Find a Way To Use It | Ask Daily Stoic

It would be nice to be a comedian, wouldn’t it? Not because it might make you rich and famous, though that would be nice. But rather, for the opportunity it would afford to turn all the things that bother you in life into material. Talk about the obstacle being the way! Comedians get to use everything that happens to them in their life, in their work. Heartbreak. Frustration. Fear. Insecurity. Confusion. It all becomes material.---In today's Ask Daily Stoic, Ryan answers questions about living on a farm, and how farm life relates to Stoicism.✉️ 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, including The Obstacle is the Way pendant.📱 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?

  Find a way to use it. It'd be nice to be a comedian, wouldn't it? Not just because it might make you rich and famous, though that would be nice, but rather for the opportunity it would afford to turn all the things that bother you in life into material. All the bad breaks could become setups. All the people who piss you off, you could turn into punchlines. As Judd Apatow writes in his wonderful book, Sicker in the Head, "One of the magical things about being a comedian is when bad things happen to you, you think, 'I can use this in an act,' and it's not purely bad." Talk about the obstacle being the way. Comedians get to use everything that happens to them in their life and their work. Heartbreak, frustration, fear, insecurity, confusion,

• 1:35Ryan Holiday?

  it all becomes material. Yet the Stoics would have us know that this formula is available to all of us, whatever happens, whatever we do for a living. Entrepreneurs build businesses to solve problems that they have encountered in life. Parents get to use the pain and trauma and mistakes of their own childhood to do a better job for their children. Coaches take the defeats and losses and use them to teach lessons or create motivation. It has become a cliche at this point that therapists go into psychology and psychiatry with the hope that in helping others solve their problems, they might solve their own. Marcus Aurelius writes repeatedly in Meditations about how obstacles can become fuel, how like a fire, we can transform everything, even the things we would have

• 2:18Ryan Holiday?

  never wanted to experience. We could transform them into flame and brightness and heat, he says. In this way, we should take comfort in the fact that nothing that happens to us is purely bad. Everything has something in it that we can use to do some good, even if it's just getting on stage to make other people laugh. Whatever it is, whatever has happened or is currently happening, we must find a way to use it to turn the fire into fuel, the obstacle into opportunity. That is our job. That's obviously what The Obstacle is the Way is about, which if you haven't read the book, well, I would love for you to read it. You can pick it up anywhere books are sold. There's Audible. We've got signed copies in the Daily Stoic store. But then we also

• 2:59Ryan Holiday?

  have this cool Obstacle is the Way medallion that a lot of people carry all over the world as sort of a reminder, the leather bound edition of the book, which people really love. And then we've got a cool pendant version. You can check all of that out at store.dailystoic.com.

• 3:21Speaker 01

  So we've got some questions from folks about my farm, which may not seem totally stoic, but I think it is. Obviously, the Stoics had a decent amount of experience with agriculture. Cato the Elder, who's Cato's great grandfather, wrote one of the earliest surviving works in Latin called On Agriculture. We've talked about in Daily Stoic Messages before. Seneca owned farms. He talks about managing his estates. The famous Roman hero Cincinnatus returns to his farm after saving Rome from invaders. So I happen to spend most of my

• 4:05Speaker 01

  time on a little hobby farm or homestead outside Austin, Texas.

• 4:13Speaker 01

  And so some people have some sort of questions about it. So I thought I'd riff on that a little bit. Someone asks, so why did I move to a farm? Well, why did I get the farm? Well, a part of it was my wife. My wife loves animals. It was always her dream and it seemed exciting and interesting to me. And so she started as a woofer. So she did, she did, she volunteered on a couple of farms, realized she liked it. We ended up getting one outside Austin. I remember the first time I visited, it was just, there was space, there was quiet, there was something to look out at. Peter Thiel has talked about, he says, like, you should invest in things that don't have diminishing returns. And he said, a great view is one of

• 4:53Speaker 01

  them. You know, I look out my back window and, or the window that I do my writing on, and I see a lake, and I see the cows, and I see ducks landing in the lake, and I see the sun coming up over the trees. You know, it's just, it's, it's beautiful and reassuring. And I get, I get some peace and stillness out of that. And it's been really valuable and important to me.

• 5:16Speaker 01

  So we picked this out a few years ago. There's some wonderful tax implications in Texas. If you use land for an agricultural purpose, so there's some benefits for that. Really, we just wanted space. We wanted quiet. We wanted some, you know, we just wanted something different. I'm a big believer in sort of living an interesting life, doing interesting things. And I've certainly learned a lot from the farm, which actually is the next question. It was like, what have you learned having a farm? I mean, one of the things you learn is you just learn how prevalent death is. Like, it's just, things are dying all the time. You gotta shoot things, whether they're, you know, a fox getting into your chicken coop, or a snake getting into your

• 5:57Speaker 01

  chicken coop, which I just had to do a few days ago. You know, it's, it's, we've got a cow that's sick, you know, it just, it rudely introduces you to the reality of life, right? And I think that's one of the benefits of having the farm. It just, it's created a more natural existence in the sense that I don't live in this sort of fantasy city world of a tall skyscraper with everything delivered and everything on demand. Kind of force self reliance. And so what's interesting about this sort of pandemic quarantine is it's like, it's actually, oh, wait, this is like maybe a more natural way to live anyway. This hasn't actually changed my

• 6:37Speaker 01

  day to day existence this much. In fact, I'm kind of enjoying actually getting to experience the thing I was spending so much time away from. And I think, you know, you learn a lot of practical things. You learn how to, you know, string barbed wire. You learn how to shoot a gun. You learn how to take care of a sick animal. You learn how to do a lot of stuff. There's a lot to do. You know, Seneca or Epictetus, he says, like, he quotes Socrates. He says, you know, some people are excited about improving their farm. He says, I, I work on improving myself. But the interesting thing about having a farm is that it's forced me to improve myself. It's made me a little scrappier. It made me more handy. It's, it's made me like learn things. It's made me get outside. I've just learned things about myself and, and, you know, have,

• 7:22Speaker 01

  I've also found like from a stillness perspective, having all this stuff to do, that's not work, like not my job job. It's not recording these podcasts or writing books or going to meetings or flying to do a talk. It's kept me centered in a really great way. And it's kept me busy. It's like, you know, Churchill had his painting. He also had some property outside London, Chartwell, which I've gone to visit it. I've gone to visit recently, you know. He loved to go out and feed his goldfish and feed his swans. There's just something in that that's really special and I've just, I've gotten a lot out of that. So the experience of having the farm has been educational. It's been centering.

• 8:04Speaker 01

  And then someone asked, you know, anything interesting recently happened on the farm? I was mentioning how, you know, there's a lot of death. Well, we lost two cows in the last week, which was not fun. One of the cows is very old, pushing 20. Yeah, there's more 16 or 17. We, we bought all these cows from the person we bought the land from. So, you know, we don't really know how they were taken care of before that they were old. And, you know, we took care of this cow. Her name was Brownie. We brought her water and hay. We tried to give her some medicine. We checked on the vet. But unfortunately she died and. You know, we went out to check on her and okay, I had to bring my son because my other son was napping and so he took him and you know, he has to see the dead cow and then

• 8:47Speaker 01

  that's a discussion. But then I had to do something about this dead cow. Unfortunately, you can't leave a, you know, a 1,500 pound animal there. Not only will it smell disgusting, but it'll attract predators, which could potentially endanger the other animal. So I don't have a tractor, so I had to figure out a way. I had a neighbor come over. We had to loop this thick strap around its neck and I had to drag it with my UTV, which is like an ATV with a cage and doors and stuff. And I had to drag it about three quarters of a mile, maybe more. Like, you know, you're just driving, dragging a 1,500 pound dead cow who used to be your pet, who you loved, who your sad has gone and you're just dragging

• 9:29Speaker 01

  it around. It was a gruesome, strange sight. And so rigor mortis had come in and it already puffed up a little bit. And, you know, I had to drag it. And let me tell you, the other cows were not happy to see this. They got mad. There's a whole thing about getting it through the gate. And then you sort of, I dragged it back down by a creek where you have a little fenced off area that the cows don't go and we drop it. And that's, again, the circle of life. The buzzards will handle it. The, you know, the coyotes will come. The ants will come. The bugs will take care of it. I didn't do it this time, but sometimes actually what you want to do, if you want to increase, speed up the decomp process, I may still have to do this. You have to, with an axe or a knife, you have to cut a

• 10:13Speaker 01

  big hole in the side of it. Otherwise, the vultures wait until basically the gases make the animal explode. And so you can cut it open or you can shoot, you know, shoot it with a shotgun or something, sort of blow a hole in it. That allows them to get in and, and speeds up the decomp process. But it's humbling, right? So this idea of memento mori, like you die and then, you know, pretty soon you're just a corpse that's getting dragged around by a chain and you're food for buzzards. You know, when Marcus Aurelius talks about, he's like, look, Alexander the Great was buried in the same ground as mule driver. I'm going to be buried in the same ground as this cow. Same disgusting process is going to happen to me. My corpse is going to be lugged around. Like, that's what life is, right?

• 10:57Speaker 01

  And so, you know, having a farm kind of reminds you of this stuff. And it's humbling and it's sobering. It's also a lot of fun and it's interesting and you'll learn a lot.

• 11:09Speaker 01

  And actually, if you're interested in learning a little bit more about this stuff, I've written about it. I have a medium piece on owning a farm. I have a piece on why I moved to Texas. But a couple of years ago, we interviewed this guy named Scott Herbert. He has a thing called Scott, or he has a podcast called Stoic Metal. M E T T L E. But he talked about how he moved to a farm in 2016. And he's got a podcast about running it, which is interesting. But anyways, he talks about how Stoicism brought him to farming. And he was lost in life. He said he was experiencing what Robert Greene calls dead time. You know, go to work and live for the weekends. And he just, he heard a call to farming and now that's what he's doing.

• 11:54Speaker 01

  And I just, I respect people who take gambles and take risks. And he said he's found that, you know, the Stoic virtues of courage and justice and self-control and wisdom have helped him manage this difficult situation. So I think that's the idea for me with the farm is like, how can I apply these Stoic teachings to a real situation in the real world? And, you know, I think having the farm connects you with nature, right? The Stoics talk about living in accordance with nature. You know, Seneca talks about taking wandering outdoor walks, being nourished by the open air and breathing. Well, that's what farming has done for me. That's what's created some stillness in my life.

• 12:39Speaker 01

  It's also been challenging. It's also forced me to grow. And so, yeah, it's fun. It's interesting. It's not for everyone, certainly. If you want to sort of see how crazy it can be, you can follow me on Instagram. But, but yeah, check it out. And if I had a couple of other books, I would definitely recommend.

• 12:56Speaker 01

  I definitely recommend Robert Graves, or no, sorry. I definitely recommend John Graves. He has a book called Hardscrabble, which I really enjoyed, and another one called Notes from a Limestone Ledge. And he just talks about sort of philosophy and his life, sort of running this small little farm in Texas. He's also a brilliant writer, so he was sort of doing the same thing I am. But, but yeah, those are some recommendations and thanks for listening. Thanks for helping make my farm possible. Certainly, the farm does not make any money. It is the writing income that subsidizes the farm, not the other way around. But, but it's a good life. It's honest and it's fun and challenging. And I think, yeah, it's been really good for me. So thanks for listening.

• 13:47Ryan Holiday?

  Thanks for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Just a reminder, we've got signed copies of all my books in the Daily Stoic store. You can get them personalized, you can get them sent to a friend. The Obstacle is the Way, He Goes the Enemy, Stillness is the Key, the leather bound edition of the Daily Stoic. We have them all in the Daily Stoic store, which you can check out at store.dailystoic.com.