Don’t Make This Lesson More Painful | Ask DS

We get so used to having our way. We live in a time when the skies have been conquered. When so many diseases have been vanquished. When technology allows us to do and have things that were inconceivable even just a generation ago. Consequently the eternal battle for our attention, between the things we control and the things we don’t, becomes even harder for us to wage. The lessons and warnings the Stoics have issued to us across the centuries about this perpetual internal fight, begin to feel like they belong to a different age, like they are meant for people who are fundamentally different from us. This is how skewed our collective sense of self has become.---And in today's Ask Daily Stoic, Ryan answers questions about how Marcus Aurelius dealt with Commodus's derangement, why the Stoics could be so socially "advanced" in some areas and so "behind" in others, how we can best line up the time when we are the most effective with the work that most needs to be done, and more.✉️ 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.

• 0:02Ryan 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. While on Thursdays, we not only read the daily meditation, but we answer some questions from listeners and fellow Stoics who are trying to apply this philosophy just as you are. Some of these come from my talks. Some of these come from Zoom sessions that we do with Daily Stoic Life members or as part of the challenges. Some of them are from interactions I have on the street when there happened to be someone there recording. But thank you for listening, and we hope this is of use to you.

• 0:45Ryan Holiday?

  Don't make this lesson more painful. We get so used to having our way. This is after all the time when the skies have been conquered, when so many diseases have been vanquished, when technology allows us to do and have things that were inconceivable even just a generation ago. The result is that the eternal battle for our attention that we have talked about often here, between the things we control and the things we don't control, becomes even harder for us to wage. The lessons and warnings that the Stoics have issued to us across the centuries about this perpetual internal fight, they begin to feel that they belong to a different age, meant for people who are fundamentally different from us,

• 1:26Ryan Holiday?

  who occupied a world alien to the one that we occupy. This is how skewed our collective sense of self has become thanks to the conquest of physical and digital worlds. We have unrealistic beliefs about what's in our control and what isn't. And it has made the art of acquiescence, as Marcus called it, even more difficult to practice, let alone perfect. "One of the many things one learns in prison," Oscar Wilde writes in his haunting essay "De Profundis," "is that things are what they are and will be what they will be." Born into a life of privilege and pleasure, complemented by staggering brilliance, Wilde had grown quite accustomed to getting his way, to doing what he wanted, to having things the way that he wanted them.

• 2:11Ryan Holiday?

  And there in prison, sentenced to two years hard labor for the crime of being gay, of being himself essentially, Wilde was faced with the unavoidable reality, as we discussed in a recent Daily Dad email, that he had to learn how to practice acceptance. He had to figure out how to come to terms with his fate and with circumstances. This lesson was as painful for him then as it is for us now, and it gets all the more painful, the more entitled and spoiled we get. We must remember that for all the privileges and advancements of our time, for all our brilliance and resilience, things still are what they are and will be what they will be. There will always be an entire universe

• 2:53Ryan Holiday?

  of things that remain out of our control, and the more comfortable we get with that fact now, the more pain and surprise we will save ourselves later.

• 3:11Speaker 01

  All right, there's one from Maureen about Marcus overlooking Commodus's derangement, and sort of the complexity of that question.

• 3:21Ryan Holiday?

  It is very complex, right? Because, on the one hand, almost all the emperors before Marcus, like five in a row, do not have a male heir. So they're able to, they're able to choose their heir. They're able to choose who succeeds them. And that was something that Marcus didn't have the luxury of doing. That's one way to think about it, and to make some sort of excuse for it. It doesn't fully excuse him, though, because, you know, Commodus is clearly unfit, right? At least from what we know historically. And the way

• 4:05Ryan Holiday?

  he's portrayed in Gladiator probably understates how awful he actually was. If you can read some of the pages in Gibbons' Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and you just see that Commodus is just unimaginably bad. To Marcus's defense, I'd offer a couple things. So number one, He doesn't, he doesn't choose Commodus. Marcus loses something like six children before adulthood. So imagine you, you're in this difficult position where you have to give a job, if to give a job to your son, and it's the most difficult job in the world. So, and millions of lives are dependent on it. So you try to pick which son is right for it.

• 4:49Ryan Holiday?

  And so you pick a son and you're grooming him for it, and then he dies. And then you have twin boys. And, and you think, oh, maybe, maybe I'll have two emperors take my place, just as Hadrian set up for me and Lucius Verus. And then both of them die. And then you think, well, maybe my son and Lucius Verus's son can rule together. And then again, one of them dies. So imagine just all this horrendous death, and what that would do to your own judgment, and what that would do to your own family. I, I think that part of it has never fully been explored. It's not like Marcus really has had one kid, and that kid turned out to be a real shithead. It's more complicated than that, right?

• 5:32Ryan Holiday?

  And, and, and I think, I, I just, as I was writing Lives of the Stoics, I just really tried to wrap my head around how devastatingly difficult that would be. And there's this, um, let me see if I can find this really fast. There's a really crazy passage in... Okay, so this is thirty, this is Notebook 1133. He says, "It's crazy to look for figs in winter, and it's no less crazy for someone to look for his child when it's no longer possible." And then, uh, Notebook 1134, he says, "Epictetus used to say that when you kiss your child, you should silently tell it, 'Tomorrow you will die.' But that's an inauspicious thing to say." No, he says, "It's not at all inauspicious,

• 6:15Ryan Holiday?

  but it expresses a natural process. Otherwise, it would be inauspicious to talk of wheat being harvested." So the point is, here... Marcus is meditating on the unimaginable reality of losing children. Like, he's probably writing that fresh off of a funeral, you can imagine. The idea being that Marcus is devastated by this loss, and I would suspect that this both clouds his judgment and puts him in an utterly impossible situation as a parent and leader. So, yeah, to me, that's one of the few where all Marcus's defenses

• 6:58Ryan Holiday?

  are dropped and you really see the real human being struggling with something. And I think that's where Marcus probably was when it came to Commodus. There was another question I saw that was good, Billy. What was it?

• 7:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, Kyle had one about how the Stoics were sort of ahead of their time in some aspects, like they're thinking about women studying philosophy, but other issues like slavery, they're assumed to be behind.

• 7:27Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, to me, the lesson here, that the Stoics believe that both men and women should be taught philosophy is an indication of how progressive and ahead of their time they were. At the same time, almost none of the Stoics, including Epictetus, say anything about whether a human should be able to own another human being. So they were very much a product of their times, or barbaric, even according to their times. To me, the lesson there is not, "Oh, were the Stoics hypocritical? Where does this invalidate what they have

• 8:07Ryan Holiday?

  to say?" I think it's different. I think it's that we are exactly the same. There are some things that our children and grandchildren will look at us and go, "Wow, they really got that right. They really helped move the ball forward." And then they'll look at other things that we accepted or declined to question and wonder...

• 8:37Ryan Holiday?

  How we could have possibly gotten it so wrong? And how we could ever possibly defend such an indefensible status quo? Whether that's, you know, income inequality, whether that's sweatshops, perhaps that's our relationship with meat and factory farming. There's going to be so many things that the future is going to find that we were just totally off about. But I think we want to be careful at how high we get on our horses about judging the past. To me, we should look at these figures as tragic figures who fell short in a lot of ways that we can then learn from. All right, what else have we got here?

• 9:21Ryan Holiday?

  Tanya?

• 9:23Speaker 02

  Hi, I'm really new to all this, but I'm a longtime yogi, teaching yoga here in Austin.

• 9:32Ryan Holiday?

  Oh, wonderful.

• 9:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. I was reading about creative output and they had it quantified into 20 to 70, 2010. So 70% of what you do is going to be okay. 20% is going to be really good. And then the 10% is going to be really great, which of course corresponds with Coach Pop in San Antonio talking about passing the ball to get a good, better, and then the best shot to really be successful. So I was wondering if the Stoics have some kind of guideline like that

• 10:14Speaker 02

  for quantifying our efforts, quantifying our output? As we write in our journals and have our self-conversation, well, how good was my day? Or did I miss the mark?

• 10:33Ryan Holiday?

  No, that's great, and I think I'm going to try to make it to the Spurs game tonight. But I think one of the things I think about is this sort of pivoting from your question a little bit, but I think like, when am I most effective? And do I line up that time with the work that most needs to be done? Right? So for me, I'm clearest in the morning, and I'm most locked in in the morning, and I've been least sort of distracted or jarred by interruptions in the morning. So that's when I try to spend time with my kids and when I try to do my writing. Then everything else, if I like, I want to focus on the stuff that I don't like doing,

• 11:15Ryan Holiday?

  the stuff that doesn't really matter, where quality control is less important. I want to do that later in the day when fatigue has set in, or the stakes are lower, or you know, I've already completed my important tasks. So when I think about, I don't, I don't think it's just about, you know, sort of outsourcing or delegating. It's also about how do you prioritize and organize stuff in your own life? I think there's a reason that a lot of CEOs, for instance, work out early in the morning. It's because that's when they have time to do it, and they have the most control over their time and schedule, and they don't want to miss that opportunity. But this is a great question, I appreciate this.

• 11:57Speaker 02

  How do you rectify the 70% that's just the average?

• 12:02Ryan Holiday?

  I think that's probably just the reality of life. I mean, I guess you could spend some time focusing on, you know, if you can get it to from 10% to 12%, you have a huge advantage over other people. If you can, you know, if you can, you know, get the 20%, from 20 to 25%, I mean, maybe that's a place to think about is just sort of chipping away at the margins. But I might just sort of take the ratio for granted and then focus on how I assign tasks to those different buckets.