How You Endure It Matters Most | Ask DS

No one knows what the future holds, but if it’s anything like the present or the past, it will not be easy. Things will not go our way. Tragedies will happen. Injustices will be inflicted upon us. Institutions will crumble. People will behave abominably. Mistakes will be made. Disasters will strike. When, where, why? No one can say. But in a sense, the answers to those questions don’t really matter.---And in today's Ask Daily Stoic, Ryan answers questions from employees at a talent acquisition recruiting company called Gem who he gave a talk to upon the recommendation of an old friend. The topics he covers include how to prioritize only what is essential in life, daily practices to prevent self-doubt from creeping into your mind, how having kids humbles you, and more.💪 Visit store.dailystoic.com/pages/leadership to sign up for in the Daily Stoic Leadership Challenge before September 25th.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee 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.

• 0:02Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. While on Thursdays, we not only read the daily meditation, but we answer some questions from listeners and fellow Stoics who are trying to apply this philosophy just as you are. Some of these come from my talks. Some of these come from Zoom sessions that we do with Daily Stoic Life members or as part of the challenges. Some of them are from interactions I have on the street when there happened to be someone there recording. But thank you for listening, and we hope this is of use to you.

• 0:44Ryan Holiday?

  How you endure it matters most. No one knows what the future holds, but if it's anything like the present or the past, it will not be easy. Things will not go our way. Tragedies will happen. Injustices will be inflicted upon us. Institutions will crumble. People will behave awfully. Mistakes will be made. Disasters will strike. When and where and why, no one can say. But in a sense, the answers to those questions don't really matter. Dean Aikerson, the Secretary of State under President Harry S. Truman, saw much of this in his own life: war and recessions and scandals and unfair personal attacks, living through the Spanish Flu. "The last 30 years of his life were defined by the looming possibility of nuclear war."

• 1:29Ryan Holiday?

  "I am something of a Stoic by nature and inheritance," he once said, explaining how he got through it all. "I have learned from the example of my father that the manner in which one endures is more important than the thing that must be endured." What the future brings the Stoic doesn't know, but how they must bear this future, the Stoic has total clarity, with courage and self-discipline and justice and wisdom, with kindness, with grace, with dignity and determination. It's a simple prescription, but not an easy one. So you best start practicing now.

• 2:04Ryan Holiday?

  This is the kind of leadership that I am trying to work on myself. It's one of the things we talk about in the Daily Stoic Leadership Challenge, which I think is one of the best things we've done. We actually got some advice from a two-star general in the Air Force. So you can listen to that as part of the challenge. One of the best interviews I think that we've done. Lots of great lessons in there. And there's a reason so many people have taken and loved the challenge. It's a six-plus-week course on leadership, but it's really digestible. It won't overload you and it'll give you actual tangible stuff you can use. I can't wait for you to check it out. Go to dailystoic.com/leadership or you can check out the Leadership Challenge at store.dailystoic.com and I'll link to it in today's show notes.

• 2:57Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to a Thursday episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. This is going way, way back, not actually that long after I was first introduced to Stoicism. I was writing for the UCR Highlander, which is the college newspaper at the University of California Riverside. And there was a guy there. He wasn't a student anymore. His name was Joe Totten. He had been a student. He had written for the newspaper and then he got a job. Basically, it was like sort of a cushy little transition job that people we knew would take after college, where you got to manage the sort of business side of the paper having graduated. And Joe was someone I became friends with, I looked up to. I remember when I dropped out of college, a lot of the people I knew sort of thought

• 3:39Ryan Holiday?

  it was a crazy idea and Joe sort of really rooted for me and was just a super sweet, nice guy who I've stayed friends with for now, I can't believe, almost 20 years since. And He asked if I would speak to his company, the company he was working at. I think he just recently left called JEM, which is a sort of talent acquisition recruiting company. He worked there for a long time. Some of the executives had been fans and they'd sort of dispatched Joe and said, hey, Joe, I think you know Ryan. Will you see if he'll do a virtual talk for us? So I did this virtual talk from a hotel room in Cancun, I think.

• 4:24Ryan Holiday?

  I had to fly down there to do an in-person talk. And then I had just a few minutes before I had to run to the airport. It's a very tight schedule, but it was an honor to do this Q and A. It was a kickoff back in March for their employees. I talked about obstacles away and then I answered a bunch of questions and that's what you are going to listen to now. You can go to jem.com to see more about JEM as far as a recruiting and software company. But here is me talking to JEM about Stoicism and thanks to my friend Joe. He was supposed to come down here. We're going to spend a couple of days together and then his kids got sick.

• 5:07Ryan Holiday?

  So that's to be rescheduled soon and I haven't seen him in a little while, but I'm looking forward to seeing him. In the meantime, you can hear Joe and I talking in this Q and A about Stoicism and life. Enjoy.

• 5:22Speaker 01

  Thanks so much for being here. Big fanboy. I was, I follow you on Instagram and watch, watch these daily snippets quite often. But I just, I wrote a question in chat, but as a high achieving person like, like yourself in a world where access creates so many things that you could respond to, do you have any advice or recommended reading on how to prioritize that which, you know, matters most?

• 5:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, one of my favorite quotes from Marcus, he says, in everything we do and say, we should ask ourselves, is this essential? Right? It says, because most of what we do and say isn't essential. And he says, when you eliminate the inessential things, you get the double benefit of doing the essential things better. Right? I think that's a great encapsulation of Stoic philosophy, but also just a life philosophy. And there actually is a great book. It's not based on this quote at all, though it could be called Essentialism, which I really like. But the idea of like, what are the things that only you can do? There's another book I like, actually by Gary Keller, the founder of Keller Williams, a real estate agency called The One Thing. You know, sort of like, what is your one thing? Like, what's the thing that you do?

• 6:34Speaker 02

  Like, your main competitive advantage, right? There's a fundamental law of economics that I did learn in the one economics class I took at UC Riverside, which is the law of comparative advantage, right? If I pick apples better than you and you pick oranges better than me, we should specialize in what we do and trade with each other. Right? But I think we have a problem trying to do everything. We have trouble delegating. We have trouble like building up teams around us. And then we end up doing a bunch of inessential things that we're not great at, that has the double cost then of making us less good at the things that we actually are really good at.

• 7:15Speaker 01

  Thank you. Yeah, makes a lot of sense.

• 7:18Speaker 03

  Hey, Ryan. How's it going? I'm gonna jump in if anybody has any other questions.

• 7:24Speaker 03

  Awesome. Well, I have this like thing about mindset, right? And everything, time I read your book, it's all about like my personal mindset. But I can't help that there's always parts of your life, seasons of your life where your mind starts to creep into this space of maybe I can't do this, or this is too hard, I'm not capable. But I'm wondering what specific self-practices that you have? And maybe an anecdote, when you've caught yourself in those moments and what you do to make sure that your mind doesn't creep too far into that zone? Because as you know, it can spiral at any given time.

• 7:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, first, I think just appreciating that not only do you do that, that everyone does that, even people who are really great at what they do, do that. And understanding that it can spiral and that your job isn't to not have that feeling. Your job is to try to arrest that spiral before it gets too serious, right? When the Stoics, like, I don't think the Stoics are, you know, in English, right? The word stoic tends to mean to people like has no emotions. I don't think the Stoics had no emotions. I think they just tried not to make decisions out of those emotions. So I'm like, we can make a distinction between getting angry and then doing something out of anger, right?

• 8:39Speaker 02

  Or having doubts, which is natural, and then quitting because you doubt yourself, right? And so, understanding that we sort of have the emotion, that it makes, that it's reasonable that we have the emotion, but the emotion itself might not be reasonable. And we want to sort of take a second and put it up to the test. Ask ourselves like, is this actually true? What would it mean if I took decisions based on this? You know, what would it mean if, what would it, will it look like if everyone did this, right? And just sort of taking that, that sort of feeling and, or that habit or whatever it is, and just kind of sitting with it and putting that up to the test. To me, that's kind of the essence of how you apply the philosophy.

• 9:23Speaker 02

  And I'm a big believer in routine. And so, one of the ways that I sort of prevent those things from getting out of control is like, I have my practices. Like, this is the time I wake up. This is when I try to exercise. You know, this is when I try to do my work. And so, having this thing that I come back to also prevents me from, you know, I think COVID was obviously really disruptive to people's routines in a lot of ways because suddenly they weren't commuting at a certain time, going to a certain place. But I think those of us who adjusted well figured out like, oh, when the world isn't dictating what we do, we have to make those decisions and build those practices in our lives, or else we're going to become totally unmoored and, and, and spin off the planet.

• 10:04Speaker 02

  And so, I do think like having the structure that I have in my life prevents me from getting too carried away with some of that stuff.

• 10:12Speaker 03

  Awesome. Thanks for sharing. So it sounds like the takeaway for me there is create the structure, fix the structure, and as long as like when I'm finding myself creeping into those, it is kind of come back to my center place, which is the structure that I built.

• 10:25Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 10:27Speaker 03

  Love it. Thank you.

• 10:29Speaker 04

  Hey Ryan.

• 10:30Speaker 02

  Hey.

• 10:31Speaker 04

  Thanks so much for spending time with us today. I think all of what you shared is so relevant to what we're going through, but also just what so many tech companies are going through right now with with the macro environment. You just briefly mentioned routines and structure. Could you expand on that and like maybe share some more examples and go deeper into your routines and your structure and which of those things have been more most impactful to you?

• 10:59Speaker 02

  Sure. Yeah, I have a couple of them. So I have young kids, so I get up early by choice, but also not by choice. They decide. But but one of the first things I do when I wake up, I have a couple of rules. So number one is I don't check my phone for the first thirty minutes to one hour that I'm awake. Right? I don't want to get sucked into the phone first thing. I definitely don't want to get sucked in to like social media or email. Right? Like I want to take a minute. And then so what we do is we, you know, sort of weather permitting, it was easier when they were small enough and and I could just strap them into something. They didn't have a choice. But I we go for a walk and we start the day by going for a walk. So we get outside,

• 11:41Speaker 02

  you know, watch the sun come up, and we look at the animals, we talk, we think about what we want to do for the day. So we that's how I start the day. I try to start the day with something really intentional, really healthy, really not work related, like really not screen related. And then I try to I try to do a little journaling. And then my other rule is I do like whatever the hard task for the day is first. Right? Like I try to it's usually writing. So like, you know, if you put it off till the afternoon, you're bringing your worst self to that thing. Right? I try to do it in the morning when I'm fresh,

• 12:22Speaker 02

  when I'm not frustrated, you know, and so I try to tackle that hard thing first. And then, you know, it could be like eleven, eleven thirty, and I've like, I've already had a pretty good day. Awesome. Very cool. Thank you. Of course, of course.

• 12:39Speaker 05

  Hey, I'm gonna jump in. It's good to see you, man. Thanks so much for being here.

• 12:44Speaker 02

  Hey, man. Yeah, I want to hear what this thing, the lesson was talking about.

• 12:47Speaker 05

  Well, we had, we had, we had conspired a little bit. I might try to ask you some like inside thing or put you on the spot or something, but um, I'm gonna take a different direction. So we got to catch up last, last spring. I got to see you and Sam and the boys. And it was my first time like seeing you in person as a, as a parent. And you know, you answered some of the stuff that, that goes with that. And, and by the way, it was so like cool to just see you as like this great dad, like so engaged with the boys. Um, but you know, one of the things on this idea of, you know, let's focus on what we can control. Let's choose how we're going to react to things. Like the best example that I can think of for that is trying to explain that to a three-year-old or a six-year-old. Like, hey, you're gonna have a better time here. If you just think about how you want to react to this, or how you could react to this, or just react.

• 13:32Speaker 05

  So we all have parents at JAM and I'm, I'm curious what your journey has been on that front.

• 13:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, actually I have a parenting book coming out in May. Um, I started with the Daily Stoic in 2016. And then, uh, in, in May, um, I'm doing the Daily Dad, which is for all parents. It's just, I'm, I'm a dad. So that's why it's called the Daily Dad, um, which is sort of one piece of kind of timeless parenting advice every day. Um, but yeah, like my, my kids do not care at all about any of the Stoics, or they would sort of roll their eyes when they hear the names, even though I, I did these two kids books about the Stoics also, but um, I just try to sort of teach the ideas in, in that really simple idea. It's like, look, like, um, your brother hit you. That sucks. Um, you deciding to hit him back, that causes consequences for you, right?

• 14:20Speaker 02

  And it's funny to watch a kid struggle with it and then you can't get too upset because you realize like you have the same problem, right? Like we all like stuff happens and then we have the reaction. We get upset. We get frustrated. We struggle, you know, um.

• 14:38Speaker 02

  We're still dealing with the same things that a toddler is dealing with, just in higher stakes and our brains not that much more advanced, which is both, uh, uh, uh, I think humbling to come to terms with. And then also it sort of simplifies things. But yeah, I think, you know, having, having kids has been, we were talking about routines earlier, uh, or routine earlier. I think one of the, one of the things I've had to adjust to is like, um, creating some resiliency in my personal life in the sense that like, if you're someone who like, this is the way that I like to do things. These are the times that I like to do things. You know, kids really humble you in their ability to say, that's not how it's going to go today. Right? And, and realizing that actually maybe like

• 15:19Speaker 02

  routines plural is a better way to think about it. Or like rituals or practices is a better way to think about it. Instead of going like, hey, this is how my day is from beginning to end. It's more like, these are the things that I like to do in the course of a successful day and being willing to shuffle them around and adjust. Um, there's a great quote I, I, I heard it's in, it's in Daily Dad. Um, somebody had a kid and, um, he got a note from a friend and he said, welcome to the world of uncontrollable reality. Right? And it is, his point was that, you know, like you, you're supposed to get somewhere at two and you're driving and then your two-year-old falls asleep at 1:55 as you're pulling into

• 16:03Speaker 02

  the parking lot. Well, you're not going to get there at two anymore. Right? Like you're going to get there when they decide that they're waking up because you know, you're not going to screw the nap up. Right? Just the idea that, that, um, it forces you to accept a lot of things and come to terms with a lot of things and adjust around things. Um, is probably a good, uh, macro lesson to learn to apply to the professional world for sure.

• 16:26Speaker 05

  Right on. Well, thanks again for being here, Ryan. And I'll, I'll just echo Leslie's sentiment. Like you, you're dropping into today and, and, you know, thank you for spending the time with us. I think I, I know your work and I know you. I needed to hear what you had to say today. I think a lot of us here did too.

• 16:41Speaker 06

  Yeah. So Ryan, that's actually, um, so sorry. I didn't mean to interrupt, but, um, That's actually why I find The Daily Stoic so helpful, which I will say I didn't have this morning. And I think I've got, you know, three or four takeaways from this conversation. One, that I need to get back into my running routine in the morning. I need to do it first thing, because I'll be much better for everybody else after that. And that, you know, the, the, just why we do what we do. It's all in the kind of how we see where we are, what are the actions we take in the moment? And then, you know, just to remember,

• 17:19Speaker 06

  who we're doing it for, the purpose of why we're doing it. And for me, you've really brought that kind of back, back into focus. And I so much appreciate it. I hope everybody else enjoyed. We, we unfortunately can't go on. So this is going to be the end of our time with you. But I think you've got a lot of fans. Everybody's very interested in your parenting books. I know I am because I actually, or your children's books too. I actually want to read your children's books because I think they probably distill it way down. And we could all benefit from that. So such appreciation for your time. And I'm super excited we had the chance to have you join us this morning.

• 17:53Speaker 02

  My pleasure. Thank you guys so much. Take care. Joe Forney.