It’s A Practice | Taylor Swift Used Stoicism To Beat The Music Industry

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

• 0:02Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. On Tuesdays, we take a closer look at these Stoic ideas and how we can apply them in our actual lives. Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy.

• 0:29Ryan Holiday?

  It's a practice. It may feel that you're not good at this Stoicism thing. You lost your temper yesterday. You relapsed on some bad habits. You did something that was unkind. You did something out of fear. Okay, few would confuse you with Cato. So few confused anyone with Cato. Even in Rome, at that time, there was an expression, "We can't all be Catos." This isn't to excuse your mistakes or your less-than-virtuous behaviors. It's just to point out that you're thinking about it wrong. The great record producer Rick Rubin makes a helpful analogy in his book, The Creative Act, which I talked to him about in a great, great episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast, which you should definitely check

• 1:11Ryan Holiday?

  out. Just like you might say that you're not a good Stoic, people might say, or worse, believe that they're not creative. "You're either engaging in the practice, or you're not," Rubin says. "It makes no sense to say that you're not good at it." It's like saying, "I'm not good at being a monk." You're either living as a monk, or you're not. What he means is that creativity, like philosophy, is not an end state. It's a process. It's a practice. It's the attempt, not the outcome, that counts. It's an intention, not a disposition. So what if you fell short? Were you trying? Are you still trying? That's the important thing. Stoicism is something we do, or rather, it's something that we're doing. Every single

• 1:56Ryan Holiday?

  day, we're trying. Every single day, we are putting the time and the effort and the intention in. We won't always be successful. We won't always live up to our standards. But what counts is that we don't quit. What matters is that we trust the process, that we respect the practice.

• 2:22Ryan Holiday?

  When Taylor Swift's masters are sold in 2019, she's not happy about this, right? They're sold to Scooter Braun, who actually reads The Daily Stoic every day, so it's cool with me. But she doesn't like it, right? That's what matters, is that she doesn't like it. She decides that's not something that works for her. So after she reminds herself to calm down and then reads this tweet from Kelly Clarkson, one of the most epic tweets of all time, I think we'd have to say.

• 2:56Ryan Holiday?

  She decides she's gonna do precisely this, right? So she re-records her first five albums and has basically been putting out music almost every day since that point, right? So Taylor Swift was, of course, very successful, very popular, very well-known before this. But it becomes this sort of springboard, the act of constantly releasing music being the cultural center of the universe now for basically three or four consecutive years. It not just transforms her and her career, but it elevates her to a level of pop stardom that I don't think anyone has ever reached before, maybe other than The Beatles. And you look at the Eras Tour.

• 3:39Ryan Holiday?

  The Eras Tour is possible, right? Precisely because she's just reintroduced a whole generation to her music. And I think what's interesting too is like, it's not just that she becomes bigger and more popular as a result of this process and seizes control of something that she didn't have control of financially before. But the songs get better too, right? It's this remarkable example of taking something that you never would have chosen, that you thought was profoundly unfair or screwed up, right? The worst part of the music business. And it becomes this catapult, right? And 1989 is the most streamed album of all time. She's Time's Person of the Year now, right?

• 4:22Ryan Holiday?

  What we do after the thing has happened to us is what matters, right? And it's not that everything is this, right? That everything becomes the catapult that advances our career to stratospheric levels, right? That's not always how it works, right? Life is much more brutal and frustrating and unfair than that. But we always have the opportunity to decide the end of that story, what it's going to mean to us, how we integrate it into our lives, who we become because of it. And this is Marcus Aurelius's story also, right? So Marcus deals with the plague, he deals with floods, he deals with war, he deals with a coup. It's one thing after another. And an ancient historian who's writing not far from Marcus's time would say that Marcus

• 5:07Ryan Holiday?

  does not get the good fortune that he deserved. It had been 20 years of uninterrupted peace and prosperity, and then all hell breaks loose like the second he takes over. And here you have this guy, this philosopher king, who wanted, he had this agenda, he had these things he wanted to do. He didn't get to do those things because all hell was breaking loose. But that's not the end of the story, of course, right? We don't look at him and lament what could have been, right? We look at him and we see how incredible it was. As that same historian would say, "That I, for my part, admired him all the more for this very reason, because amidst unusual and extraordinary circumstances, he both survived himself and preserved the empire."

• 5:48Ryan Holiday?

  Marcus Aurelius is great because of what he went through, because of what he did while he went through it, because of who he was, right? Absolute power is supposed to corrupt absolutely. It not only does it, it makes him better, right? So obstacles aren't always tragedies and disasters. It's just the stress, the responsibility, it's the new situation you're thrust into. This is the opportunity for excellence. That's what the obstacle is, the way means. And it's funny, as I was finishing up the book, I was reading about this tree. This conifer tree that I'd never heard of before, but what I thought was so interesting about it, so it's like any other pine tree. It drops its pine cone and then the pine cone is what generates the next generation of trees. Except for this pine cone, it only unlocks, it can only germinate

• 6:33Ryan Holiday?

  if it is exposed to temperatures that the climate does not naturally reach, right? It's only in a fire that this pine cone looks like the one that I'm holding in my hand. That's one of them. This woman, she puts them in the oven and cranks the oven way up and then you get to see it happen. I have this sitting on my desk. It's, to me, an illustration of this idea that the obstacle becomes the way, unless we are exposed to difficulty and stresses and adversity and situations that we did not want, right? We can't fully become what we're capable of becoming. We can't fully unlock. And the Stoics have this idea of a mor fati. It's not just acceptance, right? Part of what Taylor Swift has to do is accept

• 7:16Ryan Holiday?

  that her masters are not in her hands. But when she accepts it, once she accepts that they've been sold, then she can get to work turning it into something new or better or different, right? And so the Stoic idea for this is a mor fati, a love of fate. You don't just resist it or deny it or blame, but you accept it and then you turn it into something that you feel like was chosen for you, that you were designed for, that this is the moment where it all happens for you. Marx says, you know, what you throw on top of a fire becomes fuel for that fire, right? That it turns it into flame and brightness and heat. And of course, this is the essence of what artists do, whether they're musicians or writers or comedians or painters.

• 8:01Ryan Holiday?

  We take what we've experienced, what life has subjected us to, and we turn that into material. We turn that into ideas, right? The worst pain that the artists that perform at your shows have gone through become what thousands, millions of people cheer for, want to see, bond to each other with, relate to. So we take what happens to us and we turn it into material. And this is how we grow. This is how we build brands and businesses. This is how we bring people together.