Start The Clock. Just Start The Clock. | Plato's View

We don’t like how long they’re taking to get back to us. It’s slowing down the process, keeping us from doing what we want to do. We don’t like the estimate from the vendor who just told us it will be an extra six weeks over the initial projections. We’re frustrated the investment advisor told us we won’t hit our goal until later than expected. And there’s no question, this is annoying. It may well be fixable–if they could get their act together. But we don’t control that or them.---And in today's Daily Stoic excerpt reading, Ryan discusses the idea of Plato's View - the idea that taking a bird's-eye view of your life and dealings with people when in times of distress puts everything in perspective - and how this influenced Stoic thinking.✉️ 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. On Friday, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from The Daily Stoic, my book, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful collaborator, translator, and literary agent, Stephen Hanselman. So today, we'll give you a quick meditation from the Stoics with some analysis from me, and then we'll send you out into the world to turn these words into works.

• 0:43Ryan Holiday?

  "Start the clock. Just start the clock. We don't like how long they're taking to get back to us. It's slowing down the process, keeping us from doing what we want to do. We don't like the estimate from the vendor who just told us it would be an extra six weeks over the initial projections. We're frustrated the investment advisor told us we won't hit our goal until later than expected." And there's no question, this is annoying. It may well be fixable if they could get their act together, but we don't control that or them. You know what we do control, though? We controlled how long it took us to reach out to get that bid. We controlled how long that thing was on our to-do list, and the fact that we waited until now to get around to doing it. We're the ones who

• 1:25Ryan Holiday?

  hemmed and hawed about the decision. We're now rushing. A Stoic understands that they don't control how long it takes other people to do things, but still, they don't see themselves as powerless. No, they embrace the power that they have, namely, when they start the clock. Things take time, so why add time by being indecisive, by procrastinating, by sitting on things? You don't yell at paint for drying slowly, urging it to hurry up because you have guests coming over. You finish painting with enough time for it to do what it's going to do. And so it goes for life and other people. You can't rush them along, but we can make sure that we're not unnecessarily tearing, not adding to

• 2:04Ryan Holiday?

  the clock on our end. Accept that others are slow. If you need things to go faster, speed up on your end."

• 2:23Speaker 01

  Plato's View. This is the June 2 entry in the Daily Stoic. "How beautifully Plato put it," Marcus Aurelius writes in Meditation 748. "Whenever you want to talk about people, it's best to take a bird's eye view and see everything all at once of gatherings, armies, farms, weddings, and divorces, births, and deaths, noisy courtrooms, or silent spaces, every foreign people, holidays, memorials, markets, all blended together and arranged in a pairing of opposites."

• 2:56Speaker 01

  And actually, let me give you the Hayes one today, too, because if I recall correctly, he renders this quite beautifully. "Plato has it right. If you want to talk about people, you need to look down on the earth from above. Herds, and armies, farms, and weddings, divorces, births, deaths, noisy courtrooms, desert places, all the foreign peoples, holidays, days of mourning, market days, all mixed together. A harmony of opposites." And there's actually a beautiful dialogue by the poet Lucian, who is Seneca's nephew, I believe, in which the narrator is given the ability to fly and see the world from above. Turning his eyes earthward, he sees how comically small even the richest people,

• 3:40Speaker 01

  the biggest estates, and entire empires look from above. All their battles and concerns are made petty in perspective. In ancient times, this exercise was only theoretical. The highest that anyone could get was the top of a mountain or a building a few stories tall. But as technology has progressed, humans have been able to actually take that bird's eye view and greater. Edgar Mitchell, an astronaut, was one of the first people to see the earth from outer space. And as he later recounted, "In outer space, you develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, and intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics looks

• 4:22Speaker 01

  so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles away and say, 'Look at that, you son of a bitch.'" And then I add, many a problem can be solved with the perspective of Plato's view. Use it. You know, I just got off a plane. I'm getting on a plane again shortly. And you know, you look out the window and you see it. Sometimes when I fly to Austin, I can actually see where I live. And, you know, forty acres, suddenly, very small. A thousand acres, very small. The Tesla factory, one of the biggest buildings I've ever seen in my life, very small. Skyscrapers, very small. People, miniscule.

• 5:04Speaker 01

  I think what Edgar Mitchell is talking about is a sort of paradox of it. Everything seems very small, but everything also seems very connected. Right? And so wars and international boundaries, these all seem, you know,

• 5:20Speaker 01

  so insignificant, such artificial and petty distinctions. I was telling you, I was recently down in Big Bend National Park and, right, you look over this vast expanse and it humbles you in that sense. And then also you're like, here is the United States, here is Mexico, here is the United States, here is Mexico. You're walking on the one side of the river and then it's just a... And we don't have to get into some complicated discussion about immigration, but it's just a reminder. It's like how arbitrary. Someone born over here gets this kind of life, someone born on this side gets this kind of life. And, and they'll shoot you if you, if you come across the border with this intention, but me splashing around in the water with my kids, that's totally fine.

• 6:00Speaker 01

  Right? You realize that all these things we take very seriously are not that serious. And what matters, I think Marcus is saying, when you take Plato's view is like our connection to other people, our obligations as human beings. Being good, being decent. You know, Alexander the Great's empire looks very enormous and significant and powerful and important up close, but zoom out, it doesn't seem that different than anything else. And the immensity of the damage that he did in creating it suddenly comes into view as well. So Plato's view is about getting perspective and it's, it's a reminder that our technology helps give us that view.

• 6:43Speaker 01

  And that we should appreciate. I know if you ever watched the Daily Stoic videos, sometimes we use drone shots and it's been fun to learn how to fly this drone. But this drone has also expanded my perspective. It's allowed me to see things, even myself, right? From different angles. I never saw what I looked like running from 30 meters above me. Right? I haven't seen what the angle of the road that I like to run on looks like that way. And it helps you appreciate things differently. It gives you that bird's eye view. And I think it's really important. I think time lapses can do this too. Of course, just sitting there and looking at it, climbing up to a high spot, looking at the stars can give you this too.

• 7:25Speaker 01

  But the Stoics were trying to humble themselves. They were trying to get perspective. They were trying to remember our obligations and connections to other people. They were trying, as Annie Duke says, to get to the outside of their problems, outside of the insularity of their viewpoint and their urges and their desires and their emotional reactions. And I just think it's so important. And please do avail yourself of that knowledge. It's very powerful and important, as Marcus says, as Plato does, as Lucian does. And I'll leave that with you now to chew on for the rest of the day.