Is This The Only Story? | Becoming An Expert In What Matters

Ryan talks about the question you should ask yourself before over reacting, and reads The Daily Stoic’s entry of the day. The Daily Stoic Leadership Challenge is a 9-week course that was built to mirror the kind of education that produced historically great leaders like Marcus Aurelius. It is now a recorded course, which means all participants will join the course and move through it at their own pace. Sign up at https://dailystoic.com/leadershipchallengeSign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/emailFollow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and 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.

• 0:06Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Thursdays, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from the book The Daily Stoic, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful co-author and collaborator, Stephen Hanselman. And so today, we'll give you a quick meditation from one of the Stoics, from Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, then some analysis from me. And then we send you out into the world to do your best to turn these words into works.

• 0:43Ryan Holiday?

  Is this the only story? Something happens. You have an emotional reaction. By now, you know that this is the basic starting point, the practice of Stoicism in the daily lives of us normal folks. Events are objective, our interpretations are not. They are a guess, a story, an opinion as to what's happened and what it means. And whether or not our actions are to be governed by those instant interpretations is a good indicator of exactly how stoically we're behaving. I recently interviewed Dr. Lisa Barrett, author of How Emotions Are Made, for the Daily Stoic Leadership Challenge, which, if you haven't done, should absolutely check out. I think it's one of the best things we've done.

• 1:25Ryan Holiday?

  Given Dr. Barrett's pioneering work in the study of emotion, we asked her to give us her view on Epictetus's famous observation, "Every situation has two handles," or "two interpretations." We decide which one to grab. We decide what story to tell ourselves. We decide how to react. Out of anger or with understanding, forgiveness or fear, lust or indifference, do we yell at our employees or teach them? Dr. Barrett liked the idea and added that there are usually more than two handles. She provided a slightly different lens by which we might look at Epictetus's observation. Instead of seeing the two handles, she said, "We might ask, 'Is this the only story?

• 2:08Ryan Holiday?

  Is this the only interpretation that fits here? No. What are my other options? What are some other stories I could make up about what happened here?'" Now, you don't have to have the imagination of an award-winning storyteller to look through this lens. As Dr. Barrett also talked about, you can reference your past experiences for guidance. The last time your kid spilled orange juice on you, you interpreted it as an accident and laughed about it. Instead of losing your temper this time, tell yourself that story again. The first time an employee used poor judgment, your first thought was to make this a wonderful opportunity to teach them something that you had learned the hard way also. So maybe go with that one again, instead of letting your mind race towards

• 2:50Ryan Holiday?

  paranoid assumptions about insubordination, or corporate espionage, or violations of fiduciary duty. Maybe they just had a bad day and made another honest mistake. In every situation, you can find a better way to tell yourself about the person who cut you off in traffic, about the cashier in the checkout line you're stuck in, about the email you still haven't gotten a reply to, about the player who isn't performing the way you need them to. You just need to be aware enough of the circumstances and of your mind's own tendency to react in order to consider the other options, to see the other handles, to ask, is this the only story? And look, if you haven't checked out the Leadership Challenge, you seriously

• 3:34Ryan Holiday?

  should. Dr. Lisa Barrett was just one of some of the world-class experts we interviewed for it. We interviewed Coach Shaka Smart, formerly of UT, now the head basketball coach at Marquette. We interviewed R.C. Buford, the GM and the architect of the Spurs dynasty. We interviewed Dr. Randall Stutman, one of the great leadership coaches of our time. We interviewed Annie Duke on better decision-making. We interviewed Major General Dan Kane on courage and routines and systems, all sorts of amazing stuff on how to be a better leader, plus hours and hours of conversation with me and some of my best writing on leadership and how to be a better leader, and just how to be a better person in the world. And so I hope you check it out. You can go to dailystoic.com/leadershiplchallenge. Check out the challenge,

• 4:19Ryan Holiday?

  bunch of awesome stuff in there. I'd love to have you be a part of it. And remember, Daily Stoic Life members, if you're not a member, get this course and all our other courses totally for free. So if you're thinking about signing up for that, this might be a great chance.

• 4:33Ryan Holiday?

  Becoming an expert in what matters. And I'm reading to you today from the Daily Stoic, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living by yours truly and my co-author and translator, Stephen Hanselman. You can get signed copies, by the way, in the Daily Stoic store. Over a million copies of the Daily Stoic in print now. It's been just such a lovely experience to watch it spend more than 250 weeks, consecutive weeks on the bestseller list. It's just an awesome experience. But I hope you check it out. We have a premium leather edition at store.dailystoic.com as well. But let's get on with today's reading. "Believe me, Seneca says in On the Shortness of Life, 'It's better to produce the balance

• 5:15Ryan Holiday?

  sheet of your own life than that of the grain market.' The things that people manage to become experts in—fantasy sports, celebrity trivia, derivatives in commodities markets, 13th-century hygiene habits of the clergy—we can get very good at what we're paid to do, or adapt at a hobby we wish we could be paid to do. And yet, our own lives, habits, and tendencies might be a complete mystery to us." Seneca was writing this important reminder to his father-in-law, who, as it happened, was for a time in charge of Rome's granary. But then his position was revoked for political purposes. "Who really cares?" Seneca was saying. Now you can focus that energy on your inner life. At the end of

• 6:00Ryan Holiday?

  your time on this planet, what expertise is going to be more valuable? Your understanding of matters of living and dying, or your knowledge of the 87 bears? What will help your children more, your insights into happiness and meaning, or that you followed breaking political news every day for 30 years?" I've said this before, but obviously being an informed citizen in a democracy is really important.

• 6:27Ryan Holiday?

  But people seem to think that being an informed citizen means watching a lot of MSNBC or Fox News or spending a lot of time on Twitter. But what you see with these folks is they know a lot of trivia, but they fundamentally don't understand human nature. They fundamentally don't understand right or wrong or virtue or the things that actually matter in life. I think it was Heraclitus who said, you know, these people study all these books for all these years and they fail to realize that day and night are one. What I take from that, as he's saying, is that they're missing the big picture. They're missing the eternal, deep truths of life in exchange for the trivia. You know, they, they run a great business.

• 7:09Ryan Holiday?

  They understand these events in fiction or art or sports or whatever it is, but they've fundamentally not come to grasp the truths of existence. And I think even what I love about Stoicism is that Stoicism isn't big, arcane, abstract questions, but practical ones. It's about understanding the balance sheet of one's life, as Seneca was saying. It's about understanding their self, understanding their emotions, understanding people. Like, I've said this a bunch of times now, but like, you know, you could follow breaking pandemic news, or you could read a book about the Spanish flu, which I've recommended a bunch of times. If you haven't read The Great Influenza yet, you should, it's incredible.

• 7:54Ryan Holiday?

  You could have followed one of Donald Trump's impeachments, or you could have read a biography of Nixon or Andrew Johnson. You know, it's better to go back further. It's better to look deeper. You could learn as much from Camus' The Plague as you could from, you know, the latest New York Times report. So I, I think what Seneca is saying is that we often understand everything but ourselves. We ask all the little questions instead of the couple of big questions, like, why am I here? What's important to me? What's right? What's wrong? And that's such a shame. Philosophy is supposed to be practical.

• 8:36Ryan Holiday?

  Philosophy is supposed to push us to understand ourselves and humans. Right? Like, the amount of people that focus on this or that and then just fundamentally don't understand how psychology works, or fundamentally understand how like the very system of government works. You know, people who are talking about what's going on in Ukraine and going, "Oh, let's put a no-fly zone over it." And then you're like, "Well, what is a no-fly zone?" Or they go, "I'm mad about critical race theory." Well, what is critical race theory? They don't know. They're just tied up in stuff, right? And they haven't thought about what the thing they're talking about would actually mean. So we talked about this before, about how certainty and arrogance is the root of real ignorance.

• 9:21Ryan Holiday?

  I also think it goes for, what are you gonna choose to know about? Trivial, ephemeral things? Are you gonna probe the deeper questions? Are you gonna probe yourself? Are you gonna look inward? Marcus really says, "Throw away your books." You know, he says this in meditations, and I don't think that meant, you know, then go watch the gladiatorial games. I think he meant, "Throw away your books and sit there and think. Sit there and get in touch with yourself. Sit there and really examine, think about the things you've already learned." That's what we're talking about. And it's just another sort of deeply powerful question from Seneca. As the Stoics tell us always, become an expert in the things that matter. Focus on the things that matter. Ask the questions that really matter.

• 10:05Ryan Holiday?

  Leave the trivia and nonsense to everyone else.

• 10:11Ryan 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... For 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,

• 10:55Ryan Holiday?

  and, this is the best part, 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.