Profound Lessons From Stoic Philosophy - Ryan Holiday

Ryan Holiday is a podcaster, marketer and an author. Discipline is one of the modern world's hot topics. Because it's become apparent that in order to achieve anything, you must be able to temper your desires and direct your efforts. The Stoics believed this 2000 years ago and between then and now there's been a plethora of historical examples which can teach us how to build and sustain discipline. Expect to learn why sanity is your most precious resource, why discipline without an end goal is pointless, how to stay disciplined when success arrives, why Martin Luther King let a Nazi punch him in the face, how to enforce discipline without lambasting yourself for falling short, what Eisenhower's smoking habit can teach us about self control, why 75 hard might not build discipline long term and much more... Sponsors: Get £150 discount on Eight Sleep products at https://eightsleep.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get the Whoop 4.0 for free and get your first month for free at http://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get over 37% discount on all products site-wide from MyProtein at https://bit.ly/proteinwisdom (use code: MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Buy Discipline Is Destiny - https://amzn.to/3RQDnvL Check out Ryan's website - http://dailystoic.com/ Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #discipline #stoicism #motivation - 00:00 Intro 00:28 The Power of Sanity & Consistency 09:53 Direction Helps Discipline 14:28 Maintaining Discipline at the Top 27:15 Lessons from Marcus Aurelius 38:08 How Principles Can Aid Focus 44:30 The Downside of High Standards 53:37 The Tragedies of Lou Gehrig & Babe Ruth 58:19 Can You Achieve Extreme Results in a Balanced Life? 1:08:02 What Ryan Learned from Queen Elizabeth 1:15:13 The Virtue of Persevering Through Trials 1:27:08 Dwight Eisenhower’s Smoking Habit 1:31:59 Cautionary Tales from History 1:37:13 Where to Find Ryan - Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Listen to all episodes on audio: Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

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

• 0:00Ryan Holiday?

  If you don't know what's important to you, what kind of work you want to do, what you want your life to look like, you end up defaulting to one of two things. What pays most or what are other people doing? You can end up very far from what you actually want and you'll only know that when you get there. So you have to have a very clear sense of like where you're trying to go. Or these things, these opportunities are chances to get super off track.

• 0:27Chris Williamson?

  You've got this quote that I referenced a couple of weeks ago. Be quiet, work hard and stay healthy. It's not ambition or skill that is going to set you apart, but sanity. What's that?

• 0:38Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I find as a former like sort of young person going places, that when I'm hiring someone or I'm looking for someone like that could I want to like mentor or help or whatever, it's not like how talented you are or what your background is. But it's like the first test is like, I should say, the find is like, is this person fucking nuts or not? You know what I mean? Like, does this person have their shit together or not? And so I think we often think a lot about like getting better at what we do, like the craft of the thing, which is really important. But then when you look at like, why did this person make it and this person not make it?

• 1:19Ryan Holiday?

  It's usually, you know, very some stark divergence where they started making bad decisions. They, you know, started being very egotistical. They had this shot and they blew it. You know, it's not, it's not like in sports where you're like, this guy's just faster than that person. It's some other thing that usually sort of prevents a person from reaching everything they're capable of reaching.

• 1:48Chris Williamson?

  Is there an element in there as well about playing a long game?

• 1:51Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, for sure, for sure. Definitely. I mean, one of the hard parts about having sort of potential and ambition is that it burns sort of very hot and bright. And, you know, if what you, if you want to be established, you want to do it for a long time, you have to figure out how. Yeah, to play a long game, to not blow yourself up, to not. It's like, how do you care about it very deeply, but not sweat it so much that it's like a liability?

• 2:19Chris Williamson?

  Needs to be sustainable, man.

• 2:20Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 2:20Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I, I play with this all the time and a lot of the guys that I see that have flash in the pan successes on the internet are very similar.

• 2:29Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, well, look, and we live in an environment where algorithmically you can just be given a huge gift. You can just sort of blow up, right? And so that really has nothing to do with whether you deserve it or not. But then, once you have it, the question is, can you maintain it? Can you do the work necessary? Can you not fuck it up? Right? And I think we, I, when I talk to groups, I usually start with some version of like, you know, like, the biggest enemy in this room is not like what the other people are doing. It's not the economy. It's not like gatekeepers. Like, the person who determines like how this is gonna go is you, really.

• 3:10Ryan Holiday?

  Like, for the most part, most failures are self inflicted, or most big mistakes are self inflicted. And they often come like right after some form of success. That's kind of the most dangerous point. That's when we overreach, that's when it goes to our head. That's when we, you know, it's like, it's in that moment of success or triumph or whatever that like you need the most discipline. But there is the highest justification for slacking on said discipline, right? So this is, that's where it happens.

• 3:44Chris Williamson?

  There's a quote from Charlie Munger that says, "It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent."

• 3:55Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, that's right. Yeah, it's, it's like, can I not blow this up? Like, I remember, so like, I dropped out of college when I was nineteen or twenty. I sort of had all these cool opportunities very early, like things that, especially with what was happening. Cause I was sort of left, right in the financial crisis. So all my friends are struggling. Sort of watched as, you know, people my age have taken longer than you would expect to get where they want to go. And then, so I was very cognizant of the concept of like a regression to the mean, right? And so just because you break out early, just because you have this thing, you know, statistically. You're gonna end up like everyone else. So you have to be really cognizant of if that's what 10 is gonna, if that's what would happen sort of naturally, you better make sure you

• 4:39Ryan Holiday?

  don't accelerate that process. Like, there's even less room for self-inflicted or, you know, unnecessary errors. So I was like, really in my twenties, I was thinking a lot about like, okay, you've gotten these like opportunities, you have this stuff, like the number one thing is like, don't fuck it up.

• 4:58Chris Williamson?

  How do you avoid being too risk averse when that happens?

• 5:00Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I don't know. I mean, that is the tension. Like, you still wanna take big swings, but it wasn't like, it wasn't like I was risk averse in the sense of like, I don't wanna like, I've got this capital and I have to protect it. It was more like, how do you not alienate the wrong people? How do you not, you know, take your foot off the gas at the wrong time? Like, it was more like ego, complacency, entitlement, you know, like the, those kinds of, you know, like feeling like you're anointed, feeling like you're special. Like, as soon as you start thinking like, the rules don't apply, like,

• 5:40Ryan Holiday?

  I've made it, I'm good. Like, that's when, you know, you're probably getting into dangerous territory.

• 5:48Chris Williamson?

  Yes. It seems to me that ever since James Clear's book Atomic Habits, this has been something everyone's thinking about, right? That your outcomes are a lagging measure of your inputs. Like, where you're at is just a lagging measure of the things that you've gone toward that. And it seems like discipline is pretty much exactly the same. And that's where the, I'm gonna guess the line between your future destiny is dictated by your current discipline.

• 6:10Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I was thinking about that actually just recently. Like, all the work that I, when I'm working on a book, so Discipline has come out, I'm working on the next one, like, all the material in those books are the result of

• 6:22Ryan Holiday?

  Research, writing, thinking, organizing that I did a year ago, five years ago, 10 years ago. Right? And so all, all the work that you'll do in the future is, in a sense, the dependent on the work that you're doing now and how long you continue to do it. And so like when I sit down, I was sitting down and writing today, the, the material that's available is, like you said, a lagging indicator of work that I did at some unknown previous date. And so it can be really easy to be like consumed with what the task is in front of you and that. But if you're not simultaneously also setting up the future stuff,

• 7:07Ryan Holiday?

  you're going to wake up one day and you're not going to have what you need. It's like you can, and, and I think the better you are, the more momentum you have, the easier it is to coast for a long enough time that you don't even know.

• 7:20Chris Williamson?

  The foundation is being eroded from underneath you.

• 7:22Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 7:23Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. It's a bank account that you pay into every single day.

• 7:25Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 7:26Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. It's very interesting to think about that. I, I'm going back to what we said at the very beginning about people being able to blow up overnight.

• 7:33Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 7:33Chris Williamson?

  Uh, I did a reality TV show called Love Island in the UK a little while ago, and that basically plucks people out of obscurity and gives them 2 million followers and a million pound contract with a fast fashion company. And they're the hottest thing in the world in the UK, pretty much every single person knows who they are. And I have been worried for quite a while about what that teaches young people about the route towards success. Not that you're supposed to do something that's very difficult at a high quality consistently for a long period of time, despite what the market says to you.

• 8:02Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 8:03Chris Williamson?

  It's that you're supposed to be in the right place at the right time.

• 8:05Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. I mean, uh, one of the amazing things about the internet is that it's this platform though, it's so much more democratic. It's so, so many more people get their shots. But then, then you get that shot and.

• 8:20Ryan Holiday?

  You still have to like have the stuff, right? Like you can, you can get like, you can have one thing go viral. You can have one thing, but like, can you consistently or repeatedly do it? Do you actually have, like, once you have the audience, do you, do you have the stuff? And I'll see this too, like someone will be really good on one platform, like have a podcast that does well, or a YouTube channel that does well, or you know, a social media account. And then what happens is like, you know, the entertainment sort of business is like, well, we want you to do this, we want you to do this. And like, so I often interact with those people when they're coming to do a book and you go, oh, like, you're really just a feature or a function of the medium you're in.

• 9:03Ryan Holiday?

  You don't actually have, like, there's no there there, as the expression goes. Like, you don't have like a core thing that can then be translated into the other mediums. If you have that, you're, you're, you're golden. Like, you can, you can succeed in all the different platforms in all the different ways. If you have some like unique point of view, or a voice, or a, you know, a thing that you, a message that you're delivering, you know, it doesn't matter if you start on this platform or that platform. You should be able to, with some skill and artwork, be able to translate in all these different ways and be able to succeed in a sort of multi-disciplinary format. The problem is if you're really just like right place, right time, then it comes time to do this thing.

• 9:46Ryan Holiday?

  And like, the audience just feels that there's like, there's nothing there.

• 9:49Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. Something that I found very interesting, thinking about discipline, was the relationship between directionality or an outcome that discipline is being filtered through. It feels like you need something to direct your discipline toward. Without the direction, discipline is pretty hard to deploy because what are you being disciplined in service of? What does discipline even look like? You know, as an ex-club promoter for a long time, what was discipline to me, going out until four in the morning,

• 10:17Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 10:17Chris Williamson?

  may be somebody else's idea of complete destruction.

• 10:21Ryan Holiday?

  That's true, yeah. It, what, what is the outcome? Where are you trying to get? What's it all being directed towards? That's sort of the ultimate question, like, you know. Practice without some aim is not really practice at all. It's just activity. So yeah, you have to figure out what it is that you're trying to do. Like for me, it was, you know, okay, I don't want to write. That's what I want to do. So then it became clearer, like, you know, what are the composite tasks that go into being in a position to do that? Just like, feel like, hey, I want to run for office. You know, okay, maybe military service would be helpful. You had to graduate from these schools. You have to cultivate this network. If this, there's a, there's a resume that you need to have that job. Right?

• 11:05Ryan Holiday?

  And you got to know what that is. That's not to say that everyone has to do it the same way, but you got to know the sort of, the, the collection or the portfolio of assets or tools or skills that you're, that where you want to end up. But the Stoics have this line, they go like, um, if you don't know what port you're sailing towards, no wind is favorable. You have to know where you want to go. And this is, this is really true, like even for successful people. Like if you don't know what, like where your stopping point is, what you want your life to look like. Now all of a sudden, you know, you're in this wonderful, fortunate position where people are like, hey, you want to do this, you want to do this, they're offering you this, you know?

• 11:47Ryan Holiday?

  Do you want to take this amount of money to do this or more money to do this? And, you know, if you don't know, like what's important to you, what kind of work you want to do, what you want your life to look like, you end up defaulting to one of two things. Like what pays most or what are other people doing? And those are not the worst proxies in the world. Like it's better than no proxy, but you can end up very far from what you actually want. And you'll only know that when you get there. So you have to have a very clear sense of like where you're trying to go. Or these things are, these opportunities are, you know, really chances to get super off track.

• 12:32Chris Williamson?

  With that in mind, is it easier to be disciplined before success arrives?

• 12:37Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I mean, look, it's easier to say like singularly focused, or it's, let's say, it's easier to say no to stuff when you're not getting offered a lot, right? It's easy to be principled when the, you know, there's not a lot in the way of consequences, right? So all these things are easier to a certain degree when you're dealing with sort of less volume or like lower stakes.

• 13:01Ryan Holiday?

  I mean, one of the hard parts about being disciplined early is that you're doing this thing and the payoff may be

• 13:08Chris Williamson?

  Eating all of the shit and no reward.

• 13:10Ryan Holiday?

  Very far lagging indicator, you know? So I think it's, the truth is, it's always difficult to be disciplined, right? It's always difficult and it's something you have to figure out how to do and enjoy for its own sake. Because a lot of times, there's not only not rewards for it, but there can be the opposite of rewards for it, right? Like, there can be punishments for it. If you're like, this is what I want to do, this is the track that I'm on, this is what's important to me. And you look around and everyone's not doing those things and it seems like they're having a better time, it seems like they're getting ahead for it, right? The, you, you have to, if the only reason you're disciplined is that you think what

• 13:53Ryan Holiday?

  comes on the other side of it will be worth it, not only is that going to be hard when you're not immediately getting it, but then you find like, oh, I was super disciplined until I hit the best seller list, I was super disciplined because I won a gold medal, I was super, then you get that thing and even that thing itself isn't the reward that you thought it was. So if you hated the process of it, you told yourself it'll all be worth it when, you know, there's a, there's a disappointment there and the accomplishment is tinged with a kind of sadness.

• 14:27Chris Williamson?

  Was there anyone that you researched for the book that had that happen that reached lofty heights and then their discipline fell away?

• 14:33Ryan Holiday?

  I mean, I think being disciplined, once you're in the promised land, it's an extremely difficult thing.

• 14:42Ryan Holiday?

  I don't know. I mean, when I, when I, when I look at super disciplined people, I, again, I'm not just making the case like, okay, you got to sacrifice it, then you get this, and then you don't have to do it anymore. It's more a kind of a, it's, it, it has to get to a kind of an intrinsic thing. I remember I was, I was talking to Lance Armstrong once, and he said, like, I raced for the money, but I practiced for me. Some version of that, that like, his point was like, he likes riding the bike. What they pay him for was the competition, right? And like, and like, people have obviously differing opinions about Lance Armstrong, but he's a person who clearly loved doing the thing.

• 15:24Ryan Holiday?

  And you have to get to a point where you love doing the thing. That's why you do it. And like, in writing, for instance, there's writing and there's publishing, and those are not the same thing.

• 15:36Ryan Holiday?

  Like, publishing is when it goes out into the world, and that's interacting with the publisher, and there's contracts, and there's deadlines, and there's press, and there's good stuff, but there's also a lot that's not up to you. But like, the, the day to day-ness of it is, is you. Does that make sense?

• 15:53Chris Williamson?

  Yes, and seeing the stuff that you maybe aren't super, super enamored with as part of the price that you pay, the same as getting up on time, the same as hitting your word count.

• 16:04Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 16:04Chris Williamson?

  Douglas Murray says that, once the book is published, that's when the real work begins. That's how he.

• 16:09Ryan Holiday?

  It's just, I've said it, it's like a second marathon, and some people are not willing to run that marathon. But like, I remember I heard this interview with a comedian once, and he was saying that, like, someone asked him, like, are you still gonna do comedy, like, once you've hit it big? Or, you know, and his point was that, like, yeah, of course, because if I don't, it means that, like, I was doing this for the wrong reasons. Right? That, like, he was a comedian as a means to an end to do another thing, like, acting or producing, or, you know, having a sitcom, or whatever it is, like. I like doing the thing that I do and what you'll tend to find, this is why discipline is so important as you get successful at something like, you know,

• 16:49Ryan Holiday?

  all of a sudden you're a Pro Bowl quarterback or you're, you know, a CEO of a company or you write a book. Well, now you have all these opportunities to do not that thing, right? Like people want to pay you to do other stuff endorsements. They want to pay you to come speak here. They want you to consult on this or invest in this. And so if you don't love that thing, you're going to end up doing all those other things. Or worse, if you do love that thing, but you don't have the discipline to be like, this is what I'm here for. This is like what, why I did this. You know, the reward for your discipline and your success is that you don't have the time or bandwidth to do that thing anymore.

• 17:33Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 17:33Ryan Holiday?

  And you only have a limited window to do that thing, right? And so one of the things I try, I try to go like, well, could other people like, writing is a thing that only I can do, like only I can write the things that I have to say. So I have to figure out a, a life and a system and a practice where I'm filtering what I'm saying yes and no to, but I'm also like building systems or structures. So like, I'm not spending a lot of time doing things that are prevent, and then I don't have time to do the hard thing, which is like sit down at the blank page.

• 18:10Chris Williamson?

  That outsourcing of tasks that other people can do is an important one. One of the challenges, at least I'm seeing now, especially because Naval and his concept around leverage and all of that personal accountability stuff. I think people are quite quick to outsource stuff that they probably shouldn't be. I'm seeing a lot of, so for instance, in the podcasting world would be a good example.

• 18:35Chris Williamson?

  The podcaster is the only person that understands the direction that they want to take the show in, but tons of shows that are smaller than the size of this one have guest bookers that look after all of the guests that come on.

• 18:46Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 18:46Chris Williamson?

  They have researchers that read the book and tell them the questions that they should ask. They have a thumbnail and a titling guy that comes in and demonstrates how it's visually going to look on YouTube and

• 18:57Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 18:57Chris Williamson?

  and on Apple Podcasts and stuff. You go, well, like, what are you now? I have a friend who did a 330-date comedy tour over many years, basically doing the same act. And he said that after the first 50 to 70 shows, he was no longer a comedian. He was an actor. And the point being that he was no longer actually

• 19:20Ryan Holiday?

  The script.

• 19:21Chris Williamson?

  doing the art of comedy. He was just a mouthpiece for what had happened before. And he had to take a big chunk of time off because he'd lost his love.

• 19:29Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, yeah, you have to maintain the authenticity of the craft or the thing. And yeah, you do outsource and you find leverage points, but it's usually about the trivial things that don't matter.

• 19:42Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 19:42Ryan Holiday?

  To free you up to spend the most time on the things that do matter. So when you're saying no to stuff, it has to be clear that that is part of a process of saying yes, a thousand percent yes, to like the things that really do matter. So, yeah, when I outsource, if I have an assistant or someone who mows my lawn, or I'm sort of taking tasks off, that's not so I can just dick around, right? That's so I really do have the time to like sweat the details of the stuff that I make, right? I tell a story in the book, there's this exchange, Coretta Scott King, Martin Luther King's wife, is called by the actor Harry Belafonte. And, you know, she's, I think

• 20:26Ryan Holiday?

  Martin Luther King had just gotten arrested, or was, you know, sort of away doing this march or something. And as they're talking on the phone,

• 20:35Ryan Holiday?

  You can tell, like, she keeps having to put the phone down, she gets interrupted, kids are, need something, she's taking food out of the oven, she's like, just busy while they're on the phone. And Bella Fonte goes like, I, this is a personal question, but I have to ask, like, are, are you, do you have like any staff? Like, are you doing, are you totally by yourself right now? And she goes, yes, yes, of course. And he says, why don't you have any help? And she goes, well, you know, like, my husband's a minister, chief, he thinks the optics are bad, you know, don't know if we can afford it. It, it, it's just sort of a combination of this block that they had. And, and Bella Fonte goes, like, that's ridiculous. And it ends now. He's like, I'm, I will pay for you to

• 21:17Ryan Holiday?

  have staff. And he realizes that, like, he's like, they're doing, they're running this massive organization, they're the head of this movement that has the potential to change the world, like, Martin Luther King can't be worried about whether there's milk in the fridge or not. And his wife can't be, you know, worried, you know, about this or that. Like, there, there has to, you have to have the ability to, to delegate and build, like, a system or a structure around you. And I think that can be really hard for people, especially if you came to what you did from a very sort of scrappy, like, passionate thing where you loved doing it, one, but two, like, you didn't think anyone could do it as well as you. And it takes a certain amount of discipline to, to, to find out

• 22:02Ryan Holiday?

  what, to separate the essential from the inessential, to delegate or eliminate the inessential, and then that leaves you with the essential. In Meditations, Marx realized, so you can imagine, he's the emperor of Rome, he's having to think about this exact thing. And he says, you know, the question you have to ask yourself in every moment is, is this essential? And he said, because most of what we do and say is not essential. And he says, the, the thing is, when you, when you eliminate the inessential, you get the double benefit of doing the essential better. And so, this, this isn't, you know, this sort of hoity-toity, like, first world problem. It's, it's in a, a critical dilemma, a critical juncture point, as you get better at what you do, how do you find the way to

• 22:45Ryan Holiday?

  professionalize and systematize and scale the stuff so you can spend more time on the things that matter and less time on the things that don't matter? Or you can bring in other people who are better than you at certain things that allow you to take what you do to another level.

• 23:01Chris Williamson?

  It's such a common dynamic that I see, especially coming from the northeast of England, right? Spit and saw the salt of the earth people who are that person that you said scrappy. They've come up from the bottom up. They've done all of the things themselves. They were HR and marketing and finance and accounts and all that, everything. And they get to the stage where you go, look, man, like you are now bouncing off the rev limiter in first gear. The only way that you're going to be able to do this is to relinquish some of this control. And it's a combination of fear, of perfectionism, of a lot of things that come about. And it is a particular type of discipline. I think the Puritan work ethic, this is something that I would love to have drilled into myself 10 years ago. So we ran

• 23:43Chris Williamson?

  a Saturday club night in Newcastle, the city I went to, Union. And I did 204 Saturdays in a row without missing a single one. The only first one that I did miss was because I had a chest infection and I was completely dead. I literally couldn't go. I was going on holidays that would leave on a Sunday and get back on a Thursday for four years because I didn't want to be away for this particular thing. I was absolutely adamant that if I left the Saturday, something would go wrong. But the stuff that I was doing during the day, setting the club up, was getting a piece of rope with a gaffer tape and throwing it over the top of a particular bracket at a very specific place because that's where the inflatable went that looked right in the middle. And if it went a little bit to the left, it was often it went a little bit to the right. And then the way

• 24:26Chris Williamson?

  the smoke machine was set up and everything, and me and my business partner did this, we were the directors of this company that was doing thousands and thousands of people every single Saturday night. And it was us that was spending three hours each Saturday between 11 and 2 going in and doing this. Like, why? Well, it's because we were terrified that if somebody else did it, that would be the gateway drug, the pebble at the top of the avalanche that would cause everything to fall to pieces.

• 24:49Ryan Holiday?

  Look, and there's a form ironically of kind of fear or resistance in this sort of obsession or...

• 24:59Ryan Holiday?

  You know, sort of drive to be on top of everything. I remember when I was at American Apparel, I looked down from my office one day and the CEO and owner of the company was in the parking lot, like directing traffic. Like there'd been some problem and there's a traffic jam and he sees it and he runs downstairs and he's like directing traffic, like thousands of cars. It's like a shift change. He's directing traffic. And so there's some, you know, version of leadership stories where this is like hands on, the leader gets down in the trenches with the soldiers and like does what needs to be done. And there, there is truth to that. Like a leader has to be willing to do

• 25:40Ryan Holiday?

  anything, but a leader also can't do everything. And the truth is, there were a lot of hard decisions that the company desperately needed to make, like strategic decisions, sort of cultural decisions. That weren't down in the car park. That weren't down there that he was, as I step back from it, can clearly see was running from those things. You know, there is the immediate reward, the immediacy, the tangibleness of like, I'm gonna go solve this problem, when he should have been in his office doing something that if someone walked by might not have looked like work, right? He could have been sitting there like

• 26:19Ryan Holiday?

  this, just thinking. But if he doesn't do that, no one does that, right? Like you, you have to think about your role in an organization, in a project, in a field. You have to go like, if not me, then who, right? And like, there's a lot of decisions, especially as you get higher up, that only the owner, only the creative, only the main person can make. And thinking long-term, you know, setting principles, you know, setting goals, except those are the things that only you can do. Other people can do a lot of these main pieces, but if it's, if you're not doing that thing, it's not happening. And you have to figure out what that is. And that's what

• 27:01Ryan Holiday?

  that question, is this essential? Is like, is this essential? Am I the only one that can do it? What happens if I don't do it? And that's got to sort of determine your. You know, day to day priority list or your to do list.

• 27:15Chris Williamson?

  So that would be somebody not with excess discipline, but with um discipline that is heavily focused, perhaps in a suboptimal direction or perhaps behind them almost. It's focused on tasks that they should have let go of a little while ago.

• 27:28Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 27:28Chris Williamson?

  What about someone on the other side of that? What about somebody that achieves the accolades and gets to that stage? And then everything falls away. I think you had uh was it Robert Moses?

• 27:39Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 27:39Chris Williamson?

  Was somebody that was like that and you could compare him with like a George Washington who or um who's the guy that was in charge in nineteen forty four? When America was in the war.

• 27:48Ryan Holiday?

  Like George Marshall?

• 27:49Chris Williamson?

  George Marshall, yeah, him. Uh, that would be a big difference, right? You have someone that's basically in charge of, what was it you said, about seventy million human lives?

• 27:58Ryan Holiday?

  Oh Eisenhower, yeah.

• 27:59Chris Williamson?

  Eisenhower, sorry. Yeah.

• 28:00Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah Eisenhower is basically this sort of brief moment after the Second World War, the most powerful man in the world. He leads this enormous army, you know, he's the head of the nuclear arsenal, you know, he is a conqueror of conquerors, the head of, you know, the most powerful nation in the world for this sort of brief moment. And he has this line that I think a lot about. He says, you know, freedom is better defined as the opportunity for self-discipline. And so, you know, we think of discipline as this thing you need to achieve a kind of success, right? And you do, you have to be disciplined on the way up. But also, like, people make you

• 28:44Ryan Holiday?

  disciplined on the way up because you have fewer options. There is no other way, right? You you have to be disciplined about your money because you don't have any, right? You have to be disciplined about your work ethic, et cetera, because like you're in this competition with all these people. It's sort of a forcing function. But then you get there, you get to the top. And now the rules that previously bound you or the things you needed to prove, that's not there. And so if you're not self-driven, if you're not, you know, enforcing that discipline on yourself.

• 29:20Ryan Holiday?

  It all falls apart, right? And I think, deep down, the reason a lot of people are ambitious and want to be successful is they they have they want to be the president, or they want to be the CEO, or they want to start their own company. What they think is that the end of that rainbow is an exemption from all the rules that they don't like. And in fact, it's those people have to be stricter on themselves. The Stoics would say, no one is fit to rule who is not first master of themselves. And so the idea is that discipline is is not this thing that is enforced on you, like when you're in school, you can't go to the bathroom at this time, you got to be here at this.

• 29:59Ryan Holiday?

  You know, as you work your way up, a lot of those things, not only not only fall away, but actually, life says, well, what time do you want to be here? Right? Like, what do you want from us? What do you need from us? Right? Suddenly, people are accommodating to you. And so, or, you know, they're building you, they're telling you how great you. If you don't have this sort of strong internal compass, this strong sense of what you're OK with, what you're not OK with, what you need to do, what you shouldn't do, then the success is going to be deeply unmooring, right? And deeply disconcerting and liable not to last, because you it's like you ran past

• 30:44Ryan Holiday?

  all the barriers and now you're just there. And so, yeah, discipline has to be this kind of internal thing that you cultivate that stays with you, whether the circumstances are really good or really bad.

• 30:57Chris Williamson?

  Do you not think that this is where Commodus would have probably played a stark contrast to his father's role?

• 31:04Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I mean, what's so interesting about Antoninus, Marcus Aurelius, and then Marcus Aurelius's son, Commodus, you have sort of a great emperor, a greater emperor, and you have one of the worst emperors. And why is that? I don't, I mean, there's so much we don't know, right? We don't know what their relationship was like, we don't know what happened. It could be that Marcus Aurelius was the greatest father in the world and his son was a psychopath, right? We know there's a there's just a tragedy, the whole thing is tinged in tragedy in the sense that, you know, Marcus Aurelius had Twelve or thirteen children and every one of his sons dies.

• 31:47Ryan Holiday?

  Commodus is the only one. We have some sense that Marcus, for instance, the first thing Marcus Aurelius does with absolute power since incredible moment in human history, he's named emperor and he anoints his brother, his stepbrother, co-emperor. The first thing he does with this power is he shares it, right? Which is a nod to the old Roman system, which had two consuls, like had two presidents who would serve, like co-presidents who would serve these one-year terms. Then Rome becomes an empire and this changes. But Marcus says, thinks that there needs to be this kind of check on power. So he and his brother serve as co-equals.

• 32:29Ryan Holiday?

  We get the sense that he was setting up some system where two of his sons, or his son and his co-emperor's stepbrother's son would rule together.

• 32:39Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so do you think that maybe Marcus was trying to future-proof any one tyrant from being in too much control because you would always have this other person? And by doing it at the moment that he was given power, it set, it was the highest cost that he could pay?

• 32:56Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, like one of the most beautiful passages in Meditations, again, it's this private, you have the private journal of the Emperor of Rome. And he's saying, be careful not to be Caesarified. You can easily be dyed purple, he says, the Roman emperor wears a purple cloak. And he's saying, you can't be dyed purple, you can't be stained or changed by this position you're in, right? We have Lord Acton's rule of like absolute power corrupts absolutely. He was saying like, he was consciously talking to himself about trying to prevent that from happening. And I think obviously the decision at the very beginning to share power is like, you

• 33:36Ryan Holiday?

  know, a very big sort of step, like it's preemptively trying to prevent that from happening. And we, we believe that his succession plan for his son was to set up some sort of system or tradition where that happened again. The other quirk is Marcus is the only emperor, five emperors in a row to have a male heir. So Marcus, Marcus's father is not Antoninus. Marcus, Antoninus is his adopted father, just as Antoninus's adopted father is Hadrian, and Hadrian's adopted father is Trajan. There's this period, there's this process. So Marcus isn't able to do that, right? He's not able to choose an heir because he has a male son.

• 34:19Ryan Holiday?

  But we get the sense that he wanted to have two, maybe one his son, one of his brother's son, or two of his sons rule together. But in the best-laid plans, they all die. And so Commodus is the only one left. And, you know, we don't know what Marcus thinks of Commodus. We can imagine every father is blind to a certain degree to the flaws of their children and trapped by, you know, insane-ness of this system. But certainly, something goes wrong. And it's a tragedy of, in some ways, an indictment of Marcus, right?

• 35:00Ryan Holiday?

  Like, if you're the most disciplined, you know, decent human being, but somehow you're not able to pass that along to your family, I mean, what does it say? It raises a lot of questions, for sure.

• 35:15Chris Williamson?

  That is interesting, the fact that you have this emperor, philosopher, god-king thing going on, incredibly giving, very benevolent, very caring, you know, was equality, like, ideas that were literally millennia before their time.

• 35:30Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 35:31Chris Williamson?

  And yet, one of the few roles that every father has, that they need to fulfill somehow happened. But then, everybody is so idiosyncratic and unique and individual, you don't know. I mean, we all know about the rebellious, rich kid that happens to be a dick.

• 35:46Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 35:47Chris Williamson?

  Smashes up the father's car and has parties in the house when the parents are away and all that stuff. So, and I suppose the open loop here that may never, is most likely to never be closed, unless we discover some more hidden something somewhere.

• 36:03Chris Williamson?

  Is interesting for speculation. It's like, is this a blip in what would have been otherwise a pure white snow surface of Marcus Aurelius's rule?

• 36:13Ryan Holiday?

  Or is it just, you know, the exception that proves the rule, which is the reason we don't have this system is that it almost never produces good results, right? Like, there's 30 or 40 Roman emperors, and there's five that they consider the five good emperors, right?

• 36:29Chris Williamson?

  Does that finish, that finishes with?

• 36:30Ryan Holiday?

  Marcus is the last, well, Marcus is considered the last of the five good emperors. There's five emperors in a row. There's a few other good ones, but the point is, I mean, even with the passing of Queen Elizabeth, like, how many other good ones have there been? There's not that many. There's been thousands of kings and queens in these various kingdoms over thousands of years, and there's probably, what, two dozen that were like, they did a good job. They proved, what Matthew Arnold, one of the sort of biographers of Marcus Aurelius in the 1800s writes, he goes, "And Marcus Aurelius is given every privilege and power and advantage in life, and the remarkable thing is he proves himself worthy

• 37:09Ryan Holiday?

  of it," right? And how rare that is, not just in, you know, royal families, but like anyone with any kinds of privilege, right? How many people who are incredibly athletically gifted also, you're like, and they're a great person too, right? Or people who are wealthy and you're like, and they're also so hardworking and such a great parent, right? The reality is, and this is why I think discipline is such a virtue, and justice too, and wisdom and all, it's really hard. It's really fucking hard. And it's harder, it's harder in some ways when you can get away with not doing those things. And that, I think, is what

• 37:49Ryan Holiday?

  sort of privilege and power often enables. There's not the forcing function of having to earn it, right?

• 37:59Ryan Holiday?

  Comitatus doesn't have to run for election, you know, like he just gets it. And because it doesn't have to get it, it doesn't do a very good job of it.

• 38:08Chris Williamson?

  That's the interesting element about the life cycle that discipline has, especially as you progress as a human, that in the beginning, it's about working hard, it's about leaning in. As you start to develop more and more, it's actually perhaps a little bit more about leaning away. It's about restricting the options that you have. It's about leaning in a little bit less. And that what got you here won't get you there mentality has never been seen more for me than watching that kind of transition at least begin to happen in my life as well. I'm like, look, I have more things that I need to say no to than things to say yes to. And I was a pathological yeser. So I'm like, okay, well, what do I, what do I do now? I can't people please anymore.

• 38:53Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 38:54Chris Williamson?

  If I take my eye off the ball on the main thing, the main thing is the podcast. That needs to happen. I need to prepare. I need to choose guests that I'm interested in. I need to make sure that I am on my game as much as possible. That's the, the single ordinating function. Two examples, actually, that I keep on using, and I don't know whether you came across them. So apparently when he was at Amazon, Jeff Bezos filtered every decision through one heuristic. And it was, does this make the customer experience better? And apparently Elon Musk has got the same, and it's, does this get us closer to Mars? And I don't know if it's true, but.

• 39:27Ryan Holiday?

  Surely it doesn't look like he's following, said Rubrik.

• 39:30Chris Williamson?

  That's up for debate. My point being, even if it isn't, the idea, you can see how much more simple everybody's life would become if you had a single ordinating principle. It's like, does this make the people of Rome, the, the existence better? Everything from, do I have wine tonight to what time do I get up tomorrow to who do I have meetings with? And this is where the multiplicity of options that people have in the modern world creates a difficulty for discipline, I think, because the, the, the amount of distractions that are there.

• 40:01Ryan Holiday?

  Well, that's the idea. If you, if you don't know what port you're sailing towards, no wind is favorable. How do you judge whether you should do X or Y, whether you should do it now or later? Right? Whether you should say yes or no? Well, how much you should charge, how long it should take, you don't know any of the things unless you know where you're trying to go. Like for me, I don't have like a question where I'm like, hey, like, is this helping me become the most of this or the most of that? I kind of think about it because the reality is we have multiple things, right? So if if Marcus realizes I gotta be the, is this good for Rome? Well, you know,

• 40:38Chris Williamson?

  What about your son?

• 40:39Ryan Holiday?

  This is good for my son, right?

• 40:40Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 40:40Ryan Holiday?

  So I think about it in terms of like, I want to be very good at my professional life. I want to be a great writer. I want to be a great husband. I want to be a great father. And those three things are related, but also in tension with each other. But the nice part about the tension is it prevents you from going too far in one direction. And I think it it sort of forces a kind of discipline. There's things I could do that would make me more successful as a writer, but would come at the cost of my marriage. Or there's things like my wife and I could do that would make our marriage better, but then, you know, we're personally happier, but we're gone all the time or whatever, right? Like, you have to think about how these things matter to each other or balance with each other.

• 41:22Ryan Holiday?

  And my friend Austin Kleon sent to me once, he said, actually, right when I moved to Austin, he said, work, family, scene, pick two. So the point was you can be good at your work, can have a family, but like, partying, being cool, like, the fun experience is the perks of the job, you know, you gotta say no to that. Conversely, you can be great at your job and party it up, but like, probably not going to find that person, or your kids are going to be like, where's dad, right? So you can't have all those things. And and when you know, okay, well, the important things to me are work and family. The important things are family and having a good time. Okay, well, you're going to leave some potential,

• 42:05Ryan Holiday?

  some whatever your magnum opus is, it's not going to happen, right? And so knowing that, okay, here's what I want. And then here's what I'm willing to trade or give up to that to get that thing, you know, like, that clarity is super, super important.

• 42:19Chris Williamson?

  What was that word? A crazier, a crasia?

• 42:23Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, the idea that there's sort of a higher self and a lower self. These sort of for the ancients, there was this sort of perennial battle between the higher self and the lower self. And, you know, discipline to me is

• 42:40Ryan Holiday?

  The deciding factor, right?

• 42:41Chris Williamson?

  To mediate them.

• 42:42Ryan Holiday?

  Which wins, right? You know, what side are you going to win out here? And, you know, it takes a sort of a strength of will that the story I that goes to the beginnings of Stoicism is the it's called the choice of Hercules. Hercules is walking through the hills of Greece and he comes to this crossroads. And basically, there's two goddesses. One is the goddess of vice and the other is the goddess of virtue. You know, basically, one is the lower self and the higher self, the easy way and the hard way. And he has to choose, you know, he has to choose. Do you get, you know, do you get everything you want? It's easy. Are you willing to work for it? Are you willing to sacrifice, you know, virtue or vice?

• 43:26Ryan Holiday?

  That choice of Hercules was at the essence of, you know, Stoicism. Are you are you choosing the disciplined way or the ill-disciplined way? Uh, you know?

• 43:38Ryan Holiday?

  And that choice, we we face that choice, not just like this one big pivotal moment in our lives where you choose between I'm going to go for it or not go for it. Like you said, you you also choose it every day. I'm going to eat this or that. Am I going to get up at this time or this time? Am I going to push through when it's hard? Or am I going to wait for it to be easy? Like, that choice happens over and over and over again. And the Stoics would say that, you know, if you want to be beautiful, if you want to be great, you have to make beautiful or great choices. Comes down to over and over again, we have this choice of Hercules. And do we make it often enough? I don't I don't know if you have to make it always, but more often than not,

• 44:21Ryan Holiday?

  you have to make that right, beautiful, great choice. And that is what determines whether you will be those things.

• 44:29Chris Williamson?

  Do you think there's a risk of attaching a sense of self-worth to your ability to be disciplined? It seems to me that a lot of the friends that I have who are superbly disciplined spend more time lambasting themselves for missing out by one to 5% on the the perfect game for each day.

• 44:49Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 44:49Chris Williamson?

  Because the the meditation was good and they did it. But maybe they thought about work for a minute of their 15-minute meditation. Do you know what I mean? It makes you fragile.

• 44:57Ryan Holiday?

  Well, the paradox of of having high standards is that it makes you.

• 45:04Ryan Holiday?

  More likely to reach great heights, but also almost constitutionally unable to enjoy or appreciate, or even recognize that that's where you are. Right? Like, the person who goes, "Oh, that was the greatest game in the world. I crushed it," is, you know, not going to see all the things they could have done better. Right? The person who goes, "Oh, but I messed up this, this, this, and this." That person is tends going to be the one, is going to tend to be the one that's improving and growing. And, and, and that's good, but it's also not a recipe for happiness, for contentment, for sustainability. Seneca is writing this letter to his friend Lucilius, and, and they're talking about Stoicism, this idea that, you know,

• 45:47Ryan Holiday?

  you try to get better every day, hold yourself to these high standards. You know, and at this point, he's probably in his 60s or 70s. He's been doing this a long time. And he goes, "How do I know?" He's sort of rhetorically, but maybe Lucilius had asked him, like, "How do you know you're doing it right?" Right? And he goes, "How do I know that I'm doing it right? That I'm getting better?" And he says, "Each day, I become a better friend to myself. That's how I know I'm making progress." And I think what he means is that discipline or Stoicism is not this constant whipping of oneself, this constant feeling of falling short, of not being good enough, being like, "You piece of shit, I hate you, like, look, you could have done all these things better."

• 46:31Ryan Holiday?

  But it's a sense of like, "You did your best good job. I love you, I respect you, there's still room to grow, but there's nothing you have to feel guilty or terrible about." And I think it's, if you want to do this well, you want to do it sustainably, you have to understand that discipline is not a form of self-flagellation. It should not be hurtful. You should love it. Like, in Meditations, Marcus really says, "Love the discipline you know and let it support you." And I think he, he means that discipline in both senses. He means the philosophical discipline, but he also means like the practice of it. And I, I think that love and support are two, like...

• 47:14Ryan Holiday?

  Operative, but also underrated words there, right? Like, if you feel bad about yourself and that's what you think discipline is, I think you're getting it wrong.

• 47:27Chris Williamson?

  It's a motivating factor, though, right? That's why people do it. They need to have both carrot and stick. And for the most part, a lot of the people, I think, that are seduced by heavy discipline, they're stick people. A good example of this, Andy Frisella, who reached out a couple of months ago, he did that 75 hard thing. He was the guy that made 75 hard. Have you heard of this?

• 47:47Ryan Holiday?

  No.

• 47:48Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so it's a challenge for 75 days in a row, and you have to do two 45-minute workouts, read 10 pages of a nonfiction book, meditate, drink a gallon of water, do something else and don't break your diet. It's something like that. It's like a list of things, kind of basic, but pretty intense. And if you miss any one thing on any one day of the 75, you go back to the start and you start again. And from the outside, I loved the idea. I haven't done it, but I love the idea of something that created a framework for people to build discipline around. However, I haven't got a single friend that's done 75 hard

• 48:30Chris Williamson?

  and not snapped afterward and not gone to a period of a decrease in discipline. Even if you smeared it across 150 days, their discipline overall is lower. One of the guys didn't train for half a year after he did it. One of the guys didn't meditate. Another one of the dudes couldn't bear to go into work and do a bunch of other stuff because they just myopically nailed themselves to this goal. And sustainable perseverance, commitment over time. Like, these are the sort of words I think that being introduced into a more holistic view of discipline would be interesting.

• 49:01Ryan Holiday?

  Magic words for me are more often than not, like, more often than not, are you doing what you're supposed to be doing? Are you holding yourself to high standards? Are you taking the, you know, the hard choice over the easy choice? Putting in the extra? More often than not, are you doing it, right? If you, if you try to hold yourself to this perfect or impossible standard. Um, not only are you liable to sort of not do it and then feel terrible afterwards, but I think it can so often come at the expense of other things that are important. Or it become, you become so terribly out of balance that it's almost an excuse.

• 49:42Ryan Holiday?

  Right. You're like, so you do some challenge for 30 days or 75 days or whatever. It's like, they don't throw you a parade at the end, you know? I mean, look, I, I appreciate the idea of challenging yourself, pushing yourselves. And to a certain degree, all discipline is arbitrary. But like, I'm not trying to just win made up competitions or check arbitrary, you know, things off the list. I, I wanna, I wanna do this consistently over a long period of time. So I run. And so one of the things that happens when people, when people find out you're running, they go, oh, are you running a marathon? Are you training to do an Ironman? I'm not trying to win at my hobbies, you know? Like the, to me, the doing the thing is the reason I'm doing it.

• 50:26Ryan Holiday?

  It's good for me for a variety of reasons. If I, but, but it could very easily become an unhealthy, unproductive thing that comes at the expense of the other things that are important to me. So I think sometimes people can get caught up with seeing it again as this kind of a means to an end, when it, it should be a sort of an integrated practice into your life.

• 50:49Chris Williamson?

  I think that this becomes very prevalent when you grow up a little bit, that my ability to view broader time horizons has only really kicked in in the last couple, I'm 34, it's only kicked in in the last few years, that you presume the thing you're doing now is going to be the way that life's going to be forever. And the training plan that you do now, even if there's a 10%, 20% risk of injury over the next six months, doesn't matter because you want to be jacked to go away on summer holiday or whatever. And then after a while, you realize, no, my goal is in 20 or 30 years to be. Significantly more capable than I am now.

• 51:24Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 51:25Chris Williamson?

  What is the route between me now and me there? And the fear and the degree of neuroticism around it being, it's not fast enough. It doesn't happen quick enough. That dissolves quite nicely.

• 51:38Ryan Holiday?

  I was talking to the Olympian Kate Courtney. She's this amazing mountain bike racer. And she was telling me, you know, like her, her coach would give her a workout. She like, you know, ride 20 miles. She'd ride 25 miles or, you know, do it in two hours and she'd do it in 90 minutes. And I think a lot of successful driven people understand that impulse. Like you're like, I want to win everything, right? Even practice. And he said to her once, uh, and, and when I signed her copy of Discipline's Destiny, I, I wrote this in it because I think about it all the time. He said, do you want to be fast now or do you want to be fast later? Right?

• 52:17Ryan Holiday?

  The purpose of training, the purpose of practice is to peak in the race, in the moment that it matters. Life is a little bit different than the Olympics is there is no sort of one moment. But if you have this idea that, you know, your big moment is in the future, that it's a marathon and not a sprint. The idea of sort of forcing it now, peaking early is actually something you should be quite worried about. So you have to be disciplined about your discipline. You have to curb that impulse to do in some ways, the easier thing now, which is like, I want to go all out. I want to push everything into the center of the table. I want to go now, but now might not be the moment.

• 52:59Ryan Holiday?

  And the ability to step back, to restrain yourself, to, to, to, to focus on sustainability and endurance and all that, you know, it, it's may well be the harder thing. And so it's like, do you want to be great now? Or do you want to be ready when like a truly great opportunity is there? Do you want to do your best work at 22 or the only work at 22? Or do you still want to be doing this when you're 82? Because you love it, because you'll have more experiences and wisdom and all that stuff now. And those are the kind of questions I think people at a really elite level are thinking about.

• 53:37Chris Williamson?

  What was that comparison between Lou Gehrig's career and Babe Ruth's career and how their trajectories went?

• 53:44Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I mean, clearly Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth are two of the greatest baseball players of all time. Both achieve incredible athletic feats, but when you look at Lou Gehrig, when you look at Babe Ruth, you're sort of like, how? Like, how did you even, like, he doesn't look like an athlete. And so in some ways, he's very impressive that he could hit all these home runs. But you, you definitely get the sense, and, and the more I think you study, you know, sort of elite performance story history, sometimes you're just amazed and saddened at the greatness of someone because you're like, how did you do it? And what could you have been capable of if you weren't your own worst enemy? So both Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth's careers are cut short, right? Lou Gehrig from Lou Gehrig's disease or ALS.

• 54:28Ryan Holiday?

  And then Babe Ruth, I mean, this wasn't a guy who took care of himself. He burned through millions of dollars. He treated his body like a garbage can. You know, he sort of has this precipitous decline at the end and, you know, he was not Tom Brady, right? Like, in peak athletic conditioning at the end of his career. He was obese, you know, drunk old man, right? And I think that's so tragic to me, right? And to me, the idea is like, if you respect the craft, if you really love the thing you're doing, you owe it to that craft to take the responsibilities of it seriously, right?

• 55:08Ryan Holiday?

  And I think I, I wanted to show that contrast because we so often just assume, oh, this person accomplished all these things, therefore it's good. But what else could they have done had they had more discipline? And I think one of the small consolations of someone like Lou Gehrig is you go,

• 55:30Ryan Holiday?

  He left it all in New Jersey. Like, there was nothing that he could have done in his career that he didn't do. The only thing that, uh, the only tragedy was that for reasons that were not his fault, he didn't get to do it as long as he could have done it. Right? But the games that he played, he showed up for it and he played them. And I think about that, you know, every day when I wrap up, I'm like, did I leave it all there? Or that I phoned it in today? You know, did I, uh, make excuses today? Did I not bring my best self to this thing? And again, more often than not, you want the good answer to that

• 56:15Ryan Holiday?

  question.

• 56:16Chris Williamson?

  I like the idea of the more often than not, because it means that an individual repetition that is suboptimal. Today, I, I just didn't quite work. It seems like it would give you a little bit more detachment from it. And I think that that's very important.

• 56:31Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, you, Mark's realist in meditation goes, you gotta pick yourself up when you fall, but also celebrate that you're a human being. And none of us are perfect. That we're gonna mess up, we're gonna screw up. But if you have this sort of baseline that you, you know what you're capable of, you know what you should do, you know that you're not always going to be able to do it, but you know what to come back to. To me is more important than having these impossible, perfect standards that are almost in their own way, paralyzing or impossible or discouraging. And, and so I think cultivating a kind of, like a rhythm, that there's like this thing, and sometimes you, sometimes you fall off

• 57:13Ryan Holiday?

  the rhythm, but you know how to come back to it. That to me is a, a more sustainable, conscious, kinder way to be committed to something.

• 57:24Chris Williamson?

  I think that. Again, that's something that you learn through experience. I was locked into, perennially locked into a work so hard that I can't take it anymore. Burnout, spend three days in bed, work so hard. That was me. That was, that was the cycle of how I worked pretty much for most of my twenties. One of the advantages of doing that was that now I know some of the warning signs when I start to get close to that.

• 57:50Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 57:50Chris Williamson?

  And I can just, yeah, and I can just about fly underneath that a little and go, okay, how long can I hold this for? And I'll back off a little bit more, but it's less of this.

• 58:00Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 58:01Chris Williamson?

  Apart from the fact that it's less efficient, because three days of doing nothing is a lot worse than a couple of days of doing 50% of something.

• 58:08Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 58:09Chris Williamson?

  But it's just suffering, the difference in terms of suffering is pretty drastic. And I think another interesting example, so you're talking there about two different types of athletes, one of whom left everything on the table, another one who didn't and, you know, took a turn away. Michael Jordan seems to be someone that was almost tyrannical in the way that he went about his game and left it all on the table, but did it in a way that sacrificed everything else, pretty much everything else. Do you think that it's possible for people to get extreme results in life whilst still having that balance? It seems like you're trying to, to do that, and that was the two out of three example.

• 58:49Ryan Holiday?

  To me, that, that's the challenge. Like, it's almost easier to be great than it is to be good. And I don't mean to contrast good and great in that sense. I mean that, like, like to say, I don't care about anything but succeeding in this thing is almost taking yourself off the hook to a certain degree. There was a writer once, she said, like, I don't want to have kids. I don't want to get married. I want to be an art monster. Right? And I get that, right? I think anyone who's like, loves what they do, there's a certain like, I want to be the center of everything. I only want this thing to matter. But that's almost the easier path, right? Like, to, to, to be like, well, why is this person an asshole? And they're like, well, they're great, you know, like that it's, it's,

• 59:34Ryan Holiday?

  I think sometimes people think that their innate talent or their success or their commitment to a path or a goal is like an exemption from.

• 59:45Ryan Holiday?

  The rules of human behavior, right? Um, I don't have to care about other people. I don't have to keep my word. I, you know, there's a, there's a story about this writer. I'm forgetting her name. She was at this party. She had a young daughter and uh, she's a poet and she's at this party and Jack Kerouac is there. And she, you know, it's one of those famous parties and she's there and, and uh, she gets up to leave. She goes, you know, I, I um, I promised the babysitter I'd be home by 10. She has like a young daughter, had to leave. And Jack Kerouac, you know, sort of different model of kind of writer says, you know, if you don't forget about that babysitter, you'll never be a great writer. And she gets up and she leaves anyway.

• 1:00:29Ryan Holiday?

  And, and she says later, I knew in that moment that if I didn't keep that promise to the babysitter, I wouldn't be a great writer. And her point was that like, having some talent, some calling doesn't exempt you from keeping your word. And then in fact, if you tell the babysitter, you're going to be home at 10, and then you blow that off, you're also the kind of person that says, I'm going to be at my desk writing by nine. And you break that promise also, right? And so actually, I think cultivating a practice or a set of standards that are more than just like, how good are you professionally? Makes you a more well-rounded and better professional.

• 1:01:14Ryan Holiday?

  And the people that I really admire are people who have, you know, gotten to the commanding heights of their profession, but are still good neighbors and citizens and activists and fathers or daughters or wives. Like, I, I just, there's something to me hollow and, and kind of a cop out about being great at one thing at the expense of all the other things. When especially at the end of your life, you don't get to take that thing with you, you know? Um, you don't get to take it with you. So what does it matter that you made more money or?

• 1:01:53Ryan Holiday?

  You wrote one extra book, like you're gonna sit back and go, I really fucked it up.

• 1:02:01Chris Williamson?

  That's why it's so important to start with the end in mind, I think. Why am I doing this?

• 1:02:04Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 1:02:04Chris Williamson?

  What are the ordinating principles that I have?

• 1:02:07Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 1:02:07Chris Williamson?

  That I'm working toward? Because yeah, you could spend a very, very long time climbing up a ladder to find out that it's up against the wrong wall.

• 1:02:13Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I mean, and how many people that are on the medal stand, you know, they're accepting the Nobel Prize, or, you know, they they get to that number, they told themselves, I want to make that, and then.

• 1:02:26Chris Williamson?

  What was the thing about beyond mountains, there's more mountains?

• 1:02:31Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, it's a Haitian proverb, behind beyond mountains, there are more mountains. But I think it's more, it's more like you think that this thing is going to fix it. It's gonna make me feel good, it's gonna make my parents proud of me, it's gonna make me part of the club. We think that these external things are gonna address this internal lacking or need or emptiness that we have. And I

• 1:03:00Ryan Holiday?

  I've done a lot, I've read a lot, talked to a lot of people, I've yet to find someone that got it. It's a mirage. It's a phantom. You get there and it moves. And

• 1:03:19Ryan Holiday?

  in one sense, that's a tragedy, in the other sense, it's a great gift, right? The first time you do that thing, and you get it, the thing you've been working for, and then it isn't what you thought it would be. If in that moment, you can accept the gift you've been given, which is a decoupling from external success and internal contentment, happiness, enoughness. If you can make that break in that moment, you're free and empowered forever. Because now you can still do the things you're good at, you still want them, but you you are no longer at the whims of this lie or this delusion.

• 1:03:57Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:03:58Ryan Holiday?

  But what most people do in that moment is

• 1:04:03Ryan Holiday?

  Tell themselves a second lie, which is, oh, it's, I have to prove I can win an NBA championship on my own. I have to show that this wasn't a fluke. Oh, it's not $10 million. Actually, it's $100 million, right? Or it's not number two that's enough. It's I gotta be number one. If that's what you do, I think you have, you have made a bargain or told yourself a lie that is now almost impossible for you to get free of.

• 1:04:37Chris Williamson?

  I think that people need to see that for themselves.

• 1:04:40Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 1:04:41Chris Williamson?

  I've been told this lesson a million times.

• 1:04:45Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:45Chris Williamson?

  And I, each time that something good happens that feels like a success, it helps me to prove that same rule to myself.

• 1:04:54Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 1:04:55Chris Williamson?

  A little bit more.

• 1:04:56Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 1:04:56Chris Williamson?

  Uh, Robert writes why Buddhism is true in that he talks about, um, life is suffering, said by the Buddha, and the word dukkha, D U K K H A, contested by some scholars is not meaning suffering, but unsatisfactoriness. Life is unsatisfactoriness. And given that, uh, Robert is a evolutionary psychologist now writing about Buddhism.

• 1:05:17Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:17Chris Williamson?

  That aligns those two perfectly. Like, humans are not built to be happy. We're built to be effective. And effectiveness is everything being just a bit more shit than you thought it was going to be.

• 1:05:26Ryan Holiday?

  Well, from an evolutionary perspective, there's very little value in the finish line existing, right? There's a lot of evolutionary value to it. It's move it a little bit further. It's, it's like the horizon. You never actually get there. But in chasing it, you go further and further and further. And so, understanding why it exists should help you

• 1:05:49Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:05:49Ryan Holiday?

  break free of the power that it has over you. And I mean, look, I, I've liked to think that the work that I've done since coming to this conclusion is still very good, right? It's just, and in fact, I would argue it's better. Like, when I think of, like,

• 1:06:11Ryan Holiday?

  There's no question craving or anger or wanting to prove something. This is powerful fuel. But at the same time, it's really volatile fuel. And I'm not sure it actually puts you in the headspace needed to do like your best work. And I, I would think that the work that I've done from a place more of fullness and contentment and balance, I think it's better. Like, not only is it better for me, but I think the actual product is better. But I think people are really afraid. They're afraid of what it will cost. They're afraid of like, if I put this down, if I'm motivated by something different,

• 1:06:54Ryan Holiday?

  if I no longer need to do X, Y, or Z, I won't do it anymore. And so they don't. So they find, you know, the anger gets them here and then they're like, well, I need to find something new to be angry about. You know, I shoved it in these people's faces and it wasn't as satisfactory as I thought. So I'm going to shove it in more people's face. Right? And that, that is, again, from an evolutionary perspective, from an output perspective, it's, it, it works, but I'm not actually sure it's best.

• 1:07:24Chris Williamson?

  But it's also, what are you optimizing for again? If it's a miserable experience and if you sacrifice the thing that you want to achieve the thing which is supposed to get the thing that you want. If you sacrifice happiness in order to become successful so that you can finally be happy.

• 1:07:39Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:40Chris Williamson?

  It's that story of the fisherman again. Like, well, just, just, why not just be happy? Why not just give yourself a little bit more of a break?

• 1:07:47Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, you talk to people and you're like, well, why do you want to do X? And they're like, then I can do Y. And why is so much more accessible to them now? And why, why do you think they're mutually exclusive? I'm not sure that they are.

• 1:08:02Chris Williamson?

  You mentioned Queen Elizabeth earlier on. What did you learn about her?

• 1:08:07Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I think she's this remarkable person. I mean, you look at someone, you don't want to talk about sustainability. You have this job for 70 years. And, you know, as I was saying, the idea of Marx's theory is he's given these privileges, this immense power, platform, et cetera. And he proves himself worthy of it. And you look at the outpouring of support for this woman when she died, even from people who have sort of an ideological disagreement with the monarchy. To me, that's very high praise. When people disagree with what you do, still find the way that you did it to be admirable and impressive. And, you know, she was a remarkable picture of restraint and dignity and poise, tradition, but also flexibility and innovation.

• 1:08:52Ryan Holiday?

  And I just, you know, discipline is not just how far can you run? You know, how hard can you work? It's also, you know, are you in control of yourself? Like, you want to talk about someone who was in command of themselves.

• 1:09:11Ryan Holiday?

  This is a woman who, over 70 years, never lets the mask slip, never has the outburst, never has the, you know, dropping of it. For 70 years, she's like on point for a thing that she didn't choose, for a thing that, you know, only because of a quirk of history even was in a position to take.

• 1:09:36Chris Williamson?

  Tell people that story in case they're not familiar.

• 1:09:38Ryan Holiday?

  So, uh, her uncle was the King of England. He abdicates in this sort of fit of passion, as he's in love with this terrible woman, basically. Uh, and suddenly, Queen Elizabeth's father becomes king. You know, he would have been expected to rule for 20, 30, 40 years. Instead, sort of dies, I think after like 20, 25 years. The, uh, her father dies unexpectedly young of lung cancer. And then, in her, what, late 20s, early 30s is, I think, yeah, early 20s, is suddenly the queen of, of this enormous empire.

• 1:10:16Ryan Holiday?

  And what is her job? You know, her job is better defined by all the things she's not allowed to do as opposed to the things that she can do. It's this symbolic role. And, you know, I wanted to illustrate the idea of discipline. Again, it's not just, but it's also when you feel like, and not doing it, right? The restraint and poise, the, the ability to, to want to do something, to very understandably want to do something and then to not do it because it's not the right thing to do.

• 1:10:52Chris Williamson?

  Becoming of a queenly.

• 1:10:55Ryan Holiday?

  That, that, that is a kind of discipline and grace that I think we need to see more of. You know, when you think about, you're like, why is this person tweeting this? Why are they saying this? Why are they doing this? And you're like, well, they can, you know, not because it's the right thing to do, not because it's important, not because it's going to accomplish X, Y, and Z, but this kind of lack of self-control, I think. She is a, she is a inspiring picture of what self-control can look like. And not, not self-control in the masculine sense, which is what we, I think we so often tend to stereotype it as.

• 1:11:31Chris Williamson?

  How would it be feminine?

• 1:11:33Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I just mean like, she's, she's not, this isn't a physical thing. This is a spiritual and emotional and a mental thing.

• 1:11:41Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. As you're getting news headlines written about you that are claiming you think a thing or did a thing or were part of a thing, and you don't have the compulsion to write a response to.

• 1:11:51Ryan Holiday?

  Well, and it like, she's a, she was a little old lady, you know, and that it, she's not this big hulking thing. She's a little old lady and yet, you know, was more restrained and disciplined than these ambitious prime ministers, male or female, right? Like she, she had a sort of a different path to power. And in a world where everyone says everything that they think and is constantly fighting for their recognition, for their chance in the spotlight. I think she's a really powerful example, or was a really powerful example, that the opposite of those things is often more impressive or a better path. Didn't.

• 1:12:34Chris Williamson?

  Martin Luther King get punched by a Nazi or something and it was that's kind of a similar situation.

• 1:12:40Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, yeah, again, we tend to think of discipline as strength, force. There's a moment in Martin Luther King's career, he's obviously a committed proponent of nonviolence and it's it's one thing to be like strategically, we are marching from here to there, the police are going to attack us, we just need to keep going. You know, he's onstage and a Nazi walks onstage and just starts punching him in the face in front of everyone that he knows. And what people said they found, so he's attacked, so first, you know, he's hit. And the natural human thing when you're hit would be to protect yourself, which he does, instinctively hits himself. And people said the shocking sound, like the auditorium goes dead silent, you could

• 1:13:25Ryan Holiday?

  just hear, you know, flesh on flesh. And then there's this moment, so he's, you know, he's being tested at the highest level. He's, I am a practitioner of nonviolence. That doesn't mean I don't just not engage in violence, but like, what do you do when you are violently attacked? And in this split second, as he protects himself, he catches himself, and they said he drops his hands. And it was like this, you know, it's, this is more than self-discipline. This is some higher, almost saint-like place that he's managed to reach where, you know, again, he's not just protecting himself, not defend, like, not actively defending

• 1:14:10Ryan Holiday?

  himself, but he has, for philosophical and spiritual reasons, said the discipline is to actually allow yourself to be attacked in this moment, which he does. And, you know, it was this shocking moment that sort of fundamentally, it teaches the power of nonviolence and that his commitment to the message, more than any other thing he could have possibly done. And and then, you know, obviously, the man is swarmed and the first words out of Martin Luther King's mouth are like, don't, don't hurt him, don't hurt him. And again, it's easy to say these things, but then what do you do in that moment of being tested? And to me, that's more impressive than, you know, any Olympic gold medalist or, you

• 1:14:55Ryan Holiday?

  know, feat of athletic strength, that he's able to conquer his like, almost Innately human need to protect yourself is able to stop that in the moment. That to me is, you know, discipline at some sort of transcendent heroic level.

• 1:15:12Chris Williamson?

  What about perseverance? What did you learn about people who coped when things got really difficult? It seems to me that discipline, even in the modern world, you know, no matter how hard it is that you're working toward a thing and how difficult the pursuit is, it's still quite a bourgeois sort of luxurious position to be in. You know, I know that you recently got a cold tub. We've got one in the house as well.

• 1:15:36Chris Williamson?

  Let's not get that wrong. We are larping at discomfort.

• 1:15:38Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 1:15:39Chris Williamson?

  We're electing to go into discomfort because the world has become so nerfed and so comfortable around us that we need to buy pieces of kit that we can get into that forces to feel cold. What about times? Where do you stand? Where can people find that's firm for them to stand when they're doing the discipline and the world just continues to punch them in the face?

• 1:15:59Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't, I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss the difficulties of life, right? Like, I think it's good to have practices, physical practices that push us. But like, life is fucking hard and it breaks your heart. There's Murphy's Law, right? What can't go wrong will. There's also another law that says like, it always takes longer than you expect, even when you take this law into account, right? Like, it's hard. Like, people go, I want to start a podcast. How long it took you before you even started to see rewards or it pay off? Like, I mean, even just now, you're probably early in it, right? It takes longer than you think. It's fucking hard and it breaks your heart, you know?

• 1:16:41Ryan Holiday?

  Is that, is it certainly preferable to like starving to get to death on some, you know, desert plain? Of course, right? It's better than, it's better, you know, here in this moment than anywhere in history, probably anywhere in the world, of course. But like, If you don't have a sort of a fortress, the Stoics call it an inner citadel, kind of a fortress that you can retreat into, that you can rely on. I don't think you're gonna make it. Maybe algorithmically you get lucky and it always goes your way, maybe. But to count on that, or to let alone expect that, you know, I think is to,

• 1:17:21Ryan Holiday?

  is to set yourself up to be crushed by what is inevitably a heartbreaking, difficult, you know, soul testing process. Paul Graham talks about, after the rush of the excitement of an idea, he calls it like the tech crunch bump, right? You get your first bit of attention, then you enter the trough of despair. Right? And the trough of despair is fucking real. Like, every book I start, it starts off exciting, it's fun, here's what I'm gonna do, and then right into the trough of despair. And you might not come out of that for months. Like, and by the time you're out of it, you don't even, it catches, oh, I'm on the downhill side of this. Like, I'm,

• 1:18:02Ryan Holiday?

  you don't even realize that you're out of it until you're so far out of it that, that you're almost surprised by it. So you have to have this ability to endure, to show up fucking every day, even though it's hard, even though it doesn't feel like you're making progress, even though not doing it would be way easier. You have to cultivate that strength. And it doesn't matter if it's, you know, you're trying to become a massage therapist, or you're writing, you know, some, some like, you know, the great American novel. Like, it's fucking hard. Or you're starting some movement. You know, you're trying to build this movement off the ground, uh, from nothing to change the world. Like, it's gonna take a long time. Things are kind of constantly go wrong. It's gonna be way harder than you think. And it might not test you in the sense,

• 1:18:46Ryan Holiday?

  in the way that, like, starving tests you. But it's gonna challenge you in every conceivable way, and you have to have... You have to have what it takes to get through it. You have to have a really strong why too, or you're not going to get through it.

• 1:19:02Chris Williamson?

  One of the other elements that gets laid on top is, I think, shame and guilt around it not being as bad as it could be.

• 1:19:09Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:10Chris Williamson?

  You know, the fact that a lot of the people that do deal with discomfort, it's them choosing to go after a pursuit that they care about. You're choosing to write these books. No one is holding a gun to your head, other than your own existential conscience, that you have to go and write these books. So, okay, well, what does that mean? How do I ameliorate the fact that I'm choosing to do a thing? I'm electing to do it, but it's causing me suffering. But I also, the suffering from that, I derive meaning. And it's sort of all this big mess, I think.

• 1:19:43Ryan Holiday?

  You know, it's weird, like, as I wrote this book several years ago called The Obstacles Away. And so people go, well, what was the biggest obstacle in your life? And I think people think it's like some contest, or this measuring thing, or they think that the only obstacles that count are like, well, I lost my leg in an accident when I was seven, or, you know, I was born, you know, and barely survived this genocidal attack. Like, obviously, all those things are profound obstacles. And we can learn so much from Viktor Frankl and Man Search for Meaning. There are these people who have been through the absolute, like, crucible of the human experience. And they have something profoundly deep and powerful to teach us.

• 1:20:24Ryan Holiday?

  But I think we're often quick to dismiss the adversity of our lives, you know, and we somehow think also that it's this thing that happens once. And in fact, we all wake up every single day in a world that we don't control, that's utterly indifferent to us, our happiness, our fulfillment. And the challenge is like, do you have what it takes to keep going through that? To not be despot, to not despair, you know, to not become cynical, to keep believing, to keep trying, to keep pushing, to keep...

• 1:20:59Ryan Holiday?

  Using the experiences that you have to to to get better. To me, that's that's the marathon of it. That's the gauntlet of it. And I I'm just, uh, of course, we should poke fun at the fact that we live these nerf lives and we should acknowledge readily the incredible privileges that we have compared to other people, compared to people who lived a long time ago. But if if you think that it's easy because we're privileged or because, you know, you're not, uh, running from, you know, somebody trying to kill you, you're, I think, being naive and anyone who's done anything hard can tell you like, you have many moments,

• 1:21:43Ryan Holiday?

  these sort of dark nights of the soul moment. And if you don't have something to draw on, uh, you're you're not going to get through that.

• 1:21:52Chris Williamson?

  Well, what's a firm place for people to stand then? You know, you're doing something, you're working hard and it's just difficulty after difficulty, the discipline is being tested. Where do they where do they go in those moments?

• 1:22:05Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. I mean, the the for the Stoics, that's what the inner citadel was, this sort of the the principles, the ideas, the the the practices that you've gone that where you go, hey, I've been through tough shit before, right? Like, uh, I've been through stuff like this before. I mean, just to think, if you just think about, first off, the unlikeliness of you and I even being here, we're already extremely lucky.

• 1:22:32Ryan Holiday?

  But you think about like you were born this tiny defenseless thing with no discernible skills or knowledge and you're not fucking dead. Like you, you, you, you survived against incredible odds and incredible adversity to even like, you learned how to walk, you know, you got through school, this like. Crazy, insane, you know, thing, you worked your way up from like nothing, like in that sense, like it's an incredible journey. Just as like someone who, who, you know, went from poverty to to wealth, they'd be like, I got from here to there. Like, we all have the ability to look back and be like, look at where I was not that long ago. Right? And you should, you should have some

• 1:23:17Ryan Holiday?

  sense of what you're capable of. Marcus really said, meditations, he goes like, what, you're sort of worried or anxious about some future thing. And he goes, well, what will I meet that with? And he says, the same tools that I've met today with, like, that you, you have been through stuff. And especially coming out of the pandemic, like, people should go like, you just lived through a historical event of, you know, epic proportions. And the way that you would hear from grandparents who lived through the depression or the war, you know, traveled across oceans on some boat to go to some new, like, those historical moments are on par with the historical moment that we just lived through, that we are continuing to live through. And you're still here. And I'm not, I'm

• 1:24:02Ryan Holiday?

  not implying that people who are not here somehow, not here as a result of their own fault. But what I'm saying is like, you have been, you have been in the arena and you have been knocked around and you, you made it. And you should be able to look back at the things that you've done and take, have a certain pride and confidence in your ability to get through real shit. And that should give you some firm ground to stand on as you contemplate what tomorrow might bring, you know, like you'll meet tomorrow with what you met yesterday with and what you've met all the challenges of your life with. And I mean, I do think there's value in seeking out difficulties and challenges and

• 1:24:45Ryan Holiday?

  pushing yourself. So you, you have even more confidence, but like, The fact that you're here, that you've been through all the things you've been through, that's not nothing.

• 1:24:53Chris Williamson?

  Yes, I love that. The idea of the inner citadel as you're talking away, I've got this idea of a huge grand hall, maybe influenced by the fact I'm watching a lot of Game of Thrones at the moment. A huge grand hall and above the fireplace are all of the heads of the different enemies, but they're all you. It's all you at different stages. It's all, it was you when you doubted your ability to do this. It's you when you felt weak and you decided you were going to do it anyway. It's you when you chose the path that was virtuous as opposed to the one that was hedonic. I have a friend who I saw at the start of this week and his band has a lyric that says, "I can't drown my demons, they've learned how to swim." And he'd suffered with depression, same as me, throughout his twenties. And that's one of the things that was one of the most empowering, enlightening reflections I had from dealing with depression for a chunk of time,

• 1:25:37Chris Williamson?

  was the world is going to have to do really, really well to be able to torture me more than my own mind already did. Like, I have already become the

• 1:25:50Chris Williamson?

  prison keeper of every single little bit that I knew was exactly the, like, pharmaceutical-grade

• 1:25:58Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:59Chris Williamson?

  insult that I wanted, that was pinpoint accurate to make me feel as bad as possible. And each different time that you get past that, another head goes up on the wall, another head goes up on the wall. That's another situation that I've managed to get myself through. When I was adamant that it was going to be destruction and embarrassment and all the rest of it. And everybody that's listening is listening.

• 1:26:21Ryan Holiday?

  And that's, that's the benefit also of discipline and having high standards, which is like, you know that what you subject yourself to on a regular basis, the standards you hold, are higher than the other things. So you're not intimidated by like, what are other people going to think? How's it going to do? Cause you have worked to such a degree that that's, that is almost like settling. That's like the low end of what you're expecting.

• 1:26:45Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:26:46Ryan Holiday?

  And, you know, this difference, I think, between kind of an inner scorecard and an outer scorecard. The outer scorecard is almost the easier one. Like, what do other people think? Do people like me? You know, obviously it's not under control, but there's a, there's a

• 1:26:59Ryan Holiday?

  There's a softness to that because it's, it's, it may well be less than you're actually capable of.

• 1:27:05Chris Williamson?

  Yes, yes. What about Eisenhower's smoking habit? What did you learn from that?

• 1:27:10Ryan Holiday?

  Well, we're talking about this guy who says, you know, freedom is the opportunity for self-discipline. He's this most powerful man in the world and he's in his 50s or 60s and has these heart problems. The doctor goes, dude, it's the smoking, man. You've been smoking, you know, five packs a day or whatever for 30 years. And he gives himself an order and he quits, right? He just quits cold turkey after a lifetime of a habit, which is extremely difficult to do. And, you know, I think the Stoics were very

• 1:27:40Ryan Holiday?

  suspicious of anything that was in control of us. So Seneca says, you know, show me somebody who isn't a slave, you know, a slave to a mistress or to fame or to money or to what other people think. And, you know, he wanted to,

• 1:28:05Ryan Holiday?

  he wanted to break any of those habits, right? To, to, to rule, he's a, ruling over the self is the greatest empire. And, you know, are you in charge of the cigarettes? Are you in charge of the phone? Are you in charge or the need to win one more or make more? Can't pass up the deal? I can't be out of the thrill, you know, are you in charge or is the need in charge? And they, when the need was in charge, that was something you needed to look very, very hard at.

• 1:28:38Chris Williamson?

  If you need any substance in order to perform, then it's stopped conferring a benefit. That's the reason why I did 1,000 days sober, even though I wasn't drinking that much. But I was like, look, I am going to be the person that gets to call the shots.

• 1:28:50Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:51Chris Williamson?

  I'm going to go out on nights out and I'm going to work out what it's like to go on a night out sober as a club promoter, as a fucking club promoter for like 15 years. And then I did 500 days without caffeine. And I think that caffeine stares people in the face. I think that most people don't have varying levels of tiredness. They simply have varying levels of caffeine concentration in their blood. People don't say, I'm tired. They say, I need a coffee. You've supplanted the problem for the solution.

• 1:29:17Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 1:29:17Chris Williamson?

  The way that you describe it. And what happens is by doing that, I'm using chemicals as a proxy for everything else here, but you paper over the cracks. That are causing that to come through. Have you ever stopped to think about why you're so fucking tired at two o'clock in the afternoon?

• 1:29:33Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 1:29:34Chris Williamson?

  Like, is it maybe that you're not actually getting enough sleep? Is it that you're going to bed at different times? Is it that your sleep environment?

• 1:29:39Ryan Holiday?

  Eating the wrong things or?

• 1:29:40Chris Williamson?

  Exactly.

• 1:29:40Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, of course. Yeah, you gotta look at the sort of root cause. Yeah, and any time you can't not do a thing, you probably need to stop doing that thing. And this is, this is true for work too, right? Like, if you're like, I just can't be out of it, like, I can't stop. Workaholism, you know, there's, there's the addictions or the compulsions that are not socially acceptable. You know, heroin, you know? And then there's the ones that are not just socially acceptable, but often socially rewarded.

• 1:30:17Chris Williamson?

  Blowed it, yeah.

• 1:30:17Ryan Holiday?

  And those are the, those are the most insidious ones. And, you know, people will applaud you for it and they'll celebrate for it. And then they'll, they'll laugh at you or question you or make you feel like you're the crazy one for not doing it. Why don't you want to go out with us? Well, I don't enjoy doing that.

• 1:30:37Ryan Holiday?

  And then you feel like a weirdo for having your sort of own thing that you don't want to do. And yeah, it requires discipline. Like, I'm not, I'm not interested.

• 1:30:45Chris Williamson?

  The same for you with the books. I mean, I imagine that you're writing close to the limit in terms of what you could write. But if you, someone had a gun to your head, you would be able to crack out another however many percent per day. So there is some that's being left in the tank. There is a little bit that's being left in the tank with regard, with regards to that. So the, well, why don't you want more success? That would be more accolade. That would be more applause. That would, the publishers would be fucking delighted, I'm sure. So.

• 1:31:10Ryan Holiday?

  Well, the, the question, when they, when they try to see you as someone, an addict, or, you know, someone have, does someone have a problem? It's, you know, what are the costs of this thing to you? Where, are there negative repercussions in your life from this thing? Right? And so if it's coming at the expense of X, Y, and Z, so yeah, sure, I could do more. I could do more faster. But it would, it would start to deteriorate the quality of the other things that are important to me. Or it might shrink the time horizon that I, the longevity that I would like to have. And so, yeah, you have to ask yourself, is, is I trying to do it now or trying to do it later? Or, you know?

• 1:31:56Ryan Holiday?

  Well, what's what's actually important to me?

• 1:31:58Chris Williamson?

  What about the cautionary tales from people like Napoleon and King George the fourth? Because I have I no background about either of these people.

• 1:32:07Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I tell a story in the book about Napoleon. He writes this essay as a young man about the perils of ambition. You know, it says, what is Alexander doing? Trying to make it to the ends of the earth? You know, he can't, he's conquering this and this and this. And he goes like, what a fool, you know? So the irony that, you know, he would then be that conqueror. It's almost too perfect. But it's what happens, right? None of those people start off thinking that's where I'm going to end up. It's a process that once you begin, it's it's hard to stop. And yet, like, once that governor comes off, it's almost inevitable, right? And ambition is a thing, talking about socially acceptable addictions.

• 1:32:51Ryan Holiday?

  Ambition is a thing that very few people question or criticize. Up until it stops working, right? Everyone's clapping you on the back, telling you it's a great idea, right up until you overreach and lose all of it. And then they go, you're a fool. What were you thinking? How could you do it? And so you have to have that sense. No, other people, consequences of your life, all these things, they're going to be the lagging indicators. You've already passed the point of no return. So you have to have this sort of internal governor, this internal compass, this internal sense of your limitations that, you know, prevents you from

• 1:33:37Ryan Holiday?

  becoming another cliche.

• 1:33:39Chris Williamson?

  And what about King George?

• 1:33:40Ryan Holiday?

  Well, King George, I was sort of contrasting him to.

• 1:33:47Ryan Holiday?

  Do you want the the life where you say, I don't eat this. This is how hard I have to work out. This is, you know, the strenuous life seems like the hard life, right? Compared to, I eat what I want. I do what I want. But who's happier, right? The person who's in good shape or the person who's not in good shape? The thing about, you know, exercise and diet is that it's it's hard now. But the rewards or the place it gets you is is pleasant. The thing about the Oreos or the milkshake or, you know, whatever it is, is it feels good on the way down, but the the consequences are, you know, they linger.

• 1:34:32Chris Williamson?

  Was that King George, late 1800s? Was he East India Trading Company time?

• 1:34:38Ryan Holiday?

  Uh, he's not, he's not like the American King George.

• 1:34:42Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:34:42Ryan Holiday?

  I think he's after that King George.

• 1:34:44Chris Williamson?

  Too many Georges.

• 1:34:45Ryan Holiday?

  This is Queen Victoria's father, I believe.

• 1:34:49Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so this might be about the right time. I'm watching Taboo at the moment. So it's a five year old series.

• 1:34:56Ryan Holiday?

  For her uncle, I forget.

• 1:34:57Chris Williamson?

  With Tom Hardy in it.

• 1:34:58Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:58Chris Williamson?

  Right? And it's all about the East India Trading Company. And Tom Hardy comes back and he's been in Africa and he's learned voodoo magic and lots of other stuff. And it's got, I would be very surprised if it's not. But he's got this sort of big bloated, like, super fat king and he's gout and sort of bad complexion and all this sort of stuff. And, uh, yeah, I mean, you you look at that and Tom Hardy's this guy who is continually sort of underfoot. He keeps on making the right decisions whenever he can. And you do, you you are contrasted between, there's another guy that's kind of an echo in between both of them. And the guy that has the life that you would want to lead is probably Tom Hardy, is the guy that's actually doing the right things. I sent you, or I think I mentioned to you the last time that we spoke about The Forgotten Highlander.

• 1:35:43Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 1:35:43Chris Williamson?

  Alistair Ercard.

• 1:35:44Ryan Holiday?

  I read that book.

• 1:35:44Chris Williamson?

  How did you get on with that?

• 1:35:45Ryan Holiday?

  Uh, it was fascinating. Uh, it was fascinating. Uh, yeah, when we talk about people who've been through real adversity, right? There's, there's those people.

• 1:35:53Chris Williamson?

  There's levels to this guy.

• 1:35:54Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, yeah, of course. There, there is some level where you're like, how is that even humanly possible? How did you not break under these circumstances? And it, it should remind you, I think, I mean, one of the things I take from that is that, like, we're capable of more than we could possibly conceive of. So. When you're having that dark night of the soul, you're in the trough of despair. Like, you can definitely make it through this. Like, you definitely have what it takes to do this. Like, you come from an unbroken line of those ancestors. Right? Like, every one of us comes from an unbroken line of people who endured terrible things,

• 1:36:35Ryan Holiday?

  who made it through famines and wars and, you know, adversity and challenges that we can't even begin to conceive of. And like, we should feel, we should remind ourselves that we're their descendants. You know, we are the heirs to that tradition. And, you know, to go back to the idea about Marx's realist, are you going to prove yourself worthy of it? Or are you going to be a disappointment? To me, that's a, that's a question to ask yourself in some challenging moment.

• 1:37:11Chris Williamson?

  Ryan Holiday, ladies and gentlemen. If people want to check out the stuff that you're doing at the moment, Wes, best to go.

• 1:37:15Ryan Holiday?

  DailyStoic.com. I do one email every day about Stoic philosophy. And if you like podcasts, obviously do, I do a podcast version of it totally for free every day at the Daily Stoic Podcast.

• 1:37:26Chris Williamson?

  Ryan, I appreciate you.

• 1:37:26Ryan Holiday?

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:37:28Speaker 02

  Mr. President, my company for me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is.

• 1:37:38Speaker 03

  Digger got us into this mess and Digger's gonna dig us out. From the director of Birdman and the Revenant.

• 1:37:44Speaker 02

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You stop, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 1:37:49Speaker 03

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:37:52Speaker 02

  I'm not the first nanny.

• 1:37:53Speaker 03

  Digger, see the trailer online, only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R, under 17, not a minute without parent.