Daily Stoic Sundays: Ryan Talks with South Carolina Football About How to Practice Stoicism

Today’s podcast features Ryan talking to the University of South Carolina Gamecocks football team, discussing how you can use Stoicism in a practical way to keep learning, make (and stick to) your own standards, and make the most of your defeats. This episode is brought to you by WHOOP. WHOOP is a fitness wearable that provides personalized insights on how well you’re sleeping, how much you’ve recovered from your workouts, and how much you’re stressed out from each day. It’s the ultimate whole-body tracker for someone who needs an all-in-one solution. Visit WHOOP.com and enter STOIC at checkout to save 15% on your order. This episode is also brought to you by GoMacro. GoMacro is a family-owned maker of some of the finest protein bars around. They're vegan, non-GMO, and they come in a bunch of delicious flavors. Visit http://gomacro.com and use promo code STOIC for 30% off your order plus free shipping.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/ryanholidayInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/ryanholiday/Facebook: http://facebook.com/ryanholidayYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

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

• 0:04Ryan Holiday?

  Bienvenidos a la edición de fin de semana del Día Stoic. Cada viernes, te traemos una meditación inspirada por los antiguos estoicos, algo que puede ayudarte a cumplir con esas cuatro virtudes estoicas de coraje, justicia, sabiduría y temperance. Y aquí, en el fin de semana, nos sumamos a un profundismo en esos mismos temas. entrevistamos filósofos estoicos, nos reflejamos, nos preparamos, pensamos profundamente sobre los problemas desafiantes de nuestro tiempo y trabajamos en esta filosofía de una manera que es más posible aquí cuando no estamos ruidos de trabajar o de llevar a los niños a la escuela, cuando tenemos el tiempo para pensar, para ir de un caminato, para sentarnos con nuestros diarios

• 0:48Ryan Holiday?

  y para prepararnos para lo que traerá el futuro.

• 0:54Ryan Holiday?

  El ego es esta sorta de fuerza inminente que está constantemente entrando entre nosotros y lo que queremos hacer. Y está tomando este objetivo, este anillo de acero que estamos tras y está moviéndolo un poco más allá cada vez. Y así, si el ego es tan destructivo, ¿por qué es tan común? Mi teoría es que el ego es una especie de mecanismo de defensa. Las cosas son difíciles, las cosas son aterradoras. No tenemos muchos buenos ejemplos de lo que un líder humilde y confiante se ve. Y así, debido a que es aterrador, debido a que estamos lejos de casa, debido a que estamos tratando de hacer cosas que no tenemos muchos buenos ejemplos para,

• 1:34Ryan Holiday?

  el ego es como una almohada, es una prota, es una manera de hacernos sentir menos aterrados. En lugar de poseer ese sentimiento, ponemos esta especie de falsedad frente a nosotros. En Alcoholics Anonymous, dicen que el ego significa "encarcelar a Dios fuera". La idea es que en lugar de ser humilde, en lugar de ser pequeño, en lugar de apreciar la realidad de nuestra situación, tomamos el ego como una especie de armor protectora. Pero no es armor, porque nos hace más vulnerables a largo plazo. En lugar de ego, quiero que tengas confianza. La confianza es fuerte. Confidence is earned. Confidence is based on information. It's not based on that voice in your head. What we're going to go through is sort of the three phases that we happen to be in in life.

• 2:19Ryan Holiday?

  Right? We're either aspiring to do something. We're either in the middle of great success. Or we are experiencing adversity. And every person is at one of those three phases at some point in the course of their life. And we're actually constantly rotating through all this. You it was you were aspiring to play college football. Now you're here playing college football. But tomorrow you could you could you could be benched. You could experience some injury. You could struggle in school. You could struggle on the playing field. We're going to be at one of those three phases. And ego is distinctly different at each one of those phases, but equally problematic at all of them. And so we're going to go through why ego is a problem at all of those phases.

• 3:04Ryan Holiday?

  So aspiring, this is when we are trying to do something in life. When we are we are starting out, when we're engaging on a journey, when we're trying to get better, when we're trying to improve. And I think this begins with taking up what we call the student mindset. How can we learn? How can we, instead of thinking that we already know something? How do we focus on what we learn? This is Kirk Hammett right here. He's in this mediocre heavy metal band called Exodus. Maybe the name is familiar to some of you who know heavy metal. But Kirk Hammett is chosen out of this band to be the lead guitarist in a band called Metallica. Metallica is like the up and coming band at this time. So basically, this is like getting drafted, right? Or this is like getting recruited to play for a university like this one.

• 3:49Ryan Holiday?

  You're pretty good, but now you've made it. And so what does he do, right? He's made it. Does he celebrate? Does he go buy a nice car? Does he party? No, he does the opposite. He goes out and he finds the greatest guitar teacher that he could possibly have. He he's good, but he wants to get much better. And he knows that the learning curve that he's on is about to get much steeper. So he hires this guy named Joe Satriani, who himself is one of the greatest guitar players of all time. And what Satriani says is that it's not that Hammett wasn't good. It's that he had this set of Skills, but he couldn't quite weave them all in together. And so for two years, he's like officially a rock star now, right? He's, he's in this huge band, he's making a ton of money. They're recording an album that's going to go on to sell millions of copies.

• 4:33Ryan Holiday?

  And every day he's leaving the studio and doing what? Going to have more lessons in how to be better at this thing that he's already one of the best at. And this is an essential way to keep ego at bay. You focus not on how good you are, not on what you've done, but on how much better you can get. And this keeps us, the student is humble. The person who thinks they've mastered something is not humble. Epictetus, one of the Stoic philosophers, he would say, it's impossible to learn that which you think you already know. You guys were the best players in middle school. You were the best players in high school. You were the best players in college, right? But as you go up each level, what happens is the, the level of competition gets much higher.

• 5:17Ryan Holiday?

  So if you think that you're great, if you think, to go back to this Epictetus quote, if you think you know everything, if you think you've got it, the problem is now you can't adjust to this reality where you actually don't quite have it, right? Where there's a lot left for you to learn. And so if we can, if we can say that actually, no, I don't know everything. There's so much left for me to learn. We have the ability to get a lot better. Ego is this sort of impediment to improvement because it doesn't believe that it needs to improve. Ralph Waldo Emerson, every man I meet is my master in some point, and in that I learn from him. I've talked to coaches and teams all over the world. And what I think is always interesting is that the head coach usually sits in the front row, just like this.

• 6:00Ryan Holiday?

  Not because there's very, there's usually very little I can teach that person. He probably knows more about this than, than, than I do. But he's in the front row taking notes, not just because he wants to set a good example. But there is maybe a 1% chance that there is something that I could pass along. So what, what greats have is not a sense that they know everything, but actually a hunger, an awareness of what they don't know, and an eagerness to go find that from any and every source. Socrates is considered. Considered the wisest man in the world. What's his secret? He was aware of his own ignorance. He was aware of what he didn't know. And so, again, this is what we want to cultivate in ourselves. So I don't like this idea of faking it till you make it.

• 6:43Ryan Holiday?

  I think that another word for that is lying or fraud. I like doing the work. I'm gonna make it happen with my own work, with my own effort. Bill Bradley, when you are not practicing, remember someone, somewhere is practicing, and when you meet that person, they will beat you, right? Ego thinks that it already is the best. Humility says, "I'm going to work until I am the best." So there's the innocent climb. That's where we're all aligned. But then, it's precisely when things start to go well, that now ego says, "Well, I'm not getting enough credit. I'm not getting enough recognition. Why are they talking to me this way? Don't they understand all the things that I've accomplished?"

• 7:23Ryan Holiday?

  And so now ego starts to tear at the bonds that once kept a team together. The disease of me can strike any winning team at any moment. That's what Pat Riley was saying. So you have to be constantly on guard for this. And I think the job of a leader is to manage your own ego, right? To keep your own ego in check, to be aware of egos around you, to make sure that you're not bumping into other people's. You're not threatening them. You're not overriding them. You're not making them feel small and insecure. The goal here should be egolessness, part of one larger unit, right? That's what a team is. If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, who am I? I think that's the essential question.

• 8:08Ryan Holiday?

  And then, of course, I think where ego really gets us in trouble when we're successful is that it whispers in our ear that we don't have to do the right thing, that we can get away with anything, that we're special, that we're above the rules. This is certainly Tiger Woods's problem, right? He felt like the rules didn't apply to him, that he could get away with anything, that he was special because of how great he was. This is Marcus Aurelius. I write about the ancient Stoics a lot in my books. And he's the emperor of Rome, but he's also this philosopher. And so, when he takes over as emperor, what does he do? The first thing he does is he anoints his brother co-Emperor. So imagine you're named captain of the team. This is an incredible honor. Is your first instinct, how do I share this? How do I bring someone up with me? But that's what he did.

• 8:53Ryan Holiday?

  And this is a great line. He says, "Just that you do the right thing, the rest doesn't matter." Right? Whatever the conditions, whether you're tired, whether people are looking, whether they aren't looking, whether you're going to be criticized for it. What matters is that you do the right thing. Doesn't matter what ego is telling you. What matters is, is it the right thing? And then there's this moment where after Marcus becomes Emperor, the empire is very heavily in debt. And there's a lot of things an Emperor can do in this situation, right? He could levy taxes on the poor. He could invade another country, could print more money. He could do things that would basically hurt everyone but him. And that's actually not what Marcus does. The first thing he does, he starts, he walks through the Imperial Palace,

• 9:37Ryan Holiday?

  all his possessions, and he begins pointing at all the most valuable possessions that the Emperor owns. And he asks his men to sell them. So he starts selling off the palace furnishings to pay down the debt. He says, "Why should the Roman people suffer if I'm not going to feel the pain first?" And I think that's what a leader does. They do the right thing even when it costs them. And in fact, they're willing to take the hit first before anyone else. And he has this great line in Meditations. He says, "Let's waste no more time arguing what a good man is like. Let's just be one." And that's what we have to do, particularly in our moments of greatest success. Because that's what it reflects most on us. And then, of course, there are going to be moments of failure.

• 10:21Ryan Holiday?

  We're going to have success and there's going to be setbacks. Maybe setbacks inflicted by our own ego. Maybe totally unfair setbacks, right? That's the reality. Life kicks our ass. It just does. Murphy's Law, what can go wrong will. We are going to be publicly embarrassed. We're going to be criticized. We're going to be attacked. Things are going to go wrong. We're going to fail. We're going to lose. We're going to mess up. Now, here's where ego is really toxic, right? Because if your ego was there on the way up, whispering in your That you're special, that you're better than everyone else. That you winning a lot says that you're a great human being. Or that having a lot of money makes you the best person around. Well, now what happens if those things are taken away? Right?

• 11:06Ryan Holiday?

  If what you love is what people are saying about you on Twitter. Do you actually love that they're saying things about you on Twitter? Do you love how nice they're being? Well, then how do you handle it when all of a sudden they turn on you? Right? And so if ego is there, taking a lot of this into being our identity. We're really fucked when things aren't going well. And so Ben Horowitz, he's one of the most successful investors of all time. Airbnb, Dropbox, Uber, multi-billion, billions of dollars in investments. He says, "The hard thing isn't setting a big goal. The hard thing is what you do when you start to fail. When you start to experience difficulty, when the dream turns into a nightmare." And that is going to happen in life. We are going to have setbacks. We're going to get hurt. We're going to get benched.

• 11:50Ryan Holiday?

  We're going to get criticized. We're going to drop a pass. Right? Things are going to happen. And then how do we respond? This is really where we prove who we are. You've got to be tough. You've got to stick with it, of course. You've got to have determination and grit. And it's also important to remember that for the most part, these are very first world problems. Right? We are very, like, I think what we want to do is practice gratitude. Ego is always about, "How can I have more? How can I be better than everyone else?" But what humility and confidence can focus on is what we're grateful for. That we're born right now, that we live in this country. Right? That we live in a time of peace, that we've been given all the gifts that we've been given. We can focus on what we're grateful for rather than on what we've been deprived of in this very moment.

• 12:34Ryan Holiday?

  But what Warren Buffett talks about is the idea of having an inner scorecard versus an outer scorecard. So an outer scorecard is winning, attention you're getting, social media followers. It's being promoted. It's being recognized. It's externals. But an inner scorecard is a sense of, are you getting better? Are you putting in the work? Are you proud of what you're actually doing? Is this something that's in your control? Or is it something outside of your control? And for the richest man in the world, clearly very successful by any external metric, to say that an inner scorecard is more important, I think that's something we should listen to. Okay, here's Nick Saban raising a national championship trophy, right? What's he doing? He's not smiling. And is that because he's incapable of being happy?

• 13:19Ryan Holiday?

  No, what he talks about is even when he's winning, what he's thinking about is whether he did everything the way that he set out to do them. Did he, did he win not by the score, like the scoreboard, but did he win by the team following through on the standards or the game plan that they set up? John Wooden, he said the same thing. He said, "Winning is not determined by the box score at the end of the game. Winning is, is did we play our absolute best game?" And I know that's easy to say. It's very hard to live, right? Can you measure yourself by an internal scorecard of your own standards, not your external ones? So this happened to me on one of my books, actually with Ego is the Enemy.

• 14:03Ryan Holiday?

  Sold the most copies out of any of my books. It should have debuted at number one on the national bestseller list, but it wasn't there. What happened? We don't know. Got, maybe it got screwed over, maybe it got edited, maybe it just got forgotten. But I'd earned this thing and then they didn't give it to me. So am I gonna feel like that book is a failure because I didn't get this piece of recognition? No, because what I take pride in is that I know that I wrote the very best book that I was capable of writing in that moment. And so pride for me, where I'm putting my identity is not on the outcome, but on the input, right? And that allows me to never be knocked down by these external things. So it's like we must establish our identity in everything we do.

• 14:48Ryan Holiday?

  Notice it, it's not about outcomes. It's about what we do, what we put in. And so if you can take satisfaction in that, it not only insulates you from, from bad times, but it, but it prevents you from being puffed up by your success. So what if you do everything wrong and you still win? Is that really a success? I would argue, no. I'll give you an example of this. So this is Tom Brady's draft card. He's drafted in 2000. He's probably in better shape now than he was in 2000, but he's taken... The 199th pick in the sixth round. So in many respects, this is probably not just the greatest draft pick in the history of the NFL. It's maybe the greatest draft pick in the history of sports, period.

• 15:32Ryan Holiday?

  It might be the best hire in the history of business. To take the greatest quarterback of all time to get him in the sixth round, you'd think the Patriots would be ecstatic, right? How great are we at drafting that we picked Tom Brady in the sixth round? Well, actually, they're not ecstatic. Of course, they're very happy that they get Tom Brady for so cheap. But what they focus on is the fact that they took this guy in the fifth round. This is Dave Stachowski. I'm sure he's a very nice person, but he doesn't even make it out of training camp. So actually, the director of personnel for the Patriots keeps a picture of Stachowski on his desk for many years as a reminder, not that he blew it,

• 16:12Ryan Holiday?

  but to not let the ego go to his head, not to congratulate himself or to take credit for something that if he was really being honest, he didn't fully understand when he did it. If the Patriots just sat there and said, yes, we're amazing. We drafted Tom Brady in the sixth round. They're not going to get better at scouting talent. If instead they sit there and they go, how the hell did we wait through five rounds before we took this guy? Now they're going to think about this and they're going to get better drafting each year as a result. And so Marcus Aurelius would say, what we want to do is accept success without arrogance and to let failure go with indifference. We want to let things go, whether people are saying we're fucking amazing

• 16:55Ryan Holiday?

  or whether people are saying that we're trash, right? Because they don't know what matters is what we know. What matters is the standard that we set for ourselves in what we're doing. I think the other thing that's going to happen in life is we're going to have moments where we're not in control, where we have, where we're stuck, right? Maybe you're red shirting for a year. Maybe your plane is delayed for two hours. Maybe you're benched in favor of someone else. Maybe you're forced to retake a class. These are going to be moments where we're not in control, where we have what you might call dead time. As an example, this is a guy named Malcolm Little. He was basically a low-level criminal in Harlem. And he ends up getting caught.

• 17:40Ryan Holiday?

  He goes to jail. Sentenced to 10 years in a penitentiary. He spends the first, basically, year of that sentence being very angry about the fact that he's in jail. And not liking it, of course. But then he asks himself, "Well, what am I gonna do with this time?" Right? He could become a better criminal in jail. He could sit there and watch the seconds of his life tick away. Or he could use this time. So he ends up, he goes to the prison library and the commissary. He buys a notebook and he checks out a dictionary. And he begins to transfer, word by word, the dictionary. Basically teaches himself to read this way. Teaches himself a vocabulary this way. And then he starts reading everything he can get his hands on. He reads history, he reads philosophy, he reads religion.

• 18:21Ryan Holiday?

  And it's in this process that Malcolm Little is transformed into Malcolm X. He would say, "From then until I left that prison, in every free moment I had, if I was not reading in my library, I was reading in my bunk." He becomes Malcolm X. Why does Malcolm X wear glasses? It's because he actually wears out his eyes, reading in the dim light of prison. People would ask him where he went to college, because he was so smart. And he said, "Books." That's where he went to college. He just read. He transformed himself. He took dead time, time that he was not in control, and he turned it into what we would call a live time. Right? He made use of every possible second. And so, the, one of the thoughts I would leave you guys with is: Ego says, "This is unfair. I hate this. I don't want this. I just have to wait this out."

• 19:06Ryan Holiday?

  Confidence, humility says, "Okay. What can I accept about this situation that will allow me to move forward?" Instead of spending one second complaining about the hit that blew out my knee, or the fact that someone got chosen over me, what I'm gonna focus on is how I can use this position that I'm now in to move forward, to get better in some way. How can I turn this into a good thing that happened to me? They've done some interesting studies on elite athletes where, actually, after an injury, they come back and they're better in some way. The academic term for this is post-traumatic growth. And so, the idea being that the athlete is injured, yes. And it would be better if they weren't injured, right?

• 19:51Ryan Holiday?

  If they never had a weak knee, or they didn't blow out their elbow, or whatever it was. But... Maybe they spend that time becoming a better teammate, or reevaluating why they're playing the game in the first place. Or if you know what Tommy John surgery is, right? Where they take the tendon from one elbow and put it into another elbow. So, the player actually, because they blew out their arm, they come back with a stronger tendon to begin with. This is post-traumatic growth. But also, how do they elevate or change their game to compensate for this injury that they have? How do they, you know, because now, let's say, they can't run this way, they change how they run and they get better in a new way. As players get older, this is what they have to do.

• 20:37Ryan Holiday?

  They don't have the raw explosive strength anymore, but they're smarter, they're wiser, they know the game better. So they're improving, they're elevating their game in a different way. So how do you use what happens to be better for it? In the Stoics, they have this concept, amor fati, which translates to "a love of fate." And Marcus Aurelius, the image he uses for it, he says it's like fire. He says, "Everything you throw in front of a fire becomes fuel for the fire." The person who is hungry, who can make use of everything that happens to them, that's the person who gets better and better. So the last thing I would say is how do we keep ego in check? I think one of the things we've got to do is we've got to get off social media as much as humanly possible, right? So, this is Glacier Bay in Alaska.

• 21:22Ryan Holiday?

  It's very hard to be obsessed with yourself when you are looking at the beauty or the majesty of something much bigger than yourself, right? Meanwhile, you're staring at the alerts of your phone and you do feel important and you do feel distracted. And it's hard to think about the big picture. When you are meticulously monitoring everything that everyone is saying about you, that's a problem. When you have this device in your pocket where you tweet and say everything that pops in your head, particularly when you're angry, when you're upset, when you've been hurt, right? That's a bad position to be in. We often say things we regret out of ego, but instead of saying them privately, we've now said them in front of all of the entire world on social media.

• 22:06Ryan Holiday?

  Media and that's where we get ourselves in trouble. So I urge you guys to sort of step out of your bubble, to step away from technology, to even step away from football. Have something the opposite of football that allows you to center yourself on a regular basis. I live in Texas on a small farm and every morning I go for a long walk. I watch the sun come up and in this moment, I'm not me, the author. I'm not someone who's ambitious. I'm just out there sort of equal to everyone else in the world. And this is an important centering experience for me. And Neil deGrasse Tyson saying, when we look up at the sky, we feel very small, but we also feel connected to something larger than ourselves. This is my donkey. His name is Buddy.

• 22:49Ryan Holiday?

  I bought him on Craigslist. He cost a hundred dollars. And when I walk out and I see him, he's just standing there. He just stands there. He just doesn't do anything. He just stands there. And it's funny, when I first got him, I would just sort of laugh. Like I thought he's just really dumb, that he just stands there. He doesn't do anything. And then I realized like, this is his job. Like as long as he doesn't die, that's a pretty successful day for him. And so he's not beating himself up. He's not comparing himself against other people. He's not whipping himself. He's not checking how many Twitter followers or Instagram followers he has. He's not fighting the other donkeys. He's just fully being himself. He's experiencing sort of complete stillness and completeness, even if only for a few minutes.

• 23:33Ryan Holiday?

  I keep this coin in my pocket. It says memento mori. And there's a quote from Marcus Aurelius, he says, "You can leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think." I think to me, that's the ultimate antidote to ego, is remembering how short life is, to remember how lucky we are to even be alive in this moment. And then to sort of fully be present and appreciate all of it. And to not waste a second of it, thinking that I'm better or superior or worse than any other person alive. So, thank you guys very much.

• 24:06Ryan Holiday?

  Hey everyone. Great news. The ebook edition of Ego is the Enemy is on sale this weekend for just $2.99 on Amazon. And to make it even better, we're offering a discount on Ego is the Enemy themed stuff in the Daily Stoic store. Get 20% off our Ego is the Enemy pendants and challenge coins with the code EGO discount, or you can get an Ego print for just $10 when you buy a matching pendant with a code EGO PRINT. This is a perfect chance to take that reminder of why ego is the enemy, of who we want to be, of what we can do, of collaboration, of happiness, of wisdom. You can't learn that

• 24:48Ryan Holiday?

  which you think you already know, is what Epictetus said, and he's right. You can go to store.dailystoic.com and just search Ego, and you'll find the Ego is the Enemy challenge coin pendant print, and you'll get Ego is the Enemy, number one bestseller on Amazon for just $2.99 right now. Thanks. Be well.