Find A Way To Use What Life Hands You | Ask DS

Change is a constant in life, and embracing it is key to living a fulfilling and meaningful existence. The Stoics recognized this fact and encouraged us to be adaptable and flexible, no matter what life throws our way. It can be tempting to resist or fear the unknown. However, the Stoics taught that change is not something to be feared, but rather, it is an opportunity for growth and self-improvement. Marcus Aurelius wrote, "The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it." By focusing on our thoughts and our perspective, we can choose to see change as a positive and embrace it with open arms.---And in today's Ask Daily Stoic, Ryan answers questions after a Stoicism seminar at the Andrews Air Force Base. Topics covered include how Stoicism applies to parenting, as well as whether any of the Cardinal Virtues is more important than the others.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

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

• 0:02Ryan Holiday?

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

• 0:44Ryan Holiday?

  Find a way to use what life hands you. Change is a constant in life, and embracing it is key to living a fulfilling and meaningful existence. The Stoics recognized this fact and encouraged us to be adaptable and flexible, no matter what gets thrown our way. It can be tempting to resist or fear the unknown. However, the Stoics taught that change is not something to be feared, but rather, it is an opportunity for growth and self-improvement. Marcus Aurelius wrote that the universe is change, and our life is what our thoughts make it. By focusing on our thoughts and perspective, we can choose to see change as a positive and embrace it with open arms.

• 1:28Ryan Holiday?

  And actually, today's episode is an example of that very idea, because it was written in part, although not completely, by ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence bot that can apparently do a remarkable job of mimicking and generating what a writer does, what I do. And yet, I'm saying "written in part" because although what the program spit out was largely usable and without grammatical errors, it wasn't perfect. It didn't sound exactly right. Things had to be moved around. Stuff had to be deleted. In his fascinating book Average is Over, which was published in 2013, the economist Tyler Cowen, podcast guest also, predicted the rise of products like this. But instead of despairing that we'd all be replaced,

• 2:13Ryan Holiday?

  he simply suggested that talented humans would have to figure out how to use these tools to be better at their jobs. And this itself is a very stoic idea because change, disruption, new technologies, they happen. And we have to adjust and adapt to them instead of feeling threatened by them. We have to find ways to be improved by them, to benefit from them, as we do with all that fate hands us. Embracing change also requires us to let go of our attachment to the past and the things that may no longer serve us. It may mean letting go of old ways of thinking, trying new things, even stepping outside our comfort zone. But by embracing change, we open ourselves up to new possibilities and experiences that can enrich our lives.

• 2:59Ryan Holiday?

  So let go of your fear of change and embrace it with open arms. Remember that change is a natural part of life. And by adapting and growing, we can live our lives to the fullest.

• 3:18Speaker 01

  So I know you have a new book coming out about parenting. But I was just wondering, can I speak to how stoicism applies to parenting directly?

• 3:27Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, if you want to think about things that are outside of your control, parenting is a very sort of constant reminder of that. I thought it's interesting. Again, we tend to think of philosophers as these sort of solitary figures. It's usually old, dead, white guys. Or it's your sort of classic university professor. But the Stoics were parents. Marx was at 12 children. Six of them died before adulthood. So you think, again, you think of meditation as this work of philosophy, this work of an empire. It's also the work of a grieving parent in the middle of a... Pandemic, which was the Antonine Plague.

• 4:08Ryan Holiday?

  And so I've always been fascinated by, you know, sort of people who've done the thing that you're doing before you. And as it happens, most of the people that we also get our philosophy advice from have also done this thing, sometimes with success, sometimes not with success. I open the Day with Dad, which is the new book, and I do a parenting email every day called Day with Dad, which is totally free at daywithdad.com. But there's a story where this kid comes to live with Plato. And Plato's sort of mentoring him and teaching him, and then he goes back to his house and he, his dad loses his temper about something and, you know, sort of gets very upset.

• 4:50Ryan Holiday?

  And then the boy just looks at him and goes, you know, "I never saw Plato act that way." And the idea of, you know, to me, this is such a great example of the idea of, you know, it's not what we say, it's what we do. And I just love the idea of, you know, Plato's primary impact on this person is not his, you know, complicated teachings or his theories about government, you know, it's that he was a controlled person who didn't lose his temper, right? And so I just try to, basically, the premise of the book, the premise of the email is like, what have really smart people throughout history thought about these sort of basic parenting principles? And I think one of the problems I found with the parenting books, which, you know,

• 5:35Ryan Holiday?

  everyone gives you when you have, when you have kids, is you're reading this book about this thing that you're not even at yet, right? You read what to expect, and you're expecting, and you're like, how am I supposed to think about what I'm supposed to do six months from now, you know, let alone 16 years from now? And so what I found with the Day of the Stoic and some of the books that I read is there's something really powerful about like, one little thing to think about today, and ideally it's a process they've engaged in, you're doing it on an ongoing basis. And so that's the idea, sort of one piece of parenting advice I give every single day.

• 6:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, thanks Ryan, sure, I just, I'm just a square group. So, I know you're working your way through the Cardinal Virtues series.

• 6:21Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 6:22Speaker 01

  You're two down, two to go. What, in your opinion, now, is one easier to write about than another? And then, is one more important than the other?

• 6:32Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, so I'm doing a series on the Cardinal virtues. Stoicism and Christianity share the same cardinal virtues, which is courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom. Cardinal, actually doesn't have a religious connotation, it comes from the Latin cardus, which means pivotal or hinge. And so, I've been doing this series, I did courage first, I did discipline. I just finished the justice book, which actually is gonna be pushed a year, so that'll come out in 2024, and then I have to write the wisdom one. Part of the reason I pushed it is the wisdom one seems like the hardest one, and I'm well intimidated by it. But I, but I've written, in the discipline book, I tell the story of Joyce Carol Oates,

• 7:16Ryan Holiday?

  the novelist, and she had this, she has this habit where when she writes a novel, she finishes it, and then she puts it in a drawer for a year, just to sort of let, we're talking about not being emotional, she wants to have an unemotional, undetached view of the material, she wants to go step back and think, you know, what can I change? What could I do better? You know, did it age the way I wanted it to? And that seems like impossible to me, I've never been able to do that. So, I, after I finished discipline, and I sat down and wrote justice, I decided that would be a challenge for me. So, the book is, was basically done, the rough draft I finished in December, and it was supposed to come out in September of this year, and I said, you know what, I'm

• 8:01Ryan Holiday?

  gonna, I'm gonna do that. It was a scary lead for me, but that's been sitting in the drawer now for, I don't know, four, four months, and I'm sort of waiting to think of trying. It's actually been harder for me not to work on it than it has been to, to work on it. So, I think wisdom is probably the trickiest one, or the most intimidating, it's the one that probably seems the most pretentious talking about also, so I'm thinking about that for sure. And then... Actually, I don't know if any one of them is hardest, but the challenge on the project has been, for all of my other books, even though some of them ended up kind of being a part of a series,

• 8:43Ryan Holiday?

  I've always just taken it one thing at a time. So, this is a book that I'm writing. I'm gonna say what I'm thinking, use the material in front of me, and then I'll think about what happens next. This has been the first project where I had to think about the relationality between the material. And, because if I put something in the courage book that later I decided would be better in the wisdom book, it's like, you know, too late, that ship has sailed. So, I've had to think much more about that. So, I'm really writing like four books at the same time, or, you know, each time is one less, obviously, but having to think about how, you know, is this, you know, is this an example of courage? Or is this an example of discipline? Is this an example of discipline? Is this an example of justice? And then realizing, of course, I think the natural conclusion to all that is that

• 9:28Ryan Holiday?

  the virtues are actually inseparable, right? You know, courage in pursuit of injustice is missing the point. And then having to know what to be courageous about, you know, this is where wisdom comes in. And so, having to draw this sort of artificial box around what each of the virtues is or isn't, or where one begins or where the other, that's been the real challenge in the series. But, I should say, I'm looking forward to not being writing, to not writing these books. I would like to be time for courage. Thanks. Yeah.