, then you're going to wake up one day and realize, I did all of this stuff to get away from something

• 40:16Ryan Holiday?

  that's been inside me the whole time. And that's very, very sad.

• 40:22Jay Shetty?

  That is, that's, yeah, that's.

• 40:25Jay Shetty?

  Well, that's the inconvenient truth of it, right? Like, that's the hard part, that you chased pleasure for so long that you completely missed what was already there. But I think, is it that we don't? What is your take from studying it? Like, is it that we don't know the benefits enough? Is it that we don't like processes enough? Is it that we're just addicted and there isn't? Because I look at, and I do think, looking at very daily habit changes is the easiest way to build the muscle to go, I can do this. So I always give the example of, when I met my wife, I was addicted to sugar. Like, I genuinely was, and I didn't even know it. I had a Sprite and a chocolate bar every day without thinking about it. It's how I got through college, it was life.

• 41:09Jay Shetty?

  When I was a monk, I didn't have either of those things. But that was more of a suppression, and there was lots of other interesting things to do. Or I didn't need that kind of energy. When I came back.

• 41:21Ryan Holiday?

  You're like the convict who's sober in prison. Just because you don't have access to it.

• 41:24Jay Shetty?

  Exactly, I didn't have access to it. And I didn't, I definitely built a discipline where I didn't feel like I needed it. But then when I came back to the real world, all I wanted was chocolate and sugar. And so when I met my wife, it's like, you know, we've been married for six years now, together for 10. And she like, at first, she would just educate me. And like, she would just tell me, because she's a dietitian and nutritionist, this is her job. She's laying out all the dangers of sugar. Then she's like, taking it out of the like, home. Like, it's not around anymore, it's not accessible. And then almost like, it's taken six years. And I would say now I'm at a place where the habit has really transformed. That's like a six-year journey.

• 42:00Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 42:00Jay Shetty?

  And obviously, it probably happened like halfway through, I'd say. Like, probably it happened three years ago where I really started cutting out sugar. But it needed a coach. My wife was the coach. It needed a obedient or submissive student. I trust my wife on this area. It wasn't like, I didn't have an ego about it. She knows more than me about the body. And then on top of that. It needed a focus in the sense that in my health, we kind of did it one at a time without even trying. Whereas like we took our sugar first, we started working out next. Like she was, she kind of did that even unconsciously. It just took so much and I go, and I know obviously with the Stoics, we talk about mentoring and coaching and there's always this cross learning. But I feel like now we're all trying to do it on our own.

• 42:43Ryan Holiday?

  We are, and we're also expecting that it just happens. That it's this like epiphany. If knowing what to do was enough, everyone would be in great shape. No one would have any of these illnesses or problems that we have. It's so much more complicated than that. And I, I do try to remind people that it's a, it's a journey that you're on your whole life. There's passages in meditations where Marcus really is just going, you're an old man and you're still losing your temper. You're still worried about what other people think. He's like, you're still afraid of death and it's almost here. And, and realizing that if the wisest people in the world struggled their whole life with this thing, the idea that you, who were lucky enough to hear about it in your twenties

• 43:28Ryan Holiday?

  or thirties or forties, that you're just gonna get it. It's naive and it's also unfair to yourself. The question is, are you getting better at it as you go? Right? Seneca says, how do I know I'm making progress? And my philosophy says, I've begun to become a better friend to myself. So, discipline is not just squeezing blood from the stone. It's not just whipping yourself. It's hiring a coach. It's, you know, setting reachable goals as you go. It's, it's stepping back and giving yourself credit and saying, look how far we've come, man. Like we're doing great, right? It's not, it's not just this sort of like in your face,

• 44:12Ryan Holiday?

  like how are you not there yet-ness, right? It's, it's a journey and you're not supposed to really ever get there. That it's like the horizon, it's always a little bit further away. And so, you know, I think. When we hear discipline, I think we think of like the Marine drill sergeant.

• 44:30Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 44:30Ryan Holiday?

  This is kind of transformative. You didn't have discipline and now you do. We should also think about that, like having a discipline. It is a thing you do your whole life. And realizing that that's how we should measure this progress.

• 44:45Jay Shetty?

  This episode is brought to you by State Farm. We talk a lot about intentional decision making. And that extends to the practical stuff, too. Like making sure your coverage actually works for your life. State Farm is there to meet you where you are. And they know how sweet it is to feel good about your decisions. Talk to a State Farm agent today to learn how you can choose to bundle and save with a personal price plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts and savings and eligibility vary by state. This episode is brought to you by Whole Foods Market. If you're talking about quality food, you can't forget Whole Foods Market.

• 45:27Jay Shetty?

  Who've been holding themselves to the highest standards since they opened in 1980. That means you'll see thousands of organic products across their stores, from the produce department to the aisles. It also means you'll never see certain ingredients. They've banned artificial sweeteners and colors, high fructose corn syrup and more, so you can shop with peace of mind. Shop Whole Foods Market in store or online. I think though, that that's what we're banging our head against is that the mind has been so far removed from the idea that things take time.

• 46:04Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 46:04Jay Shetty?

  That patience is required, that one step at a time. Like we hear those things all the time. But there's literally nothing we do in our lives that requires us to move one step at a time anymore. Like it just doesn't work. And we know these examples, like whether you're ordering food to your house or whether you're getting this delivered or whether you jump into an Uber or Lyft, we know that. But I found it really interesting recently, like I just went through a double hernia surgery. And it's not life threatening and it's meant to be routine, but it's far worse than the doctors make it out to be. And the journey back to feeling like I can operate normally, it's been two months now, and I'd say I'm seventy five percent there. I would say that the first four weeks were like learning how to walk again.

• 46:49Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 46:49Jay Shetty?

  And I have never, ever moved that slow in life, in a good way. As in that every movement of the body or the mind had to be slow.

• 47:01Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 47:01Jay Shetty?

  Because if I moved fast, I could potentially relapse.

• 47:04Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 47:04Jay Shetty?

  So I couldn't, I can't, I still can't pick anything above like fifteen pounds if not allowed. Uh, I, I couldn't for that first month, like walk for the first week. And then I had to shimmy for the rest of it. And I had to like, when I sat down on a chair, I had to be so mindful. And I was like, wow, I thought I was mindful.

• 47:21Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 47:21Jay Shetty?

  And having this surgery has made me the most mindful person ever. I've, I've never eaten that slow because the digestion was harder and there was pain in this area. And so it was the first time in a long time I felt that present. And I consider myself to be a present person.

• 47:37Ryan Holiday?

  I think that the root of it is this illusion we have that we're in control, right? That we're deciding how things go. And then we have an injury or a problem or something that disrupts it. And we are rudely, but also kindly reminded how little control we have. I remember I was, I moved across the country, I was writing my first book. The two days before I was supposed to start riding my bike, New Orleans, I get stuck in the street car tracks, I go over the handlebars and I break my left elbow. And I'm left handed. And so like, all of the way that I was thinking about writing this book goes out the window for like six weeks. I couldn't get like the adrenaline or the endorphins that I needed just to function as a person. I had to go on these like long walks.

• 48:18Ryan Holiday?

  So, you know, I get the news and it's like, okay, I'm not going to be able to work or think for like six weeks. This is a total dead loss for me. But then I started taking these walks, like hour, two hour, three hour walks, just around. And what do you know, I start writing the book in my head on these walks. If I had gotten things the way I wanted them to go, it would have been far less advantageous to me than me having to respond to the way they did end up going. So at the core of Stoicism is this idea that we don't control what happens, we control how we respond to what happens. It seems like it's this curse, this human frailty or weakness that like, we're not in control.

• 49:03Ryan Holiday?

  But our superpower is our ability to respond to that, to find good in it, to be made better for it. And you, you go through this thing and you realize, oh, this is an opportunity to practice all of the things that I ordinarily take for granted, I assume I have. There's this one Japanese Zen master, actually the Zen master from Zen and the Art of Archery. And he's at the end of his life, he's, he's dying and he, he, he goes to like urinate in the snow and it's red. He's like bleeding, he's dying and the students are alarmed and he goes, this too is practice. All of these things that we experienced, that we didn't want, or we thought they should go a different way,

• 49:43Ryan Holiday?

  they're actually the opportunity to practice the way, or the logos, as the Stoics would call it, in the way it's actually meant to do. If we choose to be present, recognize it and take that opportunity instead of fighting it, or resenting it, or wishing it were otherwise.

• 50:02Jay Shetty?

  Even, I love that point that you made, that, that even that was practice.

• 50:06Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 50:06Jay Shetty?

  That is beautiful. Like that's, that's magical. Like that idea that even in that worst scenario, at the end of all of it, it was still practice. And if we could only wrap our hand around that, because I think we still think of practice and performing, practice and arrival, practice in the end, we still see it as separate. And, and there is nothing that's separate. Like that tree outside that's huge is still growing and being nourished. It's just you don't see it anymore.

• 50:33Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 50:34Jay Shetty?

  And I almost, sometimes what I do with clients is I'll give everyone a seed and I'll ask them to plant it and take care of it. And that's like an old way of just learning growth, because it's so painful to be watering something every day and not seeing it grow, only to realize it is growing. Or I remember something they gave us in the monastery was like, they gave us this rope. It was like this really old rope. And it was already tied and we were asked to untie it. And it's like, most of us spent the whole of the first day we got it, trying to untie it and failing.

• 51:06Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 51:07Jay Shetty?

  Only by like day twenty one to realize all we had to do is pull it a little bit every day. And hopefully it would unravel because it was so tight. And so even if you sat there all day, you would just, you'd go mental and you wouldn't achieve anything else.

• 51:20Ryan Holiday?

  Right. Yeah, it was the willful will, right? It's like wanting it a certain way, needing it a certain way, trying to force it as opposed to stepping back and letting it be what it is. It's like the way our mind works, whatever is happening now, you will look back on sometime in the future as formative to who you become, right? And yet, in this moment, all we're doing is trying to make it something other than it is, right? Like, we will look back on COVID and see the, the good in it, the lessons that came from it, the reminders it gave us, the weird experiences we had, the connections, all of that, we'll look at that. But in that moment, all we're thinking about is when this will be over, whose fault it is,

• 52:03Ryan Holiday?

  you know, what it's cost us, right? Freud says, in, in retrospect, the struggle will strike you as most beautiful. But it's seen, it's such a, it's such a shame, so unnecessary to deprive yourself of understanding the beauty of it now. Certainly, perspective adds to it, it allows you to see it differently. But what if you could just not feel guilty, worried, anxious, resentful? Like, you know in the future, this will be a story, right? You'll, you'll have learned, but you could give yourself the gift of at least some of that now by accepting it and just seeing it as what it is in front of you, that it's practice.

• 52:46Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, yeah. And the, and the challenge, I guess, is that because we've not Had an experience, maybe in our early childhood or in our teens, where we saw that, where it was like, we went through a difficulty, we built discipline and we got over it, or we learned from it, as you're saying. I find that a lot of people have experienced difficulty, but then they were given comfort or shelter, or the difficulty was somehow removed or left. So you never got the opportunity to build the discipline muscle, if that makes sense. My, my wife will often talk about like, for her, if she went through a difficulty, like her parents would come and save the day.

• 53:21Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 53:22Jay Shetty?

  Right? Someone would swoop in and solve the issue. Her sister would do her homework for her. And so as that happened more and more and more, it created this behavior of someone will save the day, that I don't need to build a discipline around this.

• 53:35Ryan Holiday?

  Obviously, saving is coming from a good place. The other thing we do is we tell, it's so bad that that happened to you. I'm so sorry. You're this victim, right? Like, the first year of COVID, they would describe for kids that this was like a lost year. And I just remember thinking like, how

• 53:51Jay Shetty?

  That language, yeah.

• 53:52Ryan Holiday?

  Patronizing, but also self fulfilling that was for kids. Like, when I would talk to my grandparents or old people that lived through the depression or the Second World War, which were, by the way, a lot longer than COVID, they weren't like, oh, it was a lost time. It was a transformative, formative experience that in retrospect, made them who they were, that maybe even if you'd asked them if they would have wanted things to be different, they would have said no. And we have the power to, to transform whatever we're going through into that thing. So yeah, by rescuing someone, you're depriving them of that thing, but also by telling them that there's no, there's nothing in this thing

• 54:33Ryan Holiday?

  that it's indisputably, inarguably bad, is to deprive them of the agency, the perspective, the gift that they have in front of them, if they choose to see it that way. And we should emerge from this period, the very least, as you said, like, if you haven't been through stuff like this before, you just lived through an event of historic proportions. Like, you just lived through an event that your kids and your grandchildren, future generations will marvel at, and you emerged unscathed, maybe even improved in some ways. Like, you, you should emerge from this with a real sense of what you're capable of enduring and surviving and adjusting towards. And that should give you a lot of confidence as you wake up and you experience things that

• 55:19Ryan Holiday?

  Are so microscopic compared to that thing.

• 55:22Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 55:23Ryan Holiday?

  Right? And, and you should feel armed with a certain set of weapons or tools that maybe you didn't have before. Like, you've been knocked around and you didn't get knocked down. That's, that's powerful.

• 55:37Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And, and in my own little way, it's like in, while I was going through my surgery, it was exactly that where it's like, I can either sit here and think this is the worst, because it did feel like the worst for someone who's active, always on planes and always traveling, always working, to, to be completely off. And it wasn't even restful because it was painful. Like, it wasn't restful time. Everyone's like, we didn't work for a month. It must have been amazing. I was like, well, no, I was in pain.

• 56:00Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 56:01Jay Shetty?

  But the idea that my mind at the time was like, this is the worst. I hate this. And when's it gonna be over, right? Which is the same as COVID.

• 56:11Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 56:11Jay Shetty?

  Which is the same as anything. Like, those are the three thoughts that go through our head pretty much, whether it's surgery, COVID, or anything else that's going on. And having to reframe those thoughts in the moment.

• 56:22Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 56:22Jay Shetty?

  Made it become a really beautiful process at the time. And now a sense of gratitude for it having moved on. But that's what I'm hearing from you. It's like, you will reflect, well, hopefully you'll reflect afterwards. But there is a bit of reconfiguration that has to happen at the time.

• 56:38Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, there's a story about Phil Jackson, when he was a coach of the Lakers, he gets this back surgeries, super bad back surgery, and he can't stand on the sideline. He has to sit in a chair. And the way they had him sit, it's like a row back. And so suddenly, all the, the things that he's comfortable with as a coach are not possible. He's not able to pace the sidelines, get up in people's faces, intervene, direct people. He just has to sit back and has to watch. It's like the antithesis of his coaching style. And yet, and he's a sort of a Zen Buddhist, a sage guy. He realizes that this is practice. That he, he realizes that now the team's having to come to him. Now the team's having to solve some of the problems.

• 57:19Ryan Holiday?

  He's having to explore a different way of communicating. He's having to communicate verbally better than physically. It's a way to change, adjust. He's forced to do it differently and thus learns some things he wants to continue doing differently. Now realizes he was taking for granted certain things that are actually super important, right? And so you can always take from this, like it's this forced lifestyle experiment. Just see it as that, right? Like COVID, the biggest forced lifestyle experiment in human history. Things that people said were impossible had to become possible. Remote work, you know, e-commerce, all these things. And then you want to throw that away by saying,

• 58:00Ryan Holiday?

  I can't wait for things to go back to normal, right? It's like normal is what caused this, right? Normal was you before you learned the things that you learned in that intervening time. And for COVID, for Phil Jackson's back surgery, insert whatever disruptive event you're undergoing in your life.

• 58:19Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 58:19Ryan Holiday?

  You don't want things to go back to how they were. You want them to go to a new place where you have the old perspective and the new perspective fused into something new. When Marx realized the impediment to action advances action, what stands in the way becomes the way. The Zen expression is the obstacle is the path. Same east-west coming to the same idea. It's like this thing has opportunities inside it to make you better, should you choose to accept them.

• 58:44Jay Shetty?

  Yeah. And that's what I like. It's not the simplistic idea of, and I'm always trying to address this. It's not the simplistic idea of look for the positive in the negative, right? Like, that's not what we're saying here. This isn't the idea of like, oh, there's a beautiful side to this. That's not the point. Let's get into that a bit because I feel like people kind of simplify and go, oh, no, that's just, yeah, we'll just look for the silver lining, which is not what we're saying.

• 59:07Ryan Holiday?

  Well, do you know the Stockdale paradox?

• 59:09Jay Shetty?

  No, totally.

• 59:09Ryan Holiday?

  So James Stockdale, he studies Stoic philosophy and then he shot down over Vietnam. And he's taken prisoners. He's been seven years horribly tortured in this Vietnamese prison camp. Afterwards, he's speaking to Jim Collins, who writes Good to Great.

• 59:23Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, Good to Great.

• 59:25Ryan Holiday?

  He formulates what becomes known as the Stockdale paradox. Jim Collins says, who has the worst trouble in the prison camp? And Stockdale says, oh, that's easy. The optimists, right? The people who thought, I'm going to be out by Christmas. I'm going to be out by the spring. This isn't going to be hard. When Stockdale's parachuting into this camp, he says, I am leaving the world of technology and entering the world of Epictetus. He says, it's going to be seven years at least. But he said, he said, the first step is I had to unflinchingly accept the reality of my situation, which is that I might not get out, which is that I'm probably going to be tortured, which is that I'm not in control, which is that there's so much unknown pain and suffering ahead. I have to accept that. This is not going to be fun. This is not going to be easy.

• 1:00:09Ryan Holiday?

  He says, but simultaneously, I said to myself, if I get out, I want to have transformed this into something that in retrospect, I would not have traded away. That's the paradox of what we're talking about. Stuff happens, life gets in the way, you lose someone, your company goes bankrupt, the market shifts, you know, a natural disaster. Your life can get flipped upside down at a moment's notice. You have to unflinchingly accept the reality of that situation, the unfairness, the unexpectedness of it, your blamelessness or your blameworthiness for it. And then simultaneously go, okay, I'm not saying this is wonderful, that I'm glad it

• 1:00:53Ryan Holiday?

  happened, but I can make choices now that derive positive benefits from this, that make me better for having gone through this. I, I was at the beginning of the pandemic, in the middle of opening this bookstore. I'd sunk my life savings into opening this bookstore that by the time it was ready, it was impossible to open. It was looking like this enormous failure, mistake, you know, like albatross around my neck. And I, I wrote this note card to myself and I have a picture of it because I took, I wrote it to myself, I was thinking about it every day, and I took the picture in front of the bookstore. And I just wrote to myself, I said, 2020 is a test. Will it make you a better person or a worse one? Right?

• 1:01:37Ryan Holiday?

  I have no idea whether the bookstore will work. I have no idea where things are going. I have no idea what life is going to look like. What I control inside that is to I emerge from it a better person. Right? More community minded, a better spouse, a better thinker, a better writer, more patient, more self aware. Those are the things I control within it. And so when we say the obstacle is the way, we're not like, oh, it's great. This terrible thing happened to me. But you're saying what I took from this terrible thing. Or maybe you're trying to strip the labels altogether. But you're saying what I took from this was positive. I made from it. That's the paradoxical.

• 1:02:14Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, yeah, that's a great breakdown. I'm so glad you went into that because yeah, I've heard the example in the same way of when there were soldiers who said, we'll be home by Christmas.

• 1:02:23Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:23Jay Shetty?

  They their hope was shattered.

• 1:02:25Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:25Jay Shetty?

  Because they weren't home by Christmas. And whereas the people who said, we'll figure out a way to get home. And if we get home, we'll see our family. And that person was more likely to be able to deal with the fact that it didn't happen by this time. And I think, I think that's become our obsession with controlling time.

• 1:02:43Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:43Jay Shetty?

  Is partly where that comes from, where it's like, we want this done by this time.

• 1:02:47Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:48Jay Shetty?

  And then whether it's positive or difficult, when it doesn't happen, we're completely demoralized. Right? Like, it's almost like it's all over just because it didn't have happened by an arbitrary date.

• 1:02:59Ryan Holiday?

  Well, you're setting yourself up for disappointment or frustration or resentment or despair by attaching to an outcome that's not yours. If you get lucky, sure, you'll feel wonderful. But if you work for years on a book and success or failure of it was, did it win awards? Did it sell lots of copies? Did your parents read it? You know, those are things that are not in your control. But if it was, I understand this better than when I started. I am more confident than I was when I started. You know, like I said something, I got on the page what I.

• 1:03:39Ryan Holiday?

  Thought only in my head at the beginning, right? Like, when you move the outcome or the goal to something that's up to you, you'll always win. And I think that's what wise people do. They're, it's not that they're not ambitious. They are ambitious, but their ambition is things that are up to them. And so when Marcus is saying better wrestler as opposed to better philosopher, better friend, whatever, he's shifting from like this external societal driven thing to this internal thing that he controls, that he gets to judge the success or failure on. And it's not so quantifiable either. It's something deeper, more human, more connected.

• 1:04:24Ryan Holiday?

  And so as you shift that, not only do I actually think you do better work, but you are increasing your chances of feeling good about yourself at the end of that.

• 1:04:34Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, and I think the challenge, Ryan, though, is that today we want both, right? We want the, we want the feeling of I did something that was true to me.

• 1:04:43Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:43Jay Shetty?

  And it resonated with a lot of people or whatever that means, right? Like, and I feel like that's where, where everyone kind of gets stuck because it's like, you know, especially when people watch people do what they love and it gets received well. It's like, oh, well, I want to do that too. Where do you think people go wrong in that journey? Because like, what are the mistakes we make on that path? Because I feel like that's pretty much where, where people are headed.

• 1:05:08Ryan Holiday?

  Well, yeah, I mean, I think we're sometimes not honest. You're like, I'm just, I want this album to be true to who I want to be, my artistic expression, blah, blah, blah. That's why you made all these sort of individualistic decisions. But deep down, you have this sort of secret lie, which is that you're actually judging yourself on where it lands on the billboard charts, right? So that's the worst of both, right? Because you're not going, well, what do I need to do to be commercially successful? And I'm consistently judging myself on whether it was commercially successful or not. You've set yourself up for maximum disappointment. But if you can say, look, Here, my goal is to do my absolute best. My goal here is to get to the truth of what I'm saying, to express what's true inside here.

• 1:05:52Ryan Holiday?

  And that's what I'm going to focus on, and I'm not going to waste any time on these other things. I actually do think, I'm sure you've found this, that that does make better work. It makes truer work, it makes more authentic work, more relatable work. It actually does make a better product. But only if you are fully and honestly and deeply committed to doing it. It can't be like, I'm making the charitable donation, I'm doing it anonymously, but I still hope everyone sees how wonderful I am. You know what I mean? You can't have your cake and eat it too.

• 1:06:27Jay Shetty?

  Yes, exactly. And I think it goes back to what you were saying a few moments ago, where it's like, you have to accept the reality, which includes your own intention. Like, I know that I like creating things that are true to me, but are commercially successful. That is important to me, is a value of mine, and I'm okay with that.

• 1:06:43Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:44Jay Shetty?

  Because I don't want to lie about those things to myself at all, because I enjoy the idea of creating thoughts and ideas that can affect lots of people. Like, that is something that gives me a sense of feeling that I've understood an idea and been able to communicate it well enough. I guess what I'm saying is that, it comes back to what you were saying at the beginning, that I don't set out to write a commercially successful book, or launch something commercially. Like, that isn't what I used to set out to do. Set out to understand, articulate, communicate with myself, and write an incredible book. And then that leads to that. But at some part of that process, you have to think about the sharing of it.

• 1:07:24Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, of course. And I've learned a lot from you in this regard. Like, you're not helping yourself or your ideas by rejecting what makes them accessible, or shareable, or turning your nose up at this tool or that tool. Like, look, like, when I want to learn about an idea, I want to read long-form books about it. That's the medium that I'm comfortable in. I don't think TikTok, but millions of people do think TikTok or Instagram. And to turn your nose up or close your heart off to those people because they're not like you is not just snobbish, but if you actually care about the ideas, it's selfish.

• 1:08:03Ryan Holiday?

  And, and so I don't think they're mutually exclusive, but I also think if you're on those platforms and you're letting the algorithm decide what you do and don't do.

• 1:08:13Jay Shetty?

  Correct.

• 1:08:14Ryan Holiday?

  You are sacrificing the whole reason you became a creator in the first place.

• 1:08:18Jay Shetty?

  Correct. Absolutely. And I think that's, that's the balance, right? It's like, there's, there's people who just completely sell out for the algorithm. And then there's the selfish creator or the snobbish creator on the other end, who thinks they're too cool.

• 1:08:31Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:32Jay Shetty?

  Like, it's kind of like this badge of honor where it's like, oh yeah, I don't need to do that. Like, I don't care about. And, and I'm like, that, that defeats the whole point. Because I'm hoping this book was a compassionate expression of service, hopefully. And maybe it wasn't. Maybe it just was a selfish, arrogant move of professing your ideas. And that's like the best thing about it. And so you have sellouts on one end. You have selfish on the other end. And to me, like, service is kind of in the middle. Where it's like, service means I understand people's needs and interests and concerns and where they're at, but I always have to serve them what's most beneficial.

• 1:09:04Ryan Holiday?

  What's if you meet people where they are?

• 1:09:06Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:06Ryan Holiday?

  And, and like, it, there's almost a greed to it. It's like, well, I wrote in a book. If you want to hear it, you can buy it. Right? Well, what if they're not ready for that? What if they're too busy for that? What if they already did buy it?

• 1:09:17Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:17Ryan Holiday?

  But they just need a reminder of it. Right? And so there's different, just in the way that like, look, I also read in English. That's the only language that I speak, but I don't turn up my nose at all these different translations. I go, oh yeah, there's a process. These ideas get translated in those languages. And they reach people who otherwise wouldn't have consumed it.

• 1:09:36Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:36Ryan Holiday?

  And understanding that different people have different native languages. Some people like audiobooks. Some people like podcasts. Some people like. This social network or that social network. And that by thinking that, you know, one is superior to the other. In fact, you should be translating your work in all these different areas. Long form, short form, audio, video, text. What you should be everywhere that's that possible. And understanding that the win is that the ideas are reaching people and helping them in their life. If some of those things translate to sales or followers, great. But like, I always think about like, again, what is success? At the end of the day, like, if your thing sold zero copies, but it changed the world, you'd be like, that was

• 1:10:21Ryan Holiday?

  that that was a win.

• 1:10:22Jay Shetty?

  Totally.

• 1:10:22Ryan Holiday?

  So why don't you just do the stuff that changes the world? And trust, again, trust the process that you'll probably be able to make a living.

• 1:10:31Jay Shetty?

  Absolutely, absolutely. And most things that do change the world or have an impact started non commercially, right? Like in that sense of especially creation or ideas. I mean, maybe not businesses, but but ideas. Like when I started creating content, even the first few interviews I did with you, like, I didn't. I mean, that NASDAQ, that whole NASDAQ, I never got paid for that whole series. I was interviewing authors every week because I was fascinated by the idea that I get to sit down with people that I find interesting.

• 1:10:57Ryan Holiday?

  You're also putting in your hours. You're getting good at this thing.

• 1:11:00Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And you're getting good at it. You're enjoying it. You get to meet awesome people. And even even when we did the show at HuffPost, it was like, it was, I was leading the show of what kind of show we wanted it to be. It wasn't like, it was already set up. And so, yeah, I look back and I think like, all stuff that had an impact and grew was always from that deep intention, pure intention of, I want to create something that will hopefully help people have these conversations. And that was what it was for me. I felt when I started creating content, there weren't, there were so many people who had deep thoughtful conversations offline, but there was no spaces online really to have those. Or there wasn't a piece of content you'd send to your friend and be like, did you see this? Like, have we talked about this?

• 1:11:42Jay Shetty?

  And I wanted to create an excuse for people to have more meaningful, thoughtful conversations based on ideas.

• 1:11:48Ryan Holiday?

  I mean, look, I think at the end of the day, it's like, you create a lot of value. And if you can capture a small percentage of it, you're good, right? Like, I think about Craigslist, like, the vast majority of stuff on Craigslist has been free since the very beginning. Yet Craigslist still makes a billion dollars a year in revenue. Like, when you create a lot of value, I create so much content and like, The only part that is not free are the books.

• 1:12:12Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:13Ryan Holiday?

  Right? And the books fund that work and the network also funds the books. It's you. You're creating kind of a flywheel of stuff. I was thinking about one of my books that that hasn't sold as well as the other books.

• 1:12:24Jay Shetty?

  Which one is it?

• 1:12:25Ryan Holiday?

  Uh, Lives of the Stoics is different than my other books. But I personally use and then also have reused stuff that I learned while writing that book almost every single day. So like the monetization, you know, to use that word, the value creation there was a personal one. And the book is done extremely well by like any sort of standard. But like the primary beneficiary was me.

• 1:12:51Jay Shetty?

  Yes.

• 1:12:51Ryan Holiday?

  And again, if you, whatever you're doing, you can say, look, the primary beneficiary of this is me having gone through it, changing, developing, learning. And then the byproduct is that I paid my rent or that like, you know, this happened. That then you've, you've won and all the stuff that's out of your control is the extra.

• 1:13:12Jay Shetty?

  Yes.

• 1:13:13Ryan Holiday?

  That's where you want to be.

• 1:13:14Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, yeah, I couldn't agree more. And, and that requires just so much. I think that requires refining of the intention. It requires having a sense of belief and confidence. I think, I think for me was the other, and, and for you too, I from, from your journey that we've talked about before, like, I spent 10 years doing this without any followers or without any commerciality to it anyway, because it was all offline.

• 1:13:37Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:37Jay Shetty?

  And it was speaking to rooms of five to 10 people if they showed up. And so it was like, for so long I was doing it without any care of how far it went, because it was just so powerful. It was so beautiful to live in that world of, even if I had one meaningful conversation with someone after an event, that would make my day. Like I'd talk about it for weeks.

• 1:13:56Ryan Holiday?

  Let me ask you this, I've been thinking about it lately.

• 1:13:58Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:59Ryan Holiday?

  The work that you're doing now, or that I'm doing now, is the result of work you did a long time ago. It's a lagging indicator of sacrifice and commitment and study and practice from however long ago. Sometimes what keeps me up at night is I go, But 10 years from now, 15 years from now, am I putting in the work, doing the stuff now that will pay off then? And how do you know? How do you know if success is this lagging indicator? Or growth is this lagging indicator of commitment now? How can you be sure that you are paying your dues?

• 1:14:34Jay Shetty?

  Yes, I'm so glad you said that because I literally just, I've been talking to my team about a few things that we're doing. I've literally asked us to find three new coaches. Like I've, I've literally gone, I've always learned through one-to-one coaching or mentorship. Like that's my favorite, apart from books, that is my favorite way of learning. And especially when it comes to self-transformation. So I love ideas through books, but when it comes to me actually changing, I'm better when I'm working with one person and getting mentorship or coaching.

• 1:15:00Ryan Holiday?

  So you're thinking about who are, who are your teachers to get you to the next level? A level you might not even know exists yet?

• 1:15:07Jay Shetty?

  Correct. And so I'm, I'm trying to identify those people right now. So when I was a teen, I was reading Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Steve Jobs, right? Like, well, Steve Jobs was a bit later, actually, but Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, like that's who I was reading at 16 years old.

• 1:15:19Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 1:15:20Jay Shetty?

  They were hugely formative in my ideology in so many ways. And then in my twenties, obviously I lived with the monks, so that was hugely that. And then went to public speaking school when I was 11 years old. So that has, that has lasted far too long and needs to be refined again. And, and so, yeah, I completely agree with you. I look at all the skills I have today and I go, where do they need to be refined?

• 1:15:42Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:42Jay Shetty?

  And then I look at, well, what are the things I'm missing out on? Because I'm not exposing myself. Now, I do think that I do find having the podcast very fortunate because I do get to sit down with a lot of people that I seek mentorship from in an informal sense. And then I could be like, oh, I'm really going to do a deep dive on that person's book. Or like Gabor Maté was just on.

• 1:16:02Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:02Jay Shetty?

  He's amazing, like, you know, and, and people have known about him for a long, long time. This was the first time I interviewed him, but I'm like now doing a backwards, reading of all of his books.

• 1:16:10Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 1:16:11Jay Shetty?

  And so I love that, you know?

• 1:16:12Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, it's like, what rabbit holes are you falling down? What sort of new, it's like a great athlete is like, well, what am I adding to my game this off-season?

• 1:16:20Jay Shetty?

  Totally.

• 1:16:20Ryan Holiday?

  And like, how do you not get complacent and?

• 1:16:25Ryan Holiday?

  Coast, because you could be coasting for a long time and not realize

• 1:16:29Jay Shetty?

  Of your last skills.

• 1:16:30Ryan Holiday?

  That your skills are, your speed is slowly decreasing before, and then it's, it's too late.

• 1:16:35Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, that's such a good point. And, and I think the thing that hit me there, what you just said is just, it's also what skills do I need that I'm not trying to see the results now?

• 1:16:43Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 1:16:43Jay Shetty?

  Like, what is something I'm happy to let kind of simmer and build and just organically grow, rather than like, I'm going to learn this skill because next week, we're going to launch this thing. Like, that's not what I'm talking about.

• 1:16:54Ryan Holiday?

  Well, the things you were talking about that made you who you were, those were never means to an end because the end was inconceivable, right? Like, none of, it didn't even exist.

• 1:17:01Jay Shetty?

  Absolutely.

• 1:17:02Ryan Holiday?

  But somehow, it was the perfect, like, training montage for who you became. And how do you make sure the montage is continuing as opposed to this once and a formative thing? And then, you know, every once in a while, I'll do a talk and like, it's the person before me, you're like, oh, you've been doing this a long time, the exact same way, and you, you stopped. You stopped and you don't, you don't want that.

• 1:17:26Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, exactly. And I, and I think partly that's also me allowing myself, at least for me, and I'm only talking about myself, but I, I think this is helpful for people. I think you have to allow yourself to become different things. And giving yourself permission to follow that bliss, as Joseph Campbell would say, because, right, for example, when I, when I wrote Think Like a Monk, that was a the kind of end and beginning of a new journey in my life. Like, I was kind of encapsulating what I've learned of the last fifteen years. And then it was like, well, now I'm in a new space. Like, I'm a married man now. I'm, I'm, I'm a business person. I'm a, I'm a, and so many more things. And so it was almost like me saying, okay, well, I'm going to put this wrapper on this right now.

• 1:18:09Jay Shetty?

  And now my next book's all about love. And there's loads of people going, Jay, like, why are you writing about love? Like, why? And I was like, because I'm fascinated by love, like, and I'm okay with answering that question

• 1:18:19Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:19Jay Shetty?

  of why love. I don't want to continue to write books. I mean, by the way, the love book is full of wisdom I learned during my time as a monk. Of course it is. But the point is that I don't want to be defined by that, and I don't want to limit myself to any human experience. Because then I'm basically saying, I have to be this, and that's what performers do.

• 1:18:36Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:37Jay Shetty?

  I have to play this character for the rest of my life, and then you get typecast in your own life. And you don't let yourself, and I'm like, maybe my next book will definitely not be about love. I know that for a fact, my next book's not about love. But I'm okay with that. Like, I like the idea of I'm letting myself go in the direction of whatever I want to become. Because why would I limit it now?

• 1:18:58Ryan Holiday?

  When we talked about like, you know, cranking the shower handle, that that's a muscle, right? My first book was about marketing.

• 1:19:03Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:04Ryan Holiday?

  I could have sold my next book about marketing, my next book about marketing. I could be still doing that. I could still be speaking about that first book. And when I went to my publisher and I was like, you know, I want to write about this obscure school of ancient philosophy. They were like, what? You know, they were like, how's half sound? You know, they give me half what I got for my first book. But that's that muscle. I was like, I don't care. This is what I want to do.

• 1:19:24Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:24Ryan Holiday?

  And so when you cultivate the ability to do that hard thing, the challenging thing, the different thing, the investing in like being bad at something to get good at something. You think about Tiger Woods, he's changed his swing three or four times from the ground up. That's the real muscle that prevents you from sort of ossifying or declining. It's the ability to go like, just because I'm here doesn't mean I'm going to stay here. I want to try and do something radically new or different that I, I hope will work commercially, but I know personally I will emerge better, right? Like, like, let's say that the, the book doesn't work. I'm sure it will.

• 1:20:05Ryan Holiday?

  Let's say it doesn't work, but you're like, hey, my, my marriage is better as having done it. That's a win from top to bottom, right? And then, you know, you take that with you as you go.

• 1:20:15Jay Shetty?

  For me, writing it, I wrote a completely different book than the one I thought I was going to write. And I wrote it three times. And the first time it was too raw and probably too like, it was, it was probably too tough a read. And the second time it was too shallow, like it was totally like not what I would want to do. And then the third time we got the balance right.

• 1:20:34Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:34Jay Shetty?

  It's funny what you said about earlier, like the discipline of trying to get out of doing things wrong, but the discipline of ambition. Once you've had one success in anything, most people grip onto it because now you've had a taste of it.

• 1:20:48Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:48Jay Shetty?

  And now you're scared that if you don't be that person, you will lose it. And I just wouldn't want to live that way because then you are just acting and not being.

• 1:21:00Ryan Holiday?

  It's like what you think that having the success, proving yourself should make you more.

• 1:21:07Ryan Holiday?

  Courageous, less risk averse, because now you've done it. But in fact, the opposite is true.

• 1:21:13Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:13Ryan Holiday?

  This is where courage and discipline are related. It's the opposite. Now you have something to lose. Now you don't want to change, go in a different direction, because the expectation is set with the first one. So you imagine how scary it is Tiger Woods. You're like, you're the best swing in golf. And you're like, but I think it could be better. But I'm going to have to go have a bad swing for months to get to the other side of that. And so the ability to say, I decide whether I'm successful or not, not the external results. And that's why I'm willing to go down this detour, try things differently, do this. That is that sort of key skill. And courage and discipline have to be related. They complement each other. And yeah, like it was come from my first book came out. It debuted on the bestseller list.

• 1:21:57Ryan Holiday?

  It was controversial. But if who I would be today, if I continued down that road, would be a caricature of that first person, because I would have been, it would have been a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy. Instead, I went towards something that was interesting to me, which opened up another thing that was interesting. And, and that like, I wouldn't be who I am had I done the safe thing. And so all, they say all growth is a leap in the dark. Right? You have to continually take that leap. And one of the things I, I hope you learn when you do that is, first off, it's not as scary as you thought. But then sometimes like it doesn't work. And you go, oh, but I feel great about it. And then it decouples external recognition from the internal process.

• 1:22:40Ryan Holiday?

  And then you go, yeah, I just do what I want. I do where it takes me. And a lot of times it works out. Sometimes it doesn't. But it's called being a creator for a reason. You're making something. You're the leader. You're not a follower.

• 1:22:55Jay Shetty?

  Well said. Ryan, this has been so much fun.

• 1:22:57Ryan Holiday?

  The best.

• 1:22:58Jay Shetty?

  Diving in with you. We were talking for ages. I had no idea where the time went. But it's been such a joy just always like just getting into it with you. And I hope that everyone who's been listening, I hope you're going to grab a copy of Discipline is Destiny, The Power of Self-Control by Ryan Holiday. And of course, any of the other books that we've recommended before on the show. If you love this episode, you can go back and listen to a ton of other episodes with Ryan. And again, I hope today's episode, I tried not to do, for everyone who's listening, and you know, I've been trying this more recently. I tried not to do a systematic conversation of breaking down how to build discipline and. Which, you know, I've been avoiding that kind of hack kind of conversation recently, which I think you've been really resonating with.

• 1:23:42Jay Shetty?

  Because I think sometimes the penny that needs to drop isn't the how to. It's kind of like the churning of the idea in your own self of coming closer to what it truly means for you and making sense of it. So that's been my attempt at least, and I hope that's coming through. I hope you enjoyed this. Please do give me feedback on Twitter or Instagram. Tag Ryan and I both with your greatest insights, the nuggets of wisdom, and we'll see you on another episode of On Purpose. Thank you, everyone. If you loved this episode, you'll enjoy my interview with Dr. Daniel Amen on how to change your life by changing your brain.

• 1:24:17Speaker 04

  Everything in moderation, which is the gateway thought to hell. It's the gateway thought to cheating. As soon as you hear someone say, "Everything in moderation," they're going to do something bad for their brain.

• 1:24:30Speaker 05

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• 1:25:00Speaker 06

  Mr. President, my company for me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd, causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami.

• 1:25:07Jay Shetty?

  They all heap the blame on me.

• 1:25:09Speaker 06

  Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and the Revenant. What would happen if I stopped drilling? You start, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 1:25:20Speaker 05

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:25:24Speaker 06

  I'm not the first then.

• 1:25:25Speaker 05

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17.