Dr. Jonathan Fader on Peak Performance

Ryan speaks to psychologist Dr. Jonathan Fader about how difficult mental preparation and training can help lead to peak performance, the unseen value of time and developing a method for clear decision making, creating a routine to create and retain gains, and more. Dr. Jonathan Fader is a licensed clinical and performance psychologist best known for working with professional athletes in the MLB and NFL. He is part of The New York City Fire Department (FDNY) Mental Performance Initiative and a frequent contributor to the national conversation on performance. He is a co-author of the book, Coaching Athletes To Be Their Best: Motivational Interviewing in Sport as well as his debut book Life as Sport. This episode is brought to you by Beekeeper’s Naturals, the company that’s reinventing your medicine with clean, effective products that actually work. Beekeepers Naturals has great products like Propolis Spray and B. LXR. For a limited time Beekeepers Naturals is offering Daily Stoic listeners an exclusive deal, receive a free B. LXR sample pack for just $5 to cover shipping. Just go to beekeepersnaturals.com/STOIC to claim this deal. This episode is also brought to you by stamps.com, a secure Internet mailing solution to print postage using your computer. Stamps.com allows you to mail and ship anytime, anywhere right from your computer. There’s NO risk. Use the promo code, STOIC, to get a special offer that includes a 4-week trial PLUS free postage and a digital scale. No long-term commitments or contracts. Just go to Stamps.com, click on the Microphone at the TOP of the homepage and type in STOIC. This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs. LinkedIn Jobs is the best platform for finding the right candidate to join your business this fall. And now, you can post a job for free. Just visit linkedin.com/STOIC to post a job for free. This episode is also brought to you by The School of Greatness podcast. Go listen to School of Greatness, it’s an amazing show and Lewis is an engaging host who really wants to help people. Subscribe to The School of Greatness on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or visit lewishowes.com/podcast.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicFollow Jonathan Fader:Homepage: https://jonathanfader.com/sport-psychology/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/drfader Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jonathan_fader See 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 weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something that can help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, wisdom, and temperance. And here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We reflect, we prepare, we think deeply about the challenging issues of our time, and we work through this philosophy in a way that's more possible here when we're not rushing to work or to get the kids to school, when we have the time to think, to go for a walk,

• 0:44Ryan Holiday?

  to sit with our journals, and to prepare for what the future will bring.

• 0:51Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Today's guest is someone who has a daily impact on my life because I see something, actually two things, on my desk every day that are directly attributed to him. And you may have even heard of him in my book, Stillness is the Key, with a few living figures, I guess, in that book. But Dr. Jonathan Fader is a renowned sports psychologist, just one of the absolute best in the world. He's worked with the New York Mets, the New York Giants, Major League Baseball. He's the co-founder of the Union Square Practice, a mental health center, and Sport Strata, a performance coaching group, both located in New York City.

• 1:36Ryan Holiday?

  He's worked with the New York City Fire Department, countless other groups, including some guests on this podcast as well. I won't blow up their spot, but he is the dude in mental sports performance. And I talk about him in Stillness is the Key when I'm talking about the importance of sort of plate discipline, which I have talked to him about a bunch of times, but he also talks about it in his great book, Life as Sport. But Dr. Fader, we met a few times in New York City. He was an early reader of my books. He's spread them around in sports, which I really appreciated. But I came by, I visited his practice and we got to know each other. And I was talking to him about something I was struggling with, which is I struggle to say no to things. You get so many opportunities, it's hard to say no.

• 2:21Ryan Holiday?

  And he sent me this picture of Dr. Oliver Sacks. And it's Dr. Sacks at his desk, in his office, with a giant sign that says no behind him. And so now I have a picture of somebody in their office with a picture of a sign that says no. But it's a reminder to me of what I need to say no to, so I can say yes to the things that matter, which is my work, which is this podcast, which is my family, which is my health, not random inquiries from people I don't know to do things I don't want to do. And I remember when we were talking about this a little bit more, Fader also had me write on a note card, like, some questions to ask myself when I'm struggling with whether to say yes or no. He says, you know, well, I care about this in five years. I care about this when I'm older.

• 3:05Ryan Holiday?

  What's the consequences of saying no? And I, this note card is taped to my monitor. So Jonathan Fader is not just a cool person with an interesting life that I wanted to have on the podcast to share his expertise, although that's definitely one of the reasons to have him on. But he's someone who's had real tangible impact on my life. And that's why I was excited to talk to him. We talked here on my farm. The wifi was not good. It cut out a couple of times, so forgive me if there's any issues. But do check out this interview. You can go to JonathanFader.com to find out about coaching services. You can check out his book, Life is Sport, which is great and worth reading. And if you want to read about him a little bit more, he's in the say no chapter. But still, this is the key.

• 3:49Ryan Holiday?

  Here's my interview with Dr. Jonathan Fader. So how are you, how are you doing?

• 3:55Speaker 01

  Me? You know, I'm doing pretty well, considering where the situ-, where, you know, where everybody's at and where the world's at. You know, I feel surprisingly a lot of hope.

• 4:10Ryan Holiday?

  Oh, that's exciting.

• 4:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:13Ryan Holiday?

  It's better than the alternative.

• 4:15Speaker 01

  Well, you know, it's always better than the alternative. It's funny you say that because that was my dad's go to. I remember when I was, we were traveling across country once I was like maybe 10. And they made this announcement at nine AM. We're going to go visit my mom's family in Santa Cruz. And, you know, we, we, at 10 o'clock, they made this announcement, oh, sorry, we're, we're having an hour delay on the plane. And that hour delay turned into them changing the engines of the plane, which is seems like amazing. They could just do that.

• 4:44Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 4:44Speaker 01

  And we left at nine PM and everybody was losing their minds and just, you know, losing their cools and screaming at people. And my dad just turned to me and said, look, this is infinitely better than the alternative.

• 4:58Ryan Holiday?

  Right. Of, of them having the engine problem while you're in the air.

• 5:01Speaker 01

  Exactly. So, you know, a bit of a stoic moment on the, on my pop side.

• 5:08Ryan Holiday?

  I have a little part of me that pops out when I travel where like, so, but let's say the plane was supposed to, to, and it's sort of become a philosophical lesson for me, but let's say the plane was supposed to take off at 10. Uh, and then, you know, at nine 50, they're like, hey, we're swapping out the engines. That expectation that I had of it taking it, you know, taking off at 10 has become so rooted in me. And I don't know if it's from anxiety or whatever, but I almost take it as a personal affront, you know, that, that, uh, that, that, that, you know, how could this, how could this happen? And, and there's, so there's like a part of me that what I, what I take from that is just how problematic expectations are, right? It's like you lock in your head that something's going to happen at a certain time.

• 5:52Ryan Holiday?

  And all of a sudden it doesn't happen. And now, you know, uh, it's like a disaster. What you really need is that sort of parental voice to be like, look, it doesn't matter if we get there at three PM or four PM or seven PM. What matters is that we get there and that we get there in one piece, but you kind of need to be able to soothe yourself that way.

• 6:12Speaker 01

  No question. I mean, it's, I think they're problematic, but it also just shows you how subject they are to our intervention, right? That these are, these expectations are what we write.

• 6:22Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, made up.

• 6:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, look, to me, it's amazing. I mean, you can, I can get, I can travel distances. This is what I think about all the time when I'm, when I'm traveling. I can travel distances that were unknown to people to travel, you know, hundreds of years ago, and even a hundred or 50 years ago, most people wouldn't even travel a tenth the distances that I could go. And, and I think we forget that. And just to practice, I mean, listen, Ryan, I can't believe I can get Thai food. You know what I mean? Like, I could just, I'm here in New York, I can, I can, I don't even have to interact with anyone. Right? And I can get any type of food from anywhere in the world. And I mean, most parts of the country, most of the US, that's true, the, the level of, of access.

• 7:07Speaker 01

  So I think, you know, shifting your expectations around that just creates a different level of patience, for sure.

• 7:12Ryan Holiday?

  Well, yeah, the baseline shifts. We get so, whatever, whatever it's at becomes the new normal. And then we take sort of the shifting of that normal as, as a sort of a deprivation when, when if you could,

• 7:27Ryan Holiday?

  like, like, I find it interesting, like, let's say the flight is delayed and they go, it's gonna be either three hours or seven hours, you know, like, they're like, if we can do this, it'll be three hours. If it'll be more, it'll be seven hours. You're like, I hope it's three hours. I hope it's three hours. And then you're like happy when it's only delayed three hours. And so you realize sort of too, how arbitrary it is that, like, it's, it's really just your sort of greed of like needing to get to a place right now and not being willing to sort of roll with the punches or be flexible. That creates, you know, it's like, it's like this, this pandemic, like, you know, you, you see that too. When people were like, hey, it'll be two weeks. People were like, I can do two weeks. And then it turned out it wasn't going to be two weeks. And then it was like two months. And then, you know, now it's,

• 8:13Ryan Holiday?

  you know, we're well into almost a year now, but like, the people who kept telling themselves it would be over soon, as opposed to just being like, well, we'll get there when we get there. Those are the people that are, that are having the hardest time with it.

• 8:26Speaker 01

  No doubt, no doubt. I mean, you know, it's interesting. I think about our, what we call anxiety. I just call it physiological arousal and worry. But what we call our anxiety, it's one of those things for humans. Our anxiety is kind of like those little foam animals that we got when we were kids and you put in water and it just grew to these enormous sizes. You know, it grows to the level of water that you give it. And, you know, in these moments, I find that totally to be true, that those of us that can say, all right, I'm running a marathon, I'll just focus on this next mile. And I'll focus on my pace and those are those of us that are that are able to handle it and optimize our our experience.

• 9:07Ryan Holiday?

  I actually found, I find, you know, your your concept of sort of life is sport is so great because anyone who has experience with sports sees this, like I saw this yesterday. There's this thing I have to do with my email list every month. That's like a lot of, it's like a sort of a very monotonous repetitive task I have to do that I I can't outsource to anyone else because it requires a certain amount of access to stuff that I'm not willing to give. Anyways, I had to sort of do this thing like three or 400 times. It's like a pain in the ass, my hand hurts at the end of it. And I was like halfway through and I, there was a part of me that was like, why don't you just like do half of it now and then maybe you'll do half of it another time? And then there was the other part of me, the sort of distance runner part of me that was able to go like, you know, this feeling, you just have to push through this part.

• 9:52Ryan Holiday?

  You're already at the halfway point. It's downhill from here. You just have to keep going. And and I think that's been true even during the pandemic where like, if you have some experience sort of regularly testing whatever your your limits are, like whatever your, I can put up with X and then having to go, actually, it's going to be three times X or it's going to be X plus 10. You, I think, have probably been able to bear the uncertainty and the difficulty and the the indefiniteness of the last 12 months better than people who are used to either getting whatever they want whenever they want it or quitting whenever they don't get what they want or something is too hard.

• 10:33Speaker 01

  No doubt. So in that moment, though. What do you do? How do you make that shift, right, to live it as a sport?

• 10:41Ryan Holiday?

  I just, I just, I just go like, oh, I just have to get a little bit further. So like when I run or swim, although I like the activities, like a normal person, I want to not do them when they're hard, right? Like when I swim, although unfortunately I haven't been able to swim much at all during the pandemic, other than like my little pool in the backyard. But like, let's say I'm going to do a mile. I break a mile up into seven sets of 10. So I'm only focusing on like 10, 10 laps, which is never that hard, right? Like you can gut out 10 laps pretty easily and, you know, in just about any form, however tired you are. So, so it's like, you know, I go, okay, so I did the first 10. Great. Now I did the second 10. Wow. If I just have to do the second half of the next 10,

• 11:25Ryan Holiday?

  and now I'm a third of the way through. And then, you know, then I finished that. And then, you know, now I'm rounding halfway. And then, once you're rounding half. So, so I'm always sort of giving myself where I'm just, I'm managing to convince myself that I only have a little bit left each time. And so that's, that's, that tends to be how I break up hard tasks, whether, you know, whether it's writing a book, you know, I'm writing it a section at a time, or right now I'm in the middle of editing a book. And this is the most painstaking part is you're going through these little chunks, but I'm like, I'm going to do 50 pages and then I'm going to do another 50 pages. I'm not going to be intimidated by the fact that it's 300 pages and that's going to take forever.

• 12:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, you know, see, it's so, I love talking to you about this stuff, but you know, the, the process of understanding how we think and respond to stress, I think is so, it's so powerful to, to uncover it. And, you know, one of the times that, that, you know, when I think about life as sport, my main thinking around that is, well, what if I just approached everything like a sport, right? So what if I approach, you know, I'm having conflict with my boss. What if I just thought of, what would I do if this was a sport? You know, I'm in a situation here where I'm writing, right? And what if this was athletics? How would I approach it? And when you think about the way that we train and respond to physical activity and stress, we can learn a lot and think about how we apply that.

• 12:48Speaker 01

  And I had a conversation with you, actually. I don't even know if you remember this. We were talking about football and I was, I remember I was trying to, you know, you're good enough to either talk to or share your book with lots of different teams. And there was a team I wanted to bring you to and we couldn't make it work. And I just said, okay, give me, you know, I'm gonna, I'm gonna share the book with everybody and give me one line about, if you had to summarize, for example, obstacle, the way into one line. You remember this conversation?

• 13:11Ryan Holiday?

  No, not at all.

• 13:12Speaker 01

  So we had this whole conversation about it. And I, he said, well, you know what I would say? If I just had to sum it up in one thing, I would say that when we go to the gym, we expect resistance. And why shouldn't it be the same with the mental side of things? Why shouldn't it be the same when we're writing? Why shouldn't it be the same, you know, when we're, we're trying to, you know, get some project done? And I, I think that really links up with the life of sport concept really well because oftentimes we assume that there shouldn't be a level of mental training or mental preparation for things that are hard. We just expect that we should be able to do those things. But, you know, having a rough conversation, having an intense presentation, these are all real hard mental work.

• 13:56Speaker 01

  And, you know, working on that life of sport outlook or something similar can really be incredibly helpful, not only for, in my mind, performing well, but also really being there through the process and, and witnessing this incredible opportunity we have to live and, and love.

• 14:16Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I love, I love that answer. It sounds like maybe it's through your, your very generous filter because I, it doesn't immediately ring a bell.

• 14:26Ryan Holiday?

  But what I like too, the other thing I like about life is sport that I think pertains to what you're saying is this idea of like, like, sports are not real, right? Like, you know that at the end of the game, you go, you go back to your regular life. That's something I try to practice too, where it's like, okay, this tough conversation, like, it's really just like practice. Like, this is a game, and I'm gonna go try to do my best at this conversation, but it's really like, it's just practice, or, you know, it's just like a sort of an artificial contest. And to be able to see it as both serious, but also as a sort of a contained thing that I'm trying to, I mean, not win, but I'm trying,

• 15:06Ryan Holiday?

  trying to do well, also helps me sort of both dial down and also crank up the pressure in a way that, you know, maybe gets me out of whatever my immediate frame of reference is.

• 15:20Speaker 01

  You mean, you're touching on the heart of high performance. I mean, that, that comment, I think, so, so when you, when you say, like, okay, listen, I, I sort of treat it as a game in the sense that, like, oh, what if this was just practice? I mean, my experience has been in sports, in business, and in firefighting, that, you know, when you're talking to people, the, the people at the most elite levels have this way of making the important unimportant with respect to the, to the consequences or results. So in other words, playing with abandonment, right? Just not being worried about dying.

• 16:02Speaker 01

  That kind of, you know, this, this idea of a samurai, being, laying it all out on the line. And that people get confused because they, well, it doesn't mean that these consequences are important. Look, I'm, I'm a doctor, like, you know, what I do is life or death here? No, of course not. It's the, some, some of these roles, especially in first responding, are the most holy sacred activities. But the idea is that when you let go of what's the, the outcome, that you actually are going to give more of yourself to that moment. And so, different, looking at how you focus and the kind of pressures you put on yourself, and being able to eliminate the ones that don't matter are, you know, a way to that,

• 16:45Speaker 01

  that flow, that being in the moment, that, you know, is really at the center of high performance.

• 16:51Ryan Holiday?

  Got a quick message from one of our sponsors and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned.

• 16:57Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I think there's this sort of temptation when you do something that's important, whether it's sports and it's important to millions of people or writing and you know, it's sort of seen as, as, you know, meaningful or important and or, you know, firefighting or being a police officer or whatever, giving a speech to Congress, you can, you can end up taking it so seriously and sort of building it up in your head that it almost becomes paralyzing. I, there's this Dwight Eisenhower's mentor was this guy named Fox Connor and his sort of mantra that Eisenhower picked up, he said, like, always take the job seriously, never yourself. I remember one time I, I had sort of lunch beforehand with a, with

• 17:41Ryan Holiday?

  a basketball player, like a multi-champion basketball player, a great dude. And he had like a game that afternoon and we were just like, you know, like sitting there having, having lunch beforehand. And I remember like being struck at how relaxed he was and how integrated the game was into his life. And it was actually really humbling for me because it was like, what he is doing is arguably, he's much better paid for it, arguably much more, many more people care about it. I probably physically much more demanding than anything I do. And although he is going to go give a hundred percent of himself to the thing, he's, he's not acting like he's about to go, you know, do open heart surgery. It's

• 18:22Ryan Holiday?

  like integrated in his life in a healthy, balanced way. And I think oftentimes, yeah, the, the idea of like, it's just a game. This is not that important is a really important thing. Cause the, the ego can creep in and sort of be like, everything is riding on this when in reality.

• 18:39Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And, and you know, and I think, you know, what the response when I've had this discussion with people in the military, with firefighters, or even, you know, with Hedge fund traders is like, what do you wait a second here? You know, I've got a million, I've got a billion dollars on the line or, you know, this person's life on the line. And, you know, what has been really powerful is for them to realize for themselves that letting go of that allows them actually to make it more likely that they'll save lives. Um, you know, being able to let go of what happens with a particular trade allows you to have the ability to see the whole field. I think, you know, it's interesting.

• 19:19Speaker 01

  I, I was, you know, one of the stories that was told to me about, about Barry Bonds, you know, really incredibly powerful baseball player. Was that, you know, a friend who had played with him told me that, you know, Bonds had this way of, you know, if he struck out, he would come back to the dugout. And someone said to him, you know, like, why did you, what happened? Why'd you struck out? He just said, you know, I wasn't ready to hit.

• 19:49Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 19:50Speaker 01

  And, and there was none of that, like, oh, man, you know, getting on themselves. And obviously, I mean, we're talking about, you know, one of the best hitters and, you know, best power hitters, but it's that sense also of like, I'm not going to spend time worrying about things that have to do. My life is just about focusing on what's gonna, what, how I can get better.

• 20:16Ryan Holiday?

  Lance Armstrong, Lance Armstrong told me something that I think connects to that Bonds anecdote, and I think probably explains a part of both of their personality traits that gets them into trouble. Lance told me that sort of coming out of cancer, which had been this, you know, obviously horrendous battle that he had to fight. He was like, I came to see winning as life and losing as death. And so that's the other part is like, if you take it so seriously, you lose all perspective as to what actually is important. And so you can get totally skewed in terms of what you're willing to do to win said game, because your sense of the stakes are like, sort of totally screwed up. You could argue this is sort of Trump's problem too.

• 21:00Ryan Holiday?

  If you take every, every conflict, every disagreement, every, you know, uh, you know, potential issue as life or death, you lose the ability to be strategic and you're, you're solely emotional and reactive.

• 21:16Ryan Holiday?

  In addition to being miserable and ineffective.

• 21:20Speaker 01

  No doubt. I mean, listen, I think we should fold that into our into our multi-layered outline of Trump's problem.

• 21:27Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 21:28Speaker 01

  But absolutely. And it's also you lose. One of the things about this that I see all over is, I remember walking into, I've walked into many football locker rooms and baseball locker rooms. And I remember one time I walked into a locker room and it was in a losing season and someone had just wrote on the board, just win with some expletives all around it.

• 21:51Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 21:52Speaker 01

  And I think of that as kind of like a relapse. Like, we're all problem drinkers. And when we get stressed out, we relapse into this, I just got to get good results.

• 22:04Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 22:05Speaker 01

  That's just not a productive way to be at our best. And that's sort of like our monkey mind telling us it's time to get some food. And really, we should be back on the trail of saying, okay, like, what are my, what are the behaviors? What are my actual actions that are going to contribute to the bottom line? How do I win? And what am I doing? What am I ignoring that I could be doing in this moment that'll allow me to win?

• 22:32Ryan Holiday?

  But it's so hard, right? Because winning is measurable and the other things are not. So it's like, as a writer, it's like, you're like, I just, I just need something to like, chart. You know, like, I just need it to land. I just need like, the hit of virality, or I need the hit of sales, or I need the hit of the book deal, or, you know, I need, I need the, you're a stock trader and you're like, I just, I just need to like, I just need something to go way up. And then, yeah, you as the performance coach comes in and says, look, now you got to think about fundamentals, you got to think about process, you got to think about systems, you got to relax, you got to focus on excellence. But that's so much harder to measure. And so it almost takes more discipline to not care about winning.

• 23:17Speaker 01

  Oh, my God. It takes tremendous. I mean, there's, there's this T S L A quote that I love, that, you know, he says, teach us to care and not to care. Teach us to sit still.

• 23:31Ryan Holiday?

  I like that.

• 23:32Speaker 01

  And I think about that a lot. It's, you know, it requires, well, you know, someone wrote a book about this recently. You know, it's that stillness of saying, you know what? I, this is what I mean about relapsing, you know, it's like, you know, it's that marshmallow, you know, the famous marshmallow stuff, right? Like you, you give a kid a marshmallow, the kids that are able to withstand the temptation of taking the marshmallow are the ones that have the temperament to do well in life because so much of life is delaying gratification. You know, it's so much more gratifying to take a small win rather than delay. I remember actually, I don't know if you know this about me, but I drove a cab all through grad school.

• 24:12Speaker 01

  And I remember, you know, that basically, you know, I was sitting in a, in a taxi lot and, you know, uh, everybody, it was a really interesting community. Everybody, everybody, every other driver basically except for me was Ethiopian. And it was a really interesting cultural, um, exposure. But one time I remember sitting in there and I would, I was, you know, trying to, you know, pick up every ride, right? And, and I remember that the, this guy drove up to me and he saw me like running around. He's like, look, if you just sit here and you wait for the airport ride, you're not going to burn up a bunch of gas, you're going to have more energy to drive longer. And it was such sort of a simple lesson.

• 24:55Speaker 01

  And I, I think about that, it's so hard to sit still and say, you know what, I really want to win right now, but what if I really use my mental energy to prepare to win? I mean, it brings up this other quote, um, you know, I think about Abraham Lincoln who said, you know, if you give me a day to cut down a tree, I'll spend 23 hours sharpening the axe. For me, sharpening the axe is, I'm, I'm thinking about the process. Like what, what do I do that really impacts the bottom line here? And, you know, I, I'm going to relapse all the time and think about, oh, you know, I gotta finish this book, I gotta finish this podcast, I gotta, you know, I gotta do this, I gotta, you know, paint my house, whatever it is, finish this construct rather than saying,

• 25:36Speaker 01

  okay, wait, it's, it's hard, but I'm going to have a correction here and realign myself with what right now do I control? And bringing myself back to sitting still and saying, all right, I'm going to really think about where my energy is most going to impact things.

• 25:54Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I'm so glad you brought that up because it is in stillness and we talked about it a little bit on your podcast, but I was hoping maybe you could tell my audience the "you don't walk off the island" concept and the quote and what it means.

• 26:09Speaker 01

  Man, I mean, I've just had such, as you know, I've talked about, you know, I've had so, so much, I've learned so much from my work in baseball and football. And I think, you know, sometimes people think of me as a sport and performance psychologist. I am, but I really think of myself as an anthropologist. I think like I go into these cultures, I'm so lucky that I get to go into these different cultures and learn from them and take them to other places. So, everything I've learned from baseball and football, I've had the opportunity to take to, you know, business and firefighting even, and then, you know, repurpose that information and take firefighting back to sports. But, you know, in baseball, you know, people are like,

• 26:51Speaker 01

  "How do you get to be a sports psychologist?" And people think I, you know, went to some fancy school and did all that. You know, really, what got me into that was being a sports psychologist and a clinical psychologist, but speaking Spanish. And so, in the minor leagues of baseball, so if you think about your favorite team and you go to see the Dodgers or the Red Sox or the Yankees or the Mets, you go to see these teams and below that team, there are like 200 hustling people from the ages of 16 to 21 that are desperately dying to get to the big leagues. Many of them, I would say, I don't know, 30 to 50%, depending on which team you're with,

• 27:31Speaker 01

  are Latino folks from, you know, Spanish-speaking countries. Typically, Dominican Republic is one of the biggest countries. And a lot of these folks come from really poor communities.

• 27:45Speaker 01

  What's happened in baseball is, over the years, people have realized that it's not just hitting, getting hits, that really is productive and leads to winning. It's also getting on base, which means taking walks, et cetera, also stealing bases, but really getting on base has become, and you know, there was, this was popularized by Michael Lewis' book and the movie, subsequent movie, Moneyball. And what was, what's so interesting is, there's a lot of trouble training people from different backgrounds about having more plate discipline, which means taking more pitches, not swinging at things that aren't a great pitch. And we did a lot of training with players about this when I was with the Mets, and you

• 28:29Speaker 01

  know, what was interesting is that a lot, for a lot of Dominican baseball players, especially the younger ones, it was hard to take, train this approach of saying, hey, we're gonna, we're gonna lay back on these, on these pitches, we're not gonna hit it, we're not gonna swing. And, you know, in, in Spanish, there was even a phrase, no sales de la isla caminando, which translates to, you don't get off this island walking, obviously walking, meaning here, taking pitches. And so there was this way in which, when you're trained to just swing at things, you're gonna swing at everything, and you're not gonna have the plate discipline to sit back. I, I talk about this as being a lion hunting zebras. Like lions don't just go over the skinniest zebra that comes by, they sit back and they

• 29:14Speaker 01

  wait for the, the fattest, plumpest zebra to walk by. And I think in life, this is a, this is a thing that I see a lot of people from everyday life and a lot of high performers struggling with, is investing time and energy in going after everything and not thinking about like, what do I really wanna do and how am I preparing myself to have the discipline, to have the, the activities, to have the stillness, to be able to really think about what I want and expend only the energy that's gonna be useful in, in working towards that outcome.

• 29:49Ryan Holiday?

  Well, it's tricky, right? Because no one, you're, let's say you're in the Dominican Republic and your main thing to get into the league is about getting noticed, right? So no one's like, oh, you gotta go see this kid. He gets on base a lot, you know? Like that. So, so it's this kind of balance of like, what got you there? Or what got you here won't keep you here. And you have to have the ability as you mature, as you go up the ranks in life or sport or whatever, to be able to transition more towards discipline. It's almost like you need, I don't want to say ego, but you need some aggression just and, and raw talent, but also ambition to sort of separate you from the herd.

• 30:32Ryan Holiday?

  But then, once you have that, then you need a little bit more, I don't know what it is.

• 30:37Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, what your point is a fact that, you know, oftentimes we're reinforced for things in some environments that don't work in others. So, you know, this happens all the time in relationships where you like, you get into a new relationship and you're like, wait, wait, that worked before. Why isn't it working now? And so, you know, with a lot of those players, like swinging and everything and hitting them is in hitting everything that came down the, you know, down the plate was working. That's what got them reinforced. And all of a sudden, hey, it doesn't work anymore. Sometimes I talk about this, you know, as there's sort of a hidden economy of, of action that a lot of times we don't really think, all right, what, what is being reinforced

• 31:17Speaker 01

  here? We just act how we've been reinforced. We do what would work for us in previous environments. This is why we get into trouble in relationships because, you know, most time you get in a relationship and we just do what we did before. And what we did before is usually what we learned from our parents or the people who gave us love before. We don't think, wait a second, what's being reinforced here? What's going to work best for me? And what do I need to calm myself down in the moment to be able to see that and act in a way that's going to get me reinforcement? And it's actually really hard to do that without coaching. It's really hard to do, the reason that coaching works in my mind, Brian, is because most of us need someone to watch our six, to give us a 360 degree view of what's happening

• 32:02Speaker 01

  for us to really be able to note these patterns and change them. We've learned through our parenting and through these early relationships, okay, this is the way I'm supposed to be. And without a model or a coach or a mentor, it's really difficult to shift those behaviors.

• 32:19Ryan Holiday?

  Got a quick message from one of our sponsors and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned.

• 32:26Ryan Holiday?

  I would say also in sports, like, you know, getting on base is a pretty meaningful metric. You're getting stats, sort of whatever level you're playing at, you have some stats. So even though sort of intuitively, you know, like sort of hitting home runs are pretty basic heuristic and you're like, I gotta swing at pitches to do that. You can also just get the sense of like, hey, is the team winning? And, you know, but I think the rest of life's a little bit vaguer. Like, I know, like, so plate discipline, how do you measure that in the regular life? Whether you're an author, or you're a salesman, or, you know, you're a, I don't know what you are, but it's harder to do, plate discipline is harder to quantify in normal life, but, but still, I think, super important.

• 33:11Speaker 01

  You know, what you're talking about makes me think of, I saw a talk a while back by this poker player, Liv Burey, who she talked about that people use such imprecise language when they're talking about things. I'm like, hey, Ryan, you want to come on my podcast? And you might say, you know what, Fader? Yeah, I think I can do that. But, or, you know, someone asks you like, hey, Ryan, are you gonna write another book? And you're like, yeah, I will. But her, her point, or yeah, Fader, listen, you know, can we go snowboarding tomorrow? But her point was that people, her, her theory was that world would be so much more effective if we actually used percents. So someone would say to you,

• 33:56Speaker 01

  hey, man, you want to come to dinner tonight? And you'd say, I am 32%.

• 34:01Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 34:02Speaker 01

  And while, while that's so ridiculous, probably, and ineffective, it speaks to the problem you talked about, which is that we're really imprecise in how we measure things. And what I, what I, so what I do with, the easiest way to talk about this actually is business. There, you know, if you go to a typical fund.

• 34:20Speaker 01

  Right, and I work with a lot of these funds. People are saying, the way that works is basically, as you know, you know, someone will say, all right, they'll pitch a stock. They'll say, okay, should we invest in Amazon? And a bunch of analysts will say, well, here's the case against, and here's the case for. And the reason that people do that, right, is they're protecting their own ego, right?

• 34:45Ryan Holiday?

  You don't want to own the yes or no?

• 34:47Speaker 01

  Exactly, they don't want to, because if you say yes, you're going down with the yes, or you say no. And so, the best you'll get is a lean yes, lean no, a lot of the times, right? Because if you say yes, and you load up on a particular thing, and you go big in volume, and it tanks, like, you know, you, your job's on the line, a lot of times your money's on the line. And so, what PMs complain about a lot is conviction, and people's ability to, to stay with what they believe in. And so, what I've recommended to people, actually, is that they have some form of units of conviction, right, so that you're able to say, okay, I'm a 10 on this, I'm a 7 on this. I actually usually recommend out of 100, and, and so what you begin to do then,

• 35:31Speaker 01

  is you begin to look back. Numbers lie, but they lie a lot less than these qualitative measures and imprecise measuring. And so, to be able, you can look back, and you can say, all right, this did well. And, but I was actually at like a 42 on it, so that's really interesting. Let me think about what happened for me. Because what I notice in, in business, and in sports, and in life, is we tell ourselves stories all the time. I've seen so many people, teams, and, and funds, celebrate a win that didn't have a good process, and lament a loss that had a great process. So, being able to create some form of language and measurement, even subjectively, can give you like so much, so much, um, power.

• 36:14Speaker 01

  And, and similarly, I mean, you're much better at this than I am, but having, having some form of journaling about what's happening can even be helpful. It's qualitative, but it allows you, and it doesn't have to be a lot. It could just be like writing down your thought process as to why you're intending, uh, on doing something, I think is effective.

• 36:35Ryan Holiday?

  Well, no, I told the version of that story and he goes the enemy when the Patriots draft Tom Brady, obviously, in retrospect, that's the greatest draft pick in the history of sports. But, you know.

• 36:46Speaker 01

  Is he playing?

• 36:48Ryan Holiday?

  What?

• 36:49Speaker 01

  Still playing?

• 36:50Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I heard he's still, he's doing pretty good.

• 36:52Speaker 01

  Really?

• 36:53Ryan Holiday?

  Not so good, not so good for the Patriots. But anyways, there's a reason they let him go to the sixth round. And it wasn't because they thought he, everyone else would allow him to go to the sixth round, but they knew he was really the greatest quarterback of all time. Right? It's they undervalued him. So they're sort of the win that they celebrate there is muted by their awareness of what they actually thought at the time.

• 37:20Speaker 01

  No doubt. And I think, but you know, and, and, and that, that process is a good one. The NFL process compared to a lot of processes that you see in business, the combine and all that is an improved process. It's not perfect. But if you compare the combine to like what happens in business, a lot of times, it's not as good as that. Right here, you're getting objective data. It's not, I mean, it's still subjective. And in sports, this is, you know, there's all, there's always this stats versus feel dilemma in sports, where there's this huge debate, you know, as you know, where people are, you know, you almost have to, you know, it's funny, you almost have to identify yourself in sports.

• 38:02Speaker 01

  Are you a feel person or a stats person to be trusted in some communities? It's like, if you're someone who's feel, meaning you value your intuition, you, you have to like camp in one side of the camp. And it's, it's hard for people like me who, you know, really are more of a stats person, but appreciate intuition and feel.

• 38:23Ryan Holiday?

  So I was going to ask you about this idea of saying no, because obviously I look at that thing you hand, hand me, you handed me many years ago, that the Oliver Sacks picture, which hangs above my desk. But I'm thinking about this right now, like, okay, it's the middle of a pandemic, and I got invited to go to a thing tonight. Now, I would say it's, if we're talking numbers, it's probably 70% safe. Like, the protocols are pretty good. It's obviously not perfect. You really shouldn't be doing anything. I don't need to do it, but it'd be cool. It's not quite a bucket list thing. But like, there's, there's some people there that I've long wanted to meet that will be there. And who knows, it could be good, good for me in a lot of ways.

• 39:08Ryan Holiday?

  I could also get COVID and bring it home to my family, and I would never forgive myself, right?

• 39:15Ryan Holiday?

  And, and so, so on the one hand, it feels like very obvious, like, just don't do it. Just do it later. At a, you know, you don't need to do it. You know, even if it was amazing, you don't need whatever the amazingness is. And yet, there is still a part of me that's like, should I go? I don't want to say no. I'll feel bad if I say no, you know, and, and like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So I still struggle with it.

• 39:41Speaker 01

  Hey, man, not blah, blah, blah. This is the, this is the nectar of the gods right here. I mean, this is like, you're, the thing that you're posing here is something that I think we forget all the time. Like, this, the, the commodity of time, there's so many trade things said about it. But, you know, especially for those of us that, you know, love other people, which is many people listening, you know, the time is so valuable. And I don't think that we really spend enough energy determining how we're going to spend it. We let things just, we follow the brightest light. And that picture I gave you of Oliver Sacks, so, you know, this picture of what Oliver Sacks,

• 40:21Speaker 01

  the famous neurologist and writer, who I admire and love for his work on so many things, especially his work on gratitude. But, you know, what he had on his desk was this sign that just said, "No," with a big exclamation point. And I framed it and put it in my office, and I gave one to a few good friends, including you, Ryan, which, you know, is to remind myself to, to even, not even to say no, but just the act of saying, "Am I paying attention to it?" Right? Am I really thinking? And also, you know, do I have a method? So I, you know, I'll tell you, I don't have the answer to your question. But I do have an answer to, or a thought about it, which is, I think if you're just saying to yourself,

• 41:02Speaker 01

  I have a device. I have a machine which I, a factory, which I slide this plate through, or a metal detector, right? I have like TSA for saying no. I'm not going to detect all the things I should say no to, but I'm damn sure I'm going to detect the ones I definitely should say no to. I think you're already ahead of the pack. Most of us are just, you know, we're just kind of freewheeling it and saying yes or no to things. But so one of the things, for example, that I ask myself when I'm presented with something is, you know, how will I feel about this opportunity in a year? That's one thing I just say. Like, if I think of myself in a year, will I remember or have FOMO in a year? And if the answer is no to that, I generally don't do it.

• 41:44Speaker 01

  Right? So if I think that this is something that won't be memorable memorable to me, or something I'll look back and say, that was cool. I'm glad I did that. I probably won't, I won't do it. I also really think about, and I think this is important, I really think about the value of my time, both really monetarily and also experientially. So just to know what our time is worth and to say, you know, on a financial level. But I think the first thing is to say on a value level, you know, will this be something that I miss? So I think the take home there is, A, am I thinking about this? And B, have I begun to develop some kind of device or method to, to seek out, to really create some kind of real process around whether I should, I should do things or not?

• 42:28Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, the pandemic has been wonderful in the sense of like, I've always struggled with, you know, saying yes, saying no. And then the pandemic is sort of a forced no on so many things. Like, you're not even getting asked. You're just not doing them because nobody's doing them. And you're like, whoa, I'm way happier. I'm way more productive. This is way closer to what I want my life to be like. So then you get this sort of demonstrable, like, sort of view of like, oh, this is what it's actually like. You know what I mean? Like, let's say someone's quitting, thinking about quitting football. They don't actually know what life without football is like. So there's this sort of unknownness to it that makes it a leap in the dark. It's like, I actually clearly get more out of my life and my craft and my family by saying no.

• 43:15Ryan Holiday?

  And then, you know, the things start creeping back in, whether it's because people are just tired of the pandemic, or, you know, some people have just decided, like, hey, I don't care about other people, or just like the reality of, hey, like, we, people do have to make a living, and, and so life starts to creep back in, and now, you know, you're, you, you realize that your, your defenses were not nearly so strong, they were just not being tested.

• 43:43Speaker 01

  It's so great, right, to have this natural device, like this natural filter. A lot of what I'm saying is done by, by COVID. I think COVID is, it's like, you know, you go on vacation and you like have all these lofty goals. I don't know if you do this, but like, when I go on vacation, I relax, and then I think about, oh, wow, man, this is what, these are the things I'm gonna, I need to do to change for the better in my life. And then I get back to real life, and I try to retain on all of it, but I don't retain all of it. And I think that's like what's happening in COVID. My, my goal is to say, all right, this helped with my no filter. What do I need to do to build into my life constructs to help retain those things, so that when COVID is lifted, I'll

• 44:25Speaker 01

  stay. Because, you know, my belief is that, you know, life is sport, this idea, you know, my, it's two parts. One is that, you know, it, yes, mastery is important. To me, I have a, I have a great passion for helping people be their best, and for finding hidden value in people's lives, and for the psychology of improvement, and helping people improve, and, and learning from some groups, and take, taking that knowledge and bringing it to others. I really enjoy that. I feel passionate about it. At the same time, I'm passionate about being awake and alive, fully in my life, right? So, yes, do I want to, you know, bring it home for this podcast, and share knowledge, and talk to you, and, you know, come up with something that's appealing, and, and interesting, and informative for

• 45:10Speaker 01

  everybody listening? Yeah, but also, like, I'm talking to a good friend here, and this is fun. And I think that people miss the opportunity to do both. That, you know, you really can do both. And I think the one area that this is sorely missed is the connection between personal relationships and productivity. People quarantine those. They firewire them off. So, it's like, okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna go work really hard, and then, you know, then I'll be, then I'll be with my family, rather than saying, like, these things are all interconnected. And if I work really hard... To be a great mom or partner, if I really work great, if I think of my being a dad as a sport, the same way that I think of being a business person as a sport or being an athlete,

• 45:55Speaker 01

  that those things are going to filter because the field of play extends beyond the market and extends beyond the football field. The field of play is one's whole life. And so if I feel really great about those connections and those relationships, my experience is that people write better, people play better, people dunk better. And so to me, I think the grand learning in COVID is it's taking people back to that and on experiential level, they're realizing that and they're realizing that, wow, my work should be, and this is the work I do with people a day to day, is retaining those gains. So once, please God,

• 46:34Speaker 01

  this pandemic curbs, that you'll be able to retain that centered life more.

• 46:43Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, you use the word firewall, which I think is interesting. That's another thing maybe to take from sports is that when you look at these athletes and sometimes you go, oh, these people are so sheltered, whether it's college athletics or professional athletics. But it's like, that's inseparable from the insane performance that you see. Like if these guys were back to baseball where they had to get a job in the off season, or whether they're traveling from city to city in a train, and you know, what these teams have realized is that when you create some of these firewalls and you create some of these sort of cushions and you sort of systematize certain things, performance increases. And

• 47:23Ryan Holiday?

  I think what the pandemic did for me as a writer is that it created something closer to what the ideal writer's life looks like. Like if you were to say like, okay, I'm going to make this person a great writer, you would not also sign them up to travel from city to city speaking, or have them be on social media. You know, there's all these things that are sort of lucrative or part of the lifestyle, but not actually sort of performance enhancers. And I think what the pandemic has done is sort of forced us to experiment. And then actually the discipline is going to be in keeping some of that firewall up, but without the benefit of

• 48:06Ryan Holiday?

  You know, like, I mean, even now, this, this thing like, I could go, I shouldn't go for sort of ethical, you know, sort of safety reasons or whatever. But, but I have the choice to go, right? And in six months, I'll have more of a choice to go because even that hesitation about whether it's safe or not will probably be gone because I'll be vaccinated or, as you said, hopefully it'll occur by then. But then, so then it'll actually be even harder to do because it's not a should you, or sorry, it's not a can you, can't you, it's a, it's a should I and why shouldn't I kind of a thing. And so that, that firewall, when it's up by choice is the hardest thing to enforce.

• 48:50Ryan Holiday?

  Got a quick message from one of our sponsors and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned.

• 48:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, you know, what you're talking about is what I mean about this hidden economy, you know, we're, we're really great at getting dressed in the morning. Like, I'm expert at that.

• 49:06Ryan Holiday?

  Hundred, we have a hundred percent track record.

• 49:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm like, most of the time, you know, listen, I've been able to do that every day since probably, you know, nine, in the mid, late seventies. And, but, you know, when it comes to doing the hard work of creating a routine around what's going to make me great, or especially what's going to make me great at being a human, it requires a lot more effort. It requires reading books, it requires thinking, honestly, it requires coaching. I think that very few people can do this without a coach or a mentor, really, at their top level. They can get to 98%. But there's a reason why every sports team has a mental performance coach, right? At the highest level of doing something, getting that extra, that last one or two percent is really difficult. And so this goes to that, that hard part.

• 49:52Speaker 01

  The hard part is that, you know, COVID, what it did, it's kind of like we all woke up in a gym, right? Like, it's hard not to get diesel, it's hard not to get jacked if you like live in a gym. I mean, I could probably do it, but most people are going to get jacked in the gym. We all woke up in this kind of life reset gym. The question is, what do you do to retain your gains and how can you create your life, create a routine to be able to, to really, you know, be at your best? Everyone I know, including you. Who's excellent, has a pretty dialed routine. And you know what COVID did is it allowed everybody to say like, I have no choice. I've got to make this routine. I mean, even if it's just about eating, you gotta have a routine.

• 50:35Speaker 01

  You can't survive COVID without figuring that stuff out. And so, right now, it's like when you're coming back to normalization and things are normalizing. You know, how are you gonna, how are you gonna attack your routine to make sure that those gains are retained? And then also, what can you learn from it that you're gonna do in terms of your day to day that are gonna create new gains?

• 50:57Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, so for people who don't, they won't have heard the drop in the file, but we had some technical difficulties. I'm recording from my house today, which uses satellite internet and is not the fastest internet. And it tests, tests me philosophically to not get very aggravated at an inanimate object. But it is quite frustrating to be living in 2020 in what is ostensibly the most powerful country in the world. And they can't even bring broadband internet like 30 minutes from, from the capital of Texas. But, but here we go.

• 51:31Speaker 01

  It brings our conversation full circle, right? Because this is sort of where we started about these plane delays.

• 51:37Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 51:37Speaker 01

  I think there's two things. One is, you know, for me, really bringing life as sport to like bringing it home. Everyone who's ever listened to this has had technical difficulties. Like, I think for me, where it's most stressful is like you're about to give a talk, right? Like you get up to give a talk, you know, you and I do a bunch of public speaking and you're about to give a talk to, you know, whatever. 500, 1,000 people and, you know, and then the mic doesn't work. Maybe like, you know, you have one slide with a picture you wanna show for to tell a story and that can't come up. And I think that, you know, in those moments, you know, we have a choice about how we redirect our attention. I can't remember said it, but someone in the sports psychology world said that, you know, attention is the currency of performance.

• 52:23Speaker 01

  Where you put your attention and the act of realizing that's a muscle is so huge. And what I love about our, the internet failing is number one, you're proving, you're advertising, you know, life away from technology in the way that we were kind of talking about a little bit, but also it's the idea that you have a choice in any moment. And, and you know, you had this talk about Stoicism, which is like this, this loving Stoicism and loving, you know, that there's this space between thought and action where you have a choice to use the Frankel idea, does, you know, that, that doesn't mean that we don't lose our minds sometimes, right? Like I'm, look, my business is about helping people to find calm in, in treacherous performance terrain.

• 53:08Speaker 01

  But, you know, of course there are times when I lose my cool. I mean, I think the idea here is about, you know, even if you can make a 1% change in how you respond to friction in your environment, you're winning. You're definitely winning.

• 53:23Ryan Holiday?

  No, that's right. I, I think I found it's like, I found a couple sort of things with it too. So it's like, I remember I lived in New Orleans when I was writing my first book and, and, you know, we lived in this sort of small apartment and we just shared internet with the person who lived above us, like they had it and it was, it was good enough most of the time. And I remember like, you know, then it would rain, it would go out or, you know, I'm, I'm here at my house, the farm and it's not that great. And it's like, okay, but what would it cost to have a spot where this isn't the problem? So part of the reason I got my office is, is like, okay, whatever it costs to not be at the mercy of this thing most of the time is worth it, right?

• 54:06Ryan Holiday?

  Like sometimes I think people will have things that make them miserable, that make them unhappy and a small amount of money, money that they have can make that thing go away. And yet they refuse to do it because of some other script or other inhibition. And then, and then they act like the thing is being inflicted on them when really they're inflicting it on themselves.

• 54:28Speaker 01

  Yep, there's no question about, I mean, this is at the heart of, to me, what you know, you know, you've brought to the world in terms of making Stoicism accessible is this idea that, you know, things are not as they are, they are as we are, right? That, you know, we choose in every single moment, we choose our attitude, which determines our experience. And it's at the very heart of living a, I think, enjoyable life is to say that I can get better at that. I can get better at choosing. I mean, the joke I have with so many high performers is, you know, you don't, you don't go to the gym, do five curls and look at your bicep and say like, why isn't it grown? We acknowledge physically

• 55:11Speaker 01

  that you need reps and reps and reps and time before you see a marked difference in physical performance. With, with mental performance, what happens is we try something for a day or two. If like, if I, if I meditate, I use mindfulness technique, I, I immerse myself in mindfulness techniques, or I keep a gratitude journal, or one of the million different things you can do to impact your mental wellness and acuity and mental flexibility and strength. Most of the time, what people do is they do it for a day or two, and then they get exhausted and they stop. And that's not enough time. That's enough time to, to build. And so just the, the idea that in any moment, not only can I shift, but I can get better at building that muscle of where I place my attention, I think is, there's so much freedom in that.

• 55:57Ryan Holiday?

  Well, and I think you attack it from different angles. So one, there's just the practice and the skill of it, and that's part of it. Then the other part is this sort of systems, like, you know, Tim Ferriss has that question of like, what would it look like if this were easy? So what changes do you need to make in your life and your routine and your system, your structure and how you approach it that will make, you know, you less stressed, less vulnerable, whatever? And then the third part, and you brought this up a couple of times, I think it's probably a good thing for us to kick around as we close up, is like, and then this is also what coaches, mentors, spouses, feedback groups, masterminds, et cetera, provide you, which is a little bit of external perspective where they can go. You know, Ryan, you could just, you know, for $200 a month, you can make this problem go away.

• 56:41Ryan Holiday?

  Or, you know, what if you, if, if you hate X, why don't you just stop doing X? And see if, you know, see if you like that better. Right? And, and sometimes you need that outside coaching to be like, hey, here's where your problem is. Just do X, Y, and Z. And now you don't need to become a guru or a sage that magically rises above it. You can just excise the whole problem from your life altogether.

• 57:10Speaker 01

  I listen, I mean, you know, you're definitely, this isn't even the choir you're talking to. You're, you're, you're saying to like a Baptist church of a thousand people because, you know, I, I almost at this point feel empathy for people that don't seek. I, I, I get it, right? I mean, it's really hard to be vulnerable and it's really hard. This is like the hard work, right? This is like the ab workout, right? Everybody wants to go to the gym and do legs or arms. But this is like the real core workout is to say, I want to make myself open to another human's viewpoint. Even if it makes me uncomfortable or to notice the things that I'm not doing well.

• 57:54Speaker 01

  Even if it makes me feel less than or defensive, I'm going to open myself. And it's the, the thing about coaching is, you know, I definitely give people in the work I do coaching advice. I'll say, hey, let me teach you this mindfulness exercise. Let me, let's talk about gratitude, how it can impact your life. Let's, let's rehearse or model this. Let me see a videotape of you doing it and let's talk about it together. But fundamentally, the most powerful thing about coaching is really helping people to see themselves. I had a client who once called it a magic mirror. It's like holding up a certain kind of reflection to people and really asking the right questions. And having this, you know, curiosity about people's experience.

• 58:40Speaker 01

  The more, the higher the level of performer, the more it's true that they're going to, through the right questions, stumble upon what they need to do. But having the ability to connect and to have that conversation is really so incredibly needed in those moments. It's hard for us to say to ourself, this is what I'm pretending to not know about myself. It usually requires another human to be able to learn those lessons about ourselves.

• 59:07Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, it's even, I think you find a lot of times that the therapist, and I just did a video on stoicism and therapy on our YouTube channel, which you might like.

• 59:15Speaker 01

  I gotta check that out.

• 59:16Ryan Holiday?

  Most of the time, they're not telling you anything. They're just asking you questions, which forces you to give an answer that you already knew, but you were reluctant to verbalize, which then puts in place the change.

• 59:31Speaker 01

  It's so funny, you know, one of my, one of the most strange, but hilarious experiences I have in coaching, and this is true if I'm coaching an NFL player, or a hedge fund person, or a firefighter, you know, when I do give advice, a lot of times, Ryan, people will come back the next week and share with me the very advice I gave them, but present it in a way as though I never, I never told it to them. Or they'll be like, oh, my God, I had this really great idea. I should read Ryan Holiday's book, The Obstacle is the Way. That would, I think, really help me. And I'm like, in my mind, I'm like, oh, I mean, I sent you the book, right?

• 1:00:11Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 1:00:12Speaker 01

  But, you know, I just let it go, obviously, but it's, it speaks to your point that we really, it's hard for us, we really need to come to it on our own. And this is all, I mean, this is another conversation, but it's about motivation. And then my belief is, you know, that, you know, the Roosevelt quote, people need to know that you care before they care what you know. I mean, so much of this is about connection and receptivity and togetherness, more than it is about expert advice.

• 1:00:37Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, yeah, I think it's like, deep down, you already know. And what you're by deciding to engage in the therapeutic process, or the coach, or the mentor, what they're really helping you do is unlock what's already inside you. You know, the hitter already knows how to hit the ball. Something has just gotten in the way. And you're helping them remove that thing. You're not magically turning them into an athlete. I mean, it wouldn't even be talking to you if they weren't a great athlete.

• 1:01:05Speaker 01

  No doubt. And that lockpicking, man, you know, the lockpicking, though, is this process. It's like one of those Ocean's Eleven's movie. You know, you got to have every lockpick available to you. And also, if you go a little bit too fast, it like activates an alarm. Right?

• 1:01:22Ryan Holiday?

  And then you can strip the screws to add another metaphor. If you're trying too hard and you're going too fast, you bust out a drill instead of the right size screwdriver and you not only strip it, it becomes impossible to ever fix.

• 1:01:34Speaker 01

  No question. And I think a lot of people, you know, who do our work, come at it from that perspective. And that works for some people, but most people, they really, they're not going to respond to the drill.

• 1:01:48Ryan Holiday?

  No, and look, this goes to the important thing in Stoicism, which is like, it's not just the reading of the books either. It's also the rereading and it's the discussion about them. And then it's the reading again, because as you change and as what you're going through and your life changes, you unlock different things from the texts or from the thing that you already read. I mean, there's moments where I'll be, I'll be thinking about something in some passage from a book I read 10 years ago will finally make sense to me because it comes filtering back in light of the new experience.

• 1:02:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, but it just shows the mindset that like that you have and that I think has been informed by Stoicism. It's just you're open to those, to those, you're open to a continual process of learning. I think that choice is, you know, the coaches that are the best that I've worked with in getting coaching myself, or the ones that I've worked on teams with are the ones that help people to stay open. One of my favorite, one of my favorite quotes about this, I think it's by a guy named Gaston. I can't even remember now, but it's, you know, judge a man by his questions rather than his answers.

• 1:02:55Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 1:02:56Speaker 01

  And, you know, for me, You know, what's much more telling me is how, what kind of questions people ask me than the information that they give me.

• 1:03:07Ryan Holiday?

  I love it, man. Fader, you're the best. Let's do this again when, when, when your new book is out and we'll kick some more stuff around. I always love talking to you, man.

• 1:03:18Speaker 01

  Likewise, man. It's a continual learning and a lot of fun at the same time. Enjoy that farm internet, man.

• 1:03:26Ryan Holiday?

  Thanks for listening to another episode of The Daily Stoic. It's mind blowing to me now that we are well over 30 million downloads of this show. It means so much to me to have all of you listen. If you want to help spread the word about the show, please leave a review on iTunes or whatever your favorite podcasting platform is. It helps a lot. And then, of course, click subscribe. That's how we know how many people are listening and that that makes sure you get the episodes as they come in. So thanks again for listening to The Daily Stoic Podcast.