You Can Let This Make You Miserable, Or Come To Terms With It | Ask DS

It doesn't matter how important you are. It doesn't matter how much money you have. It doesn't matter how used to getting your way you are, or how much you have planned and prepared. A single driver can decide to slow down lanes of traffic and lines of cars. A single bureaucrat can decide not to accept your paperwork, not to approve your application. One person with a grudge can tie you up in months, or years of lawsuits–one lawyer can bleed you more than you ever thought possible. One jerk can pass a virus to you and your family...or worse. We just have to learn to accept that we are not in control.---And in today's Ask Daily Stoic, Ryan answers questions about the role that ignoring negativity plays in living happily, how we can inspire others to expand their minds, and how he defines success in relation to the Stoic virtues.✉️ 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.

• 0:45Ryan Holiday?

  You can let this make you miserable, or you can come to terms with it. It doesn't matter how important you are. It doesn't matter how much money you have. It doesn't matter how used to getting in your own way you are or how much you have planned or prepared. A single driver can slow down lanes of traffic or lines of cars. A single bureaucrat can decide not to accept your paperwork, not to approve your application. One person with a grudge can tie you up in months or years of lawsuits. One lawyer can bleed you for more than you ever thought possible. One jerk can pass a virus to you and your family, or worse. There's an old story about a powerful politician who asked for an extra pad of butter from their waiter at a banquet. "Sorry," the waiter said, "one pad per person."

• 1:29Ryan Holiday?

  Indignant, the politician began to rant and rave, going on about how if only the waiter knew who he was dealing with. "Well, do you know who I am?" the waiter replied. "No," the politician responded. "I'm the guy with the butter," he said. Marcus Aurelius has a cryptic allusion to a customs officer, a toll booth operator in meditations, suggesting that even he and his powerful entourage occasionally felt these very human choke points. They are timeless. They may not be distributed evenly or equally, but they are universal. No one avoids them all. No one can fight them all. We just have to learn how to accept that we are not in control, that we must, from time to time, or most of the time, experience the consequences of other people's decisions,

• 2:12Ryan Holiday?

  their whims, their vices, their mistakes, their egos. We can let this make us miserable, or we can come to terms with it. We can rail against the world, be angry at the causes of all of this, or we could remember what Marcus said, "That the world won't notice or care, and there is no reason to add frustration on top of frustration."

• 2:39Speaker 01

  Regards to really, the real, like, I see a theme running behind stoicism is objectivity versus subjectivity, and particularly in terms of controlling what you can control and controlling your reactions. And the line that struck me from today's email is what you were saying about what somebody actually says versus what you hear, where the problem is, what's the actual problem there? So I'm just wondering, what kind of strategies or tips do you have for situations like that?

• 3:15Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I think we had an email a few years back from, that was about a quote from Ruth Bader Ginsburg, where someone was asking about her secret to, you know, 50 years of marriage, or whatever. And she said that her mother, or mother-in-law, had told her when she got married, she said, "You know, in a long marriage, it helps to be a little bit deaf." And, meaning that, what I take that to mean, and I think it pertains in the wider scope to stoicism, if you want to be happy, if you want to be undisturbed, part of this is about just ignoring some of the things that are happening around you. If you've got two sort of fine of an antenna, you're going to pick up a lot of stuff

• 3:59Ryan Holiday?

  that inevitably is going to...

• 4:05Ryan Holiday?

  Upset you, make you angry. And, and I think, so, so for me, this is like sort of about my news, I would say this is your news diet. This is, you know, sort of who do you spend time with? Where do you live? You know, sort of shaping the worldview that you have to the degree that that is in your control goes a long way towards, you know, make, being conducive to happiness or serenity or, or peace.

• 4:33Speaker 01

  Perfect. Perfect. That's a, that's a great answer. Is there any books you could recommend on that topic?

• 4:40Ryan Holiday?

  Um, I like the Cal Newport book, Digital Minimalism. I think that's great. Um, let me see about information diet. What would I like? Um, I don't know. It's kind of one of those things where I, I'm not sure if there's like a book that teaches you how to do. I, yeah, I don't, I don't have, I don't have a great recommendation, but let me think more about that. But I, I, I do like that mantra, sort of garbage in, garbage out, you know, sort of how, how you shape your world, what your influences are, what brings, uh, what you bring into your life, it determines how happy you're going to be.

• 5:15Speaker 01

  Okay. Great. Thank you so much.

• 5:18Speaker 02

  Hello.

• 5:19Ryan Holiday?

  Hi.

• 5:20Speaker 02

  So exciting. Well, I'm completely new to be on Stoic, so thank you so much for everything.

• 5:24Ryan Holiday?

  Of course.

• 5:25Speaker 02

  It's actually a little bit related with the previous questions. So I, I lead a very big team and I also teach, so I have tons of students and a lot of them are very fixed mindset, right? So I, you know, from the learnings of today is like, you know, we can only, we should only focus on what we can control. I completely understand the concept, but how can I help others to walk the path of stop being so fixed mindset when you want to explore creativity, right? And you need, you know, to be in like more creative space.

• 6:00Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, so obviously, the Carol's rec book, uh, growth mindset is fantastic. I, I think growth mindset is one, I think the concept itself is helpful, right? Just to understand that there's such a thing as a growth mindset versus a fixed mindset. I think even that concept teaches you something. I love this idea of agency, right? What, how, do you believe that you have agency or no? And it might be, that might be a weird concept coming from the Stoics, because so much of what the Stoics talk about is sort of resigning. Uh, there's the, the idea of acquiescence or ascent, you know, sort of how do you ascent to the things that are outside your control? And, and so, yes, the Stoics did believe that there was some areas of life that were fixed,

• 6:44Ryan Holiday?

  but I think they were very, very focused on where they did have agency and sort of using that agency to the best of their ability. And I, I feel like it's impossible to be a creative person or an artist or a creator of any kind if you don't have belief in, in agency. Because otherwise, one, what is the point? But two, how do you actually do the thing? It's all about taking the raw materials that exist around you or that you've been given and, uh, deciding to make use of them in some way. That, that you have, as constrained as you are, even if you were an artist in the Soviet Union, you know, believing that you have agency over these characters on the page

• 7:28Ryan Holiday?

  and that you're gonna, you're gonna make something of that. To me, I think one of the, one of the alarming trends of today's world is, you know, as we focus on these things which do exist, you know, systemic injustices, um, you know, systemic problems, uh, you know, history, uh, the, the, the sort of intersecting forms of, uh, of, of oppression or, or what have you, all this stuff exists. But it also, you know, uh, runs right into the other trend of we've never had more agency or freedom, uh, than we do right now. And so, do, are you focused on where you don't have agency? Or are you focused on where you do have agency?

• 8:13Ryan Holiday?

  To me, that's the defining question, both of, of an individual's life, but also of a creator's life.

• 8:20Speaker 02

  Very cool. Thank you so much.

• 8:22Ryan Holiday?

  Of course.

• 8:23Speaker 03

  Um, I decided to focus on strategies for success and I stumbled on doing the wrong thing. Cause I was like going like one I was thinking about. So two ideas that stem my question for today is for you, Ambily, actually.

• 8:37Ryan Holiday?

  Okay.

• 8:39Speaker 03

  So I was reminded of Seneca when, uh, when he got exiled, but he got sent back.

• 8:45Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 8:46Speaker 03

  Everybody thinks he's a hypocrite. Like, why, why did you teach Nero? Cause he ended up, he ended up killing him.

• 8:51Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 8:52Speaker 03

  Um, like to dive into context, like what I think, why he did that? Because it started with his own conviction. It's because I believe his reference for God, why he got exiled back, not exiled back, but returned back is because God gave him that freedom. And so that was my first idea. And then the second idea was the Matthew McConaughey selfish, uh, selfish. Your selfish conviction, kind of like stems that, uh, that outer like consensus. So my question is, based on your own experiences, what is your definition of success, living by these stoic virtues?

• 9:31Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I, I did an article a few months back where I sort of said that my definition of success is autonomy. Like how much sort of control do I have over the direction of my own life? Um, so, so Seneca and I might disagree there, uh, in, in that he seemed to, to sort of see success as, uh, sort of being at the center of things, right? I would argue that Seneca's best contributions came not working for Nero, but the writing that he did, you know, in the period of exile. But, but I also understand that different people have different callings and it may well have been that, that he felt like, look, what I'd personally rather do is, you know, stay here and write and be a philosopher.

• 10:13Ryan Holiday?

  But if I don't take this job, somebody else worse will do it, right? And I think that's, that's sort of what kept Seneca going probably longer than he should have. Some sense of like, al- almost a sort of a, an obligation, um, or that he was almost trapped by it. Uh, when I, when I think about success, I, I think about, am I doing what I feel like I was meant to do? Or am I doing it? Or doing things in a way that is because it's how everyone else is doing it, right? So, so to me, the, the idea of that autonomy is not just like, hey, am I in control of my

• 10:54Ryan Holiday?

  schedule or not, but it's like, how control, how in control of my own destiny am I, right? So like, I want to be able to write, but I also want to be able to write the books that I want to write. So let's say I was selling five times as many books, but I had much less control over what those was in those books because a publisher decided, or because the market decided, or the trends decided. I would view that as actually being less successful than I am now. So, so that, but, but I do, I do think, you know, whether it's Seneca or Marcus Aurelius, there is this sense, and maybe it's a, it's sort of a distinctly

• 11:37Ryan Holiday?

  Roman idea, maybe it's actually very inspiring, that they were sort of taken in a, their life was taken in a direction that, that perhaps they didn't want to go, but they felt obligated to go for the sake of the common good. Do you know what I mean? And I, and that's what, that's why they call it public service, right? It's service. You're in service of something larger than oneself. And to a certain degree, Seneca did that. To another degree, when you really get into it, it looks like he was also sort of enriching himself. So it's hard to know why he was doing it.

• 12:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 12:14Ryan Holiday?

  But great question.