What We Talk About When We Talk About Knowledge | Ask Daily Stoic

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

• 0:02Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. Well, 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.

• 0:45Ryan Holiday?

  What we talk about when we talk about knowledge? We frequently talk about the pursuit of knowledge here at The Daily Stoic, about Seneca's advice to acquire one piece of new knowledge each day, about Epictetus's famous line, inspired by his hero Socrates, "It is impossible for a person to begin to learn that which they think they already know," about how the pretense of knowledge is the most dangerous vice. But we're not really talking about the pursuit of knowledge. We're talking about the pursuit of virtue. In the most highlighted passage of the Kindle edition of Robin Waterfield's wonderful annotated edition of Meditations, Robin Waterfield writes that, "The Stoics held that virtue was knowledge.

• 1:30Ryan Holiday?

  They recognized four primary virtues: prudential wisdom, courage, moderation, and justice," he says. "And they analyzed each one as a kind of knowledge. Wisdom is a knowledge of good and bad. Courage is a knowledge of what to fear and what not to fear. Moderation is a knowledge of what to pursue and what to avoid. And justice is knowledge of what to give or what not to give others." Seneca told his friend Lucilius that "you should keep learning to the end of your life. The same must be true for us. Let us never stop striving to not only know more, but to become better, wiser, and more virtuous individuals." I actually have the four virtues tattooed here on my left wrist.

• 2:15Ryan Holiday?

  I guess I'm showing it, but you can't see it. But it's the owl for wisdom.

• 2:22Ryan Holiday?

  And dripping water into wine, that's temperance for moderation, the lion for courage, and then the scales of justice for justice. That's the four virtues of Stoicism. And that's why I've been doing this four virtues series on. Discipline is Destiny is about temperance. Courage is Calling is about courage. Right Thing Right Now is my justice book. And then the wisdom one is the one I have to get started now. But before I had the tattoo, I had the four virtues coin. You might have seen it stamped, the logo, we made this for Daily Stoic. It's stamped on the cover of the leather bound Daily Stoic. It's what I stamp all the books that people sign, get signed from, The Painted Porch, the Daily Stoics are from. And then we have the four virtues coin, which you can check out also if you need a reminder. But I love this idea of virtue as knowledge. And I also love Robin Waterfield's

• 3:04Ryan Holiday?

  annotated edition of Meditations. It's just incredible. I love it. I've recommended it to everyone. If you want to dig deep on meditations, grab that also.

• 3:21Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Here on Thursdays, we do our little Q and A. I think the first talk I gave about stillness would have been back in the fall of 2019. This would have been in October. I gave it in Minnesota. I was still working out what I wanted to talk about, what the message was there. So it was all a little fresh and new. It seems like an eternity ago now, October of 2019. But it was also one of the first times I got to talk publicly about the book and answer questions about it. And that's what I'm bringing you today. Here's me answering some questions about why I decided to write about stillness, the sort of paradoxical nature of stillness,

• 4:03Ryan Holiday?

  about where, how it unlocks good ideas and good thinking, that weirdly sort of not pushing so hard forward allows you to move forward. And then how I create space in my life and how I deal with distractions, all that kind of stuff that I talk about in the book. I think you're really going to like this Q and A. Seems crazy. I didn't know what was looming just a few months in the future. None of us did back in the good old days of October 2019. But take this for what it is, a document, a moment in time captured in audio. And I hope you enjoy.

• 4:41Speaker 01

  We'd love for you guys to ask some questions of Ryan, since we got him here. I will start.

• 4:47Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 4:48Speaker 01

  On your quest of writing this book, what do you think is the biggest transformation that you have gone through because of your awareness of this concept of stillness?

• 5:01Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, for me, this idea of, I try to combine the idea of presence and enough in a sort of a mantra for myself. So I try to repeat to myself, like, this moment is enough. Right? So I would, I would talk to myself as I was writing the book. Look, this moment is enough. The experience of writing this page is enough. I'm not deferring my happiness for how many copies it potentially sells. I'm not delaying the rewards for the day it comes out. I'm fully enjoying this moment. I'm going to put everything that I have into it. I'm going to balance the, you know, balance the books, as Seneca was saying. I'm going to bring everything I have. So I say to myself, this moment is enough, whatever I'm doing, whether I'm, you know, waiting for a delayed plane, whether I'm exhausted, whether I'm arguing with somebody,

• 5:45Ryan Holiday?

  that all, this is unpleasant as this is, or unplanned as it is, whatever it is, that it's enough and that I'm actually going to be here for it. Right? I'm not going to rush through it. I'm not going to try to end it. I'm just going to actually fully bring myself to whatever that is. And so that's sort of something I've picked up from the experience that I try to, it's hard and I drift from it all the time, but I try to come back to it as a kind of mantra.

• 6:09Speaker 01

  Great. Other questions?

• 6:11Ryan Holiday?

  And we have some challenge coins for the people who answer the questions. So we'll give, I don't know how many we have, six or seven, but the first people get them.

• 6:20Speaker 02

  Great talk. Thank you.

• 6:21Ryan Holiday?

  Thank you.

• 6:22Speaker 02

  I want to know where you are in this talk.

• 6:24Ryan Holiday?

  What do you mean?

• 6:25Speaker 02

  Why are you here talking about this subject?

• 6:28Ryan Holiday?

  I just go where they tell me. No, one of the beautiful parts about writing is that you get to put all your thoughts down in the pages and then you get to go and you talk to people about it and you engage with them in a way that is, I think, a little bit more interactive than the books. But I think stillness is this timeless thing that unfortunately is also very timely, right? 500 years ago, Blaise Pascal said, "All of humanity's problems stem from our inability to sit quietly in a room alone." He didn't have an iPhone, right? He didn't have Twitter or social media. And so if stillness was causing, the lack of stillness was causing problems for people

• 7:12Ryan Holiday?

  five centuries ago, what is it doing now as there's even more incentives not to be still, as there's even more forces acting on us that's preventing stillness? And as we see in things like the missile crisis, the stakes of not having it are very, very high for world leaders, for CEOs, for business people, for parents. What I'm really passionate about right now is how do I give people the sort of skills or the framework to think about integrating this idea in their lives and sort of maybe knocking down some of the stereotypes of stillness that like, stillness is for retired people, stillness is for people who live in Hawaii, right? No, stillness is for all of us, whatever we're doing, because there are very few situations,

• 7:53Ryan Holiday?

  as I was saying, that are not improved by a stiller mind, a stiller body, and a stiller spirit.

• 7:59Speaker 02

  Well, they didn't take this away from me. I was just curious about you personally.

• 8:04Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, what do you mean?

• 8:05Speaker 02

  Like where you got interested in, I mean, we have the ideas, but what about your own personal journey that drew you to this particular path in life?

• 8:14Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I very much relate to the characters that I'm talking about in that we have things we're trying to do in life, we have drives or ambitions or goals, and we think that maybe stillness is going to prevent us from getting there. I think where I've started to come from on this, what motivated me to write the book is the realization that all the really great moments in my life came from this place of stillness. So why am I content to just sort of let them happen accidentally? How can I create habits or routines or make decisions that are going to facilitate that or cultivate it? Because I think it's so important.

• 8:49Speaker 01

  Here we go, one from John.

• 8:51Ryan Holiday?

  All right.

• 8:52Speaker 03

  Hi, Ryan. Thanks a lot for sharing what you shared tonight.

• 8:56Speaker 03

  I went to St. John's University, which is a Benedictine school, and hung around a bunch of bunks. And the one thing that I was really envious is they had a cadence and a rhythm to their day.

• 9:06Speaker 03

  And you brought up a lot of things about, I think, being, creating space and time to do some thinking.

• 9:12Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 9:13Speaker 03

  But one thing I'm just curious about, if you have any tips or techniques that you use to create what I'll call a parking lot to hold the distractions, the ideas, the demands, to park them there so that you can really get away from them and say, "Look, they're gonna stay there for right now."

• 9:30Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 9:30Speaker 03

  "I'm gonna create this space and time for myself to do this."

• 9:33Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, so, so part of my sort of schedule or routine is like the mornings, particularly early morning, that's the creative time. I wanna, so I go for the walk, I put the phone down, I'm not getting sucked into email, I'm not scheduling stuff, and I'm doing whatever the main creative work I have for the day as, as in close proximity to that as possible, in as short of concentrated burst as possible. It's Cal Newport's term of deep work. I wanna do that deep work in the morning. Maybe I'm done writing at 11:00 a.m. And the rest of the day, that's where I've parked all the meetings that I have to do, the trip to the post office, you know, all the, all the shit I don't wanna do.

• 10:15Ryan Holiday?

  All the things I don't wanna do, I've parked until later in the afternoon. So if they go swimmingly, if there are fewer interruptions, if it turns out that the trip takes five minutes instead of 10 minutes, or, you know, the meeting that I didn't really wanna do in the first place gets canceled, you know, which is a wonderful feeling, by the way, then, then I can do extra creative work. But I've already done most of what I need to do for the day as early as possible for the day. One of the other, one of the other things I have with my assistant is like... Don't schedule more than like three things in one day. Doesn't matter what they are. I don't want more than three things because all of the, every time, it's like every time you're putting something in the calendar, you're taking time away from the main thing.

• 10:58Ryan Holiday?

  So when I look at my calendar and it's full, it's like somebody messed up. I messed up, my assistant messed up, I'm, I've, I've made decisions or uh, my career has gone in a way that where actually success is taking me further away from what I want my, you know, my day or my life to look like. So uh, I, I just having a really clear definition of that success and then making sure you have systems in place that sort of ensure it is really important for me and like winning the morning to me is, is the most important thing you can do.

• 11:29Speaker 04

  Thank you for a great presentation. I, I love the, the theme in general. Um, one thing I do wonder is, you know, the, you have a room full of adults, different stages in life.

• 11:39Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 11:40Speaker 04

  And since early age, we're all told that success comes from tenacity and persistence. And so I do wonder, where do we take this conversation so that it gets started a lot earlier, so that we don't have the Tiger Woods and the

• 11:54Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 11:55Speaker 04

  different athletes and CEOs who, they're tenacious all their career, they're persistent, they did the hard work, they became super successful because that's what we value as society and then they have the breakdown.

• 12:05Ryan Holiday?

  Right, that, yeah, it's, you, you sort of wake up one day and you realize, oh, all this stuff isn't actually what I was after to begin with. I was after something else, right? And so when I, when I talk to people, I like to go to his question, I really ask them like, not like, what do you want to accomplish, but what do you want your life to look like? Like day to day, like what is a, I, I think you build your life around what like the perfect day for you looks like, right? And then, so I have this idea in my head of what that day looks like. It took me a while to get there, but at some point in my early twenties, I figured out, okay, I like doing this, I don't like doing this, I don't like meetings, I don't like people telling me what to do, I don't like having to put on a suit, you know, all the things I've figured out I don't like.

• 12:47Ryan Holiday?

  And then I said, okay, so success for me is having the things that I do like, right? Having some control of my day, being able to be creative, figuring out what that is. Now I can make decisions not based on whether objectively they are attractive, right? Whether other people think they're attractive, whether they pay a lot of money or don't pay a lot of money. But I think, does this get me closer or further away from that day? And I've made a lot of mistakes in my life where I've agreed to things, I've invested in things, I've taken on projects. And then I've realized, oh, even if this succeeded, which by the way, it's looking like it's not, right? So it's already not great. But even if I had won this thing, it would have been not success because it would have meant I have to do this thing I don't want to do.

• 13:32Ryan Holiday?

  So really, having that rubric. So instead of just going like, oh, success is being number one in this field, or success is winning this prize, or making this amount of money. It's going, well, what are you doing all those things for? What kind of life are you trying to build? That's why I was talking about what's actually important to you, and then making your decisions based on that. And when we think about this memento mori thing, not pushing it off way into the future, right? Not like, hey, I'm going to work for 30 years on this thing I don't really like, so then I can have a period at the end of my life where maybe I get to do what I do like, and by the way, I'm too tired to actually pursue that thing, right? So really, being intentional about what you want and what you don't want. I think we've got to talk to people about as young as possible.