Why You Can’t Worry | Ask DS

We’ve said before that a Stoic focuses on what they control. That is the essence of Epictetus’s teachings, after all. You put your energy where you can make an impact and you ignore the rest–the rest being fear of what other people will think, fear of the potential results, your chances of success, the long hard road that may come next. To do anything else is a recipe for misery.---And in today's Ask Daily Stoic, Ryan answers questions about how to respond to someone who ignores praise and jeers for the wrong reasons, what Ryan has learned in his visits to Stoic sites around the world, strategies for overcoming a personal tragedy, and more.📚 Check out Daily Stoic Life to sign up for the Leadership Challenge 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. Thank you for listening, and we hope this is of use to you.

• 0:45Ryan Holiday?

  Why You Can't Worry. We've said before that a Stoic focuses on what they control. That is the essence of Epictetus's teachings, after all. You put your energy where you can make an impact, and you ignore the rest, the rest being fear of what other people will think, fear of the potential results, your chances of success, the long, hard road that may come next. To do anything else is a recipe for misery. It's also, as any experienced leader can tell you, a betrayal of the job, a theft from the people who depend on you. The author Merle Miller once asked Harry Truman, the American president who faced one difficult decision after another, how he managed to sleep or concentrate with all of that up in the air. Truman's answer was that he couldn't afford to worry

• 1:29Ryan Holiday?

  or fret or second guess. "If you've done the best you can," he said, "if you've done what you have to do, there is no use worrying about it because nothing can change it. And to be in a position of leadership, you have to give thought to what's going to happen the next day, and you have to be fresh for what you have to do the next day. What you're going to do is more important than what you've done. It may well be that you made the wrong decision. It may well be that tomorrow, things are going to be insanely difficult." And you better be ready. You better be well rested. You better have all your faculties at your disposal to spend a minute, let alone an hour or month worrying, freaking out, peering through your fingers as you cover your eyes. This is a waste of energy. It's

• 2:12Ryan Holiday?

  time that could be spent productively. It's effort that could be directed at what you control and what comes next. You owe it to your team, to your family, to your mission to do the best you can and then move on. You can't afford anything else. You don't have the bandwidth for anything else. And you know that nothing else matters. And it's this kind of hard one insight that we talk about in the Daily Stoic Leadership Challenge. Truman is a big character in that. We interviewed some great leaders about how they do this, specifically how they make tough decisions, because it's one of the most important things that you're going to have to do as a leader. And one of the ways you get better at it is by studying from and hearing from great leaders. I'm

• 2:55Ryan Holiday?

  so proud of this challenge. I'd love for you to check it out and go to dailystoic.com/leadershipchallenge or you can check it out at store.dailystoic.com. Of course, link to it in today's page. But if you're thinking about trying this Leadership Challenge, just remember, if you sign up for Daily Stoic Life at dailystoiclife.com, you get this challenge and all our other challenges totally for free. But I'd love to see it in the Leadership Challenge. It's just one of our best things. It's made me a better leader. I've heard from thousands of other leaders who got better as part of the process as well. And I'd love to have you in the Daily Stoic Leadership Challenge.

• 3:33Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to another episode of Ask Daily Stoic. Thanks. You guys send in your questions to [email protected]. Your pressing questions about Stoicism, about Marcus Aurelius, about Seneca, about me, about reading, whatever it is, you ask the questions, I do my best to answer. We put it up on the podcast on Saturdays and then on the YouTube channel as well. Got some cool questions for you. Send them in at [email protected]. We've got more for next week. Chris's question is how the Stoics talk about ignoring praise and jeers of doing what's right, but how would a Stoic response to someone who...

• 4:12Ryan Holiday?

  ignores the praise or jeers, but they're doing it to do the wrong thing. Isn't this a way to sort of be unethical? I think that's a, that's a great question. You know, I think at the core of Stoicism is the belief in virtue, the idea of doing the right thing. That's, that's, uh, obviously there is a, uh, that's, that's hard to define. I, I feel like if there's a failing in the Stoics, there is, there is no Stoic 10 commandments, where it's like very clear what the Stoic, Stoics thinks you should and shouldn't do. It's, it's almost just sort of expected that we're, we're to know what virtue is. But, um, there, there is an argument to be made that, that, that like what Stoic,

• 4:55Ryan Holiday?

  what Stoicism could do is just make you a better sociopath. Like by, by removing your, you know, your fears, your worries, caring what other people think. It's just making you worse. And I, obviously that's not what the Stoics intended. There are certainly people, you know, we see people in the pickup community or, you know, there have been not good people in history and they're not good people now, who are reading these, you know, sort of ideas and they're not using it to be better. But I think this is where the reading in Stoicism really becomes important. Because when you, when you truly read Marcus Aurelius, he's not just saying, you know, ignore the, the praise and jeers, uh, so you can do whatever you want.

• 5:38Ryan Holiday?

  The way that a previous emperor like Nero or Tiberius acted. He's saying, uh, do the right, he, he's saying, don't listen to them so you can, you know, do what's good for the, like, all of Rome. So he's like, don't care what people, uh, don't care about appearances. So that way you're not, you know, distracted or tempted by money. You know, he's like, don't care about impressing people. So you don't need to be, you know, like fooling around with beautiful women. He, he's, he's trying to use this to get him closer to his moral code, to, to be closer to living in accordance with nature, as the Stoics say. He, he's trying to use this idea of, of, of pushing aside the crowd, the mob,

• 6:22Ryan Holiday?

  as they called it in Rome, so he could focus on what he knew was true, what he knew was good, what he believed was ethical, what, you know, as he says, uh,

• 6:32Ryan Holiday?

  What's bad for the hive is bad for the bee. What's bad for the bee is bad for the hive. He's thinking fundamentally about the common good, about serving the common good, about being of service, about helping people. And so he's not using that to be more selfish. He's actually trying to not be distracted or misled by the very human impulse of wanting sort of short-term approval, wanting to impress other people, wanting status, or money, or fame, or legacy, or recognition, or credit. And he says, like, "Don't think about people's cheers or jeers, just do the right thing." He's saying, like, "Do the right thing because it's the right thing." Whether it's helping somebody, saying,

• 7:16Ryan Holiday?

  "Help someone because you want to do it because they need it." He says, "Don't think about the third thing, which is getting credit for it." So fundamentally, to me, what that idea of ignoring praise and criticism is about just not caring about credit, not caring about recognition, but instead focusing all that energy on doing the right thing for the right reasons.

• 7:44Ryan Holiday?

  So Mill emailed in. He said, "I know you went to Budapest recently and you visited some Stoic sites. Like, what did you see? What did you like there?" So I was in, I gave a talk in Bucharest, which was really cool. I'd never been to Romania. And then, believe it or not, my Romanian publisher, which is called, they're called Seneca Publishing, they have a Stoicism-themed cafe called the Seneca Anti Cafe in Bucharest, which I thought was amazing and really cool. Definitely check it out. And then, so I went from Bucharest to Budapest, where I gave a TEDx talk. And it occurred to me as... I've never really been to Budapest. I've been so fried. I was on book tour.

• 8:26Ryan Holiday?

  I was like, isn't there like a Marcus Aurelius Budapest connection? And I was like, oh yeah, he spent like years of his life there. I think it's a quincum. I'm terrible at pronouncing these words, but there was a Roman military camp outside Budapest on the Danube River. And that's where Marcus Aurelius spent like several months. They think he actually wrote a large chunk of meditations there. And so you could walk the streets of this Roman town. And it's just incredible. You can, there is a public bath, like from a thermal underground spring that you can visit. It was closed when I was there, so I had to go to a different one that was only dating back to the 1600s.

• 9:08Ryan Holiday?

  But you can, you can take a steam bath in a hot spring that is the same water that Marcus Aurelius may have used 2,000 years ago. I just thought that was absolutely incredible. I know you're not supposed to, but I picked up a rock while I was there and I keep it on my desk now. But it's, it's just amazing. There's a small museum there. There's Roman ruins. You just, you don't think of the Roman Empire stretching as far as Hungary. You don't think you would see, you know, ruins of a Roman aqueduct, you know, next to a freeway in Budapest, but you can. And so I do think when we're traveling, the idea of seeking out some of these sites and walking through them

• 9:50Ryan Holiday?

  and, and just imagining what was here, imagining our connection to the people that were here, realizing that people are going to walk through the ruins of our cities 2,000 years from now and experience a similar thing is a very stoic, it's a very meditative practice, it's very soothing and sort of rejuvenating, but also humbling at the same time. So it was really awesome and I'm glad I got to do it.

• 10:15Ryan Holiday?

  So Rob wrote in with some not fun news. He said his house got broken into and he wanted to know about overcoming something like that. How do you bounce back from that? You don't feel good about it. So first off, I would say, sorry, like, I've been there. In 2013, I just bought my first house and I'd also bought an engagement ring for my wife, which I did not tell her about, and I put it in a safe in our downstairs closet and we went out of town. And there were some Airbnb renters in our house and we got a call from them that while they were out, someone had broken into the house. They'd stolen everything. They'd trashed our couches. They'd torn things off the wall. They'd broken windows.

• 10:56Ryan Holiday?

  And they were in it long enough that they busted open the safe and stole the engagement ring that I was planning to propose to my wife with. So that was, you know, let's just say that was not fun. And that was not how I was planning to tell my wife that that's what we were doing. So the truth is, the stoics would say like shit happens, life is rough. And I think one of the things I took from that was like, it's easy to get, feel really soft, feel really protected, get kind of in a bubble of your own experience and just expect the life to be kind and amazing and everything you want. I think one of the things you realize from reading Marcus Aurelius is like, this guy

• 11:41Ryan Holiday?

  had everything and life was still hard. I mean, to go to your point about getting broken into, there's a story from Epictetus about a thief breaking into his house and stealing a lamp. And what he takes from that, and I think this is the second thing, he goes like, look, you can only lose what you have. He says, tomorrow, I'm gonna go out and buy a cheaper lamp and that way I'm not gonna be as paranoid about it. So that was. One of the things I took from the experience was like, not only had I gotten a little soft, a little vulnerable, I wasn't careful, but I also set myself up to be too attached to material items. And so I wanted to learn from the experience, be a little less attached,

• 12:22Ryan Holiday?

  be a little less in my bubble. And then, you know, it ended up being like, this is a story that my wife and I have. It's an experience, actually, our wedding announcement, we got selected, it was in the New York Times, and we got to tell that story. And that wouldn't have happened had we had just like, an ordinary getting engaged experience. And so, like, how could you use this? That's what the obstacle is, the way, the impediment to action advances action, as Marcus really says, "Everything that happens presents us an opportunity to practice a different virtue." That's what we want to do. That's what I'd urge you to think about. I'm really sorry that this happened. I wish everyone was nice. I wish we could leave our doors unlocked. But that's not the reality we live in. And

• 13:03Ryan Holiday?

  that's unfortunate. But how are you going to toughen? You have a better, you'll be more successful toughening yourself up than you will hoping that nothing bad ever happens. So at the very least, if you come out of this a little stronger, a little wiser, a little more careful, and a little more aware that our possessions are ephemeral and can be taken from us, I think you'll be better. So that's another episode of Ask Daily Stoic. Thanks. Thanks to our sponsors. Thank you for listening. Thank you for watching. Subscribe to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Subscribe to the Daily Stoic email. That's at dailystoic.com. And of course, subscribe to us on YouTube. Thanks. Talk soon.