You Can Shut Your Ears | Ask Daily Stoic

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

• 0:03Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. But on Fridays, we not only read this daily meditation, but I try to answer some questions from listeners and fellow Stoics who are trying to apply this philosophy, whatever it is they happen to do. Sometimes these are from talks. Sometimes these are people who come up to talk to me on the street. Sometimes these are written in or emailed from listeners. But I hope in answering their questions, I can answer your questions, give a little more guidance on this philosophy we're all trying to follow.

• 0:59Ryan Holiday?

  You can shut your ears.

• 1:02Ryan Holiday?

  Leading up to the German Blitz, it was said that in London, you could feel the anxiety in the air. Britain's then First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, would have been particularly high strung. A debt payment was due in a month. He had no money. His son's gambling and drinking problems were getting worse. There were blackout rules, strict rationing, and the endless cascade of noises and disturbances as construction crews worked to defend the city against attack. It was during all this that Churchill goes for a walk. As he crossed paths with a newsboy cheerfully whistling, Churchill let out some tension. "Stop that whistling!" he snapped at the boy. "Why should I?" the boy said.

• 1:45Ryan Holiday?

  "Because I don't like it, and it's a horrible noise," Churchill said. "Well, you can shut your ears, can't you?" Churchill was furious. His face flushed red with anger. He kept walking and then repeated to himself with laughter, "You can shut your ears, can't you?" And it's true. As Marx really said, "You don't have to turn this into something." You can sharpen the selectivity of your eyes and ears. You can choose to let the whistling newsboy drift right on by. You can choose to pretend that you didn't just read that tweet. You can choose not to remember that you were even hit, as Cato did after being attacked at the baths. All the rudeness, all the things you take offense at, all the things that frustrate

• 2:26Ryan Holiday?

  you, all the sounds that you hate, all the writers whose opinions make you angry, you can tune it all out. You can stay above the noise. You cannot have an opinion. You can shut your ears. And when anger begins to flush your face, you can turn it to laughter. Try it. It's life changing. And by the way, this story comes from The Splendid and the Vile, which is a great book by Eric Larson. I sell it to Painted Porch. If you haven't read it, you should definitely check it out.

• 2:57Speaker 01

  I'm Jordan. I'm the legal counsel for this team. And I have this question. Why should one rigidly follow Stoicism, rather than be eclectic and take the best of different traditions? Because I think if you're boxing yourself in a very rigid system, you can compromise other aspects, like spontaneity, or underbodied emotions, like passion, or even pain, which often help you overcome those obstacles as well. So why we should restrain ourselves that much?

• 3:28Ryan Holiday?

  I don't think that we should. I wouldn't say that you should. I wouldn't say that you should rigidly follow Stoicism. One of my favorite Stoic thinkers is Seneca. But what's remarkable, as you read Seneca, the Stoic, is that the philosopher he quotes the most is Epicurus, his ostensible rival. And he says, Look, you should read like a spy in the enemy's camp, right? That you should be very familiar with all the other traditions. And he says, I'll quote a bad author if the line is good, meaning that he'll take from anyone. And so, look, the Stoics, I think, were remarkably on point about a lot of things. And especially when you consider they were figuring this out

• 4:12Ryan Holiday?

  2,000 years ago, without any understanding of neuroscience, or biology, or psychology.

• 4:21Ryan Holiday?

  Or even our modern understanding of human rights and all of these things, right? So if they were alive today, I feel like they would be practitioners of a much broader philosophy that would borrow from and absorb the best innovations from all of the other schools. So I do try to read eclectically. I've certainly integrated all sorts of ideas from Eastern philosophy into the Stoicism that I write about. Even when I talked earlier about Amor Fati, that Latin expression is from the 1800s. It's actually from Nietzsche, who hated the Stoics. But he happened to be very aligned with the Stoics in this one idea of sort of loving

• 5:03Ryan Holiday?

  one's fate and finding a way to find good in it instead of resenting it. So I'm very much myself an eclectic sort of student of philosophy. I think if you are dogmatic or doctrinaire about it, you are artificially limiting yourself and you should take from anything that improves your life and makes you a better person or better at what you do.

• 5:28Speaker 01

  Practicism at the end, which is one of the aspects you were mentioning in your book as well, I think in doing the action discipline, right?

• 5:35Ryan Holiday?

  Absolutely.

• 5:38Speaker 02

  Ryan.

• 5:39Ryan Holiday?

  Hi.

• 5:40Speaker 02

  That's Babys. I'm Greek, not a philosopher.

• 5:46Speaker 02

  Running the North American commercial business. I'll come back to the kids question that Micah did. I have two daughters, teenage age, where the phone is the extension of their hand.

• 6:00Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 6:01Speaker 02

  And part of the social media, spending more time looking at the phone than doing other things.

• 6:08Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 6:08Speaker 02

  And sometimes when I'm trying to tell them, guys, life is not a rehearsal.

• 6:17Speaker 02

  No, or no, perception is reality. Like again, like, Ed, what are you talking about?

• 6:22Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 6:23Speaker 02

  So at this age, when all the parents want to kind of prepare their kids before they go to the real life, when they're gonna stand by themselves. Do you have any ideas, practices, how you take those kids and try to, I don't know, put them into that, start thinking a bit different?

• 6:42Ryan Holiday?

  Well, when I first really fell into Stoicism in my early twenties, I think one of the reasons it resonated with me was because it confirmed all of the things that I'd heard from my parents and grandparents, but had, you know, rolled my eyes at when I heard it, right? So I think part of it is understanding, again, this idea of, you know, focus on what you control. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink, right? Or the Zen expression that, when the student is ready, the teacher appears. It's understanding that, you know, you're gonna, you can give them all the information, but when it actually clicks is not something that's up to you, and you probably can't force upon them prematurely.

• 7:27Ryan Holiday?

  So I think, understanding that, hey, I'm gonna tell them all the things that I think are important, I'm gonna repeat these things a million times, I'm gonna try to model them, but that there's probably a delayed activation for any of these ideas, right? That, and you have to, I think, reassure yourself that they are listening more than it seems that they are. They're just, one, not gonna give you the satisfaction of acknowledging it, and, two, haven't quite had the life experiences that allow any of this stuff to really make sense, right? To me, one of the really amazing parts of the Stoic tradition is this thing that they

• 8:09Ryan Holiday?

  get from Herakles, this idea that we never step in the same river twice, right? Even though the ideas are the same, it's that we're different when we step in it, just as the river is the same. But the idea that, you know, you can hear it once, you can hear it 50 times, but it's when you're in the right place at the right time that suddenly... Suddenly it all clicks and it starts to make sense. So I think I might, I might give yourself some credit that you're doing the things that are right. You're, you're telling them the things, but they're just not in a position for that to truly click at it. It, it, it will, it will, it will happen with time and you've got to sort of trust, trust that process. But I agree, of course, you know, uh, this is the opposite of the philosophical life, right?

• 8:50Ryan Holiday?

  This is instant gratification, endless stimulation, endless provocation. And, and that's certainly not where you want to come from. I think all of us are lucky. Uh, I'm just at the, the probably got in right before the door closed, but sort of remembering what life was like before it was intermediated by this thing.

• 9:14Ryan Holiday?

  Before it consumed all facets of our life. I was just reading Chuck Klosterman's book on the nineties, which is a, a amazing, an amazing history of the 1990s. You know, it's just, it's a totally different experience. It's like they, they, they live in a different world. And, uh, I think, I think with time that hopefully will, there'll be a nostalgic appreciation for some of these old ways of doing things, but, uh, but, uh, I, I, I do try to, you know, teach good habits with my kids on the phone, but, uh, it's, it's probably a losing battle ultimately.

• 9:50Ryan Holiday?

  Which is probably good for your, good for your business, not so great for the world.

• 9:54Speaker 03

  Well, obviously my son is 23, I can tell you it's a mission impossible, but the good news is they will find their own way.

• 10:02Speaker 03

  Right? I have a question to you about leadership. I believe one of the famous guy in the moment is Zelensky, the Ukrainian leader.

• 10:09Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, of course.

• 10:10Speaker 03

  And, and I personally believe he made a really great leadership job. What can we learn from him? How we act and what, what he is doing in the moment?

• 10:20Ryan Holiday?

  Isn't it, I mean, you can watch Zelensky on the Ukrainian Dancing With The Stars, which he won in like 2006. This is the voice of Paddington Bear, uh, in the Ukrainian movie. And here he is staring down, you know, a nuclear superpower with sort of sheer courage and, uh, determination. I mean, I, I think a couple of things about that situation. One, It's a reminder that, you know, it's not in vogue to discuss the sort of the great man of history theory, right? Obviously, it's politically incorrect in that it's just called the great man of history theory. But we live in a time where we look at everything as systemic or structural,

• 11:05Ryan Holiday?

  that there are these enormous forces that are shaping and shifting the world that like one human being can't make a difference. But almost all the analysis about this, you know, somewhat inevitable conflict was thrown out the window because one human being changed the equation, like one guy, a different leader.

• 11:26Ryan Holiday?

  It would have gone in a totally different direction. And so to me, it's a reminder of the sort of sheer agency that we have as human beings that we often take for granted. In the way that, you know, how much of our world has been shaped by the singular inventions or creations or decisions of people? And there's a, I think, it's easy to feel disempowered, but when we look at these individuals, I think it should empower us. There's this great expression, "One man with courage makes a majority." Again, this is all sexist language, but that a singular person can change the direction of things, whether it's Charles de Gaulle or Zelensky or Angela Merkel,

• 12:07Ryan Holiday?

  that one person, their force of will, their personality, their decisions can shape the whole direction that things go. I think that's very inspiring. To me, the other thing about Zelensky talking about social media is Zelensky and the Ukrainians have clearly figured out that there are two wars that they're fighting. There is the physical war, which they've done a remarkable job of, but there is also the information war. And they have run circles around the Russians, which is not an easy thing to do, given that the Russians are the ultimate practitioners of information war. But they have won the meme war, the information war, the narrative war.

• 12:52Ryan Holiday?

  And how brilliant that is and that we have to understand that the future will be these two. It's not just, I forget who said it, but the perception is reality, right? That the story you tell, the narrative, the...

• 13:07Ryan Holiday?

  Multimedia, interactive, participatory narrative of your cause, or your organization, or your invention, or your brand, that this matters just as much as how many tanks you have, and how big your army is, and how much money you have. So I found that to be also very educational and informative, just sort of watching them do this. Because I think it can be easy. My first book is about sort of media manipulation. But this isn't just these images, these things that we're hearing about, this line, "Oh, I don't need a ride, I need ammunition." You know, this is also very choreographed, and very deliberately and brilliantly done. That doesn't just happen.

• 13:51Ryan Holiday?

  And I've been following that quite closely as well.

• 14:05Ryan Holiday?

  You know, the Stoics in real life met at what was called the Stoa, the Stoa Pochyle, the Painted Porch in ancient Athens. Obviously, we can't all get together in one place, because this community is like hundreds of thousands of people, and we couldn't fit in one space. But we have made a special digital version of the Stoa. We're calling it Daily Stoic Life. It's an awesome community. You could talk about, like today's episode, you could talk about the emails, ask questions. That's one of my favorite parts, is interacting with all these people who are using Stoicism to be better in their actual, real lives. You get more Daily Stoic Meditations over the weekend, just for the Daily Stoic Life members, quarterly Q and As with me, cloth-bound edition of our Best of Meditations, plus a whole bunch of other stuff, including discounts. And, this is the best part,

• 14:50Ryan Holiday?

  all our Daily Stoic courses and challenges totally for free, hundreds of dollars of value every single year, including our New Year, New You Challenge. We'd love to have you join us. There's a two-week trial, totally for free. Check it out at DailyStoicLife.com.