Don’t Rush Through This | Ask DS

Seneca makes the point, however, that what we are really rushing towards—with all deliberate speed—is death. That’s what he means when he says that we get death wrong. Death is not some distant thing in the future, not some one-time thing that looms ahead. Instead, death is something happening to you right now. It’s happening as you read this email (hope it’s been worth it!), it’s happening as you struggle to put your daughter’s shoes on so you can drop her off at school and then it’s happening still more as you sit down to that coffee meeting you rushed to even though you didn’t want to have it in the first place. It happens as you procrastinate, it happens as you distract yourself, it happens as you make bad choices, it happens as you worry and dread and whine. And that’s why we created The Daily Stoic Spring Forward Challenge. It’s a set of ten brand-new actionable challenges designed to push you to examine your choices, your relationships, and your day-to-day patterns and move you closer to living your best life.“Remember how long you’ve been putting this off,” Marcus Aurelius writes, “how many extensions the gods gave you, and you didn’t use them.” He reminds us “that there is a limit to the time assigned you, and if you don’t use it to free yourself it will be gone and will never return.”Don’t rush through life, don’t rush toward death. Use the time assigned to you and sign up for The Spring Forward Challenge NOW at dailystoic.com/spring! Challenge starts March 19!----On today's episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast, Ryan talks with Kentucky Wildcats Men's Basketball Team in which he focuses on the timeless wisdom of the four cardinal virtues—wisdom, courage, justice, and temperance.*A note on the audio for this episode: an issue with Ryan's live mic resulted in the discrepancy in audio quality that you hear. We apologize for the inconvenience.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:05Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. Well, on Thursdays, we not only read the daily meditation, but we answer some questions from listeners and fellow Stoics. We're trying to apply this philosophy just as you are. Some of these come from my talks, some of these come from Zoom sessions that we do with Daily Stoic Life members, or as part of the challenges. Some of them are from interactions I have on the street when there happened to be someone there recording. But thank you for listening, and we hope this is of use to you.

• 0:48Ryan Holiday?

  Don't rush through this. You look around and you see people rushing everywhere, rushing through traffic, rushing to get their kids down to bed, rushing through work to get to the weekend. No time to talk, no time to sit, there's too much to do, there's somewhere to go. The faster the better. And this was true in the ancient world as it is today. In Rome, people were rushing to get their mail, rushing to win the next public office, rushing to the next round of the games in the Colosseum, rushing to their next big accomplishment. At least that's what they thought. Seneca makes the point, however, that what we're really rushing towards with all deliberate speed is death. That's what he means when he says that we get death wrong. Death is not some distant thing in the future, some looming end date, to which the proper response is to try to squeeze in as much

• 1:33Ryan Holiday?

  time as possible before it comes. Instead, he said, "Death is something happening to you right now. It's happening to you as you listen to this episode. I hope it's been worth it. It's happening to you as you struggle to put on your daughter's shoes so you can drop her off at school, and then it's still happening as you sit down to that coffee meeting you rushed through, even though you didn't want to have it in the first place." The time that passes, Seneca reminds us, is death. It belongs to death. You'll never get to live that which has been lived again. So why are you rushing? Why are you thinking about the future at the expense of the present? But no season reminds us of the possibility of rebirth, of a chance for life to start anew in spring. After the long hibernation

• 2:15Ryan Holiday?

  of winter, it's time to reset, to reassess, a patient time to plant seeds in the form of better habits and better routines, so you can reap what you sowed come summer and fall with more meaningful relationships and success.

• 2:29Ryan Holiday?

  And presence. And by the way, that's what we created this challenge I've been telling you about the Daily Stoic Spring Forward Challenge. It's 10 brand new actionable challenges designed to push you to examine your choices, your relationships, your day-to-day patterns, and move you closer towards living your best life. Remember how long you've been putting this off, Marx realist writes, how many extensions the gods gave you and you didn't use them. He says that there is a limit to the time assigned to you, and if you don't use it to free yourself, it will be gone and never return. Don't rush through life, don't rush towards death. Use the time assigned to you and sign up right now for the Spring Forward Challenge that we're doing at Daily Stoic. You can sign up at dailystoic.com/spring. It starts on March 19th. I'm really excited about it. I'm already

• 3:14Ryan Holiday?

  feeling the weather change. I'm reminded of that Philip Larkin line, begin afresh, afresh, afresh. And I hope you can do the same with me and thousands of Stoics all over the world. It's gonna be awesome. If you did our New Year, New You Challenge, it's a great way to build on that. If you didn't do the challenge and just sort of muddled through winter, well, I think now is the time to get serious. And I hope to see you there. Remember, if you're a Daily Stoic Life member, you get this challenge and all our challenges for free. But I hope to see you in there, dailystoic.com/spring. Talk soon.

• 3:55Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to a Thursday episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I brought you a chunk of my episode of my talk to the Kentucky men's basketball team recently. And here we are now in the middle of March Madness. And I wanted to bring you the little bit of Q and A that we had after. This is sort of an informal discussion, the football talk, which I'll bring to you later. You know, that was, that was in a, in a nice sort of theater. This was in the private dining room at Jan. And I just, you know, one of the cool experiences is I went around and toured the facility after as they, one of Coach Cal's assistants took me aside. He showed me this drawer. And there was one

• 4:38Ryan Holiday?

  of my books. They had a whole stack of Ego is the Enemy, which they give to recruits and players who join the team. That was just such a, not at all what I could have imagined when I wrote that book. And I think it says something about the power of Stoicism. But anyways, I'll bring you this quick Q and A and I'll let you get back to watching basketball or whatever it is you're doing today. And I hope you enjoy.

• 5:17Speaker 01

  Look, I think we all face a lot of noise, right? And you guys face a ton of noise. You face the noise of the crowd, you face the noise of people on social media, you face the noise of people in the regular media. And then, yeah, you've got teammates, you've got competitors jawing at you, you've got coaches telling you this, maybe you've got your parents telling you that. You've got a lot coming at you. And so I think a stove tries to cultivate a sense of some protections, right? Between you and all that noise. You've got to decide what you let in and what you don't let in. And then you've got to go, okay, in this moment, if I, they just told me I'm not measuring up and if I don't, you know, do X, Y, Z, I'm going to get cut. Or, you know, someone just, we just had a real brutal film session and they showed me

• 6:02Speaker 01

  all the things I did wrong. If I add on top of that, that I suck, that I, you know, if you add on top of that, you're not, what you're doing is taking away energy from what you can control, what you can do better, right? And if you are responding emotionally, instantaneously to how that thing makes you feel, that's also a problem, right? Like where I find ego or a lack of discipline can get me in trouble. Like, say I'm working on one of my books, I submit it to my publisher, I think it's the best work that I've ever done, pumped about it. I want them to be like, you're amazing, this is the greatest thing we've ever read, right? But instead, you know what they do? They send me back like, it's just filled with, this is wrong, this is wrong, there's a mistake. What about this? What about this?

• 6:46Speaker 01

  And the ego part of me wants to go like, who are you to tell me this? You don't understand me, you know, all that like sort of teenager-ness that we all still have in us, no matter how old we are. But what I do, I have practices, is like, when I get those notes, I don't respond for a week. I let them sit, I let it filter in, right? And then I try to look at it from different angles, I try to get other opinions. And then what I try to find in that is, you know, what a... What's valuable, what I agree with. I try to react from a place of understanding and confidence rather than a place of rebelliousness or ego. Then I try to do what I can to integrate that feedback into getting better.

• 7:29Speaker 01

  But if I send out a, you know, a response three seconds later in that space of emotion, just like if one of you guys after a game, you know, tweeting out the first thought that pops into your mind, the chances of that aging well, right? Or that's still feeling true the next day, the day after. We're not making things worse for you. You know, that's, that's what you're trying to avoid. So it's about that space between you and the response. Even if that thing is unfair, even if it's frustrating, even if you are gonna have to deal with it, probably not best to deal with it in the moment when you're hot. So that the discipline to do that, to go like, hey, I'm gonna deal with this tomorrow after I take a walk, after I think about it. That's a big part of what we're talking about.

• 8:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:16Speaker 02

  So, so what are you supposed to think? So what are you supposed to think if you don't have ego? I mean, it's confident and then ego. Where are you supposed to be thinking as you're doing something? So am I not supposed to be like, well, I can, I can press this out? Or am I supposed to be like, so how, how, how do you keep it not too hot, not too low?

• 8:39Speaker 01

  Sure. Well, I can think about it, right? Like, let's say, let's take a different story, like a prize fighting or something, boxing, right? If you don't think you can beat the guy, you're not gonna beat the guy, right? You gotta have some sense that you trained, you got a plan, you did the work, you know it's possible. If you go in there and you're doubting yourself, that's not gonna work, right? But what is the cycle of prize fighting to them? So the underdog beats the overconfident champion, right? Then what happens? They become the overconfident champion. And so what, what we're trying to do is replace ego, which is either I'm unbeatable, I'm the best, I'm, you know, perfect. And then there's also the ego of like, I'm worthless, no one likes. There's also that self obsession of the doubts, right?

• 9:24Speaker 01

  Like what they call imposterism. In the middle there, that's confidence. And I, I was thinking a lot about this. You guys know the story of David and Goliath, right? That's the story of confidence versus ego, right? Goliath thinks I'm unbeatable. Everyone else, like...

• 9:41Speaker 01

  David's not the first challenger, right? A lot of people hear Goliath's challenge, but they don't think it's possible, right? They're afraid. But David has the belief in himself, he has the knowledge that he can do it. But he's also not like, "Oh, you know, I'm God's instrument, of course I'm gonna win." What does David do? David gets a sling, or David has a tool, David has something that Goliath is not expecting. That's why he wins, right? So, I think that's a good question. I'm not saying, you know, you're just like a carpet that everyone walks all over, right? You gotta know your strengths, but you also wanna be aware of your weaknesses. And you also, you wanna be focused not on how strong you are, but on what you're doing

• 10:26Speaker 01

  to be stronger, or what you're doing to be better. That's what puts you in a position to keep learning and growing, and not become complacent, and thus, you know, vulnerable.

• 10:36Speaker 02

  All right, one more question. So like, if you know you're emotional and you put the work in, and you're not making shots, like, so how are you supposed to be about that? And you know you're coming to the gym every day, putting in shots, and you're missing shots.

• 10:51Speaker 01

  Sure. Well, is getting mad about it making you hit the shots any better?

• 10:56Speaker 02

  No.

• 10:57Speaker 01

  Right. So, the idea is, it's not that, again, it's, no one is emotionless, right? It's not possible. But what I think the stones are trying, that's why I said it's about being less emotional, not emotionless, right? But what we're trying to cultivate is more of an even keel. I imagine when you were younger, missing shots hurt you more than it does now, because you've taken so many more shots. You have a better sense of rhythms, you know slumps are inevitable, you know. You also cultivate, like, you know whether it was a good shot or not, whether it goes in, right? Regardless of whether it goes in, right? And so, so it's not that you don't feel it, you gotta feel it.

• 11:42Speaker 01

  Like, a person who doesn't care about the game, who's just sort of sitting there like a mug, is probably not gonna do great. But what you're understanding is that like, hey, by getting upset about this, or getting mad about it... Like, worst-case scenario, you know, you're getting a technical, you're giving points to the other team, or you're making stupid mistakes because you're nodding your head. Like, there's a reason we talk trash, right? We talk trash because we want to provoke the emotions of the other person because we know when they're emotional, they're not as good as they can be. Right. So we got to understand that that process is also happening to us, right? And the more of an even keel,

• 12:23Speaker 01

  the more equanimity or poise we can have, the better we're going to do in big moments.