Daily Stoic Sundays: The Daily Stoic, August 16 - How to Turn Your Trials Into Triumphs

On today's podcast, Ryan discusses today's reading from The Daily Stoic, about how to overcome your challenges through the Stoic mindset. We also present a discussion from Ryan about how to turn tragedy into triumph. Get your copy of the leather-bound, limited edition of The Daily Stoic: https://dailystoic.com/leather***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/dailystoicSee 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.

• 0:04Ryan 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,

• 0:46Ryan Holiday?

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

• 0:55Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another Weekend episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Today, we're going to riff a little bit on an entry from the Daily Stoic. Then we're going to go into something we did a little while ago about some of the themes in this entry. This is the entry from August 16th from the Daily Stoic. "Anything can be an advantage. Just as the nature of rational things has given to each person their rational powers, so it also gives to us this power. Just as nature turns to its own purpose, any obstacle or any opposition sets its place in the destined order and co-ops it so every rational person can convert any obstacle into raw material for their own purpose."

• 1:40Ryan Holiday?

  Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 8, 35. "At five feet, three inches tall, Muggsy Bogues was the shortest player ever to play professional basketball. Throughout his career, he was snickered at, underestimated, and counted out. But Bogues succeeded by turning his height into the very thing that made him nationally known. Some people looked at his size as a curse, but he saw it as a blessing. He found the advantages contained within it. In fact, on the court, small size has many..." Any advantages, speed and quickness, the ability to steal the ball from unsuspecting and significantly taller players, to say nothing of the fact that players just plain underestimated him. Could this approach not be useful in your life? What things do you think have been

• 2:24Ryan Holiday?

  holding you back that in fact could be a hidden source of strength? I just love this entry. It's to me, it's the encapsulation of the idea of the obstacle is the way. It's the encapsulation of Amor Fati. What Marcus is saying is that the Stoic manages to turn everything into raw material. That was actually something Robert Greene told me early on in my career. He said, you know, everything is material and artists can use everything as material. And, you know, Marcus's metaphor himself is like that fire consumes everything into fuel. That's what we want to do. That's the Stoic way. Look at where we are as a society, as a planet right now, we're being ravaged by a pandemic, by political polarization,

• 3:08Ryan Holiday?

  by populism, by distrust in institutions, by technological disruptions, by economic turmoil. If we can't figure out a way to use this, if we can't figure out a way to get better for it, I mean, God help us, right? Because it doesn't feel like it could get worse, but it could. And that that's what the Stoics are saying. We don't control what happens. We control how we respond. We don't control what life throws at us, but we control what we make of it. That's what we want to do. That's what Stoicism is about. We'll go into the video here in a second. Obviously, the audio of the video, it's me riffing on how we turn trials into triumph, how the obstacle is the way. Obviously, if you like this entry from the Daily Stoic, and you're interested in checking out the book, or you have the book and you've

• 3:53Ryan Holiday?

  beat it to hell, like a lot of people, you've filled it with notes and you want a new edition. We did just launch the Daily Stoic Premium Leather Edition. It's the same book you know and love, leather bound cover, inset Four Virtues logo. It's got some new illustrations, got a ribbon as a bookmark like the others, gilt edges on the pages. We use this awesome, high-quality Bible manufacturer to make it. It's just a limited run. I'm not sure how many copies we're gonna do, so if you want to check it out, do that at dailystoic.com/leather. But I mean, look, to me, books are designed to be read and reread and beat up. And when I see a person's copy of the Daily Stoic and I can tell they've read it over the last four years, I mean, I just, I love that.

• 4:37Ryan Holiday?

  When somebody shows it to me, they say, oh, I love your book and it's pristine. I have my suspicions because I know what my books look like that have mattered to me. They, they look like I hate them, but in fact, this, this abuse is actually a sign of love. So, you know, Seneca talks about the importance of reading and rereading and, and having a lingering over the master thinkers and having a dialogue and a discussion. That's what Marcus did with the copy of Epictetus that he got from Junius. That's what we hope you do with any of the books that we recommend here, including our own. If you want to check out the leather bound edition, you do that at dailystoic.com/leather. And then we'll get into this idea of, right now, of how we turn trials into triumph.

• 5:20Ryan Holiday?

  So if we, if we take it for granted that life is gonna knock us on our ass sometimes, that we're gonna do everything right and everything that possibly go wrong does go wrong, if we're gonna face disaster, then the question is, how do we respond to disaster? We've talked about how the Stoics sort of respond to bad news, but just managing the response to me is like, only part of it and the least interesting part. I think the, the powerful thing is, how do we take these disasters and turn them, as the Stoics famously did, into opportunities as almost fuel for greatness? So what's interesting is like, it's almost like, of course, that Stoicism would be founded around that exact series of events. So Zeno is a very successful dye merchant.

• 6:04Ryan Holiday?

  His family has been traders of what's called Tyrian purple dye for generations. And he's leading one of these convoys of ships to Athens to sell this dye. And all we know is that he suffers a terrible shipwreck and loses, loses everything. He washes up on shore, dead broke. This could have been the worst thing that ever happened to him. He very easily could have lost his life, so it probably was the worst thing that happened to him. All the money, all the success, generations of work evaporated like that. And famously, though, this is what drives Zeno to philosophy. He ends up at a bookstore, there's a reading, he hears the teacher talking about Socrates. He goes, hey, how can I learn more about this?

• 6:46Ryan Holiday?

  Just then, a philosopher named Kritis is walking by, and Zeno is basically handed off to the mentor, who puts him on the path to create Stoicism. So obviously, none of this would have happened had the convoy of ships gone swimmingly. So the disaster is what puts him in a place to have this experience. But he famously says later, he goes, thus fortune did drive me to philosophy. Or he says, I won a great fortune by losing my fortune. In the shipwreck, in losing everything, he discovered the thing that not only made his life better, but made the life of millions of people better. We wouldn't be having this conversation right now had he done that. So that's how a Stoic tries to see the good in everything. But a Stoic also realizes that sometimes losing everything is a great freedom,

• 7:30Ryan Holiday?

  and it can put us on a path to discovering what we were actually put on this planet to do. The world easily found another Tyrian die merchant. It did not, and has never seen another Zeno. I tell this story in The Obstacle is the Way. It's sort of the conclusion. I talk about how the framework for overcoming obstacles is this, but then we have to apply it in real life. So at the end of Marcus Aurelius's reign, he's sort of sick, he'd been sick a long time. And this rumor gets out that he's died. And it's at this moment that one of his most trusted generals, Evidius Cassius, declares himself emperor. You might not think that's a big deal, but this was a death sentence for all of Marcus's family. This basically meant that this guy he'd lived with and trusted and built up from essentially nothing

• 8:15Ryan Holiday?

  had been plotting to replace him the whole time. But the problem is Marcus is not dead, and he was not really even near death. He was totally fine. So now Marcus has to discover what he's gonna do. And what's so interesting about it is that Marcus wasn't angry. He didn't seek vengeance. What he does is, he says, actually, this is an opportunity. He tells his men, he tells the Senate, I'm gonna use this as an opportunity to teach the Roman people and history how civil... Strife can be dealt with. So he doesn't get angry. He doesn't have, you know, the desire to crush this person. He says, I'm gonna, I'm gonna bind this country back together. It's very similar to Lincoln. Like Lincoln did not want a civil war. At every turn, he tried to convince the self not to do what they were trying to do.

• 9:00Ryan Holiday?

  And he was the first to welcome the self back into the union. There was some baseline terms, of course, but what the important thing for him was union. Marcus writes, he's like, there's only one thing that I fear fellow soldiers. And that is that Cassius will kill himself because he's ashamed to come into our presence. Or that someone else will do so upon learning that I am to come and I am setting out against him. If that happens, Marcus says, I will actually have been deprived of something. A prize such as no human has ever obtained. And what is this prize? He says, to forgive a man who has wronged one, to remain a friend who has transgressed friendship. And to continue faithful to one who has broken faith. Marcus says, no one is to be executed for this civil war.

• 9:44Ryan Holiday?

  No one is to be punished for it. He tells the Senate, let no one's hands be stained with blood. And actually, this worst case scenario does come to pass. Someone assassinates Cassius. And we're told Marcus wept about it. Because what he saw this was, was not a bad thing. Obviously, he wouldn't, he didn't want it to happen. But it was an opportunity to teach people that just because there's some dispute over who's emperor or not, does not mean that Rome has to descend into a violent, bloody, terrible civil war. And Marcus does save that from happening. And he does, I think, most beautifully, prove that he actually meant these things that he was writing about in Meditations. One of the more unfortunate themes in Stoic philosophy is exile.

• 10:26Ryan Holiday?

  Apictetus is exiled, Seneca is exiled, Musonius Rufus is exiled at least three times and probably four times. Imagine four times, you lose your house, you lose your ability to stay in your own country. And you're sent off to some godforsaken land. And at one point, he's, he's sort of banished to this island. What's so beautiful about Musonius Rufus is that he's totally unruffled by this. You know, people are like, are you gonna kill yourself? Are you gonna plot? Your return, he's like, no, I'm gonna do what I gotta do. So he does his writing, he does his teachings. Famously, on one of the islands that he's banished to, he discovers an underground spring. The island had previously not thought it had any springs and was dependent on rainwater. So he's there actually helping the people who are stuck on this island with him.

• 11:11Ryan Holiday?

  And so I love the picture of Musonius Rufus just going, okay, this is where I live. This is what I do, right? How can I be of use where I happen to be at this moment? And I think that's the Stoic approach. So instead of going, woe is me, this is so bad for me, we think about how can I be of use to other people? In some cases, losing everything frees us to not be so concerned with ourselves and allows us to focus instead on the use that we can be for other people. I think what Musonius did was he seized the opportunity to live by his teachings, to be of use to the world. And in doing, he actually became quite famous. I think he believed that exile was not an evil or a hardship, but kind of a test

• 11:53Ryan Holiday?

  and a chance to move closer to virtue in the real world. And that's how we can see the obstacles that we face or the disaster that we're in the middle of right now. And I think that ties into one of the most modern stories of a Stoic turning disaster into opportunity, and that's James Stockdale. As Stockdale is parachuting down into a prison camp in North Vietnam during the Vietnam War, he says to himself, actually, I'm leaving the world of technology and entering the world of Epictetus. He knew he was gonna be the highest-ranked prisoner taken captive so far in the war. And he said, okay, this isn't about me. This is an opportunity to be a leader. This is what I was trained for. This responsibility has now fallen on me. And I think the most beautiful thing that Stockdale says about this, he goes like,

• 12:36Ryan Holiday?

  I never lost my faith in the end of the story. He said, I never doubted for one minute that I couldn't turn this into an event for which, in the future, I would not have traded away. What he meant was, by being a good leader, by testing his philosophy in the real world, by sticking to his ideals, by being a good soldier, by being a good, you know, comrade, he had the opportunity to turn this into a Life-defining event. And like most people, this is all they've ever even heard about Stockdale. He wins the Medal of Honor. He becomes an admiral in the Navy. He takes one of the worst things a human being has had to suffer through solitary confinement for years. You know, shackled in leg irons, deprived of friends, family, clean food and water.

• 13:21Ryan Holiday?

  And he uses this as an opportunity to just prove the philosophy, right? He uses it as an opportunity. He creates what they call a culture of defiance inside the prison camp. He comforts fellow prisoners when they break under torture because he knows that that no one can really endure what they're being subjected to. He even creates a code language for them to communicate with. And they had this sort of acronym that go U S, right? That doesn't stand for United States. It stood for unity over self. The idea was they were a team, they were in this together, they were going to get through it together, they were going to support each other, and they were going to make this the kind of thing that would define their lives and define the story of their lives. And so I think that's what the Stoic thinks about when we face disaster is like, yeah,

• 14:06Ryan Holiday?

  sure, I don't want this to happen. Sure, I would have chosen for this not to have happened. Sure, it's not even my fault that this happened. But now that it is my fate, the idea of amor fati means I love this, it was chosen for me, and now I'm going to make it something that I can be proud of. I'm going to make it something that at least has some advantages, if not for me, then at least for the other people around me. And that's how a Stoic turns disaster into opportunity. A Stoic believes the obstacle is the way. A Stoic doesn't just accept their fate, but loves it, embraces it. And as Marcus said, what you throw on top of a fire, it turns into flame and brightness. And that's what Zeno did, that's what Marcus did, that's what Musonius Rufus did, and that's what James Stockdale did.

• 14:50Ryan Holiday?

  And I think that's what you can do. If you like the podcast that we do here and you want to get it via email every morning, you can sign up at dailystoic.com/email.