You Are An Artist (Whether You Know It Or Not) | Watch Over Your Perceptions

Maybe you don’t see yourself as an artist, just like Socrates didn’t see himself as an athlete, but maybe you are. According to Mikel Jollett, the founder of the band The Airborne Toxic Event and the author of a fascinating and haunting memoir about his troubled childhood, we have to “take our pain and make it useful. That’s what it means to be an artist.” His own art came from growing up in a cult his mother had joined, then living with her series of messed up husbands, struggling with addictions, getting in trouble at school, not knowing what he ought to do with his life. But all this struggle ultimately shaped him and in turn shaped the art he would make.-P. S. Building the skill to take the challenges life throws at you and transform them into something useful takes practice. That’s why we created the Daily Stoic Challenge Deck, full of actionable daily challenges for you to push and develop yourself year round. Bundle your pack with the Challenge Deck Vol. II and save—available over at the Daily Stoic Store! If you want to do more reading on these topics, we highly recommend Dying Everyday by James Romm (and we have a podcast with him on this topic). Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe is a great modern read on one of the biggest crimes of the 20th/21st centuries. And for more on the life of Seneca and Thrasea and some Stoics who did resist Nero, check out Lives of the Stoics (signed copies here).-And today's Daily Stoic Journal reading, Ryan discusses what the Stoics teach us about keeping constant watch over the flood of perceptions that fill our minds. Ryan quotes Mark Manson's Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life reminding us to find the right things to care about.✉️ 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. Each day, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, illustrated with stories from history, current events, and literature to help you be better at what you do. And at the beginning of the week, we try to do a deeper dive, setting a kind of Stoic intention for the week, something to meditate on, something to think on, something to leave you with, to journal about, whatever it is you happen to be doing. So let's get into it.

• 0:36Ryan Holiday?

  You're an artist, whether you know it or not. Maybe you don't think of Socrates as an athlete, but that's how Epictetus described him. "The man was a ball player," Epictetus said, "catching what life threw at him and throwing it back. And not easy throws either, but war and pain and being misunderstood and even eventually being sentenced to death." Socrates handled this all with the grace and the skill of an elite athlete. Maybe you don't see yourself as an artist, just like Socrates didn't see himself as an athlete, but maybe you are. According to Michael Jollett, the founder of the band The Airborne Toxic Event and the author of a fascinating and haunting memoir about his troubled childhood, he said that "we have to take our pain and make it useful. That's what it means to be

• 1:21Ryan Holiday?

  an artist." And his own art came from growing up in a cult that his mother had joined and then living with her series of messed up husbands, struggling with addictions, getting in trouble at school, not knowing what to do with his own life. But this struggle ultimately shaped him and in turn shaped the art that he would make. And Marcus Rilius wrote about how we have to turn our obstacles into fuel, that we convert the impediments to action into new opportunities for action. That's art, that's sports, that's philosophy. And it's a highly skilled thing, and certainly not easy, but it's the only way. Because life is going to keep throwing stuff at us. We're going to experience pain and suffering.

• 2:00Ryan Holiday?

  All we can do is catch it and throw it back. All we can do is find some way to make it useful. It's funny, I'm working on the 10th anniversary edition of The Obstacle is the Way. So this is right now, and that's basically what I'm talking about in that book. And that's what my life for the last 10 years have been, big and small, certainly not on the scale of some people, of Marcus, or, you know, an artist who goes through a cult. But we're all trying to take what life throws at us and turn it into something. That's when, when they say the obstacle is the way, they don't mean that everything's magically going to become better and awesome, but it's that we have to use what happens to our own benefit, even if it's just making art that comforts or entertains other people.

• 2:42Ryan Holiday?

  I've got a The Obstacle is the Way coin, of course, that's one form of art, right? It was a cool opportunity to do, you can check that out at [email protected]. There's a ring, there's a necklace. And if you haven't read the book yet, I hope you will, we made a cool leather edition. You can grab that, [email protected].

• 3:23Ryan Holiday?

  Watch over your perceptions. Every moment brings a flood of impressions of the world around us, and our minds are filled with the perceptions that arise with them. The Stoics teach us that we must keep a constant watch over this flood, as if we are standing guard to protect something of vital importance. What is it that we are protecting? Our peace of mind, clarity, and freedom, all of which are anchored in our perceptions. Epictetus reminds us that we need to pay attention to what matters and learn how to ignore so many of the relentless provocations that come our way.

• 4:01Ryan Holiday?

  That's from the Daily Stoic Journal, obviously. And here we have Epictetus telling us, "Keep constant guard over your perceptions, for it is no small thing you are protecting, but your respect, trustworthiness, and steadiness, peace of mind, freedom from pain and fear. In a word, your freedom. For what would you sell these things?" Epictetus Discourses. "An important place to begin philosophy is this: a clear perception of one's own ruling principle." That's Epictetus's Discourses as well. "I don't agree with those who plunge headlong into the middle of the flood and who, accepting a turbulent life, struggle daily in great spirit with difficult circumstances. The wise person will endure that, but won't choose it,

• 4:47Ryan Holiday?

  choosing to be at peace rather than at war." Seneca Moral Letters 28.

• 4:55Ryan Holiday?

  It's tricky, right? I mean, the Stoics ask us to be active. They ask us to be involved. They ask us to be engaged. And then somehow, they expect us to be at peace, to not be bothered by what's happening in the world. That's the tricky thing, right? Like, you can go off in your cave, right? You can go on your 10-day meditation retreat and get some semblance of peace or stillness. The tricky thing, and this is what I was trying to write in that book as well, the tricky thing is to find peace now, within yourself, while engaged, while fully aware of what's happening in the world. What you don't know about, what you tune out,

• 5:38Ryan Holiday?

  what you pretend doesn't exist, you know, it's easy not to be bothered by. But the key to Stoicism is finding the ability, the strength, to have that peace and stillness despite everything that's happening. I open Stillness as the Key with the story of Seneca trying to write a letter to Lucilius, and he's in this noisy apartment in Rome. And he's trying to, you know, he's saying, "Look, you know, I didn't choose this. I had to do it." That's the cost of what his philosophy is demanding to him. The Epicurean said, "Hey, go flee to the garden." Seneca has to be engaged. He has to live in the city. He has to be involved. But can he find peace within that? And he says that you can. You can find peace.

• 6:23Ryan Holiday?

  You can become, as Marcus Aurelius talked about, the rock that the waves are crashing over, but eventually become still around. And we do this by keeping guard over our perception, as Epictetus is saying. It's knowing what to care about and what not to care about. You know, I've had Mark Manson on the podcast before. You know, the subtle art of not giving a fuck is not caring about anything. It's about finding the right things to care about and things not to care about. So that sort of discernment is really essential to managing our emotions and our perceptions, which is the theme in the journal this month. You know, as we say, every moment brings a flood of impressions, a flood of news, a flood of interruptions, a flood of things that we have to,

• 7:08Ryan Holiday?

  that we're called to have opinions about, to react to, that are vying for our attention. And our ability to stand guard against this, to let the good things in, to keep the bad things out, that's the key. That's the struggle. That's the fight that we're all engaged in. So, you know, even me, obviously, I live out in the country a little bit. I live the life of a writer, which allows me, you know, some shelter from the craziness of, you know, a person who has to commute into a, you know, a major city and work in an office with dozens of other people or hundreds of other people and TVs blaring and phone calls and meetings. And yet, even there, even amidst my sort of privileged situation,

• 7:53Ryan Holiday?

  I have to decide what to let in and what not to let in. You know, what role does the phone play in your life? What role does, you know, your colleagues or your partners play in your life? You know, how disciplined are you about staying on task while you're in it? How long are you able to maintain your focus on what matters? Even if nothing's going on, is your mind the enemy of itself? Are you drawing yourself towards here? Are you drifting or are you daydreaming? How to stay focused, how to concentrate like a Roman, as Marcus said, that's the most important thing. And so Having a clear perception about our own mind, our own limitations, our own temptations. This is really the key. That's what we're working on here. That's what I want you to think about today and this week.

• 8:38Ryan Holiday?

  Remember, keep constant guard over your perceptions, for it's no small thing you are protecting. You're protecting your respect, your trustworthiness, your steadiness, your peace of mind, freedom from pain and fear. In a word, what you're protecting is your freedom.