7 Viral Speeches About Stoicism | Ryan Holiday Speaking

On today’s episode of the podcast we’ve compiled some of Ryan Holiday’s best and most viral talks about Stoicism. Few writers have done more to bring ancient solutions to help solve our modern problems than Ryan. By age 33, his philosophically driven bestselling books have sold over four million copies and spent more than 200 weeks on bestseller lists. Ryan provides a framework for overcoming obstacles, scaling new challenges and battling both the ups and downs and life. Profiled by the New York Times, Sports Illustrated and ESPN, Ryan counts among his clients and followers some of the biggest names in business, tech, culture and professional athletics. Book Ryan Holiday to speak at your event, go to: https://ryanholiday.net/speaking/If you are looking for gifts for family members and friends, the 2021 Daily Stoic Gift Guide is here to help! This year’s guide features a bundle of books signed by Ryan Holiday, our new page-a-day desk calendar, the four virtues medallion, and more. Click here to give the gift of Stoicism this holiday season! KiwiCo believes in the power of kids and that small lessons today can mean big, world-changing ideas tomorrow. This holiday season, give the gift of a fun, hands-on holiday experience with KiwiCo. KiwiCo is a subscription service that delivers everything your kids will need to make, create and play. Get 50% off your first month plus FREE shipping on ANY crate line with code STOIC at kiwico.com. DECKED truck bed tool boxes and cargo van storage systems revolutionize organization with a heavy-duty in-vehicle storage system featuring slide out toolboxes. DECKED makes organizing, accessing, protecting, and securing everything you need so much easier. Get your DECKED Drawer System at Decked.com/STOIC and get free shipping. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://DailyStoic.com/dailyemailCheck 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

• 0:03Speaker 00

  Welcome to the Weekend Edition of The Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these Stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space, when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal,

• 0:46Speaker 00

  and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring. As you know, Stoicism has had a big impact on my life, and it's helped me so much through the last 15 years. And it's something I try to share with others. Sometimes that's a book recommendation. One of the things we've tried to do over the years is create some physical embodiments of Stoic philosophy, just sort of physical reminders of these ideas. I've got the Marcus Aurelius bust on my desk. My whole office, my home even, is sort of reminders of these ideas from the ancient Stoics. Maybe that's something you would want this time of year, or as you're looking to give something to someone in your life, to introduce them to the ideas of Stoicism. Maybe that's members of your team or your unit.

• 1:31Speaker 00

  Maybe that's a friend you know who's going through something. Anyways, we put together a 2021 gift guide of these things. You can check that out at dailystoic.com/giftguide. It's 10 awesome gift ideas for the Stoics in your life. The Obstacle is the Way leather-bound book, The Daily Stoic leather-bound book. We've got action guides. We've got digital courses. There's the Daily Stoic Life membership. We've got signed personalized editions of all my books. Awesome stuff like that for you or for someone in your life. Check that out at dailystoic.com/giftguide.

• 2:06Speaker 00

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another Sunday episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I still remember the very first public talk I ever gave as an author. It was in Brazil in 2012. It was not good. I'm sure it's on the internet somewhere. But I really struggled. I was nervous. I was not confident. Didn't know exactly what I wanted to say, but I've now given literally hundreds, possibly thousands. I think it's more like hundreds. It's definitely more like hundreds. Talks all over the world. I was even supposed to give a talk to Antarctica a few years ago. That fell through. But if I had, I think that would put me on every continent or close to, I think that'd be every continent. Anyways, it's been a joy of mine to talk about Stoicism to all sorts

• 2:51Speaker 00

  of different crowds from NBA locker rooms to military bases, to hedge fund boardrooms, to nonprofits, even schools. It's been a joy of mine. I learn a lot, giving the talks, seeing what the audience work. But anyways, here in today's episode, it's a collection of some of my most popular talks, viral moments from talks here or there that have been posted on the internet. And yeah, it's been fun. I hope you like it. I hope there are some lessons here that will help you apply Stoicism in your actual life. And hey, if you want to have me come talk to one of your groups, you can check out my website,

• 3:36Speaker 00

  ryanholiday.net, and there is the speaking info there. Sadly, over the last two years, most talks have gone virtual, which has been cool, obviously, to keep people safe and not having to travel far away from home. I've definitely appreciated that. But I do miss the rush of being in front of an audience, going to cool places, meeting cool people. And one day, that will be back. But for now, this video will have to suffice. Here are some of the best, most viral moments from my talks about Stoicism for your Sunday morning, afternoon, or wherever you happen to be in the world.

• 4:10Speaker 00

  It begins with getting up early. On my farm, I like to wake up early. I don't have an alarm clock. My kids are my alarm clock. They get up insanely early, but I'm up, right? And I never, ever in my life have regretted getting up early. It's been hard in the moment. I get that. Marcus Aurelius even talks in meditations. He goes, "I don't want to get up." And he says, "Why not?" This is a conversation with himself. He says, "It's so warm here." Right? And he says, "But is this what you were put on this planet to do? To huddle under the covers and stay warm?" Because, no, get up and do what you were meant to do. Right? So I've never regretted getting up early. I'm always glad after that I did it. The hard part is actually doing it. But I wake up early, and in these moments, before other people, before the obligations, before the interruptions,

• 4:55Speaker 00

  before the distractions, you are free. It is quiet. You're in control. You don't have to be anywhere. You don't have to do anything. You are still. These mornings are so important. The writer Toni Morrison talks about how, as she was starting as a writer, she had a job in publishing, but she had to find time to actually do her writing. And she couldn't do it in the afternoon when she was fried and tired. She couldn't do it at night after she'd just gone through an exhausting day. She had to get up early. She said she would get up at around 4:00 a.m. And it became this ritual of writing. She needed to be mid-sentence, mid-paragraph, whatever it was, as the sun came up. Watching this transition from darkness to light was the sort of magical sacred time that she did what she needed to do.

• 5:40Speaker 00

  Right? And so the mornings, to me, are really important. How you start the day determines how successful the day is going to be. And then if you stack these on top of each other, this is where you're going to be successful, right? So I get up early. I do my work. We'll talk a little bit more about this. But I get up early. I want to own the morning, right? And of course, not everyone's a morning person. As I said, Marcus Aurelius is not a morning person. That's not the point. If you're having trouble getting up early, if you're not a morning person, I do have a magical secret, a really easy strategy that will help you get up earlier better. And it's actually the title of a book I like to read to my kids, which is "Go the Fuck to Sleep."

• 6:20Speaker 00

  The secret to waking up early in the morning is going to bed early, right? People go, "I can't wake up early." And then it's like, "Well, what's your evening routine?" So part of the morning routine is about the evening routine. Wrap up the evening correctly, you start the day properly. I think one of the things I found myself during the pandemic, you're exhausted, you're tired, you sit down on the couch, you feel like, "I can't do anything but just sit here and scroll on my phone, or sit here and watch Netflix." That is precisely when you have to have the discipline and the willpower to get up, go in your bedroom, and go the fuck to sleep, right? When you're tired, the solution is to go to sleep, not to sit there and veg out.

• 7:08Speaker 00

  So this is philosophy for doers. This is philosophy. Marcus Aurelius is the most powerful man in the world in his own time. He's the emperor of Rome. And every night, he practices Stoic philosophy. He sits down and he writes notes to himself about how to be a better person. And that work survives to us in a book called Meditations. And I was introduced to Meditations. I was about 19 years old. This is right before I dropped out of college. I had to buy it on Amazon. As you can see here, this is, uh, it's not working. Long before the days of Amazon Prime, I had to buy a few other books and wait several days for it to arrive. And as I did, I tore this book apart. It's what the economist Tyler Cowen would call a quake book. It shakes everything that I think that I know about the world.

• 7:52Speaker 00

  Now, admittedly, I'm 19 years old, so it's not a whole hell of a lot. But it shakes everything to the core for me. And really, it's a, actually, this is a picture of me reading Meditations after the next web conference here in 2013. I went to Rome. This is me on the Appian Way, where Marcus would have come to and from the city. And really, it's though it's a single passage in this book that has the most resonance for me. And I'll show that to you now. He's saying, "Our actions may be impeded, but there can be no impeding our intentions or dispositions because we can accommodate and adapt. The mind adapts and can..." ...to its own purposes, the obstacle to our acting. And then he concludes with the maxim that I've tried to live my life by.

• 8:37Speaker 00

  He says, "The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way." And so, this is the critical tenet of Stoicism. Essentially, in any and every situation, no matter how bad or seemingly undesirable it is, we have the opportunity to practice a virtue. And virtue is a bit loaded, so we'll replace that with excellence. Everything that happens to us is a chance to practice excellence. And this is, I think, best illustrated by a quote from Andy Grove, who's one of the CEOs of Intel. He's saying, "Bad companies are destroyed by crisis. Good companies survive them. Great companies are improved by them." The Stoics say over and over again, "We don't control what happens to us. We control how we respond." And so, we can always respond well. We can always respond with excellence.

• 9:20Speaker 00

  And we can turn this obstacle into an opportunity. And that's what I ultimately sat down and wrote a book about. This is how I've tried to approach my entrepreneurial ventures. That's how I try to approach my writing as a person who wakes up every day and struggles to try to be better at something.

• 9:37Speaker 00

  It's always harder than you expect. There are always more difficulties than you would want there to be. But we have to learn how to love that. The Stoics have this concept of amor fati, which really just translates to "a love of fate." It means that instead of fighting the things that happen, instead of resenting the things that happen, we say, "Ah, this is wonderful. This isn't something I have to put up with. It's something I get to do." Right? Marcus Aurelius, "It's not unfortunate that this happened. It's fortunate that it happened to me." And in fact, Marcus, sort of talking about this idea of amor fati, says that, you know, what you throw in front of a fire, what you throw on top of a fire, becomes fuel for that fire.

• 10:22Speaker 00

  He says, "It turns it all into flame and brightness. Turns it into heat. It uses it as fuel." That was actually one of my favorite pieces of advice that I got early on as a writer. It said, "Look, this is gonna be hard. You're gonna screw up. Things are not gonna go your way. Life is gonna happen to you. But the good news is, all of that stuff is fuel. It's all material. You can transform it into art. You can transform it into connection. You can transform it into sentences and books and whatever it is that you make." But it's not just writing that that's true for, it's all fields, right? If we didn't have our experiences, we wouldn't be able to have the insights, the connections, the ideas that allow us to move forward as creators and leaders.

• 11:08Speaker 00

  So we need this stuff to happen. And instead of resenting it, instead of running from it, we want to absorb it. We want to, want to turn it into flame and brightness. But think about what Marcus is saying. He's saying what you throw on top of a fire is fuel for the fire, consumes it. Except that's not strictly true, right? If the fire is weak, if the fire is going out, if the embers are growing cold, what you throw on top of the fire can put that fire out. So you have to cultivate this discipline of the will, this commitment, this tribe, this passion, this fire. And that's what allows you to transform the negative things, the adversity, into opportunity, into fuel, into advantages, right? That's what we're trying to cultivate. And when you look at the greats of history, that's what they do. They take the worst things that have ever happened to them and they transform it.

• 11:53Speaker 00

  Malcolm Little goes to jail, a criminal. He emerges from jail as Malcolm X. His time in prison transforms him. You could argue the same is true for Nelson Mandela. The same is true for so many people that something happens to them, the thing that they never would have wanted to happen, the thing they fought from happening. And then they were able, instead of resenting it, instead of fighting it, instead of waiting for it to be over, they embrace it, they use it, they are transformed by it.

• 12:21Speaker 00

  It's easy to think about other people's ego and we can spot that pretty easy and we know when people's ego is holding them back. But where does your ego hold you back? That's what I want you to think about, right? What is ego preventing you from learning or doing? Where are you making decisions out of ego and how is that causing problems for you? Epictetus, one of the Stoic philosophers, I think he encapsulates where egos really holds us back. Says, "It's impossible for you to learn that which you think you already know." Right? If you think you're as good as you can be, you're right because you can't get any better, right? If you think you know everything, you're right because nobody can teach you anything. And so what we actually find is that the truly great in sports, in business, in life, in literature...

• 13:06Speaker 00

  What they're actually defined by is this incredible humility, this hunger to learn. They are perpetual students of their craft, right? Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Every person that you meet is better than you in something, and that's what you want to focus on." There's a great physicist, and he was saying, "Look, the more I learned about physics, the more I found out that I didn't know." What he said, "As your island of knowledge grows, so does the shoreline of ignorance," right? As you get better, as you're in this league a longer amount of time, as you go from playing to coaching, or playing to announcing, or playing to business, what you're constantly going to be exposed to is all the things that you didn't even

• 13:50Speaker 00

  know you didn't know, right? And so if you're the kind of person who reacts negatively to that, like if you don't know something, you stick your head in the sand, you get defensive, you get turned off, you're not going to get any better. But if you're the kind of person that likes being a student, that's perpetually obsessed with learning and getting better, and sees, is actually confident enough to say, "I don't know," right? "I don't know, tell me about it," right? I find myself all the time, people ask me a question about something, because I don't want to admit I don't know about it, I pretend that I know, and then they skip over teaching me about that thing, right? And so if you think you know everything, you don't get any better. And this is where ego tears us apart.

• 14:32Speaker 00

  Ego also prevents us from collaborating effectively with other people. Pat Riley talks about "the disease of me," how it tears teams apart. And Cleveland, the city of Cleveland is a great example of this, right? How many championships did LeBron James and Kyrie Irving leave on the table because they couldn't get along, right? Shaq and Kobe, it's the same thing. Michael Jordan, you know, incapable of getting along with his teammates because he couldn't, these great people can't understand that not everyone is wired just like them. They can't understand their motivations. They can't understand that different people are needing and wanting different things. They live in a world other than your own bubble, right? Kyrie Irving's such a sad example. Example of this, right?

• 15:17Speaker 00

  He actually didn't want LeBron to come back to Cleveland. Wrap your head around that. The best player maybe in the history of your game wants to come home and bring a championship to your city. And he says, "No, but now I'm not gonna be the number one guy on the team anymore." What kind of bullshit is that, right? And the same thing ends up happening to him when he goes to Boston. And look, the same thing's gonna happen to him in Brooklyn if you can't figure out how to keep this ego in check. But LeBron's not blameless in this either, right? It doesn't occur to LeBron that this had been Kyrie's team and that Kyrie hadn't made as much money as him and that Kyrie wasn't as famous as him and that Kyrie was not getting

• 16:02Speaker 00

  the same special treatment as LeBron. It totally catches LeBron by surprise when Kyrie demands to be traded, right? And this is ego on both sides. It's teammates living so much in their own bubble, so much in their own head, so ignorant of what other people are going through, what other people want and need, that they leave wins on the table. So the disease of me, it's not just costly and it makes us miserable, it does make us miserable, but it tears teams apart, right? And if you think back even again to the Bible, the story of David and Goliath is ultimately a story of ego versus confidence, right? Goliath thinks he's invincible. "No one can beat me. Look how big I am. No one's beaten me before.

• 16:46Speaker 00

  Obviously, I'm unbeatable." David hears the challenge from Goliath and he says, "I think I can do that, but I'm small. I don't have the advantages that Goliath has." And this is why he fishes a few stones from the river and he attacks Goliath in a surprise. He hits him with a stone with his sling. And then, this is a famous painting of the story, he cuts off Goliath's head with his own sword, but engraved here on the hilt is the acronym H-O-C-S, which stands for humility kills pride, right? This is the timeless cycle in prize fighting, right?

• 17:27Speaker 00

  The underdog beats the overconfident champion, becomes the champion, becomes overconfident, becomes egotistical, stops training, stops getting better, and then boom, they're beaten by a younger version of themselves, right? That's the cycle, that's what ego does. So confidence and ego isn't the same thing. Confidence is an understanding of our strength, but also an awareness of where we're weak, of where we need to get better. Ego is this sort of delusional sense that we have no weaknesses and we have unlimited strengths. And so we see in philosophy, there is no ancient philosophical school or religion that says ego's great, we need more ego, ego is the key to happiness, right?

• 18:11Speaker 00

  They all say the opposite for a reason. And then that leads us into the last lesson I wanted to talk with you guys about. This is the idea of an inner scorecard, right? What does, how do you measure success? How do you actually determine what success is for you, right? Is it winning? Is it making lots of money? Or is it being the best version of yourself, right? Warren Buffett, super rich, super successful by any external scorecard, right? Any external measure. He's one of the best investors and financiers to ever live, right? And yet he's saying that it's more important to live by an inner scorecard than an outer scorecard. But this is a picture of Nick Saban

• 18:57Speaker 00

  ecstatically raising a national championship trophy. How is he unhappy in this moment, right? When I spoke to Alabama a couple of years ago, he and I talked about this. He was saying that the reason he can sometimes look unhappy when they're up by 45 points or when they've just won a championship is that he is holding himself and the team to a higher standard than just winning, right? John Wooden said the same thing. He's like, look, what matters is, did we do in a game what we set out to do in practice? Whether we win or lose is secondary to that. So if they, if you lose, but you did everything right, right? That's okay. But if you win...

• 19:42Speaker 00

  On a fluke, or because the other team blew it, and you did everything wrong, you don't get to give yourself credit for that success. And this is what this idea of an inner scorecard versus an outer scorecard, one of the ways you keep ego from creeping in is that you hold yourself to a higher standard than winning or losing, right? So I've got bad news. You're all gonna die. Every single one of us in this room is going to die. There's no exceptions to this rule. I'm not known for my predictions, but I feel pretty confident about this one.

• 20:20Speaker 00

  It's a fact. In fact, death is the one prophecy that has never failed. And I'm not disputing the fact that there have been all sorts of amazing, important breakthroughs in technology and in medicine. Here's a graph of life expectancy, even over just the last couple hundred years. It's definitely going in the right direction, right? We're living longer than ever before. This is wonderful. I would never deny that. But the heartbreaking fact remains that of everyone who has been born, the mortality rate remains at a steady 100%. And it's not going anywhere anytime soon.

• 21:05Speaker 00

  It's just a reality of life. Everyone that's born dies. In 1569,

• 21:15Speaker 00

  a French nobleman named Michel de Montaigne was thrown off a galloping horse. It was a horrendous accident. And as he lay, sort of broken and bloodied on the ground, he was more or less given up for dead. His friends carried his limp body back to his house. And he said he could feel life sort of dancing on the tip of his lips. It was coming in and out of consciousness. And he actually remembered feeling that if he went to sleep, he would never wake up. His grasp on life was that tenuous. And somehow, Montaigne does survive. He lives. And this experience fundamentally changes him. He'd sort of idled through life up until this point.

• 21:59Speaker 00

  He'd mostly done what other people wanted him to do, wasn't particularly motivated. And this experience, this brush with death, this reminder of his mortality, it energizes him. And a few years later, he publishes his first book of essays. He actually invents the essay. He becomes one of Europe's most celebrated writers. He becomes a confidant of the king. He serves as a diplomat. He travels all over Europe. And he even becomes mayor of his hometown. It's a fascinating sort of rejuvenation of his life. And in a way, it's kind of a timeless story, right? A brush with death changes life. We hear about someone who finds out they have cancer, and they quit their job, and

• 22:43Speaker 00

  they dedicate themselves to some cause, and it's the turning point in their lives. We hear about someone who finds out they don't have long to live, and it reminds them to reach out and reconnect with someone. It rejuvenates their relationships. And sometimes, I think, we even think about what we would do if we found out that we had a short time to live. If we were in the doctor's office, and the doctor came in, and he put his hand on our shoulder, and he said, you know, "You have cancer. You only have a short time to live." Well, the interesting thing is, we do have cancer, right? We do only have a short time to live. The prognosis was terminal the day you were born, right? And that's the bad news, right? The bad news is, you're going to die.

• 23:28Speaker 00

  The good news is, now that I've reminded you of this fact, now that we're here talking about this uncomfortable truth, you have a choice, right? How will you live? How will you respond? Who will you be, knowing that your death is an eventual reality, right? And this is what we're going to talk about today. This is what I'm thinking about. And what's so interesting is that, in the modern world, we can lose track of that connection to death, right? In the ancient world, death was a fundamental reality. It was a direct part of your life. People's day-to-day experiences. The plague could come and decimate an entire town or an entire country. A war could break out and everyone might lose a family member, or they might have to

• 24:13Speaker 00

  fight it themselves and witness death up close. Death wasn't always so antiseptic and distant, right? We were familiarized. People used to die in their own homes. They had this experience, this day-to-day contact with death. But what's interesting is even though death was way more familiar to people not long ago, their art, they built forms of reminding themselves of this fact pretty constantly. There's actually two genres of art. There's one, which is Vanitas. And if you've probably seen paintings like this, or you might notice this next time you walk through a museum, like, half the paintings all have a skull on them for some reason. This is a reminder of mortality. That's what that skull was supposed to represent. This is a famous Vanitas painting.

• 24:58Speaker 00

  It's time in the hourglass. It's life, which is the flower, and then the skull is the death. And you see this in countless paintings across history. You see it on tombstones, and you see it in buildings. What's interesting even is there's another genre called the Dance Macabre, the Dance of Death. And it's, there's almost these comical paintings showing skeletons, reminding people that they're mortal. There's a church in Prague that's actually decorated with the bones of the priests and the monks who serve the church. Decorated and scattered throughout Europe is something called a cadaver, they're called cadaver tombs. And they show what the person looked like in life, and then they show what they look

• 25:43Speaker 00

  like now. And often they have this Latin inscription on them, which just means like, "What I am, soon you will be." This morning, I went to Saint Stephen's Basilica, and you can see a mummified hand that's a thousand years old. This is the same sort of reminder. This is why we're supposed to see these things. Montaigne actually liked to play a drinking game with his friends. They would hold up a painting or a picture of a skeleton, and they would say, "Drink and be merry, for when you are dead, you will look like this." So inspired by their example, a few years ago, I started carrying a coin in my pocket. It's got the three symbols from that first painting I showed you. And in the front, it says memento mori, remember death. And in the back, it has a quote from Marcus Aurelius, who said, "You could leave life right now."

• 26:28Speaker 00

  And actually, the full quote is, "You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think." You could leave life right now. And it's true, right? Even with all the medical advancements that we have, even with all the technological breakthroughs that hopefully lie in the future, this won't help you if you get hit by a bus, right? This won't help you if you get drafted to fight in a war. This won't help you if you go out for a walk and your heart just decides to give up, right? These things happen. So I'm interested in how we can use this. I think you should take the thing that you're most afraid of, that you're most intimidated by, that's the most uncertain and uncomfortable, and you should look at it, you should stare at it. You should take these obstacles that we face in life and use them to your advantage.

• 27:12Speaker 00

  That's what the idea of the obstacle is the way means. It's how do we find a way forward through the thing that is most scary and most uncertain? And the good news is actually, when you stare and think about death, that it can have an energizing effect, right? When you know that your life is short or potentially uncertain, it concentrates your mind, it gives you focus, it gives you priorities.

• 27:39Speaker 00

  A key part of my morning routine, getting centered, getting to that place of stillness, is my journaling practice. I've done this for a long time, but I really locked into it in the pandemic because it was overwhelming. We have so much going on, so many conflicting feelings, scared, nervous, worried, what about this, what about that? All the things you have to do, all the things you're frustrated about, all the things that are unfair. The journal is the perfect place for that. I use a bunch of different journals. I have a journal, it's weird, I know I do my own journal, but there's a question that I ask each day, I answer the question. I have a gratitude journal I do. There's a really good journal I love called the One Line a Day Journal. So if you're, people are like, "Where do I start? I can't get started, I've tried to start, it's not worked." I love this one because everyone can do one sentence a day, right?

• 28:24Speaker 00

  And what I love about this journal is I'm now five years into it and there's, there's five slots on each page. So I can see where I was a year ago, two years ago, three years ago, four years ago. You can see, it's this awesome way to track progress, to track your moods. You can see how you have patterns. But the point is, it doesn't matter how you journal. It doesn't matter if you do it on your phone. It doesn't matter if you do it on a note card. It doesn't matter if you do it in a book. I don't really care. But the idea is take some time to sit down and reflect and explore your thoughts. Right? I do it in a lot of different ways. I do it when I'm traveling, I do it at home, but I always sit down and I do this journaling. Right? Even my, my work itself, I do on note cards, I'm always writing stuff down. Work it out on a piece of paper.

• 29:09Speaker 00

  There's something special about that, which goes to something I wanted to, to point out, which really struck me. I'm, I'm sure many of you, uh, read Anne Frank's diary when you were in school, you've heard of it. Um, you think about how insanely stressful and scary that would be. It'd be insanely stressful and scary to be a 13 year old girl, let alone locked in an attic with your parents and another family worried about, uh, you know, worried about what's happening in the world. But she has this great line in her diary that I think about. She says, "Paper is more patient than people." Instead of vomiting your thoughts on your employees, on your friends, on your coworkers, on the driver in front of you who's taking forever, um, put it on the page. The page is forgiving and patient.

• 29:52Speaker 00

  It keeps secrets, doesn't care, doesn't care if you're contradicting yourself. It doesn't care if you're being, uh, a baby. It doesn't care if you're whining. Just put it down on the page. The page will help. Right? And I love the idea of having distance between you and your thoughts. Part of the reasons we're worked up and anxious and stressed is that we're trapped in, in our heads with all this stuff. Right? And you get it out and you see it from a distance and you go, I don't even agree with my own thoughts here. Right? I don't even like this. I'm not going to choose to carry this around. So putting it down on the page is just really important. These are some of Kennedy's doodles during the Cuban Missile Crisis. He was writing notes to himself, thoughts.

• 30:32Speaker 00

  But you can see his sort of brainstorming, working out of the stressful situation he's in, and this is what journaling can help us do. I was in Milan a few years ago and I got to see some of Da Vinci's journals, right? And I think it's also important, just as a creativity exercise, right? The journaling, the working, the sketching out, this is what creates the work, right? You can't have The Last Supper without the journals, right? So the idea of exploring, keeping a commonplace book, a place you collect ideas, you work out your thoughts, this is a really important exercise.

• 31:10Speaker 00

  I think discipline is something you accumulate, it's something you build on. I'm actually in the middle of doing this series of four books. So the cardinal virtues, Christianity and in Stoicism are courage, temperance, which is self-discipline, justice and wisdom. And I think these four ideas are sort of the framework, actually cardinal comes from the Latin word cardos, which means hinge. The like success, life, being a good person hinges on courage, self-discipline, justice and wisdom. So I sort of see them as being related to that, but I find that chaos is way more stressful and harder than order and discipline. So, you know, by creating structure, and again, as we move into a more remote sort

• 31:52Speaker 00

  of work world, or where things are in flux or chaos, if that, if the discipline is not being imposed on you, it's going to have to come from you. So it's this internal thing that you have to work on, and it's, I think it's good, but it's just a challenge. And I've seen so many people struggle to adjust to, no one's telling me what to do, this is so wonderful, and then the break, they're like, oh shit, I have to tell myself what to do. Really think about like, what do you want your life to look like? What do you want a day in your life to look like? And a lot of times, we just have these kind of vague ideas of what success is, and it's usually more responsibility, more money, more recognition. But if you haven't really thought about what you want your day to look like,

• 32:35Speaker 00

  it's hard to evaluate opportunities as they go. And so I found increasingly, I enjoyed writing, I enjoyed thinking, I enjoyed having more autonomy over my life, all those things. And I hope this isn't a bad thing to tell a bunch of people at a company. But I wanted, I just was really thinking about what I wanted my life to look like, and that gave me a lot of clarity about the decisions that I needed to make. Because oftentimes, we just, again, we unthinkingly say yes, because somebody offered, because it sounds cool, because it is more lucrative. You know, people do this all the time. They kind of like, they really like their job, but then someone poaches, wants to poach them to a company, and the only improvement is that it's more money. And it's like, what are you going to do with that money, right? Maybe you actually really like the freedom or structure that you have in this,

• 33:19Speaker 00

  or it's wonderful that you only have a 10-minute commute, and now you're going to have an hour commute. We don't really think about how these things fit in the larger context of our life, and the sort of stillness, or happiness, or productivity we need to be great at what we do. And so I think we evaluate decisions or opportunities on the wrong set of criteria. My new book, Courage is Calling, is now officially a New York Times bestseller. Thank you so much to everyone who supported the book. It was literally and figuratively overwhelming. We signed almost 10,000 copies of the book. It's just, you know, it hit me right here, and I appreciate it so much. If you haven't picked up a copy,

• 34:01Speaker 00

  or you want to pick up a signed copy as a gift, please do. You can get your copy at dailystoic.com/courageiscalling, or you can just go to store.dailystoic.com.