This is How You Make Hard Situations Easier | The Stoic Guide To Freedom And Power (From Epictetus)

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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Ryan 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. On Tuesdays, we take a closer look at these Stoic ideas and how we can apply them in our actual lives. Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy.

• 0:30Ryan Holiday?

  This is how you make hard situations easier.

• 0:35Ryan Holiday?

  Airports are stressful and traveling can be a nightmare. Dealing with a toddler's tantrum at the grocery store tries the best of us. The confrontation with an employee or a colleague, the phone call where we get the news that somebody passed away. Life is full of these situations. They challenge us, they overwhelm us. There is no foolproof way to prevent them or manage them, but there is something that helps. Seneca talked about premeditatio malorum. He said that we had to meditate on all the things that could happen to us and that by thinking in advance, let's say about a nightmare travel day or the eventual death of a grandparent, we lessen it, if only slightly. The unexpected blow, he said, lands heaviest. Even just saying that to yourself, that the airport is stressful, there may be delays, but I've dealt with that

• 1:19Ryan Holiday?

  before, and it's important for me to try to relax and take things as they come. This doesn't seem like much, but it helps. Dr. Becky Kennedy, who's book Good Inside, we've been raving about, calls this emotional vaccination. In the same way that a vaccine exposes our body to a manageable amount of the virus or the disease, teaching it how to fight the illness, talking to ourselves or our children about what's going to happen in advance of it happening helps us deal with it. It removes the surprise, it removes the suddenness of it. The last thing you want to do is face anything, a virus or a trip to the grocery store with a tired kid. You don't want to face that defenseless, especially when there are defenses available, when medicine or the ancient Stoics have studied it and come up with things that work,

• 2:03Ryan Holiday?

  because we are going to catch these situations. We are going to be exposed to germs, but if we strengthen ourselves in advance, we can handle it.

• 2:15Ryan Holiday?

  All the Stoics talk about freedom. Epictetus would have known what it really meant. And more importantly, he knew how to find it inside literal slavery. He said, "A podium and a prison are each a place, and in each one of those places, we have a certain amount of freedom of will." I'm Ryan Holiday. I've written a number of books about Stoic philosophy. I've spoken about it to everyone from the NBA to the NFL, sitting senators and special forces leaders. And I want to give you some strategies for finding freedom wherever you live, whatever you do, whatever kind of life you have, from the one and only Epictetus. You have two options. You can want things to turn out a certain way, or you could welcome them the way they happen, Epictetus says.

• 2:57Ryan Holiday?

  He says, "You could want them to turn out as you want them to, or you could decide that you want them to turn out how they've turned out." For the Stoics, this is the discipline of assent. Are you going to wish things are a certain way? Are you going to accept them as they are? That doesn't mean you accept the injustices of the world, per se, but it means if it's raining, you're happy that it's raining. If it's cloudy, you're happy that it's cloudy. If it's sunny and hot, you're happy that it's sunny and hot. If you're born short, you're happy that you're short. If you're tall, you're happy that you're born tall. You accept things as they are, you make the most of it. This is what the idea of a more "hot" is. Accept things, be happy that things are the way that they are, that you were given what you've been given, and then get to work using it.

• 3:39Ryan Holiday?

  That's what Stoicism is about. So my favorite thing about Epictetus is he's born a slave, and he finds himself a slave in the court of Nero. So here you have this guy. He has no power, no freedom, amidst incredible wealth, power, and opulence. But he comes to realize, watching how people act in Nero's court, that these supposedly free people aren't nearly as free as he thinks. He watches a man suck up to Nero's cobbler. He's brown-nosing the guy who makes Nero's shoes because he wants to get in Nero's favor. One man comes to Nero and says, "I'm down to my last million dollars." And then Nero says, "Oh, my God, how can you bear it?" Epictetus realizes, although he's been deprived of his physical freedom...

• 4:24Ryan Holiday?

  He's actually less of a slave than all of these people who are slave to their ambition, slave to power, slave to keeping up, slave to impressing other people, a slave to appearances, a slave to urges or mistresses. And so Epictetus realizes that freedom comes from the inside. "Yes, people can bind us up in chains," he says. "They can't remove our power, choice, they can't change our ability to make our decisions, to set our own priorities." That's what Stoicism is actually about, and that's why the philosophy is popular, not just with Epictetus, a slave, but Marcus Aurelius, who's an emperor later in that same court.

• 5:03Ryan Holiday?

  The Stoics were fond of sports metaphors, just like we are today. Epictetus, one of the great Stoics, would say that this is what life is. He compares them to ballplayers, some version of an athlete. He says, "A ballplayer doesn't categorize a throw as good or bad. They're too busy trying to catch it and throw it back." He compares Socrates to being the ultimate athlete or ballplayer, because that's what Socrates was. Not only in the course of a discussion could he ping it back and forth, that he didn't get offended, he wasn't challenged, he would always just try to respond, but that Socrates responds to persecution, he responds to war, he responds to being doubted, he responds to all the difficulties of his life, not in thinking of whether they're good or bad, but in how he's going to respond,

• 5:48Ryan Holiday?

  how he's going to deal with them. This is the essence then of Stoicism. It's a very simple idea. We don't control what happens, we control how we respond to what happens. We don't control other people, we control how we respond to other people.

• 6:07Ryan Holiday?

  You can't trust appearances. Epictetus says that what studying philosophy gives you, he says, "It makes you like a money changer, who can know from the way they bang a coin on the table whether it's counterfeit or not." Stoicism is about putting every impression to the test. And as you try to make money in life, as you try to invest in life, it's not just finding the good investments, finding the good vehicles, it's about avoiding being scammed.

• 6:34Ryan Holiday?

  It's about avoiding fads. It's about avoiding false promises. Marcus really says you can't fall for every smooth talker. That's what Epictetus is saying. You put the impression to the test. You can trust, but you have to verify. If it seems too good to be true, whether it's an emotion or an investment, it probably is. Epictetus says that when you look outside yourself for approval, you have settled, you've handed over your happiness or your autonomy. And this is such a critical Stoic idea when we talk about what's in our control, what's not in our control, how you should judge yourself, whether you're getting better, whether you're a success, whether you're rich, whether you're...whatever it is, it can't be determined by other people.

• 7:19Ryan Holiday?

  What you've done is hand over your life on a platter to other people. Obviously, this is wonderful when people are celebrating you and saying you're awesome, but what happens when that turns? What happens if the crowd is wrong? What happens if the times that you're in are valuing the wrong things? So Epictetus is saying that you want to look inward. You want to create your own standards, your own scorecard for what's important to you. So a Stoic doesn't look to outside sources, outside people, outside benchmarks for their success, for their happiness, for their self-worth. You find that internally.

• 7:54Ryan Holiday?

  A cold plunge is something you do physically, but it's really about a mindset shift. It's about embracing discomfort. It's about getting comfortable with adversity. It's about pushing your boundaries. It's about challenging yourself. It's about being present in the moment. In meditations, Marcus really talks about washing off the dust of earthly life. We know that Romans had bathhouses. They had cold plunges. They would alternate between the hot and the cold. It's hard to be anything but present when I'm sitting here in this cold plunge. This is a plunge, cold plunge. It's just one of the absolute best decisions I've made. And then getting in it every day, try to do about 11 or so minutes a week. That's one of the best decisions that I make every day.

• 8:35Ryan Holiday?

  If you want to embrace all the benefits, mental, physical, spiritual of a cold plunge, you gotta check out Plunge. It's the one I have here at my house. Plunge is offering Daily Stoic listeners $150 off their plunge order. Just use code DAILYSTOIC150 at checkout.

• 8:58Ryan Holiday?

  One of my favorite lessons from Epictetus, he says, "It's impossible to learn that which you think you already know." Whenever I'm around people that are much better than me at something, when I'm embarrassingly bad at something, I have no fear or shame about asking really stupid questions. If I'm remotely unsure about something, I'll ask. I don't care if I look stupid, which is actually another really important lesson from Epictetus. He says, "If you want to improve, you have to be content. You have to be okay with looking stupid or foolish. You have to be willing to be embarrassed, or to be awkward, or be uncomfortable with something, or you can't get any better." I'm not afraid to ask questions. I'm not afraid to look like an idiot. I'd rather look like an idiot than chop off my hand, or have something fall on me, or screw it up. So that's how I think about it. I'm not afraid to ask dumb questions.

• 9:43Ryan Holiday?

  Epictetus sees power up close, and he learns something very important. He learns that most powerful people are not free at all. He says, "Because to be free, you have to be in control of yourself." He says, "No man is free who is not master of himself." So even though Epictetus is a slave, and his life is so circumscribed compared to the rich, powerful people he's owned by, who he sees every day in the palace, he knows he's actually freer, that he has a better life because he controls his urges, his desires, his thoughts. He directs his mind. He knows what he wants. He knows what's important. And if you don't know those things, it doesn't matter how rich you are. It doesn't matter how famous you are. It doesn't matter what you have, how big your platform is, how important your job is. You are not free.

• 10:27Ryan Holiday?

  You become free when you master yourself, and you master your mind, then you master your life, and you master the world.

• 10:37Ryan Holiday?

  When life deals you a problem, you can complain. When you're facing a challenge, you can resent it. Or you can look at it as Epictetus did. You can say to yourself, "Life has paired me with a strong sparring partner, and I'm going to be better for wrestling with it, for fighting it, for beating it." And look, Epictetus isn't talking about this theoretically. He spends 30 years in Roman slavery, but he chooses to see the adversity, big and small, in his life as a challenge. So instead of being dealt in... Unfair advantage. He's stepping up and taking advantage of the opportunity to grow by struggling with this resistance, by wrestling with it, by sparring with it, by learning from it. And this is how we can face the adversity in our own lives.

• 11:21Ryan Holiday?

  Instead of feeling like we're unlucky, instead of feeling like we've been screwed over, we say, "Life dealt me something, and I'm going to be better for sparring with it."

• 11:33Ryan Holiday?

  Epictetus says, "Every situation has two handles. One will bear weight, the other won't." So what are you going to grab this by? How are you going to choose to see it? How are you going to choose to try to carry it? It's the same thing, a different perspective. Life is like that. We can look at it one way, or we can choose to look at it another way. We can choose to look at something as an obstacle, or we can choose to look at something as an opportunity. We can see chaos if we look close. We can see order if we look from afar. We can see disadvantage if we look at it one way. We could see advantage if we look the other. We can see obstacle from this perspective, opportunity from the other.

• 12:15Ryan Holiday?

  Well, actually, Epictetus talks about this. He says, you know, someone's working out, lifting weights. You don't say, "Show me your muscles." You say, "Show me what you can lift." As far as your insights go, or your breakthroughs go, or your dispuries go, or the philosophy you studied goes, that's great. But what matters is what you can do in the present moment. What matters is what you can do in moments, big and small, in your actual life.

• 12:40Speaker 01

  I would add, though, that people shouldn't expect that these ordinary contractions into negative states of mind won't keep occurring. The crucial difference between freedom and bondage is how quickly you can wake up from them, and whether you can really wake up from them.