Pod Insights The Daily Stoic Premium (🔓) BONUS: Finding Stillness Amidst The Chaos | Ryan and Samantha Holiday About this episode While in Vancouver, mom of four asked Ryan - "How do I achieve stillness while being a parent and juggling everything in my business?" In today's bonus episode, Ryan and his wife Samantha are sharing their different answers to this question, breaking down what stillness means to them and how they work to cultivate it in day to day life. Check out The Daily Dad Podcast for more episodes like this! 🎙️ Listen to The Daily Dad on Apple Podcasts and Spotify ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com 📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast🎥 Watch top moments from The Daily Stoic Podcast on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:03 Ryan Holiday? Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength, insight, and wisdom in everyday life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us, dailystoic.com.
0:29 Ryan Holiday? Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to a bonus episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. So the Stoics have this word, "ataraxia", which basically means of freedom from disturbances. I translate this as stillness. That's a word you see in both the eastern and the western philosophies. Like, how do you slow things down when they're going really, really fast? And this is hard to do in any time. It was hard to do in the ancient world. Seneca talks about trying to concentrate when there's noise on the street below. Blaise Pascal talked about how all humanities problems stem from our inability to sit quietly in a room alone. And, you know, that was before social media and the crazy news cycle. Stillness has always been difficult for me.
1:15 Ryan Holiday? And then, then you have kids, and then your life is crazy. And then you have these people to worry about who are running around, as they say, with your heart in their body. And so you're worried, you're stressed, you're exhausted. Stillness is really tough. And then it's tough when you're running a business or you're trying to make your marriage. There, there's just so many things that, that can make stillness tough. And so in today's episode, we're going to talk about that. But this is kind of a special episode. So I don't know if you know this, but I have another podcast and another daily sort of meditation thing. We have the Daily Dad. And so there's the Daily Dad email that goes out every day. Then there's the podcast version of it. So if you listen to Daily Stoic,
2:00 Ryan Holiday? which clearly you do at least occasionally, or you wouldn't be listening to this episode, you can also go over and, and subscribe to the Daily Dad podcast and get this sort of, you know, wisdom-inspired parenting lesson every day. And then on the weekends, we do like a sort of a deeper dive episode. And my favorite episodes are ones where my wife Samantha and I sit down and just sort of talk about what we're thinking about and working on as parents, how we're... Trying, or maybe struggling is a better word, to put these ideas into practice in our own lives with our two wonderful slash insane boys, eight and five. And often, we sit down in the Daily Stoic studio, but this episode was Claire, our producer's idea. I gave a talk in Vancouver and someone had
2:43 Ryan Holiday? asked me, like, how do I get stillness as a parent? Or how do I have stillness in the midst of my busy life? And so she took my answer there and then had my wife Samantha sit down and ask how she thinks about it. And then she put them together in this kind of interesting way. And that's kind of what we do on these Saturday episodes of The Daily Dad, is just come up with creative ways to just sort of drill down on some parenting stuff. So I'd love for you to subscribe to The Daily Dad Podcast. You can obviously check out The Daily Dad book. We've got the new leather edition, which you can grab at store.dailydad.com, although it might be in the Daily Stoic store also. And wishing you the best out there if you've got kids, because it is crazy and stillness feels more
3:25 Ryan Holiday? elusive than ever. But hopefully, some of the ideas discussed here will be of service to you.
3:36 Ryan Holiday? Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another Saturday episode of The Daily Dad Podcast. Back in May, I went up to Vancouver, Canada for this mastermind that I was talking to. It was called The Elevate Collective. At the end, someone asked me a parenting question that they said that they would really like to ask my wife Samantha also. So what I did was I answered it there on the spot. And then we had Sam answer that same question as well. So you'll get my answer and Sam's answer. Thanks to Samantha for humoring me on this, on this little Q and A. And thanks to the folks at Elevate Collective for having me out. I thought it was really cool.
4:17 Speaker 01 Actually have a question for like real life, how you deal as a parent?
4:23 Ryan Holiday? Uh huh.
4:23 Speaker 01 And I would actually love to ask your wife this as well. So I have four kids and I run two businesses. And you know, I wrote in my notebook, like, how do I achieve stillness in my business? Because I feel that as soon as I have a task in front of me, there's a mom, mom, mom, mom. Or there's a fire, or there's another
4:43 Ryan Holiday? Sure.
4:44 Speaker 01 thing, or there's, there's always, there's always so much chaos. I find it really difficult as a mother, as a business owner, to just like breathe and be like, okay, I can get this task done and move on. And you know, you were mentioning quiet time.
5:00 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
5:00 Speaker 01 How do you wake up and your kids don't wake up with you? So like, I just have so many questions about the actual everyday life.
5:10 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
5:10 Speaker 01 How you do that?
5:11 Ryan Holiday? I think, of course, it's, it's easy to have routines and structure and then you invite these people to live in your house and they blow it all up. I have gotten to
5:19 Speaker 01 They just like came on their own.
5:21 Ryan Holiday? I've gone from a place of having like a routine to a series of practices that I move around based on, did somebody wake up sick today? Do we wake up at our normal time? Or do we wake up two hours before our normal time? Or do we wake up an hour after our normal time? So I, I do think the idea of flexibility is really the key here. And, and sometimes you can get to, I think with some, some people, they're like, this is what I do every day. I go, I either don't believe it, or it's at the expense of neglecting a bunch of other responsibilities. So I, I try to be really flexible about it. Like, I would love to do it in this order, but I understand that the way it's going to happen today, it's going to be in this order as a result of a bunch of other people making decisions.
6:06 Ryan Holiday? But one of the things I've tried to think a lot about in my business and my life is like, what are the things that only I can do? Like, what are the things that are most dependent on me? And in my case, it's, as I have a sort of content and media business, it's mostly about me having the creative ideas, the doing the right Or coming up with the things that I want to talk about in all the other mediums. Everything else can effectively be done by someone else. And so I, I have to be really disciplined about what I'm willing to do and then what I don't do. Even though I might be better at things than other people in the business. I have to think about the main things that I have to protect. Because if I don't do them, they don't get done.
6:50 Ryan Holiday? And I think a lot of times, especially if you don't have like a sort of a big corporate entity, like a very hierarchical structure. The cost of your success is that you're not doing the things that you're best at, that only you can do, and that's really hard. I've also tried, as I've tried to integrate my personal and business life. I, I just noticed it's interesting how, this might be a little controversial, but I see people doing a lot of things that they could easily pay someone else to do. And then it's weird to me how like outsourcing childcare or time with our kids is something we do first. And then you'll like talk to someone who like changes the oil on their car. You know what I mean?
7:33 Ryan Holiday? Like to me, the things that only I can do are writing and thinking. And like only I can spend time with my kids as me. Does that make sense? So like, those are my big priorities. And then I try to be really ruthless about what I'm outsourcing or having other people do. Does that make sense? People will hire childcare before they'll hire an assistant or another employee or someone to take a task off their plate. That is actually much less important than this thing that they say is the reason they're doing all of it to begin with. Do you know what I mean? I don't know much, that's just a thought.
8:16 Speaker 02 I find it really interesting that when somebody says, I'm a mother of four kids and run a business. Like, how do you find stillness? Ryan's response to this is, how do I make more time? How do I like create time to have the stillness? And my response to that is the time does not exist. Like it is, there's always so much to do. That if I try to think that I have to carve out time in my life for there to, for stillness to have room, then it's not going to happen. Like it has to be an internal mindset for me. And so I'm like,
8:54 Speaker 02 I find that if I'm far away from creating that space, that I, that's when I fall into like a routine of like revenge bedtime, where I'm like intentionally staying up really late so I can have peace.
9:05 Ryan Holiday? What's revenge bedtime?
9:06 Speaker 02 Revenge bedtime is like intentionally not going, not, oh, maybe not consciously, but intentionally not going to sleep after everyone else is asleep to like have time to yourself. So for me, that's like, I have very productive time after the house is really quiet because there's nobody impeding on my thoughts. And I'm like, okay, if that's what's happening after, when the house is quiet, that means that that, my brain is loud. I need to be able to create that during the day. And the other way I know that I need to figure out, I need to like reach back to that part is when I'm like pulling up to the house and not getting out of the car.
9:47 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
9:47 Speaker 02 Or I put the kids in the car seat and I'm taking a long time to walk around. It's just like.
9:52 Ryan Holiday? Difference.
9:54 Speaker 02 Loud between other, between when I'm not, don't.
9:57 Ryan Holiday? I'm saying generally.
10:00 Speaker 02 To get out of the car and walk around the car. Oftentimes I try to create space and have stillness. And then there's like, my kids are handled and the business is handled and then you exist.
10:09 Ryan Holiday? Well, there's actually a Louis CK joke where he's talking about getting the whole car, the family in a car for vacation and then he shuts the last door and walks around. He says, that's my vacation.
10:18 Speaker 02 So for me, the stillness is, I find it's very interesting that there is this like creating more time, which doesn't exist for me versus the headspace. And like, I need my thoughts and my brain to be quiet in order to listen. And a lot of times if I'm, that takes a lot of practice. So I'm like. And I intention. So I'm driving the kids to school and it's really easy for me to go through my entire to do list of a million things that I need to do. That's not productive. It's just not productive. Like I, there's, there's never a clarity in those thoughts.
11:00 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
11:00 Speaker 02 I can't have just.
11:01 Ryan Holiday? Multitasking sucks.
11:03 Speaker 02 But it's not multitasking. I can't have like, there's not, like, there's a thing in meditation where you're clearing your mind. And when you're clearing your mind and something comes into your mind, instead of trying to like clear it out, you take notice of it, you think about it, you internalize it, and then you allow it to pass. And I need to have that, that create the meditative space in just like day to day operation. So I'm not flooded. Like, so driving the kids to school, it's like a practice in, I mentally have to like,
11:35 Speaker 02 get myself to a spot where I'm like, my brain is clear. I'm good to drive whatever. And a lot of times I'll do that by just like naming what I'm doing. Right now, I'm driving my kids to school and I have a lot on my to do list, but those things are going to crowd my thoughts while I'm driving. And like, what I need to do is focus on this one task. And it just, the, the result of that is I'm much calmer and I do have things that pop into my head and they're, I'm much better at handling them. So like, it's really not about creating the time. It's about creating the space internally.
12:09 Ryan Holiday? No, that makes sense. I remember we were talking to Katie, a wellness mom, one time. And she was saying when she like started her company, she realized, because she has, they have like six kids. She was like, she realized that she needed a wife. Like, the reason her husband was able to do it was that her husband had her.
12:25 Speaker 02 Mm hmm.
12:26 Ryan Holiday? And then.
12:26 Speaker 02 And that's a concept for you?
12:28 Ryan Holiday? No, no, I just thought that was an interesting, like, no one can do it without support of some kind. And so it's also like, who, yeah, who is, who's helping? And your spouse has to be that, but also. More than your spouse.
12:40 Speaker 02 Yes, but I'm like, I think for me, especially in this conversation, it's, it's like, maybe it's my own trip, but like, that's a lot for me. Like managing other people and thinking about other people and depending on other people and managing disappointment and like, expectations is just like, it is something, but it is an extra something. So yes, it is help, but it is also extra work for me. And like, I can't think of stillness and my stillness and my peace and me being able to exist within a rhythm as something that is dependent on me having a support network. It needs to be, it needs to start internally first.
13:18 Ryan Holiday? That makes sense.
13:19 Speaker 02 And I also feel like that's a really good way, like to teach the kids that so they can silence the noise.
13:25 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
13:25 Speaker 02 If even if they can't go on a walk or like, I'm using the tools that I have now in this crazy time of my life.
13:38 Ryan Holiday? Hey, thanks for listening to the Daily Dad Podcast. You can get this via email every day as well at dailydad.com. Please leave us a review in iTunes. Most importantly, if you know any dads or parents who benefit from these messages, please spread the word. Thanks.
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