Pod Insights The Daily Stoic Premium (🔓) Don’t Let It Do This To You | Stoicism Meets Major League Baseball About this episode Deserved or not, preventable or not, you’re at the mercy of fate, of the market, of a mob.📚 Book Mentioned: Ask the Dust by John Fante🎥 Watch this episode here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGGfz6BoPbI🎙️ AD-FREE | Support the podcast and go deeper into Stoicism by subscribing to The Daily Stoic Premium - unlock ad-free listening, early access, and bonus content: https://dailystoic.supercast.com/✉️ FREE STOIC WISDOM | Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Ryan Holiday? Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.
0:14 Ryan Holiday? Don't let it do this to you. Maybe it could have been avoided. Maybe it wasn't fair. Maybe it happened to you. You got screwed over. You got humiliated. You were robbed of something you worked hard for. You screwed up big time. And now you're in the middle of a scandal. You're at rock bottom. Deserved or not, preventable or not, you're at the mercy of fate, of the market, of a mob. The author, John Fonte, whose story I told in an article many years ago for Medium about the crazy publishing saga of his novel, Ask the Dust, I'll link to that in today's show notes. He had a number of bad breaks in his career. It just didn't go the way that he wanted. And that could have made him angry.
0:58 Ryan Holiday? It could have turned him into a drunk or a deadbeat. But it didn't. "I think the one thing that a writer must avoid is bitterness," John Fonte told a journalist in 1979. "I think it's the one fault that can destroy him, can shrivel him up. I've fought it all my life." It was that fight that his son admired most about his father, that he soldiered on as a writer and was eventually rediscovered and rightly celebrated. "I'm not naive enough to think that good work always wins out in the end," his son, James Fonte, explained. "There are plenty of painters who died in Auschwitz. I don't necessarily think there is justice in the world. It's just that my father had the strength of character
1:42 Ryan Holiday? not to let it break him." Injustices will befall us. Certainly, they befell the Stoics. Seneca was exiled, so was Epictetus. Others had their property confiscated. Others still were executed. Think of James Stockdale and how the public treated him after that disastrous vice presidential debate in 1992. What matters is how we endure those moments, though, whether our strength of character allows them to break us or not. What matters is whether we stay good despite the bad things happening to us, whether we let them steal our decency, our joy, even our sense of humor. We don't control those big external events.
2:24 Ryan Holiday? We do control how we remain in side.
2:39 Ryan Holiday? Hitting a baseball is not just one of the hardest things to do in professional sports. It's one of the most incredible human feats, period. I'm fascinated with anyone who can do things that you shouldn't be able to do. And I'm here at spring training, talking to a bunch of baseball teams. And so in today's episode, I wanted to talk about some Stoic lessons specifically in and around the sport of baseball, which is an amazing game, a challenging game, one obviously the ancients didn't know about, but their ideas are timeless enough that they apply to this both very old and still very new game. Even if you don't play baseball, there's a lot you can learn from these people who are the best in the world at what they do, about how they manage their emotions, about how they get back to center, about how they marshal all their resources at this thing in front
3:22 Ryan Holiday? of them, and how they ride the ups and downs of a game that is fundamentally about failing and striking out over and over and over again.
3:34 Ryan Holiday? The basis of Stoic philosophy, it's called the dichotomy of control. This might sound pretty simple and straightforward, you've probably heard it before, but the idea is there are some things that are up to us in life and some things that are not up to us. And the most basic task, the hardest task unfortunately, is figuring out what those things are, right? Because all the time and energy we spend on stuff that's not up to us is time and energy we are not spending on the stuff that is up to us. And you think about what it boils down to, how little is actually in our control, right? You guys don't control the weather, but you control how you play in the weather. You don't control what your coaches do or say, you control how you play. You don't control what the media says or does, you control how you play. You don't control how your teammates play, but you control how you play.
4:16 Ryan Holiday? You don't control where the ball bounces, but you control whether you get yourself to where you need to be to catch that ball, right? You control what you do, you don't control what other people do, what other people say, what other people think, what's happening in the world, right? We have this limited Things, there's all the things that are happening in the world, there's this tiny little bit of it in there that we control. But we spend so much of our time and energy and emotions on the stuff that's not up at us, right? And this is not just a source of a lot of misery and unhappiness. It's a resource allocation issue. The more focused we are on what we're gonna do, on what we are saying, on what we are thinking, on what's going on in here, right? The better. And the more time we're not spending on that is taking away from what we have. So that's the first is this dichotomy of control.
5:00 Ryan Holiday? Which leads to the next lesson, which I actually have tattooed on my arm, and it's the idea that the optical is the way. Right, so the Stoics say we don't control what happens, but we do control how we respond to what happens. We control what we're gonna do about what happens. We control what we're gonna think about what happens. So the Stoics believed that there was really no such thing as obstacles. There was only opportunities. But this thing is presenting you an opportunity to do something. Difficult people are presenting us an opportunity. An injury is presenting us an opportunity, right? Being tired is presenting us an opportunity. These are reps dealing with that thing, right? This is a challenge that's getting us outside our comfort zone.
5:40 Ryan Holiday? You guys go in the weight room and you expose yourself to heavy loads so you can get stronger, right? This is what we're doing. How do you get reps dealing with difficulty and adversity? Let me read you this passage. This is a famous passage in Meditations that I love, sort of encapsulates that idea. Marcus Serrano is the most powerful man in the world. He says, "Our inward power, when it obeys nature, reacts to events by accommodating itself to what it faces, to what is possible. It needs no specific material or circumstances. It pursues its own aims as those circumstances allow, and it turns obstacles into fuel." Says, "As a fire overwhelms what would have quenched a lamp, what's thrown on top of the fire is absorbed and consumed by it, and makes it burn still higher."
6:23 Ryan Holiday? And so the idea is that actually, nothing can get in your way, nothing can cause problems for you, because what it's actually doing is presenting you a chance to grow and change. Maybe not in the way that you like, maybe not in the way that you planned, maybe not in the most fun of ways, but it nevertheless is presenting you that opportunity. There's another really good one here. He says, "What we have to cultivate is the judgment that can look an event in the eye." So we're talking about an injury, you're talking about a... An article, we're talking about feedback you just got, talking about someone who just did something frustrating. He says, "So the judgment can look at the event in the eye and say, 'This is what you really are, regardless of what you may look like, regardless of what our first impression about that thing is,'" which might say that it's negative, or unfair, or shitty, or whatever.
7:07 Ryan Holiday? And then he says, "And then adaptability adds, 'You are just what I was looking for.'" And it says, "This is to me a present for the exercise of virtue," just to say, "erite," or excellence. So we go, "Hey, this situation, this obstacle, it is frustrating, it is unfair, I don't like it, I wouldn't have chose it." But it is a chance for excellence, right? Everything is a chance for excellence. That's what the Stoics mean when they say, "The obstacle is the web." Okay, who here knows what positive visualization is, right? Imagine things going well. The Stoics, that's all well and good. They also do negative visualization, right? So imagining it going quite poorly. The Stoics would say, "It's better to do a pre-mortem than a post-mortem."
7:50 Ryan Holiday? Right? A post-mortem is great for the doctor, it's not so great for the patient who died. You want to imagine what could go wrong, and then you want to prepare for that in advance. So the Stoics are saying that what is unexpected, what we don't want to think about, right? Lands the heaviest on us. So the Stoics are always thinking about the worst-case scenario, not in a way that makes them anxious, not because they want to suffer in advance, but because they want to be prepared. The word Stoic in English, it means, you know, not having a big reaction, being calm and under control, not being emotional. Part of the reason the Stoics have this reputation is because they don't get rattled by things, because things don't surprise them. Their view is that nothing should ever happen to a wise person that is a surprise.
8:31 Ryan Holiday? Seneca said, "The only thing that a leader is not allowed to ever say is, 'Wow, I didn't think that would happen.'" Like, your job as the leader is to think, "That could happen." And what would I do if that happened? Where do I need to be if that happens? What would my plan be if that happens? Now look, most of the time, these negative circumstances won't happen, and that's great. It's better to be pleasantly surprised that they don't happen than unpleasantly surprised if they do happen. Do you guys know who Frank Robinson is? One of the greatest baseball players of all time. The first one to win the MVP in the American and the National Leagues. And then he also has a World Series MVP too. There's a story about just an ordinary game. The Orioles are playing the Red Sox. And he hits what he thinks is a clean homerun. It's going out into left field.
9:15 Ryan Holiday? And then at the last minute, it bangs off the green monster, like 40 feet up almost. And as it bangs off the tin, it's at that moment that he realizes, well, he didn't hit a homerun. And that he hadn't been running as fast as he should have been because he was so convinced it was going out of the park. And Robinson ends up having to settle for a double instead of what could have been a triple or maybe even a full trip around the bases if he'd really, really run. Now, the Orioles end up winning this game in a blowout. You know, it's one of his at bats in thousands of games. His commitment, his dedication, his discipline, his contributions, they're unquestioned. So that's why the manager of the Orioles was stunned when after the game Robinson walks
9:57 Ryan Holiday? into his office and slams $200 down on his desk. And he says, "Coach, I'm fining myself." Says, "I should have run it out." Basically, he knew that he cheated the game. He cheated himself. He cheated his teammates by just not doing his best. Now, it didn't matter in the big scheme of things, but it mattered to him. That's what we're talking about when we're talking about virtue and discipline. Doesn't matter that you can get away with it. It doesn't matter that no one's putting a gun to your head. It doesn't matter that most of the other times you did do the right thing. It matters this time. And that's why you have to hold yourself accountable. That's what justice and accountability are. This is the standard. This is who I am. This is what I know I'm supposed to do.
10:40 Ryan Holiday? And I'm going to do it even if no one's looking. When I think about the things that I'm most embarrassed about, most ashamed about, they're not things that were public, that I got in trouble for. Most of the time, they're things where I just knew I could have done better. I knew I should have done more. And I didn't. And again, no one held me accountable. And I didn't hold myself accountable, but I'm doing it after, right? I'm looking back and going, hey, that excuse didn't age well. I should have been more involved. I should have spoken up. I should have said no to this or that. And that weighs on you, right? That's what your conscience is there for. I think this is what Epictetus meant when he said, "When anyone criticizes you, you should say to yourself, 'I got off easy,'
11:24 Ryan Holiday? because if they really knew me, they'd say something worse."
11:29 Ryan Holiday? Accountability is primarily self-accountability. Just as discipline as a virtue is self-discipline. It's not that they made you do it, that you have to, that you did or didn't do it because you were afraid of getting caught or you knew you wouldn't get caught. You did or you didn't do it because of your values. Right? They sometimes compare the Stoic virtues, like the cardinal virtues, right? People point out that's also what a compass is called, the cardinal points on a compass. I think justice, integrity, decency, honesty, fairness, this has to be the north star of that compass, right? You might be confused by everything that's happening. You might be confused by everything that's happening in the world. But you know what you're supposed to be doing, which is to say what is right.
12:14 Ryan Holiday? And so, we need these virtues, this value more than ever, because these are confusing and bewildering times. I actually think the story of David and Goliath is the story about ego and humility. And then, right in the middle, we have confidence. Right? You might go, "Okay, I get ego's bad, but isn't confidence important?" And I'd say confidence is sitting right there in the middle. We call it the golden mean between self-doubt and arrogance. And the story of David and Goliath, right, is a guy who thinks he's invincible, and then, a bunch of people who are afraid of him. And it's not till David, who's a shepherd, decides to challenge Goliath. And they laugh at him. They think, "How could you possibly beat this person?"
12:58 Ryan Holiday? And at first, he tries to put on, you know, your typical soldier's armor. It doesn't work. He realizes that he can't fight this way. And so, David heads down to the river. He fetches a few stones, and then he goes at Goliath with his sling. And what I think the point of the story is, is that David has the humility to know where he's weak, which is that he's not your typical soldier. But he has the confidence to know that he has an advantage here in this. And as he runs at Goliath, Goliath laughs. And it's the last thing Goliath ever does is underestimate this young man. And David matches strength against a weakness rather than a weakness against a strength. Or what we so often do out of ego is strength against strength.
13:43 Ryan Holiday? We go at someone right where they are strongest. We try to dominate them. But the humility to look, to be strategic, to probe for weakness and to go there. That's what this story is about. And then as Goliath is felled, David, in the story, we don't tell kids this part. David runs at him, grabs his sword and cuts Goliath's head off with his own sword. There's something poetic and ironic about how we are often the root of our own failures. Right? That's probably Goliath before the fall. That's the funny thing about ego, right? We see where ego gets in other people's way. We see how it holds other organizations back. We can see it in music and politics and business, how somebody's ego gets them into trouble.
14:25 Ryan Holiday? The funny thing is it's much harder to see our own ego, which is of course exactly how ego works. You can see it in other people and you can't see it in yourself. So ego is this thing that gets between us and seeing reality, seeing what's going on, seeing how things actually are. It gets in the way of us getting the feedback we need, living in the reality that we need to live in. And so what the Stoics say about ego is that you can't learn what you think you already know. And so ego being a know-it-all, thinking you're fantastic, thinking you're amazing, the reason this makes you worse is not just that it's insufferable and annoying, but ego prevents you from learning and growing because it thinks you don't need to do that. Right?
15:08 Ryan Holiday? If you're a know-it-all, in a sense, you're right, the Stoics would say, because you can't know anything else. Meanwhile, humility, we talked about Socrates for a second. The reason Socrates is considered so wise is that he knows that he doesn't know. The Socratic method, if you learn about this in school, is about asking questions. It's rooted in curiosity and openness. There's a idea in physics that as our island of knowledge grows, so does the shoreline of ignorance. So you're constantly being exposed to what you don't know if you have that curiosity. Jerry, I heard you're the best learner in the organization.
15:44 Ryan Holiday? There's the humility. But you're not the youngest guy here, right? That's true. So the idea is, is how do you remain a student always? Right? You become a student early on, but how do you stay a student? There's a story about Marcus Aurelius then, again, the emperor of Rome, the most powerful man in the world. He said the best teacher is considered a philosopher king. And he's seen leaving his palace. And a friend, he stops him and he says, "Sir, where are you going?" And he says, "I'm off to see Sextus the philosopher to learn that which I do not yet know." And so, the man's amazed. He goes, "Here we have the king of the Romans still taking up his tablets and going to school." Right? I think we're all trying to get out of school as fast as possible. Nobody likes sitting in a classroom. Nobody likes getting lectured, I get it. So I'm gonna talk fast.
16:29 Ryan Holiday? But how do you open yourself up to learn as much as possible? How do you remain a student of what you do always? In this way, humility makes us better, right? The scientific method is about a hypothesis that you're then trying to disprove. So intellectual humility allows you to discover, allows you to experiment, allows you to learn. And then intellectual certainty, conceit, arrogance, right? This is what gets you in trouble.
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