Make Them Do Their Own Stuff | Ask DS

There is a great story about a young Spartan woman, Gorgo, who would one day become queen. Despite her royal status, like all Spartans she was raised to be self-sufficient, with no frills or needless luxury. So imagine Gorgo’s surprise when she witnessed a distinguished visitor to Sparta have his shoes put on by a servant. “Look, Father,” she said innocently to her father, King Leonidas, “the stranger has no hands!” Sadly, for some of us, it could just as easily be deduced that our kids have no hands. And no brains. We put on their clothes for them. We make their decisions. We clear the road in front like a snowplow. We hover like a helicopter, just in case something goes wrong. We do everything for them. Then we wonder why they are helpless.---And in today's Ask Daily Stoic, Ryan answers questions from a virtual audience as part of a Stoicism Q&A session. Topics covered include the concept of the Passions, how to read the classics, the representation of the Virtues in The Gladiator, and more.✉️ 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. We're 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?

  Make them do their own stuff. There is a great story about a young Spartan woman, Gorgo, who would one day become queen. Despite her royal status, like all Spartans, she was raised to be self-sufficient, with no frills or needless luxury. So imagine Gorgo's surprise when she witnessed a distinguished visitor to Sparta have his shoes put on by a servant. "Look, Father," she said innocently to her father, the king Leonidas, "that stranger has no hands." Sadly, for some of us, it could just as easily be deduced that our kids have no hands and no brains. We put their clothes on for them. We make their decisions. We clear the road in front like a snowplow. We hover like a helicopter,

• 1:30Ryan Holiday?

  just in case something goes wrong. We do everything for them. And then we wonder why they are helpless. We wonder why they have trouble with anxiety or low self-esteem. Confidence is something you earn. It comes from self-sufficiency. It comes from experience. And when we coddle and baby them, when we take away their hands, we deprive them of these critical assets. And it's not right, and it's not fair.

• 2:05Speaker 01

  I'm kind of new to Stoicism, so I don't know all the Latin phrases and all that, but I still kind of get stuck on the passions aspect.

• 2:14Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 2:14Speaker 01

  And I'm wondering if it's because the Greeks and the ancients, they defined passions as different, because I understand the lust and anger and desire keeping them in the balance, but you know, kind of finding your flow and what you're really engaged in wanting to do, I find that as a passion too.

• 2:30Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 2:31Speaker 01

  So maybe if you could talk about that, or put something in the chat of where I can learn more about that.

• 2:35Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, if you look at the Wikipedia page for the passions, let's pull it up here. "In philosophy and religion, the passions are the instinctive, emotional, primitive drives in human beings, including, for example, lust, anger, aggression, and jealousy, which a human being must restrain, channel, develop, and sublimate in order to be possessed by wisdom." So I think that's a good definition, because it's not just saying you are sublimi-- is that just saying you suppress them? In some cases, it's about channeling them or developing them properly, right? So obviously, passion, as we speak about it in the modern world, is sort of the idea

• 3:20Ryan Holiday?

  of like, loving what you do, being committed to it, having a calling or something. I don't think the Stoics would be instinctively, you know, instinctively object to that, but there's a great, you know, there's a great chapter in Cal Newport's book, which I know we talked about him last time, but he and I were just talking about this, and his book's so good, you can't ignore it, they can't ignore you. It talks about, like, I think it's a woman who was really unhappy with her job, and her passion was yoga, so she quits her job in a sort of a fit of inspiration and opens a yoga studio, which of course, she has no experience, or qualifications, or money to do, right?

• 4:05Ryan Holiday?

  So basically, her passions, her passion, which is a good thing, it's good to want to master something, blind her to the reality of the situation at hand. So I think Cal's point was like, don't do it. I would say maybe the middle ground is-- Sure, you can pursue this passion for yoga, but it has to be developed and sublimated and channeled so you can effectively exploit it and utilize it rather than be used by it in the way that, you know, you get some feeling of lust or anger and it carries you over and it makes you do something that almost immediately after you have a lot of regret about.

• 4:48Speaker 01

  Gotcha. Okay, that makes a lot more sense. Thanks for that clarification on that. Appreciate it.

• 4:51Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, of course. Lance?

• 4:54Speaker 02

  Hey, Ryan.

• 4:55Ryan Holiday?

  Hi.

• 4:56Speaker 02

  My question is related to the, I guess, more the mechanics of actually reading the source material.

• 5:01Ryan Holiday?

  Okay.

• 5:02Speaker 02

  I've only started reading that I've got Discourses. That's my first foray into the actual material. And my impression is that it's not the same as reading fiction where you're not going to plow through 40 pages all at once. Like, how do you read it? How do you digest it? Like mechanically?

• 5:19Ryan Holiday?

  Sure. So it's always important to, and this is why the intros of the books are really important, but whenever I read an ancient text of philosophy, I also go and I read the Wikipedia page. I try to read some articles about it. I try to read the Wikipedia page of the author. I try to get some understanding of the context in which this was created. For Epictetus, this is a great example. So Epictetus did not write the book that you're holding, right? But you could tell this from the title because it's called Discourses, but it's not even his version of the Discourses. What happened is, you know, 2,000 years ago, Epictetus is giving some lectures

• 6:00Ryan Holiday?

  and one of his students, Arian, is there writing it down. So this is like if you, this would be like, if it turns out that one of your college professors is considered, in retrospect, one of the wisest people that ever lived, and I went through a box of stuff in your basement and I found your notes from that class, right? Like, it would be kind of a snapshot of a snapshot of a snapshot. Like, we don't know why Epictetus was talking about. This, we don't even know if these are exact quotes or not. So, so it's important that you understand the context in which Epictetus is talking about, which is really, he's kind of lecturing to a group.

• 6:42Ryan Holiday?

  And then that those notes are kind of being sort of transcribed back to us. So I think Epictetus is good to read in chunks. To really like, you know, to read a few paragraphs at a time. I like, I, I mentioned some of the, the Princeton University Press editions of like specific collections where it's sort of organized by themes. There's also an even more accessible edition of Epictetus. It's so accessible that some people sort of object to the translations. But Sharon LaBelle did a book called The Art of Living. But you can read, it might be good to read these two side by side. The Painted Porch, or sorry, The Art of Living and The Discourses.

• 7:26Ryan Holiday?

  But that, that would be a, a good way to think about,

• 7:31Ryan Holiday?

  think about Epictetus, that you're kind of reading them in chunks, but that you're also reading the lecture notes of a student. And so it's not designed to be super readable. Awesome. Thank you. Yes. Um, what else?

• 7:46Speaker 03

  Hi.

• 7:47Ryan Holiday?

  Hi.

• 7:48Speaker 03

  Hey, Ryan, you inspired me to watch Gladiator.

• 7:51Ryan Holiday?

  Oh.

• 7:53Speaker 03

  And so I'm watching it, I'm going, well, shit. He got annihilated while he was practicing the virtues. So, um, so my question to you is, how many times do you go down before you say, fuck the virtues? I'm gonna annihilate someone back.

• 8:13Ryan Holiday?

  I, I guess, uh, I guess when I watched that movie, I don't see Commodus as, as winning. You know what I mean? And this is a really important Stoic idea, which is that in the short term, there might be certain advantages. You may be giving up certain advantages by deciding to live by a code.

• 8:35Ryan Holiday?

  But, uh, but, but the alternative is, is far more terrifying and unimaginable. And then, I mean, look, in the end, Commodus does, does lose and, and Rome is sort of restored. It's a fictional movie, of course, but you know, does, um, does, uh,

• 8:58Ryan Holiday?

  You know, does Commodus sort of have more fun from time to time? Does he get to indulge in sort of vices that Maximus would never allow himself? Of course, but I think Commodus is a great example of the real cost of doing that, which is it comes at the cost of your soul and your humanity. Let's do "Will Me." Is that how you pronounce that?

• 9:23Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 9:24Ryan Holiday?

  Hi.

• 9:26Speaker 04

  Hi, Ryan. Well, thank you so much. It's an honor. It's an honor.

• 9:32Ryan Holiday?

  Thank you.

• 9:33Speaker 04

  I've been following you for a couple of years at least, and I admire a lot your work. I even like, it's an inspiration for me. My question for you is something that you, well, about Marcus Aurelius, right? That life isn't just about business. I am the kind of person that I'm an execution person. I like to be busy. I like to do a bunch of things. I like to plan a lot. And it's almost like slavery for me.

• 10:15Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, I know that feeling very well.

• 10:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, like I see you with your farm, with your journal, and I realize that I need to make time for meditating, for my journaling, for things like that. But in the end, I, well, I think you've got me, right?

• 10:38Ryan Holiday?

  No, I totally do. So my wife catches me doing this pretty often, and she goes like, "This is not an item for your to-do list, right? You can't just put this on here and just go from thing to thing to thing. This is not how one lives life." And so I think that's what Marcus is saying to himself. So don't be all about business. Don't turn everything into a job. Don't make everything a process or a system to be optimized. That's just ultimately a... Not just a recipe for misery, but it strips out the meaning and the ability to experience, you know, the sort of the moment that you're in. So, you know, you mentioned

• 11:18Ryan Holiday?

  my farm. I mean, I had to make some decisions a few years ago about sort of how I wanted to set up my life to sort of counterbalance those impulses or urges. So like, if I'm living in New York City, I have more trouble controlling that impulse than I do out in rural Texas. So I'm not saying that everyone should or could do that. I'm just saying, like, you kind of got to figure out, you know, what makes you tick and what parts of those you want to encourage. And then, and then sort of how you counterbalance those

• 12:00Ryan Holiday?

  things. So it might just be how you set up your life, how you set up your day, what sort of, you know, whether it's, hey, you know, if I have my phone in hand, I'm going to be working. So when I come home, I put my phone in a drawer and I don't touch it for an hour, right? That sort of like, sort of, I might think about stuff like that.

• 12:19Speaker 04

  Thank you. Thank you, Ryan.

• 12:21Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 12:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 12:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'm trying to figure out, you know, how to associate some of these things like the journaling, the meditations to some feel like executing something.

• 12:33Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. And, and look, I think the morning before you get sucked into other stuff is the best time to do that.

• 12:40Speaker 04

  I see.