Push Through To The Finish Line | Ask Daily Stoic

The Cynic philosopher Diogenes was once criticized by a passerby for not taking care of himself in his old age, for being too active when he should have been taking it easy and resting. As per usual, Diogenes had the perfect rejoinder: "What, if I were running in the stadium, ought I to slacken my pace when approaching the goal?"---Ryan speaks at the EO Alchemy entrepreneurial conference about his early career and his view on interpreting the Stoics.🎓 Sign up for the Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge to create better habits in 2023: https://dailystoic.com/challenge✉️ 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.

• 0:03Ryan 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. But on Fridays, we not only read this daily meditation, but I try to answer some questions from listeners and fellow Stoics who are trying to apply this philosophy, whatever it is they happen to do. Sometimes these are from talks. Sometimes these are people who come up to talk to me on the street. Sometimes these are written in or emailed from listeners. But I hope in answering their questions, I can answer your questions, give a little more guidance on this philosophy we're all trying to follow.

• 0:50Ryan Holiday?

  The cynic philosopher Diogenes was once criticized by a passerby for not taking care of himself in his old age, for being too active when he should have been taking it easy and resting. As per usual, Diogenes had the perfect rejoinder. "What if I were running in the stadium? Ought I to slacken my pace when approaching the goal?" His point was that we should never stop getting better, never stop the work that philosophy demands of us. Right up until the end, Diogenes was questioning convention, reducing his wants, challenging power, and insisting on truth. The Stoics agreed with his view that old

• 1:31Ryan Holiday?

  age was no excuse for coasting. In fact, we get the sense that many of the strongest passages in meditations are written by an older Marcus Aurelius, one who is still frustrated with himself for his anxiety, for his passions, for his less-than-flawless record when it comes to upholding his beliefs. In one passage, he says it more or less outright, "How long are you going to keep doing this? You're old and you still can't get it right." But he wasn't just kicking himself to feel better. He was trying to get himself to be better. He refused to take his foot off the gas. He was going to keep going right on through the finish line, and so should we. No matter how old we are, no matter how long we've

• 2:15Ryan Holiday?

  been at this, it's far too early to stop now to say, "Close enough." No, we're going to give it our best effort. We're going to give it everything we have.

• 2:32Speaker 01

  Let's go to Stillness. I'm a little biased. I love all your stuff, but that's my favorite. Part of the reason may be, I read Stillness when we were in Alaska last year, locked away with no reception, no real TV. I was with Ben over here, so there was very little conversation. So I read Stillness is the key then, and it really, really influenced me and it impacted me. So I'd love to have you dig into that and tell us, kind of like I said with the other books, or ask for the other books, what are we to take away? What did you, what prompted this book? I know it's part of the trilogy. What prompted it? What should you be taking away from?

• 3:09Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, the premise of that book is, like, when I think about all the great moments of my life, whether it's personal happiness or professional achievement, the sort of the through line for them is, is how locked in I was, how focused I was, how, you know, athletes talk about, everything slowed down and became clear, you know, that, that, that, that experience is so profoundly important and it's where great performance comes from, and yet, it's fleeting and rare, and we kind of just hope that it happens on accident. So it's, that book is about slowing

• 3:47Ryan Holiday?

  down so you can, you know, charge ahead. How to do the thing you want to do better is often not by doing more of it and more things at the same time. It's about, you know, essentialism and focus and really locking in.

• 4:05Speaker 01

  So it's, and again, I may have him confused, I apologize if this is the case, but in Stillness, I think you dig, it's in Stillness where you dig kind of deep into the Tiger Woods saga, if you will, or experience, or kind of what is kind of rising. Forceball and talking about his upbringing. Can you speak a little bit around how you use Tiger in his story and how it informs this message?

• 4:29Ryan Holiday?

  Well, there's different kinds of stillness, right? There's physical stillness, there's mental stillness, there's also spiritual stillness. I think Tiger Woods is a great example of someone who had, you know, complete mastery over his physical performance, like on the golf course. He's a guy who could stop a swing, you know, 100 mile an hour swing like that. He's a guy who could put a tiny ball, you know, 300, in a specific spot, 300 yards away. That's, that's physical stillness and mastery. Mental mastery, I mean, this is a guy who could tune out distraction, who could lock in, you know, could play the mentally taxing game of golf. But as the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh says, you know,

• 5:13Ryan Holiday?

  beneath the ocean, there are currents, right? So the ocean can be smooth on the surface, but underneath there can be riptides. Tiger Woods was caught in a riptide. And I tell that story in the book because, you know, it doesn't matter how much meditation you do, it doesn't matter, you know, how locked in you are at your professional thing, if you're the best in the world. If your personal life and your spiritual life and your, you know, if your emotions and your heart are all messed up and, and wound up tight, your, your success is going to be, you know, shaky, to say the least.

• 5:55Ryan Holiday?

  And so, you know, you watched in Tiger Woods, that idea that a house divided against itself can't stand. And eventually, you know, the demons of his personal life overwhelm and, and destroy his professional life. And it's been a long, hard slog up the, the way back. And as admirable as that is and impressive as it is, it's also, you know, tragic to think of the greatness that was lost in those, I mean, who lost the best years of his life as a golfer, um, you know, for what?

• 6:28Speaker 01

  You're right, and it's interesting, I think, and again, I may have a bit, but I think you go deep into his upbringing, too, his relationship with his father and his mother, and what I find especially interesting is to observe him now, at least through the internet or through TV, with his own son. We have a lot of parents in the room, or soon to be parents, or in the future will be parents. Any lessons there? Like, I know his father, he says both of them, but at the same time, I think your message was, did he move in the right direction? Is there some challenges as a result of that rough or uplifting?

• 7:07Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I don't know if anyone in the room has read David Epstein's book Range, which I actually think is a parenting book in disguise. Tiger Woods is the sort of the classic example of focus, mastery, do one thing from an early age, do only that thing, greatness ensues. But it made Tiger Woods so, so fragile, you know, and, and I mean, I think in retrospect, if you saw someone doing the Tiger, if you, if you did, or you saw a friend's parent, you know, doing, a kid's parent doing to them what Tiger Woods' father did to him, you'd see it as abuse. I mean, even that story, he was like, the

• 7:50Ryan Holiday?

  story of Tiger Woods learns to golf because he would put him in a high chair in the garage, and then play, you know, hit golf balls against a sheet for hours and hours and hours. And Tiger just grew up watching this. It's like, my, my two-year-old will sit in a high chair for like fifteen minutes before they start screaming and yelling and wanting to do literally anything other, like, how long would my kid watch me play golf? Like, eight seconds? You know, so, so as, as interesting as that science experiment was, right? Like Tiger Woods' life is basically a psychological experiment, like, how much can a person take before they break? And...

• 8:35Ryan Holiday?

  As interesting as it was and as talented a golfer as it made, it also made it inevitable that that golfer would not only likely explode at some point, but it made it impossible for them to enjoy the success as they had it as well. Like when you read about Tiger Woods before his self-destruction, I mean, I don't get the sense that he was having a good time. I get this, you know, he sounds like a tortured set. Like if you end up in your crash in your SUV in your garage and your wife is chasing you with a golf club, like that's not winning.

• 9:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it goes back to kind of what you were saying with the ocean in the car.

• 9:19Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 9:19Speaker 01

  There was, there was noise there for sure. Okay, well, Vivid, the last book I want to talk about, you mentioned Daily Stoic.

• 9:26Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 9:26Speaker 01

  Behind you there, do you read your own Daily Stoic book on daily basis?

• 9:30Ryan Holiday?

  Of course, that would be weird if I didn't. No, I have it because sometimes people ask me to read parts from it or observe it or whatever. But the premise of that book is actually, I mean, it's supposed to be an entry point to Stoic philosophy. But there's a great line from Seneca. Seneca would write these letters to his friend Lucilius, which is also a great book. If you've ever read Letters from a Stoic. But Seneca is saying like, look, the path to wisdom is long. He says, but the way to do it is just, just, he says, acquire one thing every day. You know, he says, one thing every day that makes you stronger, wiser, protects you from, you know, misfortune or difficulty. So it's just one thing every day.

• 10:14Ryan Holiday?

  And that his, that's actually what these letters, he was, he and the friend were like, I'll give you one thing, you give me one thing and we'll do this every day. And so really the premise of the book is. Don't try to, don't sit down and go, "I'm going to master Stoic philosophy." It's like, how do you do that? You have to break a difficult task down into component parts. So, the premise there is, I'm just going to give you one, you know, one page a day. And then I also, I do a free email every day about Stoic philosophy as well, at dailystoic.com. But the idea is like, actually, a lot of these things are, you know, it's not a book, it's not about reading a book one time, or going to a conference one time, or, you know,

• 10:59Ryan Holiday?

  watching a documentary one time, then you magically mastered it. It has to be an ongoing process, like a dialogue. That's how it works.

• 11:15Ryan Holiday?

  Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us, and it would really help the show. We appreciate it, and I'll see you next episode.