Where Are You Trying To Get Better? | Do Not Be Deceived By Fortune

Tom Brady has always been relentless about trying to get better. Trying to get his passes out quicker. Trying to get his spirals a little tighter. Trying to optimize his diet. Trying to recover from games faster. While almost none of us are like Tom Brady on the practice field, we’re all like him in the sense that we spend a lot of time and energy focusing on improving ourselves at work, at our chosen craft or profession. But when it comes to personal improvement?---And in today's reading and meditation from The Daily Stoic, Ryan examines why Seneca stated that "no one is crushed by fortune unless they are first deceived by her," and the folly of trusting in fortune. You can read more of Seneca's views in On the Shortness of Life: Life Is Long If You Know How to Use It.📙 Check out The Daily Dad: 366 Meditations on Parenting, Love, and Raising Great Kids for inspiration, motivation, and tools to help you become a better parent.✉️ 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?

  Where are you trying to get better? Tom Brady has always been relentless about trying to get better, trying to get his passes out quicker, trying to get his spirals a little tighter, trying to optimize his diet, trying to recover from games faster. And while none of us are like Tom Brady on the practice field, we're all like him in the sense that we spend a lot of time and energy focusing on improving ourselves at work, at our chosen craft or profession. But when it comes to personal improvement, we're a little less intentional there, even though we and our children would benefit from a similar intentionality. After he retired and then unretired, Tom Brady talked about his struggles with trying to be an elite athlete and an elite husband and father. During the offseason, he said,

• 1:27Ryan Holiday?

  "My family's got a lot of time. I have enjoyed that," he said, "but I can still do a better job of that," he admitted. "It's constantly trying to be a little bit better each day." Marcus Aurelius once asked himself why he was trying to get better at wrestling, but not better at being a human being, better at forgiving faults, better at being someone his family could rely on. It's the million-dollar question. You're relentless about improving at work, much less so about improving at home. Where would we be if we could try this even a little bit? If we could try to get a little bit better each day at being present, at being more patient, at forgiving faults, at encouraging, at empathizing, at appreciating,

• 2:10Ryan Holiday?

  at protecting, at prioritizing? How much more wonderful could life be? And how would this actually make us better at work, too?

• 2:22Ryan Holiday?

  That's obviously the idea behind the new book, The Daily Dad. One page a day to help you be better at parenting, being a better spouse, being a better person. Stoicism is there, so are all the different philosophical traditions. But the idea is you're not just magically going to become a better parent. Something you gotta work on, just like you're not going to become a better philosopher without actively studying Stoicism, which is what the emails are about and the videos are about and all the content that we do here at Daily Stoic and Daily Dad. If you haven't checked out either book, The Daily Dad or The Daily Stoic, I hope you do. I hope you check in with them often and I hope you get a little bit better.

• 3:14Ryan Holiday?

  Do not be deceived by fortune. This is the September 8th entry in The Daily Stoic.

• 3:22Ryan Holiday?

  And our quote today comes to us from Seneca in his letter on consolation to Helvia. That's his mother. It's a beautiful essay. You can read it on The Shortness of Life, one of my favorite little collections of Seneca's writings, but we'll get to the quote now. He says, "No one is crushed by fortune unless they are first deceived by her. Those who aren't pompous in good times don't have their bubbles burst with change. Against either circumstance, the stable person keeps their rational soul invincible, for it's precisely in the good times that they prove their strength against adversity." In 41 AD, Seneca was exiled from Rome to Corsica. For what exactly, we're not sure, but the rumors were that he had an affair with the sister of the emperor.

• 4:08Ryan Holiday?

  Shortly thereafter, he sent a letter to his mother seeking to reassure her. And comfort her in her grief, her grief being that she missed her son. But in many ways, he must have been speaking to himself as well, scolding himself a little for this unexpected twist he was taking pretty hard. He had managed to achieve some measure of political and social success. Maybe he chased some pleasures of the flesh, but now he and his family were dealing with the consequences as we all must bear for our behavior and the risks we take. How would he respond? How would he deal with it? What the very least, his instincts were to comfort his mother instead of simply bemoaning his suffering. Though some other letters show that Seneca begged and lobbied for his return to Rome

• 4:53Ryan Holiday?

  and to power, a request that was eventually granted, he does seem to have borne the pain and disgrace of exile fairly well. The philosophy that he'd long studied prepared him for this kind of adversity and gave him the determination and patience he needed to wait it out. When he found his fortune restored as he returned to power, philosophy prevented him from taking it for granted or becoming dependent on it. This was good because fortune had another turn in store for him. When the new emperor turned his wrath on Seneca, philosophy found him ready and prepared once again. It's a tension, right? Seneca says we suffer more in imagination than in reality. You don't want to just be thinking of all the terrible things that could happen. You don't want to be biting your nails in anticipation of this or that.

• 5:38Ryan Holiday?

  And yet, if you are naive, if you trust in fortune, you are setting yourself up for pain. He says, "Never forget of fortune's habits of behaving exactly as she pleases." Yes, you know, as we become successful, as we get things, we start to go, "This is how it should be. I earned this. I made this. It's mine." And maybe a lot of that is true. You're not the ultimate decider. Something can take that from you. Unfairness can take it from you. Injustice can take it from you. Tragedy can take it from you. The emperor can take it from you. So if you are deceived by fortune, that this is yours now, that this is the new normal, that this is stable, you have bought into an illusion and that you can be disabused of that illusion at any moment.

• 6:23Ryan Holiday?

  How painful will that disillusion be? My favorite line is in Invisible Man, it says, "How does it feel to be free of illusion?" It's painful and empty. We build our lives around these illusions, around the sense that this is how it should be, all is right in the world.

• 6:40Ryan Holiday?

  You are begging, you are begging for life to visit some humility upon you. So you have to be careful, you have to be aware, we have to practice, we have to prepare, we have to train, we can't take any of it for granted. None of it is nearly as stable as it appears. That's what Seneca realized, not just at this exile, but early on in his life when tuberculosis sent him to Egypt to convalesce. Nero turned out to be insane. That's what life does. It reminds us, it doesn't go the way we want it. And I think it's problematic how often we say things like, this is unprecedented, this is not normal, this has never happened, this has always happened, this is always how it's going to be.

• 7:23Ryan Holiday?

  Normal is crazy, normal is chaos, normal is sudden reversal. I was just reading Morgan Housel's The Psychology of Money, and he has this line in there, unexpected things happen all the time, or things that have never happened before happen all the time. That's the wisdom of what Seneca is trying to say there. That's what we prepare for, train in this philosophy for, is to be ready for precisely those kind of events. So when things go wrong, we can be the person, imagine, again, and if you haven't read On the Shortness of Life, pick up a copy there in The Painted Porch, if you could, I'll link to it in today's episode. Right? There's something sweet about the fact that Seneca is the one exiled, but he's writing the consolation to his mother.

• 8:08Ryan Holiday?

  It's not his mother saying, you got this kiddo, it'll be all right. He's saying, Mom, I'm okay, it's gonna be all right. He's comforting the people who are grieving and missing him. That's what this discipline of philosophy can be, that's what Seneca practiced for. And that's what we're working towards. Self-control, that's what Seneca was embodying there in his stoic, lowercase stoic, handling of the terrible injustice dealt to him. And I hope to give you some of that strength too. Enjoy, talk soon.