Can You At Least Be This? | Ask DS

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

• 0:02Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. 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. Thank you for listening, and we hope this is of use to you.

• 0:44Speaker 01

  Can you at least be this? Epictetus saw the cream of the Roman crop. Hadrian, the emperor, dropped in on his classes. The emperor's best families sent their most promising students to him. He himself studied under Musonius Rufus, who is known as the Roman Socrates. Epictetus may well have bumped into Seneca while they both worked in the administration. Yet for all this, Epictetus was pretty disappointed in what he saw. "How much I'd like to see such a Stoic," he once said, "one who actually lived up to the teachings, managed to be happy in all circumstances, be they exile, or death, adversity, or success." He'd been looking his whole life, he told his students, and he'd not found a one. So despairing of perfection, he lowered the standards,

• 1:28Speaker 01

  lowering them to one much more reachable for all of us. "If we can't be a true sage," he said, "let's at least try to be someone actively forming themselves on the model. Let's at least try." He was saying that while we might never measure up, we can at least do our best. We can show ourselves to be someone making progress, someone committed to the fight, someone who refuses to accept that there isn't hope for us, that we are all we can be in this moment. None of us are perfect Stoics. Epictetus wasn't. Marcus Aurelius wasn't. We're gonna slip. We're gonna fall short, dismally short, most likely. But we can't give up. We must show that we are trying, that we're actively transforming ourselves to get and to be better. We can at least be that.

• 2:19Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. It's funny, I think whenever I do a talk in Las Vegas, I seem to inevitably be put up at Caesar's Palace, which is always funny to be going and talking about the Stoics, talk about Cato, talk about Marx, really, talk about Seneca in Caesar's Palace. And so, back in March of 22, I gave a talk for DG Media. They had this thing called Momentum Builder. It was this really cool event. There was a ton of people there. I think there was like 3,000 people there, which was surreal. Again, to be talking to 3,000 people about Stoic philosophy in Caesar's Palace felt a bit unreal. And anyways, it was a great talk. I talked about obstacles away.

• 3:02Ryan Holiday?

  And then I did a little Q and A after, and I wanted to bring you some of those questions. Now, the mic wasn't perfectly picking up the audience, so I'm going to sort of give you the gist of their questions. I'm trying to get better at repeating back the question, so it records it for me. But basically, the first question was like, for someone who follows The Daily Stoic, maybe listens to the podcast or follows on social, but they haven't read the books, where would I start?

• 3:29Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I thank you for the interest, of course. I would say, what I've tried to do in my book, The Daily Stoic, and there's a free email as well, so this doesn't sound like a sales pitch, is I think sometimes we think like, oh, I've read that book, I've got it, right? And I'm really interested in more the process of reading and rereading and coming back to something. So what I try to do with The Daily Stoic and with the email is it's one page a day, one thought a day, that you take over the course of the year, or over multiple years, or over a lifetime. So thinking about it as more of an active study than a thing you read one time. So The Daily Stoic might be one that I would start with, or the emails at dailystoic.com.

• 4:09Ryan Holiday?

  But what I love about reading and rereading is that you get something new out of it each time. And sometimes when we race through to get to the end of a book, we're just trying to get done with it as opposed to like engage and re-engage with it. But the idea that we need to be constantly reminded of these things and that it's a process, that Stoicism isn't this thing you get as a result of an epiphany or having been explained to it, but instead it's a journey that you're on. And even Marcus Aurelius, the reason he's writing Meditations isn't for us. He would have been mortified that we're talking about him today because it was never meant for publication. What he was doing was trying

• 4:51Ryan Holiday?

  to speak to himself and remind himself of these ideas over and over and over again.

• 4:58Ryan Holiday?

  And then someone was a fan of Ego is the Enemy and one of their favorite chapters, actually one of my favorite chapters in Ego is the Enemy is this idea about keeping your own scorecard, which can be hard, you know, especially if as a real estate agent or any kind of business professional, like obviously the external scorecard matters too. But they wanted me to talk a little bit more about the internal scorecard.

• 5:20Ryan Holiday?

  There's two ways to measure your life based on the external stuff that you've accumulated, the awards that you've won, the money you've earned, what people have said about you, your reputation, right? All of that. Or it can be based on what you do, the internal stuff. Are you pleased with who you are, what you've done, the work product you've done? Now, it'd be ideal that these two things align, and a lot of times they do. But I can tell you with my own books, Ego is the Enemy should have debuted at number one on the Wall Street Journalist. Opened the paper the day, I know objectively how many copies I sold, I know how many copies the other books sold, and then mysteriously, painfully, obnoxiously, it wasn't.

• 6:05Ryan Holiday?

  That's how life goes, right? If I decide to hand over my definition of success, or satisfaction, or pride in my work, to an editorial board at a bestseller list, or, you know, the committee that decides who gets into March Madness, right? Or the casting director of this movie, or, right, the boss of this company. You've now handed over your definition of success to someone or something else that you don't control. And so for the Stoics, the idea of Marx really says like, "Look, sanity, happiness, is tying your success to your own actions, not what other people say or do." So the inner scorecard is like, "I know that book was the best book

• 6:49Ryan Holiday?

  that I was capable of writing at that time, and that I said all the things that I wanted to say in that book, and that I didn't cut any corners, or take any shortcuts, or take anything for granted as far as the marketing, or the building of my platform, or any of the work that went into selling it. But after that point, it stopped being in my hands. And to associate my identity, or my definition of success, or the scorecard, with anything past that is a recipe for disappointment at best, or madness at worst. So you have to keep a strong sense of who you are, what you're doing, what success looks like to you. I mean, you can't let anyone else get in your head about that.

• 7:31Ryan Holiday?

  And then someone was asking me, this funny, shortly after this event, I actually put up some signs in the Daily Stoic office related to this. They were asking about like, having a sense of urgency. How do you get things done quickly? How do you instill in people a sense of urgency? And I think this is really important. I ended up doing a chapter about this in Discipline is Destiny, which I don't think would have been out yet when I answered this question.

• 7:56Ryan Holiday?

  I mean, I would agree that it does seem sometimes that people lack a sense of urgency. At the same time, it also feels like the world is spinning faster than ever, and people are doing more things than ever. So it's, there's also a kind of a franticness. People are too urgent, and they don't take the long view often enough, particularly in the market, right? They care about, did it go up and down this year? When they should be measuring this investment, or this potential in decades or more, right? So I do think urgency is important. I think, maybe what we're talking about there is hustle, right? If you want something, if you're trying to do something, and then you're lollygagging or not, you know... Taking advantage of what's in front of you. You're gonna be disappointed when you don't get what you want.

• 8:39Ryan Holiday?

  At the same time, we also need that space for reflection and solitude and the time to think things over. So, yeah, I guess from a business perspective, if you don't have that urgency, Memento Mori is one way to do it. Also, though, I go like, look, if it's in my court, I'm gonna tackle it as soon as I can. I always think about my job as a business person, as a writer, whatever. It's like, I'm trying to hit the ball back into your court as fast as possible, right? I don't control what happens when it's in your court, but if it sits in my court two days longer than it should, that's two days that I won't get back, that I could have used to move forward. So I just focus on where is my urgency gonna speed things up?

• 9:19Ryan Holiday?

  And then the fact that other people maybe don't respond as quickly or as intensely as I would like them to be, I sort of leave that to them.

• 9:29Ryan Holiday?

  And then someone was asking about the inevitability and the unavoidable ability of suffering. And how do we balance the reality of that, but also enjoying life and living fully?

• 9:43Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, remember you are immortal, but then also remember to live, right? To be present here in the moment. To me, that's what Memento Mori does. It's not sort of dread or worry, it's not making everything pointless. To me, it gives me that urgency, that perspective, that connection to what I'm doing. So, again, like, I try to balance the books of my books each day. I'm tackling this project and I go, look, I don't know for certain that I'll live to the end of this, that I'll see it published, but I will know that if someone pulls it up from my computer today, where I stopped, it won't be a mess. I won't have phoned it in, I won't have put things off.

• 10:26Ryan Holiday?

  So to me, I'm just trying to remember to do my best here now in this present moment, but then also not to take things too seriously, you know, to go back to the donkey, not to get too wrapped up, too egotistical, too consumed with what I'm doing. Because the fragility of life should also sort of humble us and remind us to be here now while we can. And I think that enjoys, you know, fun and beauty and pleasure and all the things that Las Vegas offers, of course, as well. Thank you guys very much. I'm done.