Good Leaders Give This | 10 Rules For Life From The Stoics

General Victor Krulak was an exacting Marine. He drove his troops hard. He cared about the tiniest details. He expected perfection. So you might think he would be upset–or at least disappointed–when a major leading review of troops inadvertently knocked off his own hat…which was then trampled by every Marine who followed.---And in today's Daily Stoic video excerpt, Ryan shares his top ten rules that the Stoics promoted in order to help ensure that they stayed on the right path and didn't let the complexity of life overwhelm them.💪 Visit store.dailystoic.com/pages/leadership to sign up for in the Daily Stoic Leadership Challenge before September 25th.✉️ 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.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. On Tuesdays, we take a closer look at these Stoic ideas, how we can apply them in our actual lives. Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy.

• 0:29Speaker 00

  Good leaders give this. Victor Krulak was an exacting Marine. He drove his troops hard. He cared about the tiniest details. He expected perfection. So you might think he would be upset, or at least disappointed, when a major leading a formation in front of him inadvertently knocked off his own hat, which was then trampled by every Marine who followed after him. Certainly, the major was humiliated. And noticing he was missing from a party later that evening after the parade, Krulak sent one of his aides to the man's house. As Robert Coram details in his book about Krulak, the aide delivered the

• 1:09Speaker 00

  major's hat with a note from the general. All it said was, "Dear Major, in 1934, a young Marine second lieutenant knocked off his cover while passing in front of President Roosevelt. I don't think it seriously affected my career. Semper Fi. VHK." As we've said before, a Stoic is very strict. They have high standards. It's part and parcel of being a leader. But they must also complement this strictness with grace and tolerance. Remember, one of Seneca's great essays is on the topic of clemency. Marcus Aurelius was famous with his ability to work with and make use of flawed people. He admonished

• 1:52Speaker 00

  himself in meditations to be more forgiving and to think the best of others. He also spoke glowingly of the way that Antoninus, whom he revered above all others, was so good at making people feel at ease. Very few people need you to yell at them. Your best employees, your best allies, they have high standards for themselves, too. They know it when they screw up. They feel bad enough already. What they need is grace. What they need is help. What they need is a pick-me-up. Are you strong enough, strict enough with yourself, to give that?

• 2:27Ryan Holiday?

  This is the kind of leadership that I am trying to work on myself. It's one of the things we talk about in the Daily Stoic Leadership Challenge, which I think is one of the best things we've done. We actually got some advice from a two-star general in the Air Force. So you can listen to that as part of the challenge. One of the best interviews I think that we've done. Lots of great lessons in there. And there's a reason so many people have taken and loved the challenge. It's a six-plus-week course on leadership, but it's really digestible. It won't overload you, and it'll give you actual tangible stuff you can use. I can't wait for you to check it out. Go to dailystoic.com/leadership, or you can check out the Leadership Challenge at store.dailystoic.com, and I'll link to it in today's show notes.

• 3:09Ryan Holiday?

  The great General Mattis, very influenced by Stoic philosophy, says, "Figure out your flat-ass rules and stick to them." Talking about rules for life. What do you live by? What are your standards? And really, that's what Stoicism has been for thousands of years. Here are 10 of the best Stoic rules, 10 commandments, if you will, that if you follow will make you a better, wiser, healthier, and happier person.

• 3:37Ryan Holiday?

  This comes to us from Epictetus. He says, "It's the chief task of life, which is focus on what you control." Is it up to me? Is it not up to me? If it is up to you, it gets 100%. If it's not up to me, it gets 0%. We focus on what we control, because that's where our energy, effort, and emotions actually make a difference.

• 3:58Ryan Holiday?

  Seek out challenges. Do one thing every day that scares you, as the cliche goes. We become better for what we struggle with, just as the way you have to lift weights to get stronger. Seek out challenges. Tackle hard things. Push yourself. If you want to write a mighty book, Ralph Ellison says, choose a mighty theme. Challenge yourself. That's how you get better. Don't run away from challenges. Run towards challenges.

• 4:24Ryan Holiday?

  Well begun is half-done, as they say. So own the morning. If you want to have a good day, have a good morning. If you want to have a good life, have a good day. So it all comes back to how you start the day. Own the morning. There's a great passage in Marcus Aurelius where he's arguing with himself about getting up out of bed in the morning. And he says, "Look, were you meant to huddle under the covers and stay warm?" He says, "No, get to work. Do what you gotta do. Do what you were put here on this earth to do, and do it early."

• 4:53Ryan Holiday?

  Seneca says we suffer more in imagination than reality, and that gives us the next law, which is don't suffer imagined troubles. The stuff that you're worried about, it'll happen or it won't. Worrying doesn't affect it, right? So Seneca says, don't feel more than you have to. Deal with that when it comes. For now, focus on what's in front of you. Focus on what you need to do. Don't add to your suffering by anticipating it, by suffering in advance. That's only adding cumulatively up to more suffering. Epictetus says that every situation has two handles. And that's where this rule, actually adapted from Thomas Jefferson, comes from. He says, always grab the smooth handle. Epictetus says, one of the handles will hold weight, the other won't.

• 5:37Ryan Holiday?

  What handle are you going to grab in this situation? The one that empowers you or disempowers you? The one that makes you angry, or gives you something to focus on and change? Right? So every situation has two handles. Which one are you going to grab? Grab the one that makes you better, that gives you something to do, that challenges you. Ignore the other handle. It's easy to get upset by things, which is why the Stoics say that we have the power to have no opinion. You can just think nothing about something. If you didn't know it existed, you wouldn't have an opinion. Now that you know it exists, great. But you don't have to say it's positive, it's negative. You don't have to say it's anything. It just is. Seeing things objectively, withdrawing judgments from them is really important.

• 6:20Ryan Holiday?

  As Epictetus says, it's not things that upset us, it's our opinion about things. We control our opinions. Seneca's rule was, put the day up for review. Ask yourself, what could I have done better? Where did I fall short? Who do I want to be? Was I being that person? So every day, the law is, put your day up for review, evaluate yourself, interrogate yourself. That's how you get better. The next is a question from Marcus Rilis. He says, ask yourself in every moment, is this essential? Because the truth is, most of what we do, most of what we spend time on, most of the things that other people do and spend time on, are not essential.

• 7:01Ryan Holiday?

  And he says, when you eliminate what's inessential, you get the double benefit of doing the essential things better. Do I need to do it? Yes or no? And if I do need to do it, then because it is essential, I'm going to give it everything I have.

• 7:17Ryan Holiday?

  You have to find a way to love everything that happens. This is the Stoic idea of amor fati. The Stoics aren't resigned to what happens. It's more than that. They embrace it. They say, "This isn't something I have to do. It's something I get to do. This isn't something that happened to me. It's something that happened for me." Marx realist says, "Everything you throw on top of a fire becomes fuel for the fire." That's what the idea of amor fati is. They embrace, they love everything that happens because they know they can use it, and they know that it's what destiny had in mind for them.

• 7:48Ryan Holiday?

  Are you meditating on your mortality? I carry a coin in my pocket that says, "Memento mori." "You could leave life right now," Marx realist says. "Life is short. Don't waste time. Don't focus on things that don't matter." Going through our life with a clear sense of our mortality is essential.