Becoming a More Effective Leader and Decision Maker With Stoicism

On this weekend episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast, Ryan takes the stage to address 200 senior leaders from Herzog Technologies, Inc., a distinguished and leading rail and heavy highway contractor spanning across North America. Renowned for his profound insights into Stoic philosophy and practical wisdom, Ryan shares his invaluable thoughts on the transformative power of disciplined habits in achieving unparalleled success. ☎️ Herzog Technologies Inc. Twitter / XInstagram ✉️ 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.

• 0:06Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Weekend Edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these Stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space, when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal,

• 0:49Ryan Holiday?

  and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring.

• 0:55Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another Sunday episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I just got back home. I did a talk in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Then I was home. Then I did a talk in Phoenix. Then I was home. And then I just did a talk in Dallas earlier today. And then I drove home. So it's basically, I think, three talks in four days. But I'm excited because it's the last talk of the year. I was just going over this with the speaking folks that I work with. I'm rep by this company called Vayner Speakers. Anyways, they told me I did 50 talks last year, which it didn't seem like that much at the time, but it was a lot this year.

• 1:39Ryan Holiday?

  It was actually the same amount as last year and the same amount as the year before, but it just felt like a lot. They were packed closer together. And so it's been so many, I've kind of lost track of them. But anyways. As I was trying to come up with which one we'd run in today's episode, I pulled this talk that I also gave in Dallas, but this was way back in the midsummer. Gave a talk out in Dallas to a train company, which was pretty cool. A company that makes very heavy duty trains. And they wanted to talk about discipline. So I haven't given as many talks on discipline as I have on the other books. So I put this together and I thought you would like it. If you haven't read Discipline is Destiny, you can check it out.

• 2:22Ryan Holiday?

  But anyways, here's some Stoic lessons on discipline for the business world. But I think they pertain to all of us, whatever we do.

• 2:40Ryan Holiday?

  Thank you all. It's good to be here. I'm excited to talk something that is very relevant to what you guys all do, which is ancient philosophy. I'm sure that's what you were expecting on the agenda today. But my argument actually is that ancient philosophy is quite relevant to what all of you do, to what everyone does, right? Ancient wisdom actually applies to modern life. In fact, if I could take you back about 2,000 years, a plague breaks out in Rome. It's this devastating plague. It originates in the far east. Soldiers bring it back and it overwhelms Rome in pretty much every capacity. It's this guy's problem, Marcus Aurelius. And Marcus has to figure out how to lead through a crisis.

• 3:24Ryan Holiday?

  And not just one crisis, but one crisis after another, which tends to be how it goes. Then there's a series of historic flooding in Rome. Then Rome's borders are invaded. It's basically one crisis after another. It had been 20 years of peace and prosperity. Then pretty much the day he takes over, the shit hits the fan. And it's his problem as it is for all leaders, right? It might not be your fault, might not be what you hoped for, might not be what you planned for, but you got to figure out what to do with it. You got to figure out how to respond to it. An ancient historian would talk even back in Marcus's He would say that Marcus does not meet with the good fortune that he deserved and his whole reign was involved in a series of troubles.

• 4:08Ryan Holiday?

  And it was, right? And Marcus staggers under the weight of these troubles, as I think any leader would. He writes this book called Meditations, which is his sort of private diary, the notes he's writing to himself about his leadership philosophy, things he's trying to remind himself of. He goes, "It's unfortunate that this happened," which is a bit of an understatement, but he actually doesn't allow this sort of pity party to stand. Marcus stops himself and he goes, "No, actually, it's fortunate that this happened to me." And he tries to think about what he's gonna do with it, what he's gonna make of it. And effectively, Stoicism is this very choice, right? The idea that we don't control what happens, we control how we respond to what happens,

• 4:52Ryan Holiday?

  we control how we see what has happened. We have this choice to see any event, big or small, planned or unplanned, as fortunate or unfortunate, right? Unfortunate or fortunate. We have the choice to see what this is, to decide what it means to us, to the people we work with, to the company, to the country, to our family. We decide what this is gonna mean by what we do about it and what we do with it, right? We get to make this choice. We don't have a lot of choices, but we get to decide what we're going to do with it. And elsewhere in Meditations, Marcus really says, "Look, my actions can be impeded, right? My plans, the program I was trying to lay out, how I wanted my administration to go, right? How I wanted today to go."

• 5:37Ryan Holiday?

  He goes, "That can be impeded, but nothing can impede our intentions or our dispositions, right? So he's saying we can always accommodate and adapt and adjust, right? We can convert the obstacle to our own acting." And so he says, "The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way." This is the Stoic idea that the obstacle is the way, that it has opportunities, it has things inside it that can make us better, that can make us great, right? The Stoics are basically saying that any and every situation is the opportunity to practice virtue. Right, to step up, again, not perhaps the virtue we want, not the virtue we were planning on, but it's an opportunity to practice virtue.

• 6:18Ryan Holiday?

  And in today's world, virtue has a sort of a religious connotation, which I get. Virtue in the ancient world was rendered in the word eritate or excellence, right? So we think about it, right? Every situation is an opportunity to practice excellence. Not necessarily an opportunity to springboard the business forward in some major way, not necessarily an opportunity to make a ton of money. It's always an opportunity to practice excellence, right? We always have the opportunity to practice eritate. This is the essence of Stoic philosophy. But we go back to the idea of virtue, right? The Stoics are saying we always have the opportunity to be virtuous, to be good, to do good, always have the opportunity to practice virtue.

• 7:02Ryan Holiday?

  And the Stoics have four specific virtues around which eritate is built, and those virtues are courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom. And today, we're going to talk about discipline because I think it's one of the most essential virtues, certainly the most relevant, I think, in the business world. But the idea is that, you know, whatever the future holds, right? A bear market or a bull market, right? However uncertain the road is ahead, right? It is certain that discipline is going to be necessary. It is going to be certain that we have an opportunity to practice discipline, right? If things are going amazing, right? If the company's growing incredibly fast, that's definitely an opportunity to practice discipline, right?

• 7:47Ryan Holiday?

  That you don't overreach, you don't let it go to your head, you don't overspend, right? You don't take things for granted. You don't tell yourself it's always going to be like this. And then conversely, right? If you hit a rough patch, if things get hard, if there's a natural disaster, if the market shifts, again, an opportunity to practice discipline, right? To tighten one's belt, to find extra efficiencies, right? To endure, right? To simply survive. So the idea for the Stoics is that every situation, no matter what the future holds, is an opportunity to practice discipline. And I think there are basically three forms of discipline. They're interrelated, of course, but we can kind of put it in three big buckets. And that first bucket is going to be physical discipline.

• 8:34Ryan Holiday?

  If I could take you back to the great Lou Gehrig, one of the greatest baseball players of all time. He has a pretty impressive stat sheet, to say the least. Six World Series, 2,100 consecutive games, seven All-Star Games, six World Series, two-time MVP, 2,700 hits, almost 500 home runs, and almost 2,000 RBIs, right? He's talented, of course, but mostly he's a workhorse. He shows up every day and he does his job. He's incredibly physically tough and physically disciplined. This is what makes Lou Gehrig so great. And baseball was different then, right? They were traveling by bus and train.

• 9:19Ryan Holiday?

  They would barnstorm usually overseas in the summer. They would play multiple double headers in the side of a week. They also didn't wear helmets, right? This is an intense game. And inside this game, Lou Gehrig is known as probably the most disciplined a player in baseball.

• 9:37Ryan Holiday?

  You contrast him, I'm sorry. This is an X-ray of a hand. I wanted to make a quick point. We go, "Oh, 2,100 consecutive games." What's so insane about that is after Lou Gehrig retired, they X-rayed one of his hands and they found that he'd broken every bone in his hands multiple times, right? So when we think about these streaks, we're talking about toughness, we're talking about pushing through, talking about working even when it doesn't feel right. Lou Gehrig's, you know, a tough, a tough dude. I like to contrast someone with Lou Gehrig, when we're talking about physical discipline, with another extraordinary talented athlete. You look at Babe Ruth. Babe Ruth is naturally better than Lou Gehrig in almost every way, has more impressive stats than Lou Gehrig in a lot of ways

• 10:21Ryan Holiday?

  other than this consecutive game streak. But let's just say was not nearly as physically disciplined. This is a picture of Babe Ruth eating his favorite food, which was hot dogs. Babe Ruth goes to the hospital multiple times for eating too many hot dogs. I'm not quite sure how that's possible, but it is in fact true. He was a glutton in almost every way, for almost every pleasure that you can imagine. Women, alcohol, food. It's kind of impressive when you think about it, what Babe Ruth is able to pull off. Like, this does not look like a great athlete here.

• 11:03Ryan Holiday?

  He was, but it's interesting then to think about someone like Babe Ruth. You think about Lou Gehrig, we think about someone whose career is cut short by this unexpected illness, right? This tragic illness. But Babe Ruth's career was also cut short, right? But it's cut short by his own choice, because he lacks the sort of physical discipline that someone like Lou Gehrig has. This is Babe Ruth shortly before he dies. It's worth pointing out, Babe Ruth dies at 53. This guy looks a little bit older than 53 here. This is a guy who's ridden himself pretty hard over the years, right? And so when we think of some of the records that Babe Ruth sets, right?

• 11:46Ryan Holiday?

  Again, I think there's kind of a tinge of sadness to them. When we think about what could have been, and how unnecessary it was that he wasn't as great as he could have been. The funny thing about Babe Ruth is he would sometimes condescendingly give advice to players to not spend all their own money, to keep their body in shape. Meanwhile, he's not following any of this advice at all, right? He blows through all his money, he blows through his body, he wears himself down. And the greatness of Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth, I think, is this interesting contrast between physical discipline and a lack of physical discipline. I'm not saying that you can't be great without it, but I'm saying you're not going to be as great as you could be without it.

• 12:27Ryan Holiday?

  And so what Lou Gehrig was, was a workhorse, a guy who showed up every day, a guy who took care of himself, right? Who trained in the offseason, who didn't get out of shape and then need to get back into shape. One of his teammates would say, "There was no finer man that walked the earth. He didn't drink, chew, or smoke, and he was in bed by 9:30 or 10 at night." It's interesting to go, "That's what it takes to be the finest man on earth?", but it does. It's hard to be disciplined, and it's hard to be disciplined when you have the opportunity to not be disciplined, when the luxuries are afforded of you. There's a famous scene where Lou Gehrig walks into the Yankees dugout, well into their chain of World Series wins,

• 13:10Ryan Holiday?

  and he starts ripping the cushions off the bench. He says, "I'm tired of sitting on cushions everywhere that we go." He didn't want to get soft, he didn't want to get spoiled, he wanted to keep himself hard. One of Gehrig's biographers, actually a friend who went to school with him, would say that Lou Gehrig's sort of clean living and self-discipline, it's not smugness or about sanctification, it's that he was ambitious. He wanted something, and being in command of himself, being physically disciplined, was the way to get there. So it's not just that it's a sin, one of those seven deadly sins, it's that it's going to prevent you from doing some of the things that you want to do, it's going to sap your

• 13:52Ryan Holiday?

  stamina, it's going to sap your energy, it's going to cut short your potential. This is what we see with people who are not physically disciplined. Part of my physical discipline, part of my discipline routine, I wake up very early every morning. I've got two young kids. This is Toni Morrison, one of the great novelists of all time. She would say that she liked to get up in the morning and do some writing before she heard the word "mom," before the impositions of life came in. It's not fun to get up early, but she would get up early, she would try to tackle something hard for the day. I love that. This is Marcus Aurelius. One of my favorite passages in Meditations is Marcus Aurelius, the most powerful man in the world, having a discussion with himself

• 14:34Ryan Holiday?

  about why he needs to get out of bed early. He says, "At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself, 'I have to go to work as a human being, this is what I was born for.'" He says, "Or is this what I was created for, to huddle under the blankets and stay warm?" When I first read Meditations in college, this is my copy, you can notice I wrote 'fuck' to myself as I read this, knowing that it meant that I had to go to my early morning class. He says, "So you were born to feel nice instead of doing things and experiencing..." ...them, he says, "Don't you see the plants and the birds and the ants and the spiders and the bees going about their individual tasks, putting the world in order as best they can? Are you not willing to do your job as a human being?

• 15:17Ryan Holiday?

  Why aren't you running to do what your nature demands?"

• 15:27Ryan Holiday?

  And I love this, right? We have this debate. It would be nice not to be disciplined. It would be nice to take the easy way. It'd be nice not to push ourselves. But we're put here for that. We're put here for something more than just huddling under the covers and being warm or eating hot dogs or whatever, right? Marx says, "People who love what they do wear themselves down doing it. They forget even to wash and eat." Right? And I know some of you might go, but I'm not a morning person. I have a great book recommendation that I reach my kids sometimes. Discipline is usually, right, the result of other discipline, right? So getting up early, right, takes discipline, but it takes less discipline if you had some

• 16:09Ryan Holiday?

  discipline at night to put your phone down, right, to turn off the TV and go to bed. But so I try to get up early. My first thing is I usually try to take my kids for a walk. I try to get outside. I try to get moving, right? We started with a single stroller and then the double stroller, and now I've got to find some way to bribe them most mornings now that they can decide not to participate or to drag their feet. But we go on our morning walk. Sometimes I go and I see my donkey. This is Buddy. I bought him on Craigslist for a hundred dollars, but he's one of my favorite things in the whole world. He's usually just standing there, just like this. This might as well be a video. Then I sit down and I do a little journaling. I try to put my thoughts on paper, try to think through what I want to do, what I need

• 16:52Ryan Holiday?

  to do for the day, just a little bit of space and stillness in the morning. I think this is a really important part. And then I go to my office and I do the thing that I don't necessarily want to do. That's a little difficult. I try to sit down and I do my writing. I try to do the hard thing for the day first, the thing that requires the most concentration, the most discipline, and I want to get it done. I don't allow... Allow myself to schedule the easy things, the interruptions, the distractions. I try not to tell myself, "Oh, I'll get around to doing it later." I try to knock it out early. That's my job. And then I get it done, right? So I do the writing in the morning. And then later in the afternoon, after I've done my other stuff, one other part of my physical discipline practice is I try to swim, run, or bike every day.

• 17:37Ryan Holiday?

  And then I do a cold plunge, which is, I don't know how much you guys have read about cold plunges or heard about them. There's supposed to be all these amazing health benefits, right? It's supposed to help your immune system, it's supposed to get your circulation going. I don't know, that could all be bullshit. I don't really care. I do it because it's hard. I do it because it's actually very unpleasant, right? To slide into a plunge that is 39 degrees, right? The ice is almost there, is an unpleasant experience. But that's kind of the point, right? What we're doing when we do physical things, when we run, when we go for a walk, when we get up early, is we are also building the muscle, right? That says, "I do hard things. I do those things because they're hard.

• 18:21Ryan Holiday?

  I'm in control or command of myself." Seneca, one of the great Stoic philosophers would say, "We treat the body rigorously so that it is not disobedient to the mind." When I went for my run this morning, I thought I was going to be doing about five miles. I got back, I had about, you know, a quarter mile left. I could have said, "Oh, great, I don't have to do the full thing." And I had to do some extra laps around the parking lot, right? To finish that off. When I took a shower, the cranking of the knob to the cold side, right? That's the muscle that I'm trying to build and develop. The one that says, "I'm in control. I decide what we're doing here. I decide not to quit, right? I decide not to be discouraged or intimidated, right?"

• 19:06Ryan Holiday?

  When we practice physical discipline, of course, we're taking care of ourselves. We're getting ourselves in shape so we can live longer, right? We can have more stamina. But also, we're just practicing the sort of toughness, right? And self-control that life is going to demand of us. Discipline is a metaphor for life for all the other things that we have to do. And when we cultivate this, right, it transfers over to the other domains where we also have to practice discipline, right? Epictetus, one of the other Stoic philosophers, is saying that every situation in life, we want to be able to meet with the expression, "This is what I trained for," right? And so as we push ourselves physically, what we're setting ourselves up for is the next

• 19:50Ryan Holiday?

  time we run into some other form of adversity or difficulty, something hard we have to do, we go, "I got this. I regularly do very difficult things. I do the things that I don't necessarily want to do, but I know are good for me, I know are hard, and I can push through that," right? And that leads into what would be the next domain, the next form of discipline, which would be physical discipline. And I guess I'm skipping something here. This idea that when we control our physical needs, we elevate ourselves, that's Muhammad Ali, and we always have the ability to do this, right? And then that leads us to the mental discipline, which I would argue is harder. Lou Gehrig has a pretty good streak, right? 2,100 consecutive games, give or take, over about 17 seasons.

• 20:35Ryan Holiday?

  This little lady, Queen Elizabeth II, shows up to work every day, never misses a day of work, for seven decades, right? Slightly more impressive streak, right? We can see, you know, you see the pictures of a president, they age over four or eight years, right? This is Queen Elizabeth at the beginning and at the end, right? It's a hard job. It doesn't seem like a hard job, but it's actually a very hard job. It demands all sorts of temperamental discipline, right? Because really, the job of the sovereign of England is to not do stuff, right? They have all the title, all the pomp and circumstances, but they don't have any actual power.

• 21:18Ryan Holiday?

  They are a figurehead, they are a living symbol, and they have to demonstrate an immense amount of discipline, physical, mental, and spiritual, an immense amount of dignity and poise. They have to sort of be unruffled by everything that happens. is the entire job. She's an incredible embodiment of this. I think it's worth pointing out the physical demands of this job. She visits 126 countries over seven decades. She travels more than a million miles by boat. Right before airplanes, the Queen traveled by yacht. She travels millions of miles by air. She personally meets 4 million people, shakes hands with 4 million people.

• 22:00Ryan Holiday?

  She has 2 million people over the course of her reign over to her house. She gives out more than 100,000 awards. She survives multiple assassination attempts. Interesting, she would regularly be on her feet for 8, 10 hours a day. I think the most interesting stat about her reign, it's not in here. Queen Elizabeth, forced to sit through many, many boring presentations and speeches and long dinners, public talks, falls asleep in public only once in the course of seven decades. And it's when she's well into her 80s and it's a lecture about magnets. So I think we can give her that one. But she's a, she's a tough lady, right? And not just physically tough, but again, I think mentally tough and disciplined, right?

• 22:44Ryan Holiday?

  She meets every prime minister from Churchill through her death. And so she's often the smartest person in the room, the most well briefed person in the room, the most experienced person in the room. And yet, she's not allowed to tell anyone what to do. She can ask questions, right? She can nudge people in a certain direction, but she can't tell them what to do. And she certainly can't tell the public what she thinks about anything, right? One of her press secretaries would say, where she's been so brilliant is in her quietness. In a very noisy world where people constantly want to express themselves or overreact, the Queen has done the opposite. And I think that's so impressive, right?

• 23:27Ryan Holiday?

  In seven decades, she never gives an on the record interview with the media, right? She never lashes out, she never says anything dumb. She never gets herself in any sort of controversies or scandals. She just is the Queen, right? And you might say, oh, that's not very Difficult, I would contrast this with, say, Elon Musk, New Texan. This is a guy with ten kids, three companies, all the money in the world. And he wakes up and he can't stop himself from saying dumb shit on Twitter. You would think he would be too busy simply to do this. But he's not only not too busy, he seeks it out. He seeks out chaos and conflict. He's constantly putting his foot in his mouth.

• 24:10Ryan Holiday?

  He's constantly talking about things that he doesn't know what he's talking about. Right? Because it's easy to do this. Social media is designed to elicit our opinions about things, suck us into arguments and fights, be caught up in what's happening in the moment. Right? When actually disciplined people keep their eye on the prize, they think big picture. They understand that making yourself the center of a conversation at all times is usually just putting a target on your back, right? Smart, disciplined people don't want to be in the story. They say, "No comment," right? They say, "Let's not seek out attention. Let's do what we're doing. Let's stay in our lane. Let's not get sucked into things. Let's wait and see," right? As the Zen proverb talks about, right?

• 24:53Ryan Holiday?

  This is hard to do and it's getting harder every day. The Queen's a great example of someone who doesn't do that. Now, you might go, someone who has this job, all this pomp and circumstance, all this history and this tradition, they're probably a traditionalist. They're probably very, very conservative. And that's true in the sense that she venerates her institutions. But what's also fascinating about the Queen of England is you think about the change that occurs between the 1950s and 2023 when she passes, right? It's an incredible amount of change. And the monarchy reinvents itself many, many times while still being tried and true to its basic premise and principles, right?

• 25:37Ryan Holiday?

  The Romans would talk about the mass morium, the old ways, right? Everything is constantly changing, but you still have to have your timeless principles, right? So the Queen, when her beloved husband of many, many decades dies, sits alone. Alone in a box observing the Covid protocols, even though they would have obviously made an exception for her if she'd asked. It's probably lonely and sad. Meanwhile, right, the rest of the British government is scandalously violating the rules it's enforcing on the public, which ultimately leads to the fall of Boris Johnson's government, right? The Queen is an observer of rules and protocol, and yet, right, not stuck in the past,

• 26:20Ryan Holiday?

  she would say that change is a constant and managing it is an expanding discipline, right? The discipline of accepting, adjusting, right, adapting, converting to our own purposes, change is the essence of anyone who wants to last for a long time. And this is difficult to do. The motto of the royal household in Queen Elizabeth's time, they're borrowing a line from a, from a Italian novelist, but they would say, "If things are going to stay the same, things are going to have to change." Right? So if we want to continue to exist, if we want to continue doing what we're doing, right, we also have to constantly change and adapt and adjust, right?

• 27:03Ryan Holiday?

  Just like in the course of the half-century that you guys have been in business, right? Some things have changed, a lot of things have changed, and then certain things have had to stay the same. And the discipline to know one from the other is the essence of the kind of temperament that I'm talking about, right? The Queen also knows, or knew, what I would say is the magic word, which is "no," right? One of the hard, short word, some would say a complete sentence, but very hard for people to utter. She would say it in a slightly classier way. She would, someone would ask her if she should do this, should she comment on this? Do they want to do this? And she would say, "Ah, we better not," right? Better not. Knowing what's tried and true, knowing what your principles are, not getting too far

• 27:45Ryan Holiday?

  out of your skis, not getting too radical with things, better not. But I have actually a sign on my desk. This is Oliver Sacks. It's a picture of him in his office. He's on the phone there. I imagine he's being asked to do something, right? Asked to comment on something, appear somewhere, and he just has a little reminder behind him that says, "No." And I have this between two pictures of my kids, right? My oldest on top, my youngest below. And the reminder to me is that When I am saying yes to something, I'm saying no to something else. When I'm saying no to things, I'm saying yes to something. And then to the right of it, I have a little memo from the Truman administration. It's this cool little historical document I picked up at an auction. And this is right after Truman becomes president. It's an inter-office memo.

• 28:30Ryan Holiday?

  His secretary is saying, "Should we say that because of many similar requests, the president must ask to be excused?" And Truman, this is Truman's real handwriting, he underlines it. And he says, "The proper response is underlined Harry S. Truman." Right? The key thing for executives, for leaders, for anyone in the midst of a busy company, busy life, is the ability to say no, right? The ability to pass on things that need to be passed on, the discipline to not try to be everywhere all at once, right? Because we got to keep the calendar spaced blank. This is my ideal day, I would say. Not because I'm not working, it's so I'm using this time to work, not for meetings, phone calls, right?

• 29:15Ryan Holiday?

  Obligations that take me away from what I should be doing. This is the writer E.B. White. He's asked to speak on a presidential commission. And he says, "I must decline for secret reasons," right? As I said, no can be a complete sentence, right? Every yes is a no, and every no is a yes, right? What do you need to be saying yes to? What do you have to say no to so you can say yes to those things, right? It's one of my favorite tweets. "Could the meeting be a Zoom? Could the Zoom be a phone call? Could the phone call be an email? Could it be a text? Could it be nothing? Probably be nothing." Marcus Aurelius's question was, "Is this essential?" And he says, "When we eliminate the inessential, we get the double benefit of doing the essential

• 30:00Ryan Holiday?

  things better." So the queen is saying no, and the queen is saying better not. It's so she can stay on task, so she can do the important things, so she can do the things that only she can do. So knowing what your actual job is, what's actually moving the needle, what the most essential thing is, once you get that, right? Once you get that clarity... Then you have to be very disciplined about enforcing it. There's gonna be fun stuff, there's gonna be gratifying stuff, there's gonna be stuff that's hard to say no to, there's gonna be stuff that people try to guilt you into saying yes to, but you gotta be disciplined, you gotta be able to say this magic word. And I think the other part of this mental discipline, the Stoics would say, "Look, there's all the things that are happening in the world,

• 30:43Ryan Holiday?

  and there's the little bit of it that you control, as you guys have here. I do not control events, right? But we do control how we respond to events." Stoics would say, "Our first job is figuring out which part of it is not in our control, which part of it is in our control, right? And then, once we know what we don't control, then we can focus on what we do control, is what we're gonna do about it, right? And the Stoics would say, "Look, we control our thoughts, we control our emotions, we control our decisions, we control how we choose to see things, that's it." I talk to my employees, I go, "Look, I don't control how long that person's gonna take to get back to me, but I control how long it sits in my inbox, right?

• 31:24Ryan Holiday?

  I control how long I dilly-dally, I control how long I procrastinate. I don't control the other side, but I'm gonna make sure I'm working quickly, I'm working well, I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing, and then, right, I can adjust and adapt and accept the part of that that's outside my control."

• 31:46Ryan Holiday?

  When people think Stoicism, they tend to think like, "Has no emotions," right? I think it's important that we point out that that's not what Stoicism is. But we are trying to be less emotional, not emotionless, but less emotional, right? Because very rarely do our emotions make the decisions we have to make, the things we have to do easier or better, right? The Stoics are trying to strip out anger and fear and anxiety and greed and hate and despair and ego and pride, because these aren't helpful emotions. I have a little sign next to my desk that I look at every day when I sit down to write. It says, "Never be afraid of material. The material knows when you are frightened, and it will not help." Right? We talk about imposter syndrome, we talk about crises of confidence. Very rarely...

• 32:31Ryan Holiday?

  Does that make the thing you're trying to do better, right? Doubting yourself, questioning yourself, kicking yourself, feeling guilty about stuff. These are not emotions that are constructive to what you're trying to do. But an even keel is. That's what the Stoics are trying to cultivate. Not getting too high, not getting too low. Marx really says, "We want to be like the rock that the waves crash over and eventually the sea falls still around." General James Mattis, our former Secretary of Defense, four-star general in the Marines, he would actually carry a copy of Marx's meditations with him everywhere he went in his 40 years of deployments. He would say that the biggest problem for leaders in the information age is a lack of

• 33:13Ryan Holiday?

  reflection, a lack of solitude, a lack of silence, a lack of space to think. I know you guys have one in here, right? Press pause, right? Taking a minute to stop and think about it, not emotionally reacting, right? Not taking a bad situation and making it worse. One of my rules is I don't touch my phone for the first 30 minutes that I'm awake. I don't want to get sucked immediately into email. I want to be intentional about what I'm trying to do for the day, about what I need to accomplish, about the mindset or the headspace that I want to bring to what I'm doing, right? I would argue television news is about the worst thing you can do for your brain.

• 33:56Ryan Holiday?

  I'm always interested, I go into executives' offices, whether they're in businesses, corporate world, or they're in sports, and they're just running CNBC, or ESPN, or Fox News, or MSNBC in the background. And I go, "There is no way you are able to sit and concentrate on what you're doing with that running in the background." What you're being distracted by with is what's happening in this moment, right? What you're not thinking about is the future. What you're not thinking about is what's happening next year. You're not planning. You're getting caught up in the immediacy of the moment. And of course, this is true when you scroll Twitter, or Facebook, or Instagram, or whatever, right? I'd argue way too many of your phones look like this, right? It's very hard to be disciplined when you pull up your phone and you are getting a

• 34:41Ryan Holiday?

  Alerts constantly about things that you don't actually need to know about, right? Great, a package was delivered, cool. Is that what you needed to break your concentration to find out? No. So, creating some discipline from our devices, from our information diet is a really important way to stay on task. This is Admiral James Stavridis, a friend of mine. He would say that, look, a great decision maker synthesizes a lot of data, of course, they check it against intelligence, they correlate, right? But, how do they cultivate these great decisions? It's actually with quite a lot of discipline. He says we gotta be reasonably well-rested. I talked about waking up early, right?

• 35:22Ryan Holiday?

  He talks about clearing your mind of excess white noise, breathing deeply and steadily, lowering your voice, never raising it, moving your field of vision, right? What you can actually see firsthand, right? This is how we make good decisions, right? And I think it's important that we understand that this stillness, this quietness, this self-command is a discipline and it demands discipline. And we need this discipline for all the decisions that we are likely to face in the course of a day. I mentioned Truman earlier, right? Truman becomes president and he's got some decisions to make, right? He faces something not unlike what Marcus Aurelius faces, which is a series of crises. He's got the Soviets in Poland, the first meeting of the UN, first shipment of uranium,

• 36:04Ryan Holiday?

  the Soviets are entering the war in Japan, and then within a few months, he's gotta make the decision about the atomic bomb, the Marshall Plan containment, the Berlin air left. It's one decision after another. And so, what is Truman drawing? Well, Truman draws, of course, on the little sign on his desk, the buck stops here. That's what leaders do. That's what the heads of companies ultimately have to answer to. But he had another sign on his desk that I think is actually more important, and it's interesting that we don't celebrate it enough. It's a quote from Mark Twain. It says, "Always do right, this will gratify some people and astonish the rest." And Truman's definition of what is right, he gets from the Stoics, right? Come full circle, this is what he writes in the sign, this is what he writes about

• 36:48Ryan Holiday?

  Marcus Aurelius's meditations. Truman says, "The four greatest virtues are moderation, discipline, wisdom, justice, and fortitude. If we cultivate these, we have what we need to have, not just a happy and successful life, but also to make the decisions we wanna make." I will say one little exercise I wanted to give you from the Stoics that I think is important. Stoics are not surprised, shocked, disoriented by what happens. The reason they're able to be cruel under pressure is because they prepare, right? This is what I trained for, as Epictetus said. They're prepared for what can happen, what often does happen, right? I'm sure you're familiar with positive visualization, imagining what goes right, working your way through it.

• 37:31Ryan Holiday?

  Well, the Stoics practice that, but they also practice negative visualization. The word for this is premeditatio malorum in Latin, which means a premeditation of evils, right? They rehearse it in their mind: exile, and war, and torture, and shipwreck, right? Everything that could happen, they try to think through. Seneca also says, "The one inexcusable thing for a leader to say is, 'I did not think that would happen,'" right? You have to think about it. You have to think about what you would do if that would happen, right? Not, this isn't about creating anxiety and stress. It's about reducing anxiety and stress because you know, within the range of outcomes

• 38:11Ryan Holiday?

  and the inconceivable range of outcomes, you know how you're going to comport yourself. You know what your values are. You know you've practiced discipline, right? That you're going to be able to draw on when that happens, right? This is what HEB does during the pandemic, right? All of us in Texas, what was great about HEB is they didn't really run out of anything. And people ask, "Well, how did this happen?" And they said, "Well, it's because we've war-gamed for precisely these kinds of things." They had parts of their supply line that were algorithm, that sensed things that were happening even overseas, and they were able to automatically order stuff. They were able to stock up accordingly. They were able to communicate accordingly, right?

• 38:52Ryan Holiday?

  HEB plans for and survives the pandemic in the way that grocery stores in different states don't manage to do. Actually, in some ways, because of their experience with hurricanes and other natural disasters in Texas, right? They have experience with things going wrong. They've also practiced and planned for things going wrong. So instead of hoping for the best, right, they plan for the worst, right? So we can say to ourselves, "This is what I trained for. This is why I've been doing what I've been doing for moments like this." So obviously, what they train special forces operators, and police officers, and firefighters, and astronauts in, right? Because stuff is going to go wrong, and the margin for error is so thin. That if they're caught off guard by it, if they react emotionally to it, right?

• 39:36Ryan Holiday?

  If they're not disciplined in how they methodically solve it, right? People will die, things will crash, right? Tragedies will not be averted. And I love this quote from the Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield. He says, "Astronauts are not braver than other people. They're just meticulously prepared." And then he says, "Look, in a crisis, in a situation where something goes wrong, there's a bunch of things that you can do that makes it better." And then he says, "It's worth remembering that there's no problem so bad that you cannot make it worse also." Right? This is why we're disciplined. So when life throws stuff at us, when stuff does go wrong, right? We don't make it worse also. And now I want to wrap up with the third discipline, right?

• 40:19Ryan Holiday?

  Third discipline of discipline, which I would argue is a sort of a higher form, kind of spiritual discipline that's not just physical and temperamental, but that is able to survive and endure all that life throws at us. And life throws a lot at us. I think about, you guys, you've been in this for 50 years. Let's think about some of the things that have happened across those decades, right? You had Vietnam, you had stagflation, you had the Cold War, you had the oil crisis, you had Black Monday, you had the tech bubble, you had 9/11, you had the Great Recession, you had COVID. And then think about all the individual things, right? That your company went through and all the individual things that the individuals inside the company went through, right?

• 41:04Ryan Holiday?

  We're always going through something. It's never easy. Life is not in our control. So we're always dealing with these uncontrollables, right? But you survived those things. You made it through, right? One of my favorite quotes from James Baldwin, he's writing to his nephew, James. And he says, "Look, the future is going to be hard. What you're going through is going to be difficult." But he says, "It's important to remember that you come from sturdy peasant stock, men who picked cotton and dammed rivers and built railroads, right? And in the teeth of the most terrifying odds, achieved an unassailable and monumental dignity." Think about what this company has endured. And not just survive, but thrive through, right? Think about what it's gone through, and not just bad things, right?

• 41:48Ryan Holiday?

  But also good things, right? Boom times and boom markets that you were disciplined enough that you didn't get carried away, right? You didn't slacken your discipline and make mistakes that couldn't be recovered from, right? You don't make it this long without a lot of discipline. I think it's important that we see ourselves as the hairs to the inheritors of that tradition, that we're following in that footstep. We're following those footsteps that we're carrying it forward. So when we think about how we're gonna meet the future, how we're gonna deal with the adversity that's almost certain, and then hopefully also the good times that may happen also, how will we meet them?

• 42:31Ryan Holiday?

  Well, we'll meet them with the same discipline that we've met the past with, right? Marx realized, "How will you meet the future? With the same weapons that you had today, right? With the same endurance, right? This is Shackleton's famous ship, right? His Latin motto is "By endurance we conquer," right? You'll meet the future, you'll meet tomorrow with the same endurance that you've met not just today with, but yesterday and all the situations of the past, right? You're not gonna control what the future holds, but you control how you respond to that future, right? We don't control the state of the market, we don't control technology or the weather, right? The size of the jobs we get, right? Or the things that are coming our way, right?

• 43:12Ryan Holiday?

  We don't control whether things are easy or hard, but we do control whether we give up, right? We control whether we get back up, whether we keep going, whether we comport ourselves with dignity and strength and poise, right? Marx realized, "Talks about loving the discipline you know and letting it support you," right? We control whether we keep going back to those standards, to those principles, right? If we act with the things that you guys have posted up on your walls and in your books, right? We control that, right? This is Edison's factory in Menlo Park, New Jersey. It's on fire, as you can tell from this colorized photos. This is the man's life's work up in flames, and you know, there was no hope of putting

• 43:57Ryan Holiday?

  that fire out. Edison...

• 44:00Ryan Holiday?

  Comes to the scene, he finds his son. His son is standing there, shell shocked, looking at all of their work, all of their success, all of their facilities up in flames. Not insured, I might remind you. He had fallen in love with this form of concrete. Edison invents this form of concrete. He builds his buildings out of it. And concrete is fireproof, yes, but things inside buildings are not. So it's all up in flames and he hadn't insured it. So this could be devastating. This is the end. This is everything. Instead, Edison grabs his son, who's standing there, and he says, "Go get your mother and all her friends. They'll never see a fire like this again." I love that. I love the enthusiasm.

• 44:43Ryan Holiday?

  I love the acceptance, right? We think of Stoicism as resignation, as it's this kind of passive thing. But it's not. It's more than that. It's the embracing of the situation, even when it's heartbreaking and frustrating and unexpected. And then the next day, he tells reporters, he goes, "Look, I've been through things like this before. It prevents a man from being afflicted with ennui." Basically saying, "It's going to prevent me from getting bored. This is my next challenge." And he throws himself into rebuilding. He actually takes a loan from Henry Ford. He rebuilds the factory. It's partially back up and running in six weeks. And about six months, it's fully operational.

• 45:24Ryan Holiday?

  The final act of Edison's life is coming back from this disaster, coming back from this adversity. That's the kind of discipline I'm talking about. That's the response that I'm talking about. It's more than passivity, which we so wrongly associate with Stoicism. The Stoics would love this phrase, "amor fati," or "love of fate." They say it's not merely that you bear what's happened, but you love it, you embrace it. Marx realized, actually, what you throw on top of a fire becomes fuel for the fire. It turns it into flame and brightness and heat. And so when we have this discipline, when we have this strength, when we have this energy, the obstacles, the difficulties, the unexpected things that life throws at us, right? Not only doesn't stop us, it makes us better, right? It's opportunities for us to be excellent, to grow.

• 46:09Ryan Holiday?

  To learn, to change, right? This is what we're trying to cultivate, and this is what we need to cultivate for an uncertain future, right? And so it's good that things have been hard, right? It's made us better. It continues to make us better. If things were easy, if things went the way that we wanted them to go, right, we wouldn't be who we are now. We wouldn't be capable of what we're capable now, right? It makes us more disciplined, and it reminds us of the significance, of the importance, the essentialness of discipline. And I know I opened with that story of Marcus Aurelius, right? Marcus Aurelius, one trouble after another. He survives it, he endures it. He doesn't have the good fortune that he deserves. His whole reign is involved in a series of troubles, right? There's the plague, and then there's the flooding and the wars,

• 46:54Ryan Holiday?

  and it's one thing after another, right? But that historian doesn't stop there, just as Marcus doesn't stop there. It's not just that he didn't get a good hand, right? Doesn't control that, but he controls what he does about it. And that historian would say, this is the second half, that quote, he says, "But I, for my part, admired him all the more because amid unusual and extraordinary difficulties, he both survives himself and preserves the empire." Right? Marcus is great because of what he went through. Who he was was only possible because of what he went through. I was just using that metaphor of fire. I was just reading about this kind of tree that lives in the forests of northern Canada,

• 47:39Ryan Holiday?

  and I think it's a conifer tree. And they found that its its pine cones, right, when they fall to the ground, they only, they're only, they only germinate, they only are fertilized, they can only grow if they are exposed to temperatures that are not possible naturally, right? It's only from fire, right, that these are able to sprout. And so actually, the difficulty, right, the pain, the loss, the things that are going wrong, it's part and parcel, it's essential to the growth of, to the growth of the species. And you could argue that Marcus is a similar path. Who Marcus is, what he's able to do, right? What great companies, what great organizations are able to do is Only a result of the difficulties and the challenges that they face, right?

• 48:23Ryan Holiday?

  The excellence they're able to reach is a product of the adversity that they face. Right? He was great because of what he goes through, because of what he endures, because of who he is throughout, because of his physical and mental spiritual discipline. He would say to himself, "What's my job?" Right? "What's my job in this moment?" And he would say, "My job is to be good, right? That's my main job." He would say, "The fruit of this life is good character and acts for the common good." That's right. So when we see virtue as that, when we see excellence as that, right, there really is nothing that can stop us from doing that, from being good,

• 49:04Ryan Holiday?

  from doing good, from having good character, from working for the good of the organization, working for the good of the industry, working for the good of the client, customer, government, country, right?

• 49:17Ryan Holiday?

  This is the kind of discipline we're talking about. And as I wrap up, I wanted to give you a word that I think I could leave you with, that I think's worth thinking about. Again, discipline is not just subjecting yourself to difficult things. It's not just pain and suffering and gritting your teeth and bearing it. Stoics have this word euthymia, which means tranquility, right? And Seneca says, "Well, what is that tranquility? How does one get it?" Right? It's not you retreat to the mountains or a monastery or some beautiful resort, right? He says euthymia in the course of life has to come from something else. And he says, he defines this euthymia as, he says,

• 49:56Ryan Holiday?

  "A sense of the path that you're on without being distracted by the paths that crisscross yours, even from those, especially from those who are hopelessly lost." Right? So you think about the interchanges and the connections. You think about all the other companies doing what you do, going in similar directions. Think about what's happening in the industry, in the world. It's very easy to get distracted, right? When I was at American Apparel, I watched Dove destroy a billion-dollar company because instead of doing what he did well, The company was meant to do, he started doing what Forever 21 was doing, and Urban Outfitters was doing, and H&M was doing, right? He lacked the discipline to stay on his path.

• 50:40Ryan Holiday?

  He got distracted by the paths of those who crisscrossed him, even when some of those companies ultimately also were headed towards bankruptcy or having to reinvent themselves. So it takes a lot of discipline to know what you do, right? What makes you great, what your principles are, what your place in the market is, and to stay on that, and to not get distracted, right? To not get distracted by every shiny other thing. And so euthymia is not just a recipe for personal happiness, tranquility, but it's also a recipe for success, right? Staying in your lane, right? Staying on your tracks, right? Doing what you set out to do, adhering to your strategic plan, your mission, your principles, right?

• 51:24Ryan Holiday?

  This takes an enormous amount of discipline. My favorite band is the band Iron Maiden. They haven't quite been in business as long as you guys have, but they're approaching their 40th odd anniversary here. They've sold over 100 million albums, they tour all over the world. They've basically never been popular. It's sort of an absurd band with these funny shirts, as you can see. They've got three guitar players. They write ridiculous songs about Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan and stuff. Anyways, there's a great quote from the lead singer, the band Bruce Dickinson, who's also a commercial airline pilot. I'm getting distracted here, sorry. He has this great quote, and he says, "Look, we have our fields, right? And we're plowing that field."

• 52:08Ryan Holiday?

  And he says, "I don't care at all what anyone is doing in their own fields, because you can only plow one field at a time." And their manager was once asked, you know, by a fan, his fan said something about... Their work in the music industry. And the manager said, "I'm not in the music business." He said, "I'm in the iron fucking maiden business." And the idea is, you're not in the space. You're in what you're, you're in your space. You're in what you do. And the discipline to stay in that space, right? To lock in on what you do, what you set out to do, to tune out all the other things, right? The noise we were talking about, distractions we're talking about,

• 52:50Ryan Holiday?

  the glittering, fun, sexy opportunities that are not quite right. This requires an immense amount of discipline, right? To keep one's eye on the prize, to focus on what you control, right? To do everything with courage, and justice, and discipline, and wisdom. This is what we're talking about. And it's been an honor to share that with all of you. Thank you very much.

• 53:27Ryan 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.