It’s Better Than A Grave And A Hearse | 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?

  It's better than a grave and a hearse. It may have been a couple hard weeks, it may have been a couple hard years, may have been a tough decade, like the one that Marcus Aurelius had, which we've talked about before, complete with plagues and floods and betrayals and health issues and more. It may have been a hard life, like Epictetus's. You know what? At least you woke up above ground this morning. You're alive. Not everyone is so lucky. In fact, it may have seemed like you yourself may not have been so lucky. So here you are, alive, for now, anyway. What are you going to do with it? What are you going to make of it? Think of all the people who would kill to be in your position. Think of all the people who have been killed and are thus not in your position. Think of all the dark days where,

• 1:30Ryan Holiday?

  again, you were not so sure you would ever get to this position. Let that put everything in perspective. Let that give you some priority and urgency. Use this gift wisely.

• 1:52Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another Thursday episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. A couple months ago, I had a bunch of gigs in a row. Did a talk, got on the plane, flew to another city, another gig, went to the airport. It felt for a second like I was a musician, which I'm not, or a comedian, which I am not. But I had a little taste of the sort of road warrior life. And it's funny, one of those talks that I ended up giving was to the folks at Live Nation, who do the vast majority of concerts and events in this country. I think they did the two talks I gave with Robert Green at theaters late last year. And I'm not sure if they're doing the two talks. I'm doing a talk, two talks in Australia, one in Sydney, one in Melbourne,

• 2:37Ryan Holiday?

  the last day of July and the first day of August. You can grab tickets for those, by the way, at ryanholiday.net/australia. The point is, I got a taste of a slightly different life, one very different than the life of a philosopher/author, which is usually at home, sitting at your desk. And it's not exactly the life I want, but it's always interesting to see a different perspective. And then at the end of the talk, I answered a bunch of questions. There were some lovely folks. And we talked about how you protect your time, something I need to be better at, how you balance being ambitious with the sort of Stoic idea of focusing on what you're control. We talked about mentors and teamwork and how to maintain those kinds of relationships. I thought it was a lovely talk. I'll bring you the whole talk at some point. But in the meantime, here's me answering

• 3:22Ryan Holiday?

  some questions about Stoicism from the folks at Live Nation. I've got a couple of different parts of this I'll bring you. But for now, here's the first couple of questions. And I hope you like it.

• 3:38Speaker 01

  Okay, let's kick it off with a Q and A. Ryan, your recall is much better than mine. But I have this Epictetus quote in my head. And it's something about, you know, good things take time. Grapes and figs take time to culminate. But in this industry that we're in, time is often dictated by, you know, deadlines and just our chaotic nature of our business. So, you know, how do we get that calendar? How do we cultivate that time? That's something that, that's the gold star. But when other people are feeding these demands on us, like, how do we, how do we get there?

• 4:14Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, that's something that sort of keeps me up at night. I've come to believe sort of everything in life is a lagging indicator, right? So like if you're, if you like what you look like in the mirror, that's because you were eating well six months ago or working out six months ago. If, when I'm sitting down and the writing is going well, that's because I was researching and thinking and coming up with ideas a long time ago. When, when an artist gets up on stage and there's fans, that's a result of marketing and investments and, you know, connections that they've built over time. And so that's all from the past and you're going to want it in the future. So you can't just be sort of cultivating and reaping what you have, but you also have to be, uh, like sowing the, the next generation, the next. So I, I think, I think about that a lot.

• 4:59Ryan Holiday?

  As you get busier and busier, it's hard to make time to generate the things that ultimately, you know, you're going to want to rely on in the future. And so it's kind of, it's a battle for me. It's like, hey, I'm saying yes to these cool things. I'm doing the cool stuff. I'm also tired, whatever. Am I reading and thinking and coming up with what the next stuff is? So it does, it requires a lot of discipline. And I think it requires a certain amount of confidence. The, the thing about ego is like ego wants to be everywhere all at once. Ego doesn't want to say no because you think, um, you know, you think, uh, you're never going to get that request again, right? And you're not, it's, you know, I have to be alone or it could be this thing where I'm going to be the center of attention, right?

• 5:42Ryan Holiday?

  Um, you know, there's kind of a, it's funny how in, how ego thinks like everything's even revolving around you. Like you don't want to, you don't want to say no as if like the party's not going to be good without you. And it's like, nobody cares. Uh, and so, so just that, I think it requires some discipline and confidence and like sort of peace in yourself to, to, to say like, hey, like to do what I'm trying to do, I have to be willing to not do these things and to pay the price of not doing those things. So that when I sit down to write six months from now, I'm not like, shit, I don't have any ideas. Or I'm not so burned out that I can't think. And so it's, I think that's the battle. We're all in in some way.

• 6:24Speaker 01

  I do, I do this whole thing with like future Morgan, my future self. Like Marcus really is having that internal conversation. It's like future Morgan's gonna be really excited that you did the athletic green or whatever it is in the morning. Um, so that that helps me benefit later on.

• 6:37Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, someone told me like, obviously time travel is not real, but there is something about how you can make decisions now that your future self will be like so grateful for. And so, and you can be making things that your future self doesn't even know you're gonna need, but it turns out you will need like every once in a while have this moment where I'll, I'll be like looking for something and like I'll need something for a book or a project I'm doing. And I'll, I'll go, wait, I think there's something. And I'll go back to a book I read 10 years ago and I'll find like I wrote exactly what I needed or I made this note that I'm now drawing on all these years later. I didn't know that future me would need that, but I was investing and, uh, you know, sort of storing stuff that the future me was going to rely on.

• 7:21Ryan Holiday?

  And so when we say like all things are a lagging indicator, that's what, that's what we mean.

• 7:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. Definitely want to get to some crowd questions. Um, I know they're coming around with the mics, but can you put your guys' hands up for a question? Daniel, you're the first one I see.

• 7:37Speaker 02

  Perfect. Thank you for, thank you for being here, Ryan.

• 7:39Ryan Holiday?

  Of course.

• 7:40Speaker 02

  A big fan. Um, so my question is, we are all very ambitious people. We all love what we do. What, how, how can we balance that ambitious drive for our professional success with the Stoic principle of focusing only what's within our control?

• 7:57Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I mean, obviously like as a writer, I want the books to sell and they need to sell or they won't let me keep doing them, right? But I paradoxically have found that the more I am thinking about, how are people gonna respond to this? How is it gonna do? What's the, where's it gonna land on the bestseller list or whatever? All of that is taking me away in the moment when I should be writing from what I need to be doing. So I have found that the more, the longer I've done it and the better I've got at it, the less I care about, the less I think about the external, uh, results.

• 8:37Ryan Holiday?

  Because I have my own standards or, uh, practices that when I focus on them completely. More often than not, translate to those external results, right? So you become more process oriented than outcome oriented. Because the process is in your control, but the outcome is not. The famous line from the football coach, Bill Walsh, was the score takes care of itself. Right? By practicing, by investing, by studying film, you know, by training, you know, by doing all the things that a good football team does at practice, in team meetings, in the film room, etc.

• 9:19Ryan Holiday?

  That translates, again, more often than not, on the field for the thing that you are trying to and ultimately judged on. So that's kind of how I think about it. And then that has the benefit of, look, when you knock it out of the park, you're not like, look how amazing I am. Because you're just focused on what you're doing. And sometimes when you do everything right and it doesn't work out, or, you know, imagine an artist whose album's ahead of its time, or it comes out during the middle of a pandemic, or you can't promote it, or the middle of a writer's strike for a movie, or whatever. And sometimes it doesn't work. You're also not devastated by it because you're focused on process.

• 10:02Ryan Holiday?

  And that allows you to quickly bounce back and do it again.

• 10:06Speaker 01

  Next question, I think I saw Jenna send up.

• 10:09Speaker 03

  Hi, thank you so much for being here.

• 10:11Ryan Holiday?

  Of course.

• 10:11Speaker 03

  You talk a lot about, you know, the things that come from within you. And we all work on these really big teams with other people. So I'm curious if you can share your thoughts on the importance of mentorship and teamwork in your professional career and how that might be able to fit in with some of the principles you've discussed today.

• 10:30Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I started as a research assistant for Writer. And that's how I learned how the business worked. That's how I learned how the craft worked. And so for many, many years, I was doing like the unpleasant grunt work, but I was learning the process from start to finish. And it's opened up doors for me and created relationships for me. So I'm a product of that. And then, you know, I think one of the things you realize about mentorships is there's nothing you can ever do to pay that person back. All you can do is pay it forward to other people. And so, you know, how are you cultivating the next version of that with other people? But also realizing that mentorship isn't totally a selfless thing,

• 11:12Ryan Holiday?

  because you get ideas and energy and connections from that person just as they got it from you. So I think it's really important. I think it's the best way to learn. And I think it's really important that we're always sort of looking for people who are a little bit further along than us or a lot further. Like, if you, Seneca's thing about like, what's the what's the sort of race that you're in? Or what's the path that you're on? Who actually does have the same path as you is further along? And then what can you learn from them? So you're not necessarily doing everything by trial and error. I think that's the way that it should go.

• 11:51Speaker 01

  And do you have suggestions on like, how to connect or keep in touch? You know, for a younger generation trying to like, seek out a mentor? Like, they have that person. They're like, Robert Greene, I'm idolized by you. I really want to dive in. Like, how do you keep in touch with that person? How do you keep connecting with them over time?

• 12:08Ryan Holiday?

  I was just talking to someone about this yesterday. We were laughing that it's like, the number one thing is to not ask someone to be your mentor. Like, that's not how it works. It's like, will you be my boyfriend? Or whatever, you know, like, it's just not how it works. Like, it evolves. It's something that ensues. And so, like, what actually happened is I start, like, the first thing I did for Robert was like, transcribe interviews. This is before AI, obviously. And so, like, I had to just-

• 12:33Speaker 01

  This was what, it was 50 Cent or something?

• 12:34Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, he was doing a book with 50 Cent. I transcribed dozens of hours of interviews between Robert and 50. And then I did a good job and he gave me another thing. And I did another thing and another thing. It's, in retrospect, it was an apprenticeship. Or, you know, in retrospect, she was my mentor. But in the moment, there's people that knew each other and there was an exchange of value, you know? And so, I think it's really important that you see it as something that ensues. Obviously, you reach out and you ask questions. It doesn't just happen, but it also does kind of happen. And I think, you know- People who are demonstrating potential

• 13:16Ryan Holiday?

  and are demonstrating that they take good advice and are going places, those are people who do not normally have a shortage of people who are giving them advice. Right? And so it's also a sort of a self-propagating thing also.