Your Perspective Is Everything | Offense or Defense?

“Is your house dirty or just well-played in? Are you struggling or growing stronger through resistance training? Are you poor or unburdened? Are you rich or temporarily blessed?”Ryan explains why the way you view things can change how you respond to them, and reads The Daily Stoic’s entry of the day, on today’s Daily Stoic Podcast. Go Macro is a family-owned maker of some of the finest protein bars around. They're vegan, non-GMO, and they come in a bunch of delicious flavors. Visit gomacro.com and use promo code STOIC for 30% off your order plus free shipping on all orders over $50.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow Daily Stoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@daily_stoic See 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.

• 0:05Ryan Holiday?

  Bienvenidos a otro episodio del Podcast Daily Stoic. El jueves hacemos doble trabajo, no solo leyendo nuestra meditación diaria, sino también leyendo un pasaje del libro "El Daily Stoic: 366 Meditaciones sobre la Wisdom, Perseverancia y el Arte de Vivir", que escribí con mi maravillosa coautora y colaborador, Stephen Hanselman. Así que hoy os daremos una rápida meditación de uno de los estoicos, de Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, y luego un análisis de mí. Y luego os enviamos al mundo a hacer lo mejor posible para convertir estas palabras en obras.

• 0:42Ryan Holiday?

  "Tu perspectiva es todo. ¿Es tu casa sucia o solo bien jugada? ¿Estás luchando o creciendo más fuerte a través de la formación de resistencia? ¿Eres pobre o sin carga? ¿Eres rico o temporariamente bendecido? La forma en que elegimos describirnos y nuestras situaciones determina tanto de ello. El lenguaje que usamos nos da agencia o nos priva de ello, engancha juicio o proporciona esperanza. ¿Cuál será? En sus meditaciones, Marcus Aurelius repitiamente juega con el lenguaje y la lógica de esta manera. 多次, por ejemplo, aborda el concepto de cambio, algo que nos asusta a todos. Trata de reiterarlo, reimaginarlo como un nuevo comienzo, como una forma de crecimiento,

• 1:25Ryan Holiday?

  como una transición natural del viejo al nuevo. Luego, una vez redefinido, luego se le acuerda a sí mismo que la muerte misma es solo el cambio. ¿Y por qué temer al cambio? Es natural. El poder de la perspectiva es crucial, sin embargo, la mayoría del tiempo lo entregamos a otras personas o fuentes externas. Nosotros dejamos que otros determinen nuestra identidad. Nos commiseramos sobre etiquetas. Aceptamos la interpretación más pesimista de las cosas. Por supuesto que somos miserables, por supuesto que pensamos que estamos atrapados. Tenemos que recordar lo que Shakespeare dijo, que "Nada, ni bueno ni malo, sino el pensamiento lo hace así". Nuestra vida, como Marcus Aurelius escribió, se coloreó por el color de nuestros pensamientos. La perspectiva es todo, así que elige wisely.

• 2:10Ryan Holiday?

  Offense or defense? This is today's entry in the Daily Stoic. 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, which you can get anywhere books are sold. And of course, we've got the awesome Premium Leather Edition, designed to last forever, there in the Daily Stoic store, which you can check out at store.dailystoic.com. Seneca opens the entry today from Moral Letters 82. Fortune doesn't have the long reach, we suppose. She can only lay siege to those who hold her tight. So let's step back from her as much as possible. Machiavelli, who supposedly admired Seneca, says in The Prince that fortune is a woman, and it is necessary in order to keep her down, to beat her and struggle with her.

• 2:55Ryan Holiday?

  Even for the 16th century, it's a pretty horrifying image. But for a ruthless and endlessly ambitious ruler, it was par for the course. But is that the kind of life that we're after? Now, compare Machiavelli's view with Seneca's. Not only is he saying that the more you struggle with fortune, the more vulnerable you are to it, but he's also saying that the better path to security is in the impregnable wall of philosophy. Philosophy, he says, helps us tame the mad frenzy of our greed and tamp down the fury of our fears. In sports or war, the metaphor here would be the choice between a strategy of endless, exhausting offense and a strategy of resilient, flexible defense. Which will you play?

• 3:39Ryan Holiday?

  Which kind of person are you? Only you can answer this question, but you would be remiss not to consider the ultimate end of most of the princes in Machiavelli's books, and how few of them died happily in bed, surrounded by their loved ones. I think what we're talking about here is something that Seem Taleb talks about, which is how dependent is your life, your lifestyle, your business? How dependent is it on luck? How dependent is it on things outside your control? You know, are you someone who needs things to always be going well? Do you schedule down to the minute, and then one thing goes wrong ripples through your day? Or do you cultivate that kind of anti-fragility? That kind of resilience? That flexibility that allows you to absorb,

• 4:23Ryan Holiday?

  and bob, and weave, and change, and adjust? And I think, I think too many of us... Don't have enough slack. We are too dependent on fortune. And this is what makes us anxious. This is what makes us nervous. This is what makes us always busy, always doing, always shoring things up. Try to get to a place, try to design a life that's got some give to it, that doesn't require you to hold fortune so close, that doesn't require you to watch the market returns every day, that doesn't put you at the mercy of your boss's moods, that doesn't, you know, force you to live paycheck to paycheck.

• 5:05Ryan Holiday?

  Try to create some distance, a buffer, a moat around you that protects you from the whims of fate. Because fate is and always has, as Seneca says, doing their own thing, behaving exactly as they please. You don't want to be on the wrong side of that.

• 5:26Ryan Holiday?

  And look, this idea of deciding to see something as positive or negative, dead time or alive time, that is the core idea in the Stoic Challenge we built out of the pandemic almost a year ago now, the Daily Stoic Alive Time Challenge. The idea of making the most of however and wherever you are in life, whether you're stuck in a lockdown in some European country, whether you're waiting for a vaccine, whether you just lost your job, whether you're on a deployment overseas. Whatever it is, you can choose for this to be alive time. You can choose to make the most of it. I really think you'll like this challenge. Go to dailystoic.com/alivetime or go to dailystoic.com/alive. You can check it out. Five bucks of the course goes to feed, five bucks from the course goes to Feeding America

• 6:11Ryan Holiday?

  to feed people displaced by the pandemic. So you can check that out. And of course, Daily Stoic Life members, dailystoiclife.com, get all our challenges, including the Daily Stoic Alive Time Challenge, for free.