Pod Insights The Daily Stoic Premium (🔓) Ask Daily Stoic: Ryan and UT Basketball Coach Shaka Smart Talk Self-Control and Using Your Time Wisely About this episode In today’s episode, Ryan and University of Texas basketball coach Shaka Smart talk about focusing on what you can control, how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected college basketball, and more. Coach Shaka Smart has been involved with college basketball since 1995 and has been a head coach since 2009. In 2011, he led the VCU Rams to a historic Final Four finish at the NCAA Tournament. Since then, he has become the head coach at UT Austin. This episode is brought to you by WHOOP. WHOOP is a fitness wearable that provides personalized insights on how well you’re sleeping, how much you’ve recovered from your workouts, and how much you’re stressed out from each day. It’s the ultimate whole-body tracker for someone who needs an all-in-one solution. Visit WHOOP.com and enter STOIC at checkout to save 15% on your order. This episode is also brought to you by GoMacro. GoMacro is a family-owned maker of some of the finest protein bars around. They're vegan, non-GMO, and they come in a bunch of delicious flavors—the perfect fuel for your summer expeditions. Visit http://gomacro.com and use promo code STOIC for 30% off your order over $60, plus free shipping.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/ryanholidayInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/ryanholiday/Facebook: http://facebook.com/ryanholidayYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicFollow Shaka Smart: Twitter: https://twitter.com/HookEmSmartInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/coachshakasmart/See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:04 Ryan Holiday? Welcome to the Weekend Edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something that can help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, wisdom, and temperance. And here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers, we reflect, we prepare, we think deeply about the challenging issues of our time, and we work through this philosophy in a way that's more possible here when we're not rushing to work or to get the kids to school, when we have the time to think, to go for a walk,
0:46 Ryan Holiday? to sit with our journals, and to prepare for what the future will bring.
0:54 Ryan Holiday? Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Today, my guest is one of my favorite people, someone I've gotten to know here in Austin, Coach Shaka Smart, who's currently the head basketball coach at University of Texas. Shaka first reached out to me. He read The Obstacle is the Way. And when he moved here to Texas to take over as head coach, he reached out. We had breakfast at 24 Hour Diner there in Austin. And just a friendship has come out of that. We've talked about a number of issues. He's turned me on to stuff. I feel good to know that I've turned him on to some stuff, gotten to know his wife pretty well. His wife is an advocate for literacy for kids. She's a writer herself.
1:39 Ryan Holiday? So it's just been a wonderful relationship. Actually, Coach Smart is how I met George Ravlin, who we recently had on the podcast. It's been really cool to get to know him. It's been cool to watch him rebuild the Longhorns. I've got to go to some games over the years. He came out to my farm a couple of years ago on my birthday and caught his first fish, which was fun. Shaka, of course, has the fascinating first name Shaka, which he was given in honor of the famous Zulu warrior. He was previously the head basketball coach at Virginia Commonwealth University, or VCU, who he took deep into the tournament.
2:18 Ryan Holiday? Total surprise in 2011, he took VCU to the Final Four, which was completely unprecedented and unexpected. So he knows all about winning. He also knows about having difficult seasons. It's been a rebuilding process at Texas. And, you know, he's an interesting basketball coach. You know, he's known for the, his style of play, which they call the havoc, that sort of wreaks havoc on his opponent's psyche and their plans, which is fascinating, especially when you get to know him, as you hear in this interview, what a sort of calm, collected, kind, and sort of present individual he is. But I think, you know, just because you're, you've got a Zen Buddhist mentality, doesn't
3:03 Ryan Holiday? mean you can't be a killer on the basketball court. I think Phil Jackson's a great example of that. So anyways, it's been wonderful to get to know Shaka. It was great to see them win an NIT championship last year, although I can only imagine what it was like this year to watch the season end so prematurely. But here we are, you can listen to my conversation with Shaka and the Longhorns. It must have been so strange for you, because obviously there were some coaches and leagues where, you know, they were about to gear up for the season. But your season was going into the home stretch, the thing you trained the whole year for when, when all of this happened. That must have been really surreal and disappointing and strange.
3:45 Speaker 01 It was unlike anything that we've ever been through. We were actually, Ryan, on the court, getting ready for our conference tournament game against Texas Tech. And they canceled the tournament about 30 minutes before we played. And then we called the guys off the court and into the locker room. And so I'm standing there in front of the team. And the conference tournament had been canceled, but the NCAA tournament had not yet been canceled. But we kind of knew it was the end of the season. Just you could kind of feel that it was heading that direction. So it was a strange, strange ending to the season.
4:22 Ryan Holiday? What do you say to kids and I guess to yourself when you have to deliver news like that? How do you? What did you say?
4:31 Speaker 01 Well, fortunately, we didn't have any seniors on our team this past year. So luckily, we weren't having to talk to anyone that literally had their career ended abruptly. But at the same time, these guys put a ton of emotion and passion and energy and time into what they do. And as you mentioned, the regular season is is a lot of work to gear up for the most enjoyable time of the year, which is March, is the postseason. So to have that taken away from our guys was a tough pill to swallow for them. We just, you know, tried to prioritize their health and their well being and to help them understand that, you know, they have a support
5:15 Speaker 01 system around them to get through all this and that there are some unknowns, you know, in the future for sure, but that we would get through it together.
5:23 Ryan Holiday? Yeah, I mean, obviously, there have been all sorts of people who have been affected by this in much more serious ways. But it is kind of heartbreaking to think about the things that people, you know, that are not health or, you know, sort of livelihood. But, but, you know, athletes who were training for the Olympics that, you know, might not have another year in them, or as you said, seniors who are training for the tournament, or even just, you know, seniors in high school who will never get to go to their senior prom now. It's just sort of heartbreaking to think like, you know, time is this thing that you don't really get do-overs for.
5:58 Speaker 01 For sure. And one thing that I've learned during this time is to try to help people. Not necessarily compare their adversities because it's really easy to sit there and say, "Well, you know, I'm going through this and I've been affected in this way by COVID and, you know, that's worse than what this person's going through." The reality is, everyone's been affected and everyone is having to be flexible and adjust in certain ways. Certainly, there are, there are some folks that, that are dealing with much, much tougher hardship than we are. And so I think having that perspective helps, but at the same time, not belittling the way that you feel or, or trying to hide from that, just, just being very, very present
6:43 Speaker 01 and aware of, of what you're feeling and what emotions you have.
6:46 Ryan Holiday? Yeah, I guess like the, the, the one, it's not a positive, but it is true that we are all in the same boat, you know? Even, even a billionaire is, is facing losses from this. Even a professional athlete is looking at, you know, time they can't get back. Like, almost everyone has been disrupted in some form or another. And we could all wallow in how we've personally been wronged, or we could, I guess, maybe feel and lean into that connection that we all are in the same boat.
7:14 Speaker 01 Absolutely. Yeah, it, it all comes back to, you know, you and I talk about this all the time, is just being in the present, being in the moment and taking advantage of the opportunities that are there. I think, you know, one of the things that we try to help our players understand at this time is that it's very, very easy to succumb to human nature and your normal habitual thought patterns when you're at home. You think about it, our guys are on campus training literally over 11 months a year. So typically, when they go home, they want to chill. They want to relax and get a few days where they're just not doing much of anything. Well, now we're in a different situation.
7:57 Speaker 01 They're going on two straight months being at home. So it's more about trying to find ways to move forward and grow.
8:06 Speaker 01 And my wife always tells me if you're bored, you're boring. So finding ways to occupy your time when 60, 70, 80% of what you normally do, you can't do.
8:18 Ryan Holiday? Well, to come back to that in a second, I was thinking, one of the things you told me, which I think sort of aligns well with the Stoics is that as a coach, you try to, you know, obviously focus on what you control and you try to get your players to focus on what they control and that you try not to criticize anyone for, you know, was the shot a good shot? That's what you care about, not did the shot go in or not? And so on and so forth. It also strikes me that what we're all experiencing is a massive reminder of how little life is in our control.
8:49 Speaker 01 Absolutely. I mean, I think what our minds do, Ryan, is try to assert a level of control over our lives and that our minds are really good at playing these tricks. But the reality is, and COVID-19 is a reminder of this, that there's much, much more out of our control than there is that's under our control. And, you know, I told you, I used one of the coins you gave me every day. I look at it and on the coin, it says, just that you do the right thing. The rest doesn't matter. And so doing the right thing starts with understanding what you can control.
9:28 Ryan Holiday? Yeah, and I feel like one of the things I'm trying to do is sort of so accepting that I don't control what the governor of Texas does. I don't control what the president does. I don't control what the Chinese do or whatever it is. And so that has created a scenario in which large parts of my business aren't operating. I'm stuck in my house. You know, we're both in the same boat there. But what I do control is a whole lot of smaller personal decisions. You know, what time I wake up, you know, the habits that I practice during the day, the reading that I do, the things that I focus on and all of that. When you talk about doing the right thing, I'm curious, what does doing the right thing look like for you day to day right now? And maybe what kind of habits are you pushing
10:12 Ryan Holiday? your players to think about as well?
10:14 Speaker 01 Well, to be honest with you, Ryan, this time's been really good from that standpoint to be intentional about making decisions.
10:23 Speaker 01 How are we going to spend our time? What are we going to prioritize in conversations with our players? Because there can be a tendency to try to do too much. And I think that that's a mistake as well, because that affects the quality of what you do. For me personally, I've been able to spend some really good time in the mornings on just, I guess what I would call spiritual growth, which is just coming closer to having an elevated level of consciousness of what's going on and then being able to create a small space, I call it a gap in between whatever it is that I'm feeling or thinking
11:05 Speaker 01 and the actual awareness or essence of who I am. I know that that sounds really philosophical, but it's really helpful. If you feel that gap, to be able to make decisions, thoughtful decisions about how to spend your time. So for our players, we're encouraging these guys again to not necessarily succumb to normal habitual thought patterns, you know, normal habits. And instead, you know, choose one or two or three things each day that you're going to be intentional about doing, you know, whether it's reaching out to someone that you wouldn't normally talk to, whether it's reading something that you you normally wouldn't read. We try to leave it relatively open ended
11:48 Speaker 01 so that it can be the choice of the individual because as you know, when something is put on someone and someone's made to do something, then again, that that affects the quality of it.
11:59 Ryan Holiday? No, that's an interesting point. I I I heard some good advice from someone a long time ago. Like if you look at the to do list of really powerful or important people, it's always like very short. It's like make this phone call or like read this report or you know, it's like go here.
12:15 Speaker 01 Well, Coach Raff, he taught me this. And obviously, he's he's so wise and has been through, you know, so many twists and turns in his life, but he
12:28 Ryan Holiday? Sure.
12:28 Speaker 01 He literally told me, he said, I try to do one high-quality thing every day. And now, the one thing he does is really, really, really impressive. But that struck me. I mean, they say simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. I mean, that is high level. But if you think about it, that one thing that he does is always really, really impressive.
12:54 Ryan Holiday? Obviously, when you say one thing a day, that doesn't sound like much. But then, when you multiply it out over 82 years, that does start to add up. And I think one of the reasons we're probably suspicious of the just do a couple of things well every day strategy is that we're not good at extrapolating out, you know, sort of steady, compounding returns. That's why we're bad at saving for our retirement. You know, it's why we're bad at sort of planning and anticipating things. I guess what I'm saying is what I'm noticing and happier with is that I'm doing, my to-do lists are shorter, but the things are more important and I'm giving more time to them. And I'm not doing a lot of inessential things that maybe because I could do them before
13:39 Ryan Holiday? I felt obligated to do them.
13:41 Speaker 01 Well, Ryan, as my wife Maya reminds me, the root of the word priority is singular. So when priority was first talked about, it was a singular word, the one thing. And what we've done in modern times is turned it into priorities. But then, all of a sudden, it turns into eight, 10, 15 things. And that meets the purpose.
14:06 Ryan Holiday? No, that's brilliant. And I don't know if you know Gary Keller and Jay Papazan, who are both here in Austin. Gary Keller is the founder of Keller Williams Realty. They wrote a really good book a few years ago called The One Thing. It's so, it's so hard, though. I imagine, like, even the athletes that you see, like, by definition, they are multi-hyphenates. They're not allowed to be just athletes. They have to be student athletes. And then, of course, they're, they're men and citizens and friends. And so, we have all these competing priorities, or we have all these competing obligations. And I think it's really easy to fill up your to-do list and not ask yourself, like, what's the most important thing I have to do today?
14:51 Speaker 01 What's your most important thing, Ryan?
14:54 Ryan Holiday? I mean professionally, my most important thing is like I have to do writing and similar to the thing with George Raveling, if I can write a little bit every day, that adds up to, you know, finished editable manuscripts at the end. But I sort of say I have three things that are important to me every day, which is my work as a writer, my role as a husband, and then my role as a father. When I think about my goals, I don't have like career goals or life goals. I just want to be good at those three things and I don't want to have any regrets about those three things.
15:32 Speaker 01 I love it.
15:33 Ryan Holiday? It must be hard for coaches though, and I imagine that this is kind of a forced experiment for you and a different lifestyle. Coaches work these insanely long hours, they're gone all the time. You're sort of expected to live and breathe the job. Is this opening your eyes at all? Is it, you know, creating any changes for you, you feel?
15:56 Speaker 01 Well, I think it has created for everyone, an opportunity to step back a little bit and just reassess how you spend your time and not even so much about whether you're working or doing something else, but literally exactly how are you doing that? Where are you physically? How are you going about it? Because we've all been forced to adjust in that way during this time. It's interesting, I'm not one that typically works a lot from home. I like to be in the office. So this has been a adjustment for me in a major way in that just time wise, you know, I'll find myself maybe working late at night when I
16:41 Speaker 01 never really would have done that before. I wouldn't have been working at midnight. I would have been winding down or, you know, reading or whatever it may be. So again, I think it's like anything else, like we tell our players, it's on us to be intentional on the front end about how we want to handle it. It's definitely been, you know, good for me to just learn what works and what doesn't.
17:03 Ryan Holiday? Yeah, I asked a coach one time, or I think it was a GM or something, and I said, you know, let's say like all the coaches in the NFL unionized and there was some, some rule that set the hours that coaches were allowed to work. So like, let's say some law or regulation passed that like, coaches could only work banker's hours, like nine to five. I was like, my question is, I'd be curious what you thought, would the actual quality of play on the field change at all? Or I don't know if you know what Parkinson's Law is. Parkinson's Law says basically, a task expands to fit the amount of time you give it. So if you have a 20-hour workday, you'll find 20 hours of stuff worth to do. If you have a 10-hour
17:46 Ryan Holiday? workday, you'll get it all done in 10 hours. And I'd be curious, as a coach who, yeah, there is this expectation of the grind, always be doing, you gotta be the first one there and the last one to leave. How much of that do you think is 100% essential? And how much of it is just sort of expectation, obligation, and maybe even a little bit of just like keeping up with the Joneses as far as like, the published habits of other coaches?
18:12 Speaker 01 I think there's, there's plenty of that, Ryan. But to be honest, it's, it's really more about quality. So you could work, you know, 100 and some hours a week, and there's, there's always more to do, for sure. I mean, there's always another recruiting call you can make. There's always, at this moment, another Zoom call.
18:34 Speaker 01 But that doesn't necessarily add to the quality and the, the impact that you're actually having. You know, like, one of the things that we emphasize as a coaching staff is spending time with players. Someone taught me, you know, along the way that, hey, you need to understand, there's a difference between spending time and actually connecting. And so there can actually be, you know, quote unquote, wasted time, if you will, if you are, you think you're spending time, but it's not meaningful time. It doesn't build connection. So I, I think that's the more important thing for us. There's probably coaches, just like any other line of work, that work about half as much as someone else,
19:19 Speaker 01 but that actually get a lot more done. And at the end of the day, at the end of the day, create better results.
19:25 Ryan Holiday? No, I think that's a great parenting lesson. It's something I struggle with. It's like, because being a good dad is important to me, I go like, well, do I need to be at the office? I'll be at home, you know, like I feel obligated to be at home. So I'll go home and I'll sort of pat myself on the back for going home. But then the reality is I'm not actually there. My wife will sometimes go like, hey, you know, you could just be at the office if you're not going to be here, you know, and that strikes me as something you talk a lot about, which is just sort of being where your feet is actually concentrating and being present.
19:59 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think Ryan, it goes back to just the workings of our own minds, which is fascinating. Because, you know, we vacillate between these different modes of thinking, I need to do this, or I need to do that. And then literally, you know, we'll be in one mode and then through the back door, there'll be, you know, the personal mind will say, well, wait a minute, you didn't finish that project yet. And so, again, one thing that hopefully all of us can take out of this is just the element of quality that we want to infuse in whatever it is that we're doing. And again, as you and I have talked about this, the number one detriment to that quality is
20:42 Speaker 01 task switching. So you're doing one thing, and then all of a sudden you switch over to the other one because your phone buzzes. And again, the quality is never heightened by that, it's only hurt.
20:56 Ryan Holiday? How do you talk to your players who are basically in the most vicious spot as far as being young, being, you know, hormonal, being technology obsessed? How do you, what do you talk to them about sort of the cost of that switching and how to focus?
21:13 Speaker 01 Well, the one thing you can't do is bang them over the head with it, because they'll turn you off real quick. And one thing I've learned is, these guys, you know, unlike you and I, like, they literally grew up as, as young kids with social media. So it's a different childhood, it's a different experience. To me, the best thing to do is provide education.
21:38 Speaker 01 Through, you know, different vehicles that are compelling to the players. And so, for instance, if we can find an example of something that LeBron James does or did that is a kind of best practice that would make sense for our guys to follow, whether it's mindfulness, or the way he handles social media during the playoffs. That type of stuff is really compelling for them because of course, he's a hero of theirs.
22:07 Ryan Holiday? Sure.
22:08 Speaker 01 You know, hitting them with some, you know, academic study that was done at Stanford or Harvard, that doesn't do nearly as much as something that's more anecdotal.
22:20 Ryan Holiday? No, it's funny, that's sort of what the Stoics talk about. You know, Seneca's line, he says, "You have to choose yourself a Cato." And Cato is the sort of the hero of most of the Stoics. And, you know, he didn't write anything that was sort of how he lived. But the idea of, you know, he says, "Without a ruler, you can't make crooked straight." And his point was, you have to have people or heroes who are sort of your rulers or your benchmark, and then you're constantly comparing yourself against them and asking, you know, "What would they do in this kind of situation? How can I be more like them here? What would the..." you know, and I think that's super helpful when you're young. But I got to imagine you have coaches like that, that you evaluate yourself on sort
23:04 Ryan Holiday? of heroes in the profession that you're in.
23:08 Speaker 01 Absolutely, yeah. It's definitely a profession where there are plenty of examples, Ryan, to compare yourself to. Now, we have to be careful as well because comparison is the thief of joy.
23:21 Ryan Holiday? Sure.
23:21 Speaker 01 You know, we tend to, as coaches, maybe compare ourselves to someone that's at the absolute top of the field. And, you know, that can lead to a level of insanity. But, you know, what I try to do is compare less results and more process. You know, more, "How do these guys go about what they do? How are they successful? You know, maybe where did they trip up that I can learn from?"
23:48 Ryan Holiday? Sure.
23:49 Speaker 01 Yeah, I tend to find that sometimes the best coaches to learn from are actually coaches in other sports. Football for me is one that's really, really fascinating because they're dealing with such a larger number of players and the messaging that they use with their teams has to be so multifaceted to really hit everyone that they're dealing with. So those are coaches that I follow very closely.
24:15 Ryan Holiday? Yeah, sometimes I go back and forth between being very envious of coaches and then being very glad I'm not coaches in that what you do is so binary. Like, as a writer, you know, do you compare yourself against someone who's won more awards or someone who's sold more copies or someone who's in a different genre or not? Whereas sports, it's like, you know, there are literal rankings and there's standings and there's your win-loss record over your career. On the one hand, it must be kind of a relief, like, you know, did we do well in this game tonight? Who won? But on the other hand, that's gotta be way too simple. How do you think about success? Is it winning or losing? Is it something else?
24:58 Speaker 01 I think that's so important for the individual to define what success means to them. And then obviously, for all of us, we're trying to move towards something greater. So even if you're able to find success on one particular night or one particular season, it's really more about where you're going. So it's interesting. Obviously, coaches are completely evaluated from the outside in on the results of the games. But actually, you know, I got into coaching because for me, someone that was raised by a single mom, it was coaches for me that served as mentors and father figures and
25:39 Speaker 01 the guides for me to become, you know, a full-grown man. And so I really got into coaching because the way that those guys impacted me, I wanted to impact other people in a similar way. That's a completely different evaluation from winning or losing a game or what your record is at the end of the season. So it can be a little bit more complex. At the end of the day, you just have to decide what you're about and what you're comfortable with.
26:08 Ryan Holiday? How can you know whether you're doing that, right? Like, it must be much harder to know whether you are having impact, whether you're changing lives, not only because it's hard to measure in a box score or something like that, but also it occurs over so much of, such a longer time span. Like, you know, my second grade teacher didn't know she really had impact on me until 20 years later, or something like that.
26:34 Speaker 01 They asked John Wooden one time, he had signed a great recruiting class, and he was in the midst of winning all the national championships that they won at UCLA. And they said, is this the best recruiting class that you've ever signed? And his answer was awesome. He said, ask me in 20 years. And what he was saying was, it's not so much about where these guys are now, or even about what they're going to do over the course of the next year, two or three. It's about, you know, who they become long term. And again, you know, some coaches may not look at it that way.
27:14 Speaker 01 We do, we do live and work in a line of work that's very result based. But I love that philosophy of like, who can we help these guys become? And what role can we play in positively impacting their minds and their futures?
27:33 Ryan Holiday? Yeah, that must be immensely satisfying, right? To see the players that you coached that are, that are now in the NBA, especially players that, that maybe people didn't think had that in them. That you must take a lot of pride in that. But I've also got to imagine you have players who are, have all sorts of professions because you've done it a long time. And some of that must be even more rewarding than knowing that somebody made millions of dollars, or made it to the All-Star game, or something like that.
28:02 Speaker 01 The thing that's the most rewarding, Ryan, is, is guys that are taking significant steps down their own personal pathway of growth. And so that may be, you know, professional, something like the NBA. It may be spiritual. You know, there's about three or four players that I used to coach that now are about five or six, seven years removed from college basketball. And now they're doing all this neat stuff that. You know, hopefully we planted a seed with when they were young, you know, stuff like meditation practice every day, or you know, the mentoring they do for young guys.
28:44 Speaker 01 And again, that's really what it's all about is, you know, people are people through other people. So can we impact someone else that then goes and impacts the next person? And that's really what coaching to me is all about.
28:59 Ryan Holiday? I've got, I've got two, two last questions for you. So you've had great seasons, you've had bad seasons, you've had, you know, incredible runs into the tournament, and you've had years where you didn't make the tournament. How do you sort of think about the sort of amazing success? And, and how do you think about those, like the, the heartbreaking years? Cause I imagine there's a lot of people who are sort of feeling some, some whiplash right now. And I'm, I'm just curious as, as a, as a coach who wins and loses on a regular basis, how, how you, if, if you've thought about how to integrate that kind of, those kind of results into your life?
29:37 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's a great question. I, I think it goes back to what you said about control. Uh, and then really deciding how you want to define yourself. Uh, because, you know, we talk to players and young people all the time about having a growth mindset. And it's interesting, a lot of times we ask our guys to do things that we don't always necessarily do a great job doing. Uh, so do you define yourself by that absolute best season you had? Do you define yourself by the worst season? Or is it more about how you can grow and develop and learn from each of those seasons?
30:17 Speaker 01 I think the longer you coach, the more you're going to find yourself in, you know, different situations, situations where you have to adjust and, uh, situations that, you know, to be honest with you, give you a level of humility that maybe you didn't have before. So, um, it's all about enjoying it, Ryan, and trying to be a little bit better and a little bit more impactful of the, you know, on the people that, that you get to coach than you were the year before.
30:45 Ryan Holiday? I love that, and I've heard it from a bunch of different coaches, but it's sort of a standard line now. It's like, you know, the coach just wins a championship, or, you know, a Super Bowl, or whatever, and he sort of pulls all the players into the locker room, and he, you know, he says, "Don't let this be the best moment of your life." In a weird way, and I almost feel like responding to that, you know, insane victory, it almost has as many challenges as an insane defeat.
31:13 Speaker 01 For sure. Yeah, and, you know, not to get too philosophical on you, but in any, anything that happens that is great, there's always a seed of, you know, something that's not so good. And then anything that happens that is really tough, and a setback, there's a seed of positive, you know, opportunities from that. So I think having an awareness of those things is huge. And remember, you know, we're dealing with, in a lot of cases, teenagers. So it's on us to help them see that.
31:49 Ryan Holiday? So this last question, it's a little personal, so you can dance around it however you like. But I, it must be strange to be in your profession where, you know, there's rumors about, you know, are you going to be fired or not, you know, are you going to get a new contract or not? There's sort of that, in the ancient world, that is sort of this, the myth is the sword of Damocles. There's sort of the king, and someone's very jealous of the king, and he says, "Well, why don't you live in my shoes for one day?" And the guy says, "Okay, I'd love to sit on the throne." And the story goes, basically, the king sets this up, but the guy doesn't realize there's a sword dangling over his
32:30 Ryan Holiday? head the whole time. And this is, the message is, hey, actually, it's not so great to be the king, because there's always this thing kind of hovering over you. In this, you know, sort of economic uncertainty, and that now all of us are in the same boat on, I'm wondering, how do you, as a person who has to show up and do a difficult job all day, how do you keep that out of your mind? How do you focus? How do you not let it bother you? How do you not let it keep you up at night? Because it seems like it would drive me nuts.
33:01 Speaker 01 Well, you know how I do it, Ryan. I do it by just doing the right next thing and trying my very, very best to focus on what's under my control, trying my very, very best to stay aligned with the principles that I believe in and really setting the right example for the people around me to do the same thing. The job that I have, that the coaches have, it's a fascinating job. I think most importantly, we need to look at it from a standpoint of being grateful to even be in this position.
33:38 Speaker 01 But let's be honest, it's a very, very public forum. What you're doing is, at least in terms of results, is very, very out in front for people to see and people to criticize. And it is one of those jobs that, you know, a lot of people have opinions and maybe feel like they could do something better. And so, again, I think approaching that with humility and understanding that some of that stuff you don't control, the enjoyment that we get out of affecting the people that we work with and that we get to mentor is very, very
34:20 Speaker 01 special compared to maybe a normal nine to five job. But then also understanding the impermanence of everything we do. Somebody told, this is helpful to me, Ryan. Somebody told me a long, long time ago, I was at a coaching clinic, and he said, "You need to understand that all coaches are replacements." Yeah. So you are replacing someone else, and then at some point down the line, someone will replace you. And again, I think that that aligns well with a lot of the, you know, the historic philosophy that you talk about and the fact that if we take ourselves really, really seriously, it's easy to think that you're the only one who's doing what you're
35:03 Speaker 01 doing, who's ever done it that way, and it's the center of the universe. But the reality is, and again, COVID-19 has been as good of a reminder of this as anything. That couldn't be further from the truth.
35:18 Ryan Holiday? Yeah, there's William Manchester has a great line. He says, you know, people who think they're indispensable are almost always wrong. And who won the Super Bowl six years ago? Who was the coach at Texas basketball four coaches ago? Who's won the third most games? You know, like, nobody, nobody knows that answer. And, and that, yeah, that's what Marcus Aurelius talks about. He's like, okay, maybe people remember Alexander the Great. But, you know, do they remember Vespasian, who is the emperor who came a few before him? Or, you know, do they, he's like, how unfamiliar these names quickly get? And I, I don't think the point of that is like, that none of this matters and that what we do is meaningless.
36:00 Ryan Holiday? I think it's more like, as you said, don't take it too seriously. Don't assume that the world is revolving around you and try to be a good person inside all of this. Because that is the one thing that does seem to have the most lasting impact on people.
36:18 Speaker 01 Well, and what really matters is the moment. It's the now. So even if, you know, you're Ryan Holiday is being written about 100 years from now as this great writer.
36:32 Ryan Holiday? Or won't do me any good.
36:33 Speaker 01 Yeah, I mean, it's about now. And, you know, the thing that is also said by championship coaches. When you win a, an unbelievable championship or go on a great run is always the journey. And the process to get there is so much more powerful and so much more important than actually the moment when you win it. And, and there's almost a sense of like, okay, this is it. And that's why coaches and athletes are so driven to go do it again.
37:08 Ryan Holiday? Sure.
37:08 Speaker 01 Because they want to feel that feeling of pursuing something, of going after something. So, you know, for me, as long as I have that opportunity, you know, and I can help our guys to move forward and grow. And, you know, be part of something special, then that's where my focus is going to be. And that's a lot easier for me than getting caught up in stuff that's outside of my control.
37:35 Ryan Holiday? Yeah, I mean, the first time one of my books hit number one, it was like I was mowing the lawn and it felt great for three seconds and then I had to finish mowing the lawn, you know? And that that sort of ephemeral feeling actually didn't compare at all to the countless hours that I spent on the project, you know, the pride of the of making progress and the pride of, you know, getting this thing out into the world and hearing from people that it impacted. But yeah, you're right, we tend to gravitate towards the results, but really it's the things that created the results that that were was most enjoyable.
38:14 Speaker 01 Absolutely. Well, I appreciate the impact that you've had on me and I really, you know, when I first got to Austin, I enjoyed sitting down with you and learning from you and obviously reading, reading your books, but it's been great to to continue to have a relationship and learn from you.
38:33 Ryan Holiday? No, it definitely definitely goes both ways and thanks again.
38:37 Speaker 01 You got it. Thanks for having me.
38:39 Ryan Holiday? If you're liking this podcast, we would love for you to subscribe. Please leave us a review on iTunes or any of your favorite podcast listening apps. It really helps and tell a friend.
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