Don’t Just Be Tough, Be Practical | 7 Stoic Stories To Guide You Through Life

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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. On Tuesdays, we take a closer look at these Stoic ideas, how we can apply them in our actual lives. Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy.

• 0:31Ryan Holiday?

  Don't just be tough, be practical.

• 0:37Ryan Holiday?

  A Stoic is tough, as we said. A Stoic doesn't look for or make excuses. But does that mean a Stoic is also a glutton for punishment? Hardly. As Stephen Rinella writes in his wonderful book, American Buffalo, a story of the great American mammal and his hunting trip in Alaska to hunt a wild one, there is a fine line between being practical and being a candy ass, which is a word that Steve's father used to describe someone who was the opposite of tough. He said, "When I'm in the woods and I run into a situation that seems like a bad idea, whether it's climbing up a steep icy mountainside or taking a canoe through a nasty stretch of rapids, I always ask myself which of these two words, practical or candy

• 1:20Ryan Holiday?

  ass, best defines my decision making?" Putting aside the fact that this is an outdated term, which some may find offensive, that's a perfect distinction. A Stoic is not a candy ass. A Stoic is tough, but also practical. Marcus Aurelius himself, a hunter, writes in Meditations that "The response to brambles in the path is not to plunge into them unnecessarily, but to go around them." Unless, of course, there was no other alternative, in which case the obstacle was the way. We endure the blows and twists of life. We have a heart for any fate. But we also have a brain. We are practical. We look for sustainable, painless solutions, if they exist. We compromise. We look for efficiencies. We don't care how

• 2:05Ryan Holiday?

  something looks to others, only whether it gets the job done. If we need help, we'll ask for it. There's an easier path, we'll take it, provided we can still hold tight to our standards and our self-respect. We're tough, but only when we need to be. We're practical first.

• 2:31Ryan Holiday?

  As I've said many, many times, my favorite translation of Marcus Aurelius is Meditations by the one and only Gregory Hayes. So it was a surreal experience for me last year when he reviewed, Gregory Hayes did, reviewed some of my books and some of the other more recent books about the Stoics in the New York Review of Books. Just an incredible honor. Anyways, in this piece, he actually, he was talking about my writings. It was sort of a surreal experience, but he described something that I like to do in my writing that I didn't know had a name for it, but does. So I'll read you this intro. He says, "Storytelling is another typical feature of diatribe. As Seneca remarks, 'Learning by precepts is the long way around the quick and effective ways to learn by example.'" And he says,

• 3:15Ryan Holiday?

  "Holiday is also a great teller of stories. Here is one about Ulysses S. Grant, which is a story I tell in Stillness is the Key, and it goes like this. Before the Civil War, Grant experienced a long chain of setbacks and financial difficulties. He washed up in St. Louis selling firewood for a living, a hard fall for a graduate of West Point. An army buddy found him and was aghast. 'Great God, Grant, what are you doing?' he asked. Grant's answer was simple: 'I am solving the problem of poverty.'" And then Hayes continues, "An ancient reader would have recognized this passage at once as what the Greeks called a krea, an exemplary story about a famous person, often culminating in

• 3:58Ryan Holiday?

  a memorable utterance. Diogenes Laertus's Lives of the Philosophers is full of such anecdotes, and so are the biographies of Plutarch." So very nice words, which set up today's episode that I have for you, which is seven Stoic stories to guide you through life. Like Plutarch, like Diogenes, I believe that truth is best delivered in stories, often in fables, that's why Jesus speaks in parables as well. And so in today's episode, I'm going to tell some of those stories, some Stoic stories that I found throughout my time researching and writing about this philosophy that I think will stick with you and make a big difference.

• 4:43Ryan Holiday?

  One of the best stories in all of Stoicism comes at the founding of Stoicism. Zeno, he's this successful merchant who comes from a long family of merchants. And he suffers a shipwreck and he loses everything. He washes up in Athens, he has nothing. And there he discovers philosophy. That's how Stoicism starts. And so reflecting on this journey, this thing that he never would have wished happening, changing the entire course of his life, and now history, we wouldn't be talking had he not gone through this. He says, "I made a prosperous voyage when I suffered a shipwreck." Meaning, the worst thing that ever happened to him was actually the best thing that ever happened to him. And that's what a Stoic says. We don't control what happens. Bad stuff is going to happen. But we control how we respond to it. We control what we turn it into.

• 5:25Ryan Holiday?

  And whatever it is, whatever metaphorical shipwreck you're going through, you can make it a prosperous voyage if you think about it that way. There's an amazing story about Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller, who wrote Catch 22 and Slaughterhouse-Five. They're at the party of this billionaire. And Vonnegut is teasing Heller and he says, "This billionaire, whose house we're at, he made more money this week than your book will make in its entire life." And Heller says, "But I have something that he doesn't have." Vonnegut says, "What's that?" And Heller says, "I have some idea of what enough is." He says, "I have enough." This idea of enough is so powerful. Seneca, who quotes Epicurus, says, "If you don't regard what you have as enough, you will never be happy, even if you rule the entire world."

• 6:10Ryan Holiday?

  Enough is never enough, the Epicurians and the Stoics say, for the person who enough is too little. And if you can get to a place of enough, what I have is good, everything else is extra, then everything you get is a bonus and the rest of your life is amazing. But if you tell yourself you'll only be happy if, if I'll feel better when, you'll never get there. The finish line will move, I promise you. Enough is enough.

• 6:38Ryan Holiday?

  There's an amazing story about Marcus Aurelius. He didn't want to be emperor. In fact, when he's given the news that he's to be adopted by the Emperor Hadrian, he weeps because he thinks of all the bad kings of history. So Marcus was scared. Maybe he had a little bit of imposter syndrome like you and I have. But the night before he's to ascend the throne, Marcus Aurelius has a dream. And in the dream, he feels that his shoulders are made of ivory. And that's how he knows. He knows he's strong enough to bear the weight. He can carry the load. He can do this. And you have to know, you have shoulders of ivory too. You're stronger than you know. You're stronger than people think. You've got this. You can do it. You have shoulders made of ivory. We all do because we've done the work, because we've been training, because we've been watching videos.

• 7:22Ryan Holiday?

  We've been working up till this moment, and now it's here, and we're ready to do it. People don't know this, but John F. Kennedy very nearly lost the 1960 presidential election. In fact, he won by only about a half a percentage point, and in the end, it came down to about 30, 35,000 votes. So what happened? Martin Luther King was arrested right before the election on trumped-up charges and sentenced to four months on a prison shanghain gang. And his wife was actually very worried that he would be lynched or murdered in prison. And so she called both the Nixon campaign and the Kennedy campaign. Nixon, who was actually friends with Martin Luther King, decided not to get involved. He didn't want to piss off southern voters.

• 8:03Ryan Holiday?

  John F. Kennedy called the judge, called Coretta Scott King, and his brother also worked to get Martin Luther King released. And Martin Luther King would say after that, he was stunned by this because Nixon had been his friend, and he said, "I always regarded Nixon as a moral coward after that." And it was the news of this that rallied the black community to vote for John F. Kennedy in the election and won. So it's really just a few seconds of courage that win Kennedy the election and lose Nixon the election. And I talk about this in Courage is Calling. We think bravery is this big thing, but it's really a very small thing. It's an immediate thing. It was a call to Martin Luther King's wife. It was a call to a judge. It was the decision to get involved, to ignore the reservations.

• 8:48Ryan Holiday?

  Marcus Aurelius says, "Just that you do the right thing, the rest doesn't matter. You do the right thing, and you trust that doing the right thing will pay off. You also trust in your ability to survive, even if people don't appreciate that you did the right thing." And courage is always better than cowardice.

• 9:05Ryan Holiday?

  There was a Spartan general who's marching through Greece and as he would come to each nation, he would send emissaries to say, "Friend or foe, are you going to let us march peacefully or are we going to need to treat this as hostile territory?" Almost all of the answers came back, "Friend, friend, friend." But one king hesitated. He wanted more time to think about it and he kept deliberating and he wouldn't come back with an answer. And finally, the Spartan king said, "Let him keep thinking about it. We'll keep marching on." Emerson said, "You cannot spend the day in deliberation." George Marshall said, "Don't fight the problem, decide the problem." Right? You have to have the courage to decide, to make the decision, to make your choice,

• 9:45Ryan Holiday?

  and then to get moving on the most important part, which is execution. Courage is calling. Make your decision, decide what you're going to do, and then what? The Stoics say, "Do it. Do it as if it's the last thing you're doing in your life. Do it as if you're fully committed to it, because you are fully committed to it and you know how much it matters, because you made the decision."

• 10:08Ryan Holiday?

  So Thomas Edison is America's most successful inventor. He's sitting down for dinner with his family and a man rushes in. The factory is on fire and Edison shows up on the scene and he sees it. His life's work up in flames. His son is standing there, shell shocked. And what does Edison say? Edison says, "Go get your mother and all her friends. They'll never see a fire like this again." And some people thought he lost his mind, but he actually goes on to repeat a line from a Kipling poem about triumph and disaster treating these two imposters just the same. What Edison is realizing, as a Stoic does, is that some things are just out of our control. We can't change them. No amount of whining or complaining or weeping is going to affect

• 10:49Ryan Holiday?

  them, but we can control how we respond. And that's what Edison does. He tells a reporter the next day, "I've been through stuff like this before," he says. "It prevents an old man from getting bored," and he starts rebuilding. He actually takes a million-dollar loan from Henry Ford. In six weeks, it's partially back up and running. In six months, it's fully operational. And the third act of Edison's life is rebuilding after this disaster. And I want you to think about that as well. That's the idea, that you'll never see something like this again. You can at least enjoy the absurdity, the surreal beauty of it, and then you can say, "This prevents me from getting bored. Now I'm going to get back to work and I'm going to turn this into something."

• 11:28Ryan Holiday?

  If you want to learn more about Stoic philosophy, totally for free, you can sign up for our Daily Stoic email. It's one free email every morning. The best of Stoic wisdom, dailystoic.com/email.

• 11:55Ryan Holiday?

  If you want to learn more about Stoic philosophy, totally for free, you can sign up for our Daily Stoic email. It's one free email every morning. The best of Stoic wisdom, dailystoic.com/email.