It Was Terribly Unfair…Yet | Ask Daily Stoic

In 41 AD, Seneca was exiled from Rome. He was at the height of his senatorial career but found himself facing trumped up charges from a petty emperor who was driving him into the wilderness. He was reeling from the loss of a young child, he was leaving behind a grieving mother. But what could he do? Nothing. All he could do was try to survive and endure it, to not be broken by it.---In today's Ask Daily Stoic, Ryan presents part 2 of his 2020 Q&A at the Young Presidents Organization of Michigan - West Chapter in which he discusses how the Stoics battled plagues that can destroy one's character, and the traits of ego-driven leaders.🎓 Sign up for the Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge to create better habits in 2023: https://dailystoic.com/challenge✉️ 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.

• 0:03Ryan 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. But on Fridays, we not only read this daily meditation, but I try to answer some questions from listeners and fellow Stoics who are trying to apply this philosophy, whatever it is they happen to do. Sometimes these are from talks. Sometimes these are people who come up to talk to me on the street. Sometimes these are written in or emailed from listeners. But I hope in answering their questions, I can answer your questions, give a little more guidance on this philosophy we're all trying to follow.

• 0:49Ryan Holiday?

  It was terribly unfair, and yet...

• 0:54Ryan Holiday?

  In 41 AD, Seneca was exiled from Rome. He was at the height of his senatorial career, but found himself facing trumped up charges from a petty emperor who was driving him into the wilderness. He was reeling from the loss of a young child. He was leaving behind a grieving mother. What could he do? Nothing. All he could do was try to survive and endure it, to not be broken by it. In 1895, Oscar Wilde struggled under a similar fate. He had been ruined and persecuted. He had been humiliated and broken for a crime that was not a crime. But what could he do? As he wrote in his beautiful book, "De Profundis," "The laws under which I am convicted are wrong and unjust laws,

• 1:38Ryan Holiday?

  and the system under which I have suffered a wrong and unjust system. But somehow I have got to make both of these things right and just to me. I have got to make everything that has happened to me good for me. The plank bed, the lonesome food, the hard ropes shredded into oakum until one's fingertips grow dull with pain, the menial offices with which each day begins and finishes, the harsh orders that routine seems to necessitate, the dreadful dress that makes sorrow look grotesque to look at it, the silence, the solitude, the shame. Each and all of these things I have to transform into a spiritual experience."

• 2:20Ryan Holiday?

  Our circumstances can be unfair, unjust, and unexpected. Yet... This doesn't absolve us of needing to figure out how to navigate them, to make good use of them. Seneca could not change the fact of his exile, but he could transform it. And the same is true for us. Whatever life hands us, or a tyrant hands down for us, we have got to make it right. We have to create justice and progress and good from it. It's not fair, but it is fate. And we can turn this misfortune into a better future. It is the only way forward.

• 3:02Speaker 01

  Can you speak to that?

• 3:04Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, Mark Sturilius talks about this. Mark Sturilius writes during the Antonine Plague, you know, which would have made COVID look like nothing. But he says, you know, and at first I thought he was being metaphorical. It really didn't hit me this year until I, you know, last year, sorry, to really get what he meant. But he said, look, he's like, a plague can take your life. But he says, what you should really be worried about is the pestilence that can destroy your character. And I think a lot of the smart people that I know, we sort of, as we talk, it seems like this topic keeps coming up where you go like, man, what happened to so and so? Right? You go

• 3:46Speaker 02

  like, man, did you hear about you know who? And we're just like, we thought we were all on the same page. And it turns out, you know, so and so got infected with something worse than COVID, basically. And, and, you know, so and so got infected with something that hopefully they'll come out of at some point, but it's going to be hard for them to undo the damage that they've done to relationships, to the country, frankly, to their reputation.

• 4:16Speaker 02

  And so, so I guess what I'm saying is that COVID is a virus, but there are other viruses out there. There's the virus, right, of conspiracy theories. There's the virus, you know, you see in smart people who it's like a virus of callousness. It's like, open it all up. It's just old people, right? Like, these are horrible things that people are saying, or, you know, it's, we heard this early in the pandemic, it's not any worse than the flu. And it's like, okay, a half a million people are gonna die. What are you talking about? So there's that. But then, and then on the other side of it, there's also like some magical thinking, right? There's people have been like, oh, it'll be over in two weeks. So it'll be over in a month. I've seen this with events that, you know,

• 4:56Speaker 02

  have planned where it's like, it was, it was supposed to be in March of 2020. And then they're like, we're rescheduling to June. And it's like, okay. And then the second time, they're like, we're rescheduling to July. And then they're like, we're rescheduling to August. It's like, maybe you just don't reschedule and you wait, you know, like, there's this like, well, it's important to me. It's obviously magically gonna get resolved soon. This is magically gonna go away because it's important to me because it's my wedding because it's good for my career. There's this sort of magical thinking I've seen a lot of people do. And, and, you know, they've gotten wrecked by it. I had Jaco on my podcast a couple of months ago, and he was saying like, of your clients, of the sort of leaders

• 5:40Speaker 02

  you advise, he's like, I was like, who's, who's handled it best? And he's like, the radical realists. He's like, the people who looked at it from day one, and they were like, this is serious. This is gonna be devastating. I'm gonna take every precaution. I'm gonna make every, you know, the people who made the hard decisions were the ones who have gotten through it. They're business intact. The people who kept going, well, this is just, it is gonna solve itself in a couple of weeks. So, you know, even people as recently as, as the election were like, oh, as soon as the vaccine comes, it's all gonna, and it's like, the people who did their research knew, like, no, this vaccine rollout's gonna take, take a long time. So I think the, the, the big thing I've taken from COVID is just like,

• 6:26Speaker 02

  The, the mind is not your friend. You've got to be in charge of the mind, or the mind's going to take you either to a dark place, or a naive and foolish place. And, uh, and, and that rationality is really important.

• 6:38Speaker 01

  Stockdale comes to mind in this moment, right?

• 6:41Speaker 02

  Yes, yes. The Stockdale paradox is, the optimists are the ones who get destroyed. But if you don't believe you can persevere and make it, you also get destroyed. So there needs to be this kind of, for me, the Stoics have kind of a, a pragmatic optimism. Like, it's gonna be fucking awful, but I'm gonna gut it out. You know, it's not, not, this is gonna be a walk in the park, and of course I can do it. It's gonna be like, I am prepared for the bo, the, the blows of fate.

• 7:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, awesome. All right. Uh, do you, do you have an example of a leader that has flipped turn from ego-driven to others-driven?

• 7:20Speaker 02

  That's a great, that's a great question. Um, there's not a lot of examples. Ego tends to be an infection that's very hard to kick. I mean, look, if Steve Jobs had not gotten fired, he would not have, and he needed to be fired. In retrospect, some people go, can you imagine firing Steve Jobs? It's like, if you were Steve Jobs's boss, you definitely would have fired him, and you would have been right to do so. He was totally unmanageable. He'd lost his mind. I don't think Steve Jobs manages to come back without that. Um, I talk in the book about, um, these sort of moments where everything is destroyed. Our life implodes, we fail publicly. Um, and we sort of have two choices in these moments.

• 8:03Speaker 02

  Do we, do we face and accept that uncomfortable truth and learn from it? Or do we deny it and double down? And, uh, you know, Lyndon Johnson was this sort of, you know, cocky kid who thought he was better than everyone else, who thought he would never... You know, he would, he gets his, literally gets his ass kicked like this, this kid who's, you know, dating the, the girl that, you know, that Lyndon Johnson wanted to be with, basically just beats the crap out of him on a public street in front of everyone in his small town. And, you know, Lyndon Johnson decides to go to college a few days later. It changes the course of his life. So there are moments where we experience these sort

• 8:43Speaker 02

  of humiliations or these losses and we build ourselves back up. I think that's common. But, uh, but the problem with ego is it makes it very hard to, to, to, to face that, that truth. But, and then we bury it underground and it only becomes more potent.

• 9:00Speaker 01

  I don't know if you've read, uh, Jim Collins, you know, re-skin on beyond on, but he really writes about the 20-year-old Steve and the, you know, the older Steve and really captures that well, which kind of leads to the next question.

• 9:13Speaker 02

  And I would just say,

• 9:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, sorry.

• 9:15Speaker 02

  Jim Collins also has a great book called Why the, Why the Mighty Fall.

• 9:19Speaker 01

  Awesome.

• 9:20Speaker 02

  And that's sort of the count, it's like good to great is like success and why the mighty fall is why, why, you know, successful people fail. And I think, you know, we learn,

• 9:30Speaker 02

  you, you know, it's, it's great to learn by, by trial and error, but one of the things that, that reading allows us to do is to learn by the trials and errors of other people. And really studying failure, there's a great book I love called Billion Dollar Lessons. That's all about these catastrophic failures of companies over the years. There's a great book called, uh, What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars. A million dollars when this book was written was more like 30 or 40 million dollars. But, um, you know, studying failure is really important. It's, it's, it's easy to learn the wrong lesson from success. Failure teaches us just as much. And ideally you want to learn from other people's failures. So you don't have to do it yourself.

• 10:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, leads to a Jim Collins question around five, level five leaders. Do you see that as a quantifiable evidence that humility and low ego driving long-term greatness in companies or organizations?

• 10:22Speaker 02

  So I'm not a, I'm not a, you know, an analyst. I don't, I'm not a researcher in that sense. I like to look at sort of timeless philosophical themes and illustrate them. I like to tell stories. But there's a reason that ego is hubris, as they, as they called it in the ancient world, is the theme of like every ancient poem, every ancient play, every ancient myth or fable. There is almost no piece of art or story or religious tradition or philosophical school that says ego is a good thing, right? Ego will make you better.

• 11:03Speaker 02

  It is the, the probably the most, you know, pride goeth before the fall. It is the most timelessly warned against, you know, sort of trait of all the, the, you know, the sort of human inclinations. Ego is the one, ego and arrogance and, and all of its sort of components is, is a reason it's warned against. I think when you look at what, one of the reasons you're seeing in the, in the pandemic, a lot of sort of female-led countries have done quite well. I think in some aspects, it's a, it's an absence of ego. I think not only have, have countries run by women tended to fare quite well during the pandemic, but

• 11:47Speaker 02

  women who are scientists have like knocked it out of the park. And that's because, you know, the, the scientific mind is about, you know, the sort of admission of ignorance. It's about hypotheses rather than certainties. So, you know, I think there, there are certainly many, many examples that we could point to. My, my argument is, is

• 12:09Speaker 02

  There are many successful leaders who are egotistical. I think you'd be hard pressed to find one whose sustained success was caused by their ego. Just, just as when you look at art, it's been a lot of artists who have, you know, struggled with impulsive behavior or addiction and so on. You know, Jimi Hendrix was not a great guitar player and musician because he was a drug addict. He was such a great musician and guitar player that he was able to carry that drug addiction for a time until eventually, you know, it destroyed him.

• 12:48Ryan Holiday?

  Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it and I'll see you next episode.