Every Day Could Be The Final Quarter | Ask Daily Stoic

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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 bring you a Stoic-inspired meditation, designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life. Each one of these episodes is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women, help you learn from them, to follow in their example, and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. For more, visit dailystoic.com.

• 0:56Ryan Holiday?

  Every day could be the final quarter. In 1994, at age 57, George Raveling's life changed forever. While driving through Los Angeles on a familiar route, something he'd driven hundreds of times, he approached an intersection, checked both ways, and proceeded. But in an instant, another car slammed into his, flipping it over and over and crashing him into the front yard of a nearby house. When George regained consciousness, he tells this story in his lovely new book, What You're Made For: Powerful Life Lessons From My Career in Sports. George is a hero and mentor of mine. I'll tell you about that in a sec. He says that the police officer took him aside and said, "You have no idea how lucky you are.

• 1:38Ryan Holiday?

  95% of the time, when I get to a scene like this, the person is dead." George had survived, but just barely. He had a broken pelvis, nine broken ribs, a collapsed lung, internal bleeding, and he spent weeks immobilized and in pain at the hospital. But one day, as he was there staring at the ceiling, a thought consumed him. "Why was I spared? What will I do with this second chance?"

• 2:07Ryan Holiday?

  From that point on, he tried to treat every day like bonus time, a gift he wasn't owed, but one that he wanted to make count. And so at 62, he joined Nike as the director of basketball marketing. He became one of the highest ranking executives at one of the world's most influential companies. He would help shepherd the Jordan brand, which changed sports and the business world forever. He achieved awards and honors that he'd never dreamed of, many of which all happened after that fatal crash. But I think the Stoic message here is that we don't need a catastrophic event to wake us up to the precariousness of life. In fact, as Seneca said, "We should go to bed every day saying to ourselves, 'I have lived,' so that every morning

• 2:50Ryan Holiday?

  when we arise, it is a bonus." It's a challenge, right? We have to embrace this mindset now, not after a close call or a tragedy. We must begin each day with the quiet acknowledgement that we have been spared. Then we have to answer the question, "What will I do with this gift?" "Life is like a game in its final quarter," George writes. "The clock is ticking, and we have no idea when the buzzer will sound. Every day for each of us is a bonus. None of us is guaranteed tomorrow. If we wake up, it is because we have been spared. We are in the final quarter. Let's make it count." And I met George, a chance encounter, about almost 10 years ago now at a UT basketball

• 3:35Ryan Holiday?

  practice. And he's just become one of my absolute favorite people, one of my mentors, someone I just love very dearly. And I feel very lucky to have helped bring this book into the world. What You're Made For is not a memoir of George's incredible life, although it is an incredible life. I mean, this is the guy who owned the "I Have a Dream" speech. It's the guy that brought Jordan to Nike. He did all these incredible things. He lived twice the life expectancy for a black man born in 1937. But he's got a bunch of amazing advice in here. It's his philosophy. I think about George almost every day. I think you'll really like this book. We've got some signed copies by both him and me at The Painted Porch. I'll link to that in today's show notes. We will almost assuredly run out of them, so grab those while you can. And if you don't know about George, you're gonna love him,

• 4:20Ryan Holiday?

  so check it out.

• 4:26Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another Thursday episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Back in October, I drove into Austin, gave a talk to interesting group. It was a group of sort of school principals, administrators, executives, who were doing a retreat here, a leadership retreat in Texas. And they wanted to ask me questions about Stoic philosophy, about productivity, about life, about learning. And I was happy to oblige. Usually I do a talk and then the audience asks me questions. This was more of a moderated Q and A. Joe Powers and Arvin Grover

• 5:09Ryan Holiday?

  were nice enough to ask me some questions. One works at a school in Stanford, Connecticut, and another in Weston, Massachusetts. And they were clearly big fans and very nice guys. So we really got into it. And I wanted to bring you a chunk of that in today's episode. And if you want some more Stoic principles on leadership, do check out the Daily Stoic Leadership Challenge, which is filled with a bunch of leadership experts and leadership lessons for precisely these kinds of situations. You can check that out at dailystoic.com/leadership, and I will link to it in today's show notes, or just sign up for Daily Stoic Life, because you get this and all the other challenges for free.

• 5:52Speaker 01

  So what is it about this moment, or our inherent need, that the principles of Stoicism and all your work is key to our success as leaders?

• 6:03Ryan Holiday?

  Probably doesn't say anything good about this moment. Stoicism does tend to see resurgences in popularity when the world feels like it's falling apart. Marx realist is writing during the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. George Washington is putting it on a play about the Stoics at Valley Forge. I do think there is something about Stoicism that is uniquely suited to moments where it feels like it's falling apart. Actually, the founding story of Stoicism, Zeno, is a merchant, and he suffers a shipwreck. He ends up in Athens penniless in a bookstore. And this is where he's introduced to philosophy. Stoicism, I think, is fittingly founded in disaster. He says later that he made a great fortune when he suffered a shipwreck because it turns him to philosophy.

• 6:48Ryan Holiday?

  So I think Stoicism has always been there in moments when it feels like things are falling apart. And that's the idea. It's that we don't control what happens. We control how we respond to what happens. And I think you need the most help when it's not happening the way you want it to be happening.

• 7:03Speaker 01

  Maybe as a counterbalance, how you open that, one group wanted to know what gives you hope?

• 7:08Ryan Holiday?

  Oh, yeah, I don't know. No. I think the idea of Stoicism, so again, it's we don't control what happens, we control how we respond to what happens. You can look at sort of moments where it's all falling apart. People are behaving not as they should. People are doing things they shouldn't do. But what I love about Stoicism, what always does get me inspired is when you see people who swim against that current or people who are great inside of disasters or tumultuous times. So I think one of the things you get when you study history is a sense of despair that when you study real history, not the sort of propaganda version of history, when you

• 7:53Ryan Holiday?

  study real history, you see how things actually were. And then that can be depressing. That can sort of take some of the idealism away. But then there's the more inspiring part where you go, oh, not everyone felt this way. There were some people who were way ahead of their time. There were some people who were strikingly decent and good and believed in a better future in the midst of that. So I would say those people always give me hope.

• 8:16Speaker 01

  We talked a little bit before you got in here about building the inner citadel.

• 8:20Ryan Holiday?

  Mm-hmm.

• 8:21Speaker 01

  Would love your advice, this came from one of our groups, about coaching our teachers to act from their inner citadel when faced with an obstacle, whether it's their students or our parents, et cetera.

• 8:34Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, you know, I was thinking about this during the pandemic because obviously it was very hard on parents and teachers and schools alike. But there was this kind of interesting reaction that we had pretty early on where we where we kept talking about how much kids have been harmed by this and how much has been taken away from them. Which it's true, it wasn't fair and it was really tough. I had two young kids under four when the pandemic started, so it was rough. But I was thinking, you know, when I talked to my grandfather who fought in World War II or my other grandparents who lived through the Depression, they weren't like, oh, it was the worst thing ever and we never recovered and it was so unfair, right? They had a they had a sense of how that event shaped them, how that adversity made them who they were.

• 9:15Ryan Holiday?

  And there is something about today's culture that, and I think it's it's good on the one hand that we think about trauma, we think about the effect, you know, we have empathy, we think about how people handle things differently. That's all well and good, but there also has to be a reminder to people of what they are capable of and what they've been through. Like, if you weren't tough, you wouldn't have made it as a teacher so far, right? Or a school principal. And if you wanted things to be easy and straightforward, you like, you screwed up, you you picked the wrong profession. There's a letter that James Baldwin writes to his nephew that I think about all the time. He says, yeah, it's gonna be tough. He's like, he's a young kid coming up, he says, it's gonna be tough.

• 9:57Ryan Holiday?

  But he says, you have to remember you come from sturdy peasant stock. Says, people who built railroads and dammed rivers and crossed mountains, he says, people who achieved an unassailable dignity amidst, you know, monumental odds. I think if we can remember not just where we came from and what people before us have been through, but also what we ourselves have been through, like, you should come out of the pandemic not thinking How hard and awful it was, I think, to me, the sort of Stoic approach to that would be like, I came out of the other side of that, just now I have like a really true sense of what my capacities were. And one of the things the Stoics talk about is that they actually pity people who haven't been through things like that,

• 10:42Ryan Holiday?

  because they don't really know what they're capable of. And, you know, living through a historical moment is not fun. Living through, you know, failures of the kinds that we've lived through the last decade or so, it's not great. But what should come out of that, the only sort of upside is, you know, we've had to get tough and resilient and creative, and that's maybe how I would, I would think about it.

• 11:08Speaker 02

  What's the smallest step you can take as the building block for this operating system that will have the highest impact?

• 11:15Ryan Holiday?

  Ooh, to me, the, the most basic practice of Stoic philosophy is this idea of journaling. So how do you have and engage in an active conversation with yourself about these ideas? Stoicism shouldn't be a philosophy that you have read. It should be a philosophy you are reading, and it should be a philosophy you are engaging with. And so I, I think of that, I, I tend to do it in the evening. Sometimes I do it in the morning, kind of depends on my schedule. But I just take a few minutes and I'm, I'm just having a conversation on the page. It helps me calm down, helps me think about what's important, what I want to be working on. I, I like to be able to sort of, I use this one journal I like that has like one line a day for five, for five years. It's called the one line a day journal.

• 12:00Ryan Holiday?

  But I like to be able to see where I was, like the first year you do it at school, the second year at school, by three and four and five, it's really cool because you can see where you were on that day a year earlier. And it kind of has the effect of what we're talking about, where you go, oh, yeah, last year was difficult too, and so was the year before.

• 12:20Ryan Holiday?

  But also, there were all these great things that happened that I didn't remember. You get a sense of what you're dealing with and going through, and it kind of roots you in your own recent past. I really like that. But to me, you've got to create some distance between you and your thoughts, especially if you're in a position of leadership, because you have to... If you're not thinking... Like, look, if you have a direct boss, then they're able to give you feedback, right? They're able to tell you how you're doing, what you need to be working on, what your priorities are. But as you sort of go up the chain, if you're not doing it, no one's doing it for you. And so if we think about the pages of a journal as this way to sort of brief and debrief,

• 13:03Ryan Holiday?

  prepare and reflect, it becomes this really powerful philosophical tool. And that is what Marcus Aurelius was doing in Meditations. It is a totally unique historical document that survives to us, this sort of self-talk of the most powerful man in the world, the person who sat atop an empire of tens of millions of people and millions of square miles, not writing a work of philosophy as we think of it, but a work of sort of self-philosophy. It's a really beautiful thing.

• 13:34Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. I just wanted to say we so appreciate it. We love serving you. It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple of years we've been doing it. It's an honor. Please spread the word, tell people about it. And this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say thank you.