Let Go To Get This | Ask DS

Having goals and desires in life is fine but needing things to go a certain way to be happy? These pained, intense, anxious moments reveal the most futile and servile versions of ourselves. Ask DS: How do you differentiate between self-confidence and ego? Does our ego create blind spots? + more!🪙 We are the creators of our anxiety. Which means we can also be the ones to do something about it. Gain a powerful tool in your fight against anxiety and get the Daily Stoic Anxiety Coin today! https://store.dailystoic.com/🎟 Ryan Holiday is going on tour! Grab tickets for London, Rotterdam, Dublin, Vancouver, and Toronto at ryanholiday.net/tour✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and 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. Thank you for listening, and we hope this is of use to you.

• 0:43Ryan Holiday?

  Let go to get this. Whenever Epictetus saw an anxious person, he always asked himself, what do they want? What are they after? For if a person wasn't wanting something outside of their own control, he said, why would they be stricken by anxiety? We all fall into this trap. What does the anxious father worried about his children want? For the world to be safe and grief to never find him. The frenzied traveler, what does she want? For no bad weather and for traffic to part so she can catch her flight. And the nervous investor that the market won't dip and instead that every investment should pay off. Having goals and desires is fine, but needing things to go a certain way to be happy? Getting worked up, getting excited,

• 1:27Ryan Holiday?

  nervously pacing about things we can't control? Lashing out at people we love, at strangers behind the service counter? All because everyone in the world isn't following the script we wrote in our head about how things should go? These pained, intense, anxious moments reveal the most futile and servile versions of ourselves. It's almost like we believe if we exchange our peace of mind for stress and worry, the whole world will reward us with what we want. This is why Epictetus's famous phrase is so important, that there's things that are up to us and things that are not up to us. The thing that's on the back of the Anxiety Medallion, the one on my desk right here. The idea is that we need a reminder to identify what is in our control, what we can shape and influence in life,

• 2:12Ryan Holiday?

  and most importantly, what we could not. A Stoic learns to let go of those things we can't control. A Stoic accepts things won't always turn out how we want. And when a Stoic does that, what we receive in return is moments of peace and quiet. If you can cut free of impressions that cling to the mind, Marcus really said, free of the future in the past, we can make ourselves, as Empedocles says, a sphere rejoicing in its perfect stillness. You could argue that Stoic philosophy is basically a set of tools designed to help us combat our stress and worries, to help us focus on what we control. And that's what we've been working on with this medallion. It's like a little advice. It's a fidget, if you know what that is. Rolling of my fingers now is recommending one to someone the other day who came in

• 2:56Ryan Holiday?

  my office and was struggling with something, just like a little reminder that goes, hey, is worrying about this changing it? Is it making it better or is it making me feel worse? The idea is like, where are you putting that nervous energy? The one you have right before a big presentation or a big first date or an important test or when I'm getting up on stage before an audience? How can you calm yourself down? How can you remind yourself what part of this is up to me? What am I wanting here? Am I wanting the right thing or not? Anyways, that's what the medallion is there for. As Seneca says, he who suffers before it is necessary suffers more than is necessary. And as Marcus really said, that, you know, the idea is that the anxiety is within you. The situation is not causing it. You are bringing it to the situation. Check it out. I'll link to it in today's show notes.

• 3:41Ryan Holiday?

  I have one here on my desk. I think it's one of the coolest things we've ever done at Daily Stoic and I think you'll like it.

• 3:56Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another Thursday episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Back in March of 2003, I had a cool opportunity. I flew in, flew out, gave a talk in Cancun to a bunch of leaders at PepsiCo, actually PepsiCo Mexico. My kids were very excited because of all the delicious snacks that I got to take home, all these fascinating Mexican candies and crunchies and such. But for me, it was cool. Now, obviously my Spanish is terrible despite three, four years of Spanish in high school and then another one or two in college, I'm terrible. But the president of PepsiCo Mexico,

• 4:40Ryan Holiday?

  Robert Martinez, did a wonderful job translating and grabbing the questions for me. It was a lovely place. I went for a quick run along the beach and then I flew home. So thanks to Pepsi for having me out. They were asking me like, how does ego create blind spots? My answer was- I mean, I'll tell you a blind spot that I do see having written the book. So the question I've gotten most from ego is the enemy. Obviously, this is never true here, but people go, my boss has a huge ego. What can I do? Right? It's never, I have a huge ego. What can I do? It's my boss has a huge ego, right?

• 5:24Ryan Holiday?

  And this sort of goes over a joke you mentioned earlier, which is that we are really good at identifying the flaws in other people and putting them to the microscope and going, hey, you know, they'd be so much more successful. They could just do this, this, this. But then we don't seek out that feedback ourselves, right? There's a, sorry, again, my examples are very, very American, but there's a famous story about Pete Carroll, who's the coach of the Seattle Seahawks. Obviously, in sports, they watch a ton of film. They break down every single play. Here's what you could have done better. You know, even the quarterback, even the stars are real focused. The subject of relentless play by play breakdowns on film. And one year at the end of the season, he did a film breakdown of all the coaches.

• 6:09Ryan Holiday?

  And the coaches had to watch film of how they coached. And he was saying like, he's never seen the coaches more unhappy. And he watched how bad they were at taking feedback, the same feedback that they put the players to all the time. And so I don't know if this totally answers your question, but I mean, because of ego, the big blind spot we have is to our own flaws, our own issues. And we spend a lot of time meddling in other people, giving other people advice, you know, speculating about what they should do. And then we leave ourselves more or less as is. And that- Where do we actually have the most impact? Where can we make the most improvements is in ourselves.

• 6:52Ryan Holiday?

  Then someone asked me, you know, how do you differentiate between self-confidence and ego? Yeah, I mean, look, one of the keystone virtues is the virtue of courage, right? I just wrote a book about courage a few years ago. Like courage is the source of all the advancements and innovations and changes in the world. Courage is obviously super important.

• 7:13Ryan Holiday?

  So I'm not saying that. But and what I would say is like, if you don't believe you can do something, if you don't think you can do something, you're definitely not going to be able to do it. The problem is, the problem of ego is just because you believe you can do something, doesn't mean that you can do it, right? The key variable there is reality, is confidence, is skill. And I think confidence is better than ego if we could define confidence as based on something real. Right? Like I've said before, or a joke before, I don't believe in myself. I have evidence, right? I have evidence of what I'm capable of because of the things that I've done.

• 7:54Ryan Holiday?

  Now, when I quit my corporate job to write a book, that how did I know I could succeed? Well, I didn't. I didn't know that I could succeed. I thought that I could succeed and I knew that I wasn't a quitter. I knew that I practiced. I knew that I had good mentors. I knew that I was good at asking for advice. And I also knew that if I did fail, who cares? It wasn't going to be that like, like I'm not going to end up under a bridge somewhere. I'll just, I'll have to deal with that failure. It will hurt and I'll grow and I'll change and I'll go in a different direction. And so I think understanding that, again, thinking you're perfect, thinking that everything you do turns to gold, that you're a genius, that, you know,

• 8:38Ryan Holiday?

  that's a really dangerous attitude. But also thinking that it's impossible, that everyone's better than you, that the game is rigged. You know, those are also kind of egotistical things to think. But if you go, look, I work hard, you know, I ask questions, I've got a great team. You know, there's a lot of opportunities. A lot of really dumb people have been super successful. You know, you can do it. And I think that is a really good balance of those extremes. And actually, you know, I showed at the beginning, I showed that picture of Plato's Academy. Aristotle famously had the idea of the golden beam. Do you know what this is? The golden beam says that every virtue sits as a midpoint between two vices.

• 9:21Ryan Holiday?

  So for courage, he said, there's recklessness on one end, right? Which is too risky, it's dangerous, it's not thinking about the consequences. And on the other hand, there's cowardice, which is afraid to take risks. So and he said courage is in the middle, right? It's the right amount at the right time, right situation. And I think that's true for confidence, too. If you don't believe in yourself, not gonna be able to do anything. If all you have is belief in yourself, that's probably dangerous, too. In the middle, you want competence and competence and a sense of what you're capable of. And then someone asked, you know, how do you keep your team members interested? If not through passion, right? If the stones are saying that passion is bad, that being passionate is something to be wary of, how do you keep them motivated?

• 10:05Ryan Holiday?

  I mean, sports is a great example, right? You have to care, you have to want a win, you have to be invested. But if you're wound so tight, you sweat every little thing, that's when you that's when you get in trouble with the refs. If you're down too much, you get defeated or despondent, right? You want to keep that sort of even keel. So yeah, it's important. Motivation is really important. Getting a team, you know, emotionally invested is important. But if we're too emotionally invested, what happens when you have the perfect project set up and then COVID happens? Or some other thing, right? So I just think I'd much rather have a team rooted in a really great purpose, a really great sort of cause bigger than themselves,

• 10:48Ryan Holiday?

  than a team really sort of wound up and worked up and excited. You know, I again, I don't, I'd rather have competence than, you know, excitement.

• 11:02Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. I just wanted to say we so appreciate it. We love serving you. It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple of years we've been doing it. It's an honor. Please, spread the word. Tell people about it. And this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say thank you.