You Have To Anticipate This Kind Of Behavior | Ask DS

In Richard III and in Othello, Shakespeare has two different characters utter the same line. Both Iago and a nameless orphan say, “I cannot think it.”In both cases, the news they are faced with—the conclusion they are being asked to accept—is simply too much. The Shakespearean scholar, Richard Greenblatt, calls this phrase a kind of motto for those who can’t wrap their mind around perfidy. He’s not being condescending, for it’s a very common experience. Our naivete, our willingness to assume the best about others, leaves us open to betrayal and disillusionment. Which is why the Stoics spend so much time on this very topic.---And in today's Ask Daily Stoic, Ryan answers questions from students of the Daily Stoic Stoicism 101 course. The topics that he covers include the need for balance when pursuing mastery of skills, how he walks the Stoic walk in daily life, the Stoics' take on the Law of Attraction, and more. Check out the full 14-day course, Stoicism 101: Ancient Philosophy For Your Actual Life, at https://store.dailystoic.com/products/101. ✉️ 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. Thank you for listening, and we hope this is of use to you.

• 0:45Ryan Holiday?

  Do you practice for rejection? Part of the reason we're afraid of things is that we're unfamiliar. We don't know what it's like to bomb onstage in front of people, but it seems bad, so we avoid any scenario where something like that might happen. We've been turned down or blown off once or twice, asking someone out, asking for help. And it was unpleasant enough that we've decided that we do not want to explore those feelings any further. We don't know or don't remember what it's like to be living paycheck to paycheck anymore. So we make our financial decisions accordingly. The result is that this uncertainty, this unfamiliarity, looms large in our lives. It makes us conservative. It makes us keep to ourselves. It makes us struggle alone by ourselves.

• 1:29Ryan Holiday?

  It turns us away from potential opportunities to meet someone new, to do something cool, to start our own thing. The famous philosopher Diogenes the Cynic was once seen begging for money from a statue. "What on earth are you doing?" someone asked. "I'm getting practice in being refused," Diogenes replied. We've talked to a couple of professional baseball players on the Daily Stoic Podcast. Ian Happ and Scott Olberg are both two Musk listens. We've talked to professional basketball players like Chris Bosh or Khatima Mobley, entrepreneurs like Tim Ferriss and Rob Dyrdek. And one thing they'll all tell you is that a person who is afraid to strike out, afraid to miss, afraid to fail, is a person who will not succeed. Seneca actually practiced poverty once a month,

• 2:13Ryan Holiday?

  trying to get up close and personal with want and deprivation. He said it was so that he could say to those fears of his, the fears that we all have of losing everything or taking a setback. So he could say to that risk aversion, "Is this what you so feared?" When you practice deprivation or rejection, when you no longer fear embarrassment or messing up, then you have more energy to focus on the difficult tasks in front of you, and you are no longer hamstrung. And what you have is the most important virtue of them all, courage.

• 2:48Ryan Holiday?

  Obviously, courage is the first of the four daily Stoic virtues. It's also what I write about in the new book Courage is Calling, which came out, is that in 2021? If you haven't checked that out, it's the first in the Four Virtues series. It's followed by Discipline is Destiny. And that's also why I have the Four Virtues tattooed on my wrist, courage being represented by the lion here on my left wrist. Anyways, courage, something I'm working on, something I hope you're working on, and talk to y'all soon.

• 3:32Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to a Thursday episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. We're doing a Q and A today that's actually drawn from the Stoicism 101 course. I think it's one of the best courses we've done over at Daily Stoic. If you're looking to get introduced to Stoicism, you want to take your study of it to the next level, you want to go back to basics, or you want to build a really good foundation of what Stoicism is and how you can use it. That's what the course is about. I'll link to that in today's show notes. But this is drawing from one of the many Q and As we've done as part of the session. People got to come in and ask me a bunch of questions. We're talking about some of Marcus really says stuff about being tolerant with others and strict with yourself, that we can't hold people to standards that they never asked for, and how you sort of think

• 4:15Ryan Holiday?

  about your friend, how a Stoic thinks about their friend group, and how you try to be a positive influence. So that's where today's Q and A is coming from. It's just a selection, and I hope you join us in Stoicism 101. You can ask some of your own questions. I'll link to that in today's show notes, or just type in Stoicism 101 in the Daily Stoic store.

• 4:36Speaker 01

  Hello, everyone.

• 4:37Ryan Holiday?

  Hi.

• 4:38Speaker 01

  Fun fact, I was able to go to the Painted Porch bookstore over the weekend.

• 4:42Ryan Holiday?

  Oh, amazing.

• 4:43Speaker 01

  So.

• 4:44Ryan Holiday?

  Thank you, and I love your shirt.

• 4:46Speaker 01

  Oh, thank you. I know you like yes to you, too. You're on the podcast. Um, so my question was, I was reading Lives of the Stoic, and I noticed a passage where it compared Seneca to saying as if Emerson had also been a philosopher, a writer, a politician. And in today's email, it was, you know, comparing or just saying how Seneca was also a playwright. Zeno was a merchant, and so all these people had other trades that they worked with. So where I'm struggling is kind of finding a middle ground between maybe David Epstein's range, where you can dabble in a lot of things, and then Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 Hours, because a lot of us have so many interests, not just in work, but in life, and how you juggle all of that.

• 5:30Ryan Holiday?

  So, two things. So I had David on the podcast, and I think it's worth listening to. I love that book. There's also a handful of really good interviews with David and Malcolm, where they sort of talk through their differences together, which they're like running buddies, which I think is hilarious. So I think it's a balance, right? If you're sort of only specialized in one thing, it makes you sort of very, you can be very good at it, but you're also sort of very fragile and vulnerable, and you lack context. If you're doing a million things, you're lacking the ability to really get good at any of those things.

• 6:15Ryan Holiday?

  When I look at Seneca, I see, you know, sort of being a politician, being a writer, and being a, let's say, being a politician, being a philosopher, and being a playwright as...

• 6:28Ryan Holiday?

  Distinct but interrelated areas that were making so so his experiences in the real world at the height of Rome Rome's power and influence is obviously being in informing his understanding of the philosophy, just as the philosophy is informing, you know, his his sort of obligations as a politician. Then I would say on top of that, when you read his plays, it's very clear to me that what Seneca is talking about in those plays are things that he's not free to talk about literally in his writing. So it's almost as if the plays were an outlet for what he's seeing and witnessing that he couldn't express

• 7:12Ryan Holiday?

  in any other medium. So I guess it there it's not like, you know, he was a playwright and doing some completely unrelated thing that that all the tasks are feeding into each other in some way. So I think if you can get a synergy going, it's better than if you're if you're doing things that are diametrically opposed to each other.

• 7:34Speaker 01

  So it's okay to do things kind of like in season, not everything at the same time?

• 7:39Ryan Holiday?

  I think that's right. And then I guess the other thing to look at with Seneca would be where did he do those things at different phases in his life? A lot of his philosophical writings come after he's been exiled from politics, right? And even his plays, again, seemed to be things that he thought were important, but didn't have the ability to speak about, you know, dirt because Nero was such a tyrant, that his plays were a way to sort of get those ideas out in the world, as opposed to just being a totally ridiculous, unrelated, you know, side project.

• 8:13Speaker 01

  Awesome. No, this is great stuff to think about. Thank you.

• 8:16Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 8:18Speaker 02

  Hey Ryan, thanks.

• 8:19Ryan Holiday?

  Hi.

• 8:19Speaker 02

  Big fan of your work. So this parallels, I think, with today's email regarding success. And also in the sense of learning the philosophy versus the daily application of the philosophy. And since obviously we have you in the spotlight, I'd like to ask, where do you feel you yourself as a practitioner, and obviously someone who probably knows this better than most people that walk the earth, where do you really struggle? Where do you really feel like you fall short? And I, like you, am a father of, I've actually got a six-year-old and an eight-year-old girl. So I'm walking that path, you know, myself. So I know that's probably in there somewhere.

• 8:59Ryan Holiday?

  No, I would say that's...

• 9:00Speaker 02

  Share some of that with us.

• 9:02Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I'd say that's certainly at the top of the list. I don't think anyone who studies philosophy is then batting 100% with those ideas when you have kids, especially little kids. So, and this again, I think goes to the point of like, like, let's say you study philosophy and then you decide to live this kind of monkish life where, you know, you don't have any responsibilities, you don't have any kids, you don't have relationships. You know, in some respects, that that makes the philosophy easier because you're not being challenged. At the same time, it makes a lot of the ideas kind of worthless because they're not actually rooted in any real experiences. And it makes it very hard for you to communicate these ideas with other people because again,

• 9:47Ryan Holiday?

  you know, you don't, you don't exist in, in the same reality, the same, the same shared experiences as most people. So I would say, yeah, certainly kids, and then where with kids, probably being present, I would say is a struggle. And then temper slash like, you know, sort of patience are probably the biggest challenges. And I was just, I was just working on something pertaining to Marcus Aurelius and, and... The writer was noting that the theme of getting angry appears so many times in meditations that it's impossible not to assume that Marcus really has had a temper.

• 10:30Ryan Holiday?

  Right. And so I think it is important to note that the Stoics were not perfect. And perhaps the things they talked about most were the things that they were worst at. And you could probably deduce that from my writing as well. Anything you see that I'm talking about over and over again, you could kind of safely assume I'm talking about my own struggles with that same thing. Because what I think you're really doing with Stoicism is you're trying to get your own thoughts, your own beliefs, your own principles sort of restated in as clear a form as possible. And in that way, it's just, it's like a reminder, okay, like, here's what, here's who I want to be, here's how I want this to go. And then

• 11:13Ryan Holiday?

  you're dealing with a grouchy four year old who's, you know, running around like a crazy person, you know, how can you actually sort of get those two things as aligned as possible? That that's the struggle that we're all in for sure. Thank you. Thank you very much. Of course.

• 11:29Speaker 03

  All righty. Joel asked about the Stoics take on the law of attraction.

• 11:36Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 11:37Speaker 03

  Creating as opposed to reacting and accepting life as it is. Understands that the secret is unrealistic, but I do think there's something to the quantum field.

• 11:48Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 11:48Speaker 03

  I guess maybe just not enough information about this at the moment in time.

• 11:51Ryan Holiday?

  So there's a, there is a line in meditations that maybe if you were really looking for confirmation of the, of the law of attraction, which, you know, the law of attraction, as I understand, is that like attracts like what we think about, what we spend time sort of manifesting, what you put on a vision board, you know, you're helping create into reality. So when Marx really says, our life is dyed by the color of our thoughts, it might seem like he's talking about the law of attraction.

• 12:27Ryan Holiday?

  I would very much disagree with that idea. And the Stoics believe that our perceptions mattered, of course. And when Marx is saying that our life is died by our thoughts, I think he means like, if you're a depressive, pessimistic, negative person, you're going to see everything pessimistically and negatively. If you're a cynical person, you're going to see a lot to be cynical about. That doesn't have anything to do with what actually happens. And in fact, Marcus even talks about, when he talks about sort of meditating on death, he says, "You're not tempting fate. You're not manifesting death by thinking about death. You're quite the contrary.

• 13:10Ryan Holiday?

  By thinking about death, you're creating a better life." To be flip about it, I think the law of attraction is horseshit. I think it's sort of propagated by people who realize that it's a lot easier to sell books if you tell people what they want to hear rather than tell them the truth. And in the article, I tell this funny story about, I'm forgetting her name, but the woman who popularized the law of attraction in The Secret. Several years ago, she was selling her mansion in Santa Barbara. It's like a $20 million mansion, which should give you some perspective on how much money there is in telling people what they want to hear. Anyways, she lists the mansion for $20 million.

• 13:53Ryan Holiday?

  It doesn't sell, so she relists it at 18. She relists it at 17 and ends up selling for like $11 million. And a reporter asked her, and I think this is the point, he goes, "If the law of attraction was real, why didn't you just manifest that your house would sell for full listing price, right?" The point being, our thoughts don't make reality, but our thoughts do inform the actions that we're likely to take. So the Stoics were big on the discipline of perception, how we see things. But that's kind of where the law of attraction ends things. The most important discipline for the Stoics is the discipline of action, what you actually do.

• 14:38Ryan Holiday?

  And that's, I think, what's going to be the most important.