Daily Stoic Sundays: Life Comes at You Fast. So You Better Be Ready.

In today’s episode, Ryan reads his latest article about the unpredictability of life, and how we should always be prepared for the worst and the best that it has to offer us. Read the original article here: https://geni.us/rLEd0This episode is brought to you by WHOOP. WHOOP is a fitness wearable that provides personalized insights on how well you’re sleeping, how much you’ve recovered from your workouts, and how much you’re stressed out from each day. It’s the ultimate whole-body tracker for someone who needs an all-in-one solution. Visit WHOOP.com and enter STOIC at checkout to save 15% on your order.***If you enjoyed today’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/ryanholidayInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/ryanholiday/Facebook: http://facebook.com/ryanholidayYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicSee 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.

• 0:04Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Weekend Edition of The Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something that can help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, wisdom, and temperance. And here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers, we reflect, we prepare, we think deeply about the challenging issues of our time, and we work through this philosophy in a way that's more possible here when we're not rushing to work or to get the kids to school, when we have the time to think, to go for a walk,

• 0:46Ryan Holiday?

  to sit with our journals, and to prepare for what the future will bring.

• 0:53Ryan Holiday?

  "Life comes at you fast. Life comes at you fast, so you better be ready." In 1880, Theodore Roosevelt wrote to his brother, "My happiness is so great that it makes me almost afraid." In October of that year, life got even better. As he wrote in his diary the night of his wedding to Alice Hathaway Lee, "Our intense happiness is too sacred to be written about." He would consider it to be one of the best years of his life. He got married, wrote a book, attended law school, and won his first election for public office. The streak continued. In 1883, he wrote, "I can imagine nothing more happy in life than an evening spent

• 1:34Ryan Holiday?

  in the cozy little sitting room before a bright fire of soft coal, my books all around me, and playing backgammon with my own dainty wife." And that's how he and Alice spent that cold winter as it crawled into the new year. He wrote in late January that he felt he was fully coming into his own. "I feel now as though I have the reins in my hand," he said. And on February 12, 1884, his first daughter was born. Two days later, his wife would be dead of Bright's disease, now known as kidney failure. His mother had died only hours earlier in the same house of typhoid fever. Roosevelt marked that day in his diary with a large X. Next to it, he wrote,

• 2:19Ryan Holiday?

  "The light has gone out of my life." As they say, "Things come at you fast."

• 2:26Ryan Holiday?

  Had the last few weeks not been an example of that? In December, the Dow was at 28,000. Things were good enough that people were complaining about the war on Christmas and debating the skin color of Santa Claus. In January, the Dow was at 29,000 and people were outraged about the recent Oscar nominations. In February, it reached a staggering 29,568 and Delta Airlines' stock fell 25% in a week because people argued over a message from the CEO about passengers reclining their seats. Even in early March, there were news stories about Wendy's entering the breakfast war and a free stock trading app outage that caused people to miss a big market rally.

• 3:10Ryan Holiday?

  And that was just in the news. Think about what you busied yourself with at home during that same period. Maybe you and your wife were looking at plans to remodel your kitchen. Maybe you were finally going to pull that trigger on a Tesla Model S for yourself, the $150,000 one with the ludicrous speed package. Maybe you were fuming that Amazon took an extra day to deliver a package. Maybe you were frustrated that your kid's room was a mess. And now, how quaint and stupid does all that seem? Depending on the day you look, years of market gains have been taken back. Forty-seven million people are projected to be added to the unemployment rolls. The death count of what was dismissed as a mere respiratory flu or a hoax is now inching

• 3:54Ryan Holiday?

  towards 170,000, and there are millions of cases confirmed worldwide. There have been runs on supplies. Hospitals in certain countries are maxing out on ventilators. The global economy has essentially ground to a halt. Life comes at us fast, doesn't it? It can change in an instant. Everything you built, everyone you hold dear can be taken from you for absolutely no reason. Just as easily, you can be taken from them. And this is why the Stoics said we need to be prepared constantly for the twists and turns of fortune. It's why Seneca said that "nothing happens to the wise man contrary to his expectation because the wise man has considered every possibility." Even the cruel and heartbreaking ones.

• 4:38Ryan Holiday?

  And yet, even Seneca was blindsided by a health scare in his early twenties that forced him to spend nearly a decade in Egypt to recover. He lost his father less than a year before he lost his firstborn son. And 20 days after burying his son, he was exiled by the emperor. He lived through the destruction of one city by a fire and another by an earthquake before being exiled two more times. One needs only to read his letters and essays written on a rock off the coast of Italy to get a sense that even a philosopher can get knocked on their ass and feel sorry for themselves from time to time. What do we do? Well, first, knowing that life comes at us fast, we should always be prepared.

• 5:20Ryan Holiday?

  Seneca wrote that the fighter who has seen his own blood, who has felt his teeth rattle beneath his opponent's fist, who has been down in body but not in spirit, only they can go into the ring confident of their chances of winning. They know that they can take getting bloodied and bruised. They know what the darkness before the proverbial dawn feels like. They have a true and accurate sense for the rhythms of a fight and what winning requires. That sense only comes from getting knocked around. That sense is only possible because of their training. In his own life, Seneca bloodied and bruised himself through a practice called premeditatio malorum, a premeditation of evils. Rehearsing his plans, say, to take a trip, he would go over the things that could go wrong to prevent that trip from happening.

• 6:05Ryan Holiday?

  A storm could spring up, the captain could fall ill, the ship could be attacked by pirates, he could be banished to the island of Corsica the morning of the trip. By doing what he called premeditatio malorum, Seneca was always prepared for disruption and always working that disruption into his plans. He was fitted for defeat or victory. He stepped into the ring confident that he could take any blow. Nothing happened contrary to his expectations. Second, we should always be careful not to tempt fate. In 2016, General Michael Flynn stood on the stage in the Republican National Convention and led some 20,000 people in an impromptu chant of lock her up, lock. Her up about his enemy Hillary Clinton.

• 6:49Ryan Holiday?

  And when Trump won, he was swept into office in a whirlwind of success and power. But then, just 24 hours into his day, Flynn was fired for lying to the Vice President about conversations he had with the Russian Ambassador to the United States. He would admit this lie, and he would be brought up on charges and convicted of lying to the FBI. Life comes at us fast, but that doesn't mean we should be stupid and we shouldn't be arrogant. Third, we have to hang on. Remember that in the depths of both of Seneca's darkest moments, he was unexpectedly saved. From exile, he was suddenly recalled to be the Emperor's Tudor. In the words of the historian Richard M.

• 7:30Ryan Holiday?

  Gumiere, fortune, whom Seneca as a Stoic often ridicules, came to his rescue. But as Churchill, as always, put it better, sometimes when fortune scowls most spitefully, she is preparing her most dazzling gifts. Life is like this. It gives us bad breaks, heartbreakingly bad breaks, and it also gives us incredible lucky breaks. Sometimes the ball that should have gone in bounces out. Sometimes the ball that had no business going in surprises both the athlete and the crowd, when eventually, after several bounces, somehow it manages to pass through the net. When we are going through a bad break, we should never forget fortune's power to redeem us. When we're walking through the roses, we should never forget how easily the thorns

• 8:15Ryan Holiday?

  can tear us apart, how quickly we can become humbled. Sometimes life goes your way, sometimes it doesn't. And that is what Theodore Roosevelt learned too. Despite what he wrote in his diary that day in 1884, the light did not completely go out of his life. Sure, it flickered. It looked like the flame had been cruelly extinguished. But with time and incredible energy and force of will, he came back from those tragedies. He became a great father, a great husband, and a great leader. He came back and the world was better for it. He was better for it. Life comes at us fast today, tomorrow, when you least expect it. So be ready, be strong, and don't let your life be snuffed out.

• 8:58Ryan Holiday?

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