When The World Got Still | Ask DS

It was anxiety inducing and scary, but there was also a stillness in it. Because you were forced, against your will, to truly practice Stoicism. Not just in the sense that you had to persist and act despite that fear—because people and things were counting on you—but also because it was so clear what was in your control and what wasn’t. You came face to face with undeniable reality, overwhelming events and all you could do is focus on your response. You had to practice what Epictetus called ‘the art of acquiescence’—ditching all those plans, accepting all the costs, the hits to your portfolio, the lost time, the inescapable human frailty and mortality we all wish to deny. And within this, you also had to do and be good, for yourself, for your family, for your community, because your individual decisions had clear and unavoidable consequences for other people. It was a moment made for Stoicism, a moment when stillness was the key, as it is for all crises. And right now, the ebook for Stillness is the Key is on sale for $1.99! Grab it today, for you or someone else, if you haven’t already. The good news is you survived the moment, obviously, or you wouldn’t be reading this, but now the world has ‘gone back to normal,’ whatever that means. Things are busy and noisy again. Life is moving fast again. How much of that stillness, how much of that Stoicism, has drifted away as well? That’s the real question. Because Stoicism is not just for the crises, but also for the every day life. It’s for right now, too. It’s today that you need to be focused on what’s in your control, it’s today that you need to practice acceptance, practice memento mori. It’s today that you need to think about your community. It’s today that you need to find the stillness even as the world is spinning faster than ever. Good luck! Grab a Stillness Key for 50% off by using code STILLNESSISTHEKEY at check out. *A note on the audio for this episode: an issue with Chad's live mic resulted in the discrepancy in audio quality that you hear. We apologize for the inconvenience.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

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

• 0:06Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. While on Thursdays, we not only read the daily meditation, but we answer some questions from listeners and fellow Stoics who are trying to apply this philosophy, just as you are. Some of these come from my talks, some of these come from Zoom sessions that we do with Daily Stoic Life members, or as part of the challenges. Some of them are from interactions I have on the street when there happened to be someone there recording. But thank you for listening, and we hope this is of use to you.

• 0:50Ryan Holiday?

  When the world got still, it seems like forever ago, and just last month. You were going about your life. You had work projects, you had plans for your kid's upcoming spring break, you were getting excited for March Madness, you were thinking about the latest political controversy, gossiping with your friends about celebrity news. You were busy, things were noisy, everything was moving fast. Then suddenly, it came to a screeching, unprecedented stop. The world locked down. As we said before, life can get narrow real quick. It was a global pandemic, but your concerns were very local. Your family, your health, how would you get groceries or even toilet paper? It was anxiety inducing and scary, but there was also a stillness in it, because you were forced against your will

• 1:35Ryan Holiday?

  to truly practice Stoicism. Not just in the sense that you had to persist and act despite that fear, because people and things were counting on you, but also because it was so clear what was in your control and what wasn't. You came face to face with undeniable reality, overwhelming events, and all you could do was focus on your response. You had to practice what Epictetus called "the art of acquiescence," ditching all those plans, accepting all the costs, the hits to your portfolio, the lost time, the inescapable human frailty, mortality we all wished to deny. And within this, you also had to do and be good for yourself, for your family, for your community, because your individual decisions had clear and unavoidable consequences for other people.

• 2:16Ryan Holiday?

  It was a moment of Stoicism, a moment made for Stoicism, as all crises are. You survived, obviously, or you wouldn't be reading this. But now the world has gone back to normal, whatever that means. Things are noisy and busy again. Life is moving fast again. How much of that Stoicism has drifted away as well? That's the real question. Because Stoicism is not just for crises, but also for the everyday life. It's for the right now, too. It's today that you need to be focused on what's in your control. It's today that you need to practice acceptance and practice memento mori. It's today that you need to think about your community. It's today that you need to find the stillness, even as the world is spinning faster than ever. Good luck.

• 3:02Ryan Holiday?

  I've been thinking of that email for a long time, just how quiet and still and calm the world was. And it's funny, because I just put out Stillness is the Key in the fall of 2019. So I was just sort of coming off that tour and starting to get serious about what I was gonna do next, the writing that I had to do. And now, four years later, Stillness is the Key, which hit number one on the New York Times bestseller list, is for sale as an ebook right now for $1.99. My publisher just let me know. So I decided to pair it with that email, which is pretty cool. And you can grab it anywhere ebooks are sold, Amazon, whatever. I'll put a link in today's show notes. And then, actually, we have something else really cool. Hang on one second.

• 3:46Ryan Holiday?

  I'm gonna walk over to my door, where I left my keys, because... Hope you can hear that. One of the things about owning a bunch of old buildings is you got a bazillion keys. But the key that I use to open my office every day says Stillness on it. We made this cool Stillness is the Key. I didn't know you could make keys this way, but the key is like a rock, and it has waves crashing over it. That was Marcus Aurelius's image. He says, "Be like the rock that the waves crash over and eventually the sea falls still around." That was the Stoic image for that word, "ataraxia," freedom from disturbances, sort of a poise, a dignity. Self-contained-ness. And I think about that every single morning when I open my office

• 4:31Ryan Holiday?

  to sit down and write, as I did this morning. It's this really cool, beautiful key. And we made them, I think, last year. And because the ebook is discounted, I thought I'd discount this, too. You can grab the Stillness is the Key key for 50% off at store.dailystoic.com. Just use code STILLNESSISTHEKEY in all caps, and that should work. So check out the Stillness is the Key ebook. If you want a Stillness key, you can grab that at store.dailystoic.com, and I'll link to it in today's show notes.

• 5:14Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Brian. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. It's not my main criteria, but it is a really important one. So if you're ever thinking about having me come talk, obviously, I think about whether I have the time, think about what's going on in my life. But I also think about, can I bring my kids? It sucks to be gone, and I hate being gone. And anytime I can work, but also bring the family along, I'm very excited. And so when I got asked to do this talk in San Antonio, I was like, it's not at the JW Marriott, is it? And they were like, yeah, it is. And I was like, I'm in. I'm in. Why am I in? Because this hotel has a water park, lazy river, and a bunch of awesome water slides. And I knew my kids would be very excited. And they had an amazing

• 5:56Ryan Holiday?

  time. The leadership group that I talked to was great. I'm going to bring you a selection of some of the questions they asked me. But the memorable thing to me, as my kids still talk about, is we're climbing up the tower to the water slide. And my son starts talking about this raccoon. And I'm sort of like, uh huh, sure, sure. There's a raccoon. And there was a raccoon. There was a raccoon living in the water tower. And it was just hanging out. And I've sort of, they talk about it all the time. They go, what do you think that raccoon's doing? I don't know. If anyone listening here knows about the raccoon, or what it's up to, I'm sure my kids would appreciate the update. None of this has anything to do with the questions that I was asked by the group, I will say. I gave my normal talk on Stoicism. We talked obstacle ego and stillness. Not bringing you that. Not bringing you anything about the raccoon. I am going to bring you some of the questions that the folks asked me.

• 6:41Ryan Holiday?

  I thought they were great. I thought you might like to listen to them. And I wish I could have brought you a recording of the conversation I had before the talk. My friend Manu Janogli came out. We talked Stoicism a little bit before. We just sort of hung out and chatted. We had lunch actually by the pool. And then I went and did my thing. It was a fun, awesome experience. Thanks to the Cannonball Leadership Growth Conference for having me out. Thank you to you for listening. Here is the Q and A from that talk. Enjoy.

• 7:18Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, so for the Stoics, there's these sort of four virtues. There's courage, which I think is pretty straightforward. There's justice, which is pretty straightforward. Wisdom, which is straightforward. But discipline to me is the virtue under which all the other discipline, all the other virtues depend, right? There's nobody great who became great, who did so, I think, without a kind of a discipline. Then also, what I think is so powerful about discipline is it makes whatever you're doing great, right? If you're sweeping floors with discipline and dedication and purpose, that becomes great, right? If you're president or you're chief of staff, like Marshall was, and you can be disciplined about your ego, about yourself, about the job in front of you, it makes that great.

• 8:00Ryan Holiday?

  And so to me, discipline is the sort of key variable for all the things we want to do and be in life. And it has to be a thing that we're cultivating. As we become successful, as we are lucky to live in a time of plenty and abundance and relative freedom, the fact that other people aren't telling us what to do, right? Means we have to tell ourselves what to do, that we have to set the standards and practices, the bright lines that we observe and follow and sort of live according to.

• 8:33Speaker 01

  I loved that. I was on a run this morning with Merida through his training for her first marathon in three weeks. And I said, one of the things I've been so enamored with is her discipline to get up when nobody's looking, nobody's watching. What is it, what, what, instead of like, let me go another way, how, why are people so undisciplined?

• 8:53Ryan Holiday?

  Well, no, I think the physical practice is such a great place to cultivate discipline. And I think it's transferable, right? Like, nobody makes you sign up for a marathon. Certainly, no one's checking whether you're training or not.

• 9:05Speaker 01

  Right.

• 9:05Ryan Holiday?

  You have to do that. You have to say, it's important to me to do this. I have to do it every day. Here's the plan I set for myself. Here's, you know, how I have to follow. And you realize if I don't do it, I'm not going to get what I want. The results aren't going to be there. I'm going to embarrass myself in front of my friends or whatever it is, right? So I, to be able to do that is a really important skill. And I think people who can cultivate, when we talk about hobbies, I think having hobbies that help strengthen your discipline are really, really important. So like, obviously, what I do is a lot of sitting in a chair, thinking. And so to have a physical practice where I also cultivate discipline helps me, you know, when I'm struggling, to be able to go, I've been in this, I've been halfway through a run that was not going well, where I wanted to quit.

• 9:50Ryan Holiday?

  And I've cultivated the ability to stop myself from quitting and keep going. Right? And so I think you have to cultivate a practice from discipline in your life. I, I don't know why people don't have discipline. I mean, I guess the simple answer is that discipline is hard and people are not great. The irony is that discipline is hard now, but the rewards later are great. And the converse is also true. Eating whatever you want, doing whatever you want, not having standards feels easier now. Then you wake up one day and you look in the mirror, or you wake up and you look at your life and you're not what you want to be or where you want to be. You know, that's not, that's not great.

• 10:31Ryan Holiday?

  And the Stoics and the Epicureans, although they were ostensibly these opposite schools, they had a lot in common in the sense that they believed that a pleasure that had consequences was not really a pleasure. So if you Guys get super drunk tonight at the hotel bar and then you wake up in the morning and you feel miserable because you're hungover. Was it really that great? Right? Those aren't two separate things. That's one thing. And so the ability to sort of, I think, one of the key elements of discipline, why a lot of people don't have is they're not good at cause and effect, and they're not good at delayed or lagging indicators and tying things together.

• 11:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I love, I love that. So the idea is, you know, I think you've probably heard of the marshmallow test.

• 11:15Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 11:16Speaker 01

  Starts, starts early.

• 11:17Ryan Holiday?

  Delay gratification, yeah.

• 11:18Speaker 01

  Delay that gratification and suffer through the suck now to have what I want or become who I want to become later.

• 11:25Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, exactly. For people who don't know the marshmallow test, it's, you know, do you want one marshmallow now or two marshmallows in 15 minutes? And people are really bad. They'll just shove that first marshmallow in their mouth, maybe because they want it really bad. Or they, I think the other part is, and this is where sort of social privilege and other things can get in the way, is like, they don't trust that there'll be a second marshmallow later. They don't trust the system. They don't trust the process. Like, on discipline, I hit this sort of wall early on. I wasn't, I knew what I wanted to write about, but I didn't know if I had the material and I was struggling. I was confused. But I've been in that, like I was saying, I've been in that place a lot of times, not just physically, but with my other books. Like, never when you start a book are you like, I know exactly

• 12:08Ryan Holiday?

  what this is, exactly where it's going, and obviously it's going to work. You always have these dark nights of the soul. You always have these, you know, what Paul Graham calls the trough of despair. The, after the excitement, the, oh crap, is this going to happen? But I've been through the process enough that I trust it. I know if I do what I'm supposed to do today enough times, I'll get there. Like, if you, as a coach, like, if you've walked people through running a marathon, you know that at first, it seems impossible that you could physically do 26 miles. But if you can do one mile and then you can get yourself up to, you know, you've seen it work enough times.

• 12:47Speaker 01

  Respect.

• 12:48Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, that you have the confidence to go, just follow this and you'll get there.

• 12:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I love that. All right. So I want to ask a couple of questions, but one, one more question. So, besides Discipline is the Destiny.

• 12:59Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 13:00Speaker 01

  Your favorite book that you've written?

• 13:02Ryan Holiday?

  That is a very tough question. I think every one of the books was what I needed at that moment. So when I was writing Stillness, I was way too busy, way overcommitted. It's what I really needed. When I wrote Ego is the Enemy, it was after my first book had really popped and I was in this place of like, you know, they were making a TV show about me. There was all this awesome stuff and I was like, if you want to keep doing this and not spin off the planet, you know, ego is what you got to think about. And you know, obstacle was a different place. So I think every one of the books is something that I needed at the time. But I wrote a book a few years ago called Conspiracy, which is about the billionaire Peter Thiel and this sort of insane thing he did.

• 13:45Ryan Holiday?

  But I am proudest of it because it was the most radically different than all my books. And so even though actually it probably has sold the fewest copies of any of my books, I grew the most for having written it. And when I do books, I try not to, I try to very deliberately decouple my sense of whether something worked or not, or was successful or not, from how other people thought it was. So I almost deliberately choose the one that sold the least amount of copies so that like I have a kind of compass that is based on what I think and what I do and how it's going for me as opposed to, you know, what the market thinks.

• 14:28Ryan Holiday?

  Because I think everyone's experiences where you're like, you worked your hardest on something and it just didn't go the way you thought it would go. Then you did this other thing, you dashed it off in two minutes and it crushed. And then if you, but if you identify too much with that success, you've now taught yourself a dangerous lesson.

• 14:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I love that. Okay, so you worked with Robert Greene?

• 14:51Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 14:52Speaker 01

  What was the biggest thing you've learned from, you learned in your time with him?

• 14:55Ryan Holiday?

  So Robert Greene, I think is one of the great nonfiction writers of our time, maybe the greatest living nonfiction writer, like in the space that. Sort of the self-help and, and sort of business space. I mean, most practically, like, he taught me like how a book is made. Like, I learned the process from him. Like, he showed like the picture of me with my note cards. Like, I learned from him, like, you have an idea. How do you get the material to make that idea real? And he showed me like the building blocks of the thing. And I think so often, you know, we want someone to make an introduction for us, or we want someone to give us a break, or give us a jar, or whatever. What I actually learned from Robert was like the nuts and bolts of the craft itself,

• 15:39Ryan Holiday?

  like how you do a thing, which I use every day, you know? And so I think, I think mostly from Robert, it was about the power of craft. And Robert wrote an incredible book called Mastery, which I would recommend to everyone here. Like, how do you decide not just like, I want to be good at something? But he says like, you find what your life's task is, what you're put on this planet to do, and then how you become a perpetual student and, you know, hopeful but never in practice, master of that domain.

• 16:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, unbelievable. He is, he is, it's amazing though, because he is one of the, to your point, one of the greatest thought leaders and thinkers ever.

• 16:23Ryan Holiday?

  For sure.

• 16:23Speaker 01

  And definitely in our age. And you're now following in his footsteps in that, in that same, in that same space.

• 16:29Ryan Holiday?

  I mean, I think it's really important not just to have a mentor in your career, which he was for me, but kind of like a model, or like an exemplar of what greatness looks like to you in your profession. So who's the greatest to ever do what you've done? And maybe not just the most successful, or made the most money, or had the most clients, or the most impact, but like, the person who, you know, is those things and a good person, or and, you know, and a positive contributor to the world, or and a good, like, who is the model of those things for you? So you can kind of have, for Marcus Aurelius, his model was Antoninus, his stepfather. He's sort of always had him in mind as a sort of model of the perfect life.

• 17:13Ryan Holiday?

  And so he could ask himself, you know, like, what would he do in this situation? And I think for Robert, he's not, he's not just like a mentor to me who showed me how to do something, but more importantly, he's sort of modeled it. And it's really helpful for me to. Be like, okay, here's, here's how someone I really admire would make the decision or would approach this decision that's being in front of me. Like, early on in my career, I got an offer for a book deal. I was maybe like 22 years old. Like, the thing I wanted more than anything. And I went to Robert and he was like, you should say no. And I was like, what? This is like, this is what I want? And he's like, he walked me through. He's like,

• 17:58Ryan Holiday?

  you'll be more ready in a few years. He's like, I don't think the deal terms of this are right. He's like, I don't think you have the experiences yet to do this. You know, he sort of walked me through why to say no. And, and I did. And it was obviously terrifying and, you know, really hard. And I could have only done it on the advice of someone I trusted that much. But, you know, now when I make decisions, I like, I, one, have the experience of like, walking away from this big scary thing early on. But two, I have, oh, like, people who know what they're doing, don't just accept everything that's offered to them. Don't just jump out. Like, they, he really modeled that and worked through that with me. And, you know, that changed not just my career in that instance, but like, all the decisions that I made subsequently.

• 18:43Speaker 01

  Awesome. I just listened to an interview with Ed Milet.

• 18:48Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 18:48Speaker 01

  I sat down with Ed Milet. And I encourage all of you to go listen to Ed Milet's latest podcast. He just interviewed Ryan Holiday. And, uh, great conversation.

• 18:56Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, he was really cool.

• 18:57Speaker 01

  Great conversation. All right. Before I take some audience questions, you mentioned your bookstore.

• 19:01Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 19:01Speaker 01

  What is the name and where is it now that you're in? We have a lot of people from Texas. Where is it? And what's the name?

• 19:07Ryan Holiday?

  So the bookstore is on Main Street in Bastrop, Texas, which is about 70 miles from here. It's about 30 miles from Austin. And it's called The Painted Porch, which Stoicism, Stoa means porch. And it was named after what's called the Stoa Pochyle, or the Painted Porch in Athens. So it's, it's my little bookstore slash office slash headquarters. And it's been, it's been quite a ride.

• 19:31Speaker 01

  Well, make sure you check it out. Make sure you follow Ryan. He has some amazing guests. Peter Attia is a good friend of yours. And if you don't know who Peter Attia is, he is the Ryan Holiday when it comes to health. I'm saying the guy is Peter's great. One of the smartest human beings ever. He has a great podcast called The Drive. And when those two collaborate together, it's magic.