You’re Not Dead Yet… | 9 Stoic Secrets For Self-Mastery (From Experts)

Marcus Aurelius was already quite old while writing Meditations. He was sick and surrounded by plague. Seneca was a marked man from the moment he left Nero’s service. But as aware as these men were of their ticking clocks, they were also quite aware that they were not dead yet. Seneca wrote many of his most beautiful letters in those final years.---And in today's Daily Stoic video excerpt, Ryan shares 9 Stoic Secrets from some of the great thinkers of the modern world: Alexander Ludwig, Tom Brady's Sports Psychologist Greg Harden, Joe Rogan, Robert Greene, Guy Raz, Steven Pressfield, Tony Gonzalez, Carli Lloyd, and Chris Bosh that will help you get the most out of your life and continue on the path to self-mastery.✉️ 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. On Tuesdays, we take a closer look at these Stoic ideas, how we can apply them in our actual lives. Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy.

• 0:25Ryan Holiday?

  We're not dead yet. Marcus Aurelius was already quite old while writing meditations. He was sick and surrounded by the plague. Seneca was a marked man from the moment he left Nero's service. Yet, as aware as these men were of their ticking clocks, they were also quite aware that they were not dead yet. Seneca wrote many of his most beautiful letters in those final years. Marcus Aurelius managed to bring meditations to the most perfect conclusion. He worked hard at his very important job. Both managed to do good for their country, for their families, for themselves. While each of us can go at any moment, and some of us have been told distressing news by doctors, which gave us even more clarity about exactly how little time we may have left, this doesn't change the fact

• 1:09Ryan Holiday?

  that we have this moment in front of us. In this moment, on this day, having woken up alive, there is so much that we can do. And as long as we are living, we can do our most important job, which Marcus defined not in a professional context, but as being and doing good. Someday, you will be dead, but the good news is you are not dead yet. So how will you spend this day, this life? That is a question you can answer. That is something in your control. The one thing that all great people have in common is self-discipline. No one becomes great at what they do, at anything, without a strong command of themselves. Seneca famously says, in fact, that no one is fit to rule who has not first mastered themselves. So

• 1:53Ryan Holiday?

  in today's episode, we want to talk about that. How do you cultivate the discipline, the self-command, the ability to keep yourself in check, to do the things you should do and to not do the things you shouldn't do? And over the years, I've talked to people who are masters at so many different things, great writers, politicians, military leaders, athletes, people who have had to practice this in the real world. I'm Ryan Holiday. I'm the author of a number of books about Stoic philosophy. I've spoken to the NBA and the NFL, sitting senators, special forces leaders. But in today's episode, we're going to talk to some experts about discipline and how this This discipline helped them achieve their destiny of whatever it is that they do. I'm going to talk about the power of self-control and figuring out like.

• 2:38Alexander Ludwig?

  I always tell people, they're like, I want to be an actor and I want to do this. It was like, the only reason I am where I am in my career, or that I have one, is because I always made a promise to my young self. I said, if I'm 80 years old or jobless, at least I will have made my 12-year-old self proud.

• 2:53Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 2:54Alexander Ludwig?

  You know, because this is what I knew, I just had this knowing I had to do. I can't promise you that it will happen when you want it to or how you want it to. But if you love it.

• 3:04Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 3:05Alexander Ludwig?

  You know, with everything that you are, and you do it over and over and over again, it will happen for you. If you study, if you train, if you love it. And the irony in it is that the love and the joy is in the process of doing it.

• 3:17Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 3:17Alexander Ludwig?

  That's the most important thing is once you actually fall in love with what you're doing, the outcomes just happen.

• 3:22Greg Harden?

  Because you do realize the mental game is the game.

• 3:26Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 3:27Greg Harden?

  Tom Brady, it's easy to reference Tom because most people have seen his.

• 3:33Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 3:33Greg Harden?

  Tryout video. And they've seen that he wasn't jumping higher, lifting more, or running faster than anyone.

• 3:43Ryan Holiday?

  That draft photo of him in 2000, he just looks like a, basically a regular guy.

• 3:48Greg Harden?

  Yes, and, but you couldn't measure this or this.

• 3:52Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 3:53Greg Harden?

  That's what you can't measure.

• 3:54Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 3:55Greg Harden?

  Because his mental game was superior to everyone else's.

• 3:58Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 3:58Greg Harden?

  This guy, we'd have to tell him to go home because everybody else is begging him to watch Family. He's like.

• 4:05Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 4:05Greg Harden?

  He's living in the film room.

• 4:08Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 4:09Greg Harden?

  Just trying to study and figure out how to approach his, the game. And, but his ability to see what the average person can't see. Again, the mental game is the game.

• 4:23Alexander Ludwig?

  Difficult things are good for you, and they're good for your mind. That's what people don't understand, that don't pursue them. There's, in America, unfortunately, there's this sort of intellectual elitism. There's this, this mindset that some very.

• 4:37Speaker 03

  Smart people have because they're they're very good at certain intellectual pursuits and they look down upon pursuits that are physical in nature. Because because of this sort of prejudice, they have this idea and it's I think it's also like a fear of encountering something that you're not good at or something that's going to humiliate you and something's going to make you feel bad. It's like they maybe came from gym class, maybe came from, you know, being forced to participate in sports when they were younger and they didn't enjoy it. So they have this thing in their head that there's no value there. That's when your mind has to tell your body who the fuck's in charge.

• 5:16Speaker 03

  But that's what it is. It's like you have to be able to endure. You have to be able to tell your body that this is what we do. And the more you do it, the easier it is been. I made a video about it today when I was doing the cold plunge. Because it's like it's a it's so much easier than it used to be, but it's still hard. But it's just easy because I'm accustomed to the grind of it because I do it every day. So I just get in there or almost every day. There's something to that that's so valuable that doesn't get emphasized enough in our modern day conversations. And it doesn't get emphasized in in media. It doesn't get talked about. It's like you have to search for that. You have to search for this idea that struggle is difficult.

• 5:59Speaker 03

  Or, you know, like the title of your book, the obstacle is the way like getting through things is how you you build a stronger foundation. It's how you develop character. It's how the mind understands how to manage difficult situations.

• 6:14Robert Greene?

  The proper idea to me is sort of a lot of what I meditate about and is in Buddhism. Where you don't try to repress your emotions because first of all, you can't. We are emotional animals. And if ever you have tried to repress your emotions, particularly in a state of meditation, you see you have zero control over them, right? They're popping up, you know, it's the way we're wired. So the proper I stance is I'm not going to repress emotions, but I'm going to understand them. I'm going to see them as they occur. There's a degree of distance. I'm going to see that I'm angry in this moment. I like to imagine it as if I'm six inches away from myself. I don't know why that metaphor come up.

• 6:56Speaker 03

  Only six inches? That doesn't seem that far.

• 6:58Robert Greene?

  Well, I'm it's out this side. It's like here. However, that's like a more like a foot, I guess. Right? And I'm looking at what I'm thinking or feeling from that distance, almost from the outside, and I'm still feeling it, but I'm seeing it as if it's from, as if I'm another person. And this is a strange concept. Yeah. But you can observe your own emotions while you're feeling them. And then you, they don't have power over you. Then you can say, okay, I'm angry. Why am I angry? So number one, I recognize the emotion. Number two, why am I angry? Is it stemmed from something weeks ago, months ago, or earlier today? And then what do I do with my anger? Sometimes you want to use your anger. You want to channel your anger. So when you're in sports, if you don't have that kind of drive and that anger,

• 7:43Robert Greene?

  when you're in a bet, you know, when you're down by 12 points. It's like an extra gear. Yeah. You can pull, yeah. There's a little bit of anger and even, I don't know, of hatred or something. You just despise the enemy. You're going to crush them, right? You use that emotion. But as Phil Jackson said, if that emotion controls you throughout 48 minutes of a game, you're useless. You drain yourself, you can't control it. You also make mistakes. Make mistakes. So you need to be focused, but you also need to be able to use those emotions. That's where I use that metaphor of the rider and the horse, which I've repeated many, many times. Maybe that's another medallion that we could. Yeah. Can manufacture. No, no, that's a great idea.

• 8:21Speaker 05

  You reach a point where you're, you know, you're, you're being funneled into a bucket of all the best players. Everybody that I was playing with were the same me, just in a different state, in a different section of the country. So there's got to be some sort of separation of what's going to keep you there and what's going to allow you to, to keep staying, you know, at the top. And I think it, it ultimately starts with passion. I mean, that, that for me is a non-negotiable. If you don't have any passion and love for what you do, it's going to be just treated as a job. It's going to be treated as, you know, this monotonous thing that you just go through life. But, I mean, I loved playing.

• 9:05Speaker 05

  That round ball was, was my first love, you know, and.

• 9:10Speaker 05

  It was never about the money. It was never about the fame, the glory, nothing. It was purely because of the beautiful game. But when you step in between those lines, and I always stepped in between those lines, it was like everything else around me just paused. You know, it was just, it was like time stood still and I'm just playing this game. And yeah, it was, it was, it was pretty amazing.

• 9:31Speaker 06

  I always, I always had other things, you know, language, guitar and music came a little later. I had given up. I gave up on it in my mid twenties, early twenties. That's why I, you know, uh, went back to it. But like, I always, I always wanted to get, do some things to take my mind off of basketball. Sure. Right? It's, it's a lot of, lot of flights, a lot of bus rides. So, you know, you need some hobbies. I didn't think of it this way, but um, I had a friend that told me, you know, hobbies lead to greatness. And, and I, I always thought that fascinating and, and just that made me look back on things. And, and I did these things just to kind of get my mind off of the game. Sure. Because, you know, I was all into basketball. That is all I did, but I also had other interests.

• 10:15Speaker 06

  And, and one of the things that I found was like, so for instance, during the playoffs, I would cook. The day before a game, I would cook dinner because you have to concentrate on the meal or it's gonna suck. Right. You know, so I'm looking at the time, I'm checking the meat, I'm making sure I don't burn, boil the water over. It, it's a thing that I have to focus on. Sure. You know, because if I don't, my brain is gonna start going and then we're gonna start thinking about tomorrow and I'm gonna be back in that rabbit hole. Right. Which is fine. Sure. You don't wanna be there all the time. And one of the things I found is that, once I start relaxing in my cooking or in me playing the guitar or in me studying for something in language,

• 10:59Speaker 06

  I see some weird connection. To where I think about basketball. But it'd be like, oh, okay, I could put that to the side. It's like, it was this crazy thing of no, you know, no, no judgment. Wow, I never thought of that before. This is the move I'm gonna do tomorrow. I got it.

• 11:16Ryan Holiday?

  Right. Yeah, sometimes when you're thinking about something else, you create room for your brain sort of subconsciously to solve some problem that we talked about will for will. You know, if you're, I gotta solve this, I gotta solve this, I gotta solve. You're not gonna make any progress.

• 11:31Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. And I think I read something somewhere like Einstein played the violin. If he ran into a problem, he just played violin for days, weeks, hours, whatever it took. So I always thought, I thought that pretty fascinating. And that's kind of what I started using my hobbies for.

• 11:48Ryan Holiday?

  Because the grind will grind you down if you don't have anything to refresh.

• 11:53Speaker 06

  All the way down and you can stay in it. You know, I was working with this, um, with a video game team in the Overwatch League. And it's these Korean kids, you know, living in LA, competing. And they weren't doing too good. They're supposed to be the best team in the world and they weren't doing too good. And their thing is to be like, okay, 18 hours a day.

• 12:13Ryan Holiday?

  Playing video games.

• 12:14Speaker 06

  Playing video games like, hey, guys, you know what? Sometime, yo, go to the park. Sometimes you just stink.

• 12:22Speaker 06

  I've been there plenty of times. Sometimes you just need to go in there and be like, yeah, get out of here. Go for a walk, go eat a delicious meal, go do something else, get out of here. You know, there is, you know, a lot of something to take from, from just taking time off. There that is, you know, you do need time to repair your brain and your body to, to be able to compete at maximum level.

• 12:53Ryan Holiday?

  When I wrote The Daily Stoic eight years ago, I had this crazy idea that I would just keep it going. The book was 366 meditations, but I'd write one more every single day and I'd give it away for free as an email. I thought maybe a few people would sign up. Couldn't have even comprehended a future in which three quarters of a million people would get this email every single day and would for. Almost a decade. If you want to get the email, if you want to be part of a community that is the largest group of Stoics ever assembled in human history, I'd love for you to join us. You can sign up and get the email totally for free. No spam. You can unsubscribe whenever you want at dailystoic.com/email.

• 13:42Ryan Holiday?

  Thank you.