Handle What You Control First | Robert Greene's 6 Stoic Concepts For A Fulfilling Life

Life is frustrating. You’re waiting for people to get back to you. You’re waiting for approval on stuff. You’re waiting for things to ship. You’re dealing with bureaucracy. You’re depending on teammates. You’re dealing with the fallout of decisions that weren’t your call, rules you don’t agree with. It’s interesting though how often we complain or chafe against these constraints…yet when the ball actually is in our court, we’re slow. We’re indecisive. We don’t do our best. More than strange, it’s wasteful madness. The Stoics say over and over again that there is stuff in our control and stuff outside our control.---And in today's Daily Stoic video excerpt, Ryan presents six Stoic concepts for living a fulfilling life that Robert Greene has gathered from his decades of observing, studying, and writing about people and power.📺 You can watch the full video on the Daily Stoic YouTube channel.✉️ Get parenting wisdom inspired by the Stoics every day for free at https://dailydad.com✉️ 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.

• 0:02Ryan 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. 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.

• 0:26Ryan Holiday?

  Handle what you control first. Life is frustrating. You're waiting for people to get back to you. You're waiting for approval on stuff. You're waiting for things to ship. You're dealing with bureaucracy. You're depending on teammates. You're dealing with the fallout of decisions that weren't your call, rules that you don't agree with. It's interesting, though, how often we complain and chafe against these constraints. And yet, when the ball is actually in our court, we're slow, we're indecisive. We don't do our best. More than strange, it's wasteful madness. The Stoics say over and over again that there is stuff that's in our control and stuff outside of our control. But this delineation is about more than just putting stuff into categories or learning how to practice the so-called art of acquiescence.

• 1:09Ryan Holiday?

  It's a statement of priorities. The things in your control, you have to get them under control. You're never going to be able to make others speed up, but you can use the time they take up to decide what you're going to do when it's time to respond. No amount of yelling is going to make that container ship in the Atlantic go faster, but you can handle everything else you need to handle before it comes in. You can't eliminate the red tape in the DMV, but you can trim the inefficiencies in your own office, and that will still save you time. Stop beating your head against the wall where it makes no difference. Focus on what you control. Handle that first. Actually, not even first, because that implies it's possible to somehow get to the bottom of all of it. It's a lifelong task, getting your own house in order,

• 1:54Ryan Holiday?

  improving your own processes and decisions, and ultimately dealing with what's up to you.

• 2:03Robert Greene?

  You're going to have failure in life. People are going to hurt you. But that is life. That's what it is. So to resist that, to be angry about that, means to not love life itself.

• 2:19Ryan Holiday?

  To me, he's one of the great living philosophers of our time, certainly one of the best-selling philosophers of our time. His books have sold millions of copies all over the world. His works have changed the lives of athletes and musicians and world leaders. And he directly changed my life, talking about the great Robert Greene. Forty-Eight Laws of Power, Art of Seduction, Mastery, Laws of Human Nature, The Daily Laws. I'm Ryan Holiday. Not only have I written a number of books about Stoic philosophy, spoken about it to the NBA and the NFL, sitting senators and special forces leaders. And in today's episode, I want to give you not just some really genius things from the one and only Robert Greene, but I want to give you Robert Greene talking about Stoic philosophy and some Stoic lessons that he's applied, that you can apply,

• 3:02Ryan Holiday?

  that connect Stoicism to his work on power and warfare and strategy and human psychology.

• 3:11Ryan Holiday?

  The thing that you and I made together, which is the Morfati coin.

• 3:15Robert Greene?

  Yes.

• 3:16Ryan Holiday?

  Which is the idea that it's also in Nietzsche, a phrase of sort of loving everything that happens to you, not resenting it, not fighting against it, not carrying around a grudge or a burden, but sort of embracing it and finding the good in it.

• 3:31Robert Greene?

  Yeah.

• 3:32Ryan Holiday?

  Where does that fit in with our human nature?

• 3:34Robert Greene?

  Well, it doesn't fit in because it's not natural to us. Our natural frame, our natural starting position is when something bad happens, why me to feel sort of a grievance, to feel that things aren't fair, to feel that other people aren't giving you what you want or what you deserve? We start from a position of feeling kind of sorry for ourselves.

• 3:57Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 3:58Robert Greene?

  We deserve more than what we're getting. And so overcoming some of these natural elements in human nature and turning them around and using them for another purpose, another way. And Morfati is very powerful in that you train yourself to accept everything that happens. It's sort of a banality to say that things happen for a reason. But there's some truth to it. For Nietzsche, it was, "This is life. Life involves pain. Life involves adversity. You're going to die one day, and it's not going to be pleasant. Your friends and family members, they're going to die one day, and it's not going to be pleasant. You're going to have failure in life. People are going to hurt you." But that is life. That's what it is.

• 4:43Robert Greene?

  So to resist that, to be angry about that, means to not love life itself.

• 4:51Ryan Holiday?

  Seneca has this thing, but I still struggle with what it means. He says, "We suffer more in imagination than reality." Now, I think he's saying, and I was talking to a friend who's sort of dreading this thing that's going to happen. He's worried about this negative news article that's going to come out. I was talking to him about it, and I was saying, "Look, like, it's going to happen, and it's going to either be really negative or not that negative. But you're borrowing the suffering in advance. You're feeling crappy about it before it's happened." I'm just curious, what does that quote mean to you?

• 5:22Robert Greene?

  I often have the idea as I'm meditating, "There's a world out there that has nothing to do with me. It's completely indifferent to Robert Greene. The birds could care less about my fate. The trees don't know anything about my existence. The sky doesn't care at all about me, right?" Okay, that's the reality, that's the world. But my thinking creates this thing as if I'm the most important thing in the universe, that everything that happens is going to happen to me, and it's going to be bad, et cetera. So to be able to see that thinking traps you so many times into patterns, that you've been programmed to respond to situations, a lot of times by anxiety. Thoughts pop up about, "I've got to do this phone call." Or, "Oh, I forgot to email that person."

• 6:07Robert Greene?

  Or, "Damn it, this interview's coming up, and I don't want to do it." So much of the thoughts are anxieties that you're anticipating what's going to happen, right? If you can just control that, if you could just see that that is the source of your problem, and that the world is indifferent to you, and that the circumstances are totally neutral, and that newspaper article that comes out, you can't control it, and maybe the bad stuff will actually, in the end, rebound to your favor, or it'll make you tougher. It'll make you realize certain things. If you can just see them as facts, then you've got the power.

• 6:43Robert Greene?

  My philosophy has always been you have to make ideas your own. You have to take what somebody teaches and you have to put it into your own experience. It can't just be these dead words that you kind of digest that have no relevance to your daily experience. You have to take them, they have to come to life within you, within your own experience. So you read a passage and, "Oh, that's not maybe what I'm really going through right now", but you kind of maybe recall some experiences in the past that might be relevant. And then the second day you come up with something that is maybe a little bit closer. And then as you go through it more and more and more, it kind of soaks in and you see more and more access points to your daily experience. And then it can kind of become something that you internalize.

• 7:29Robert Greene?

  Death is the ultimate barrier for all of us, not just physically but psychologically. I maintain that human beings are messed up, screwed up in so many ways because of their awareness of death and their fear of death. It is through this fear that we created all kinds of superstitions, that we created the idea of an afterlife. You're enslaved by this fear, you're not aware of it, it's controlling you. Overcoming it is the ultimate freedom. Most people are gonna say, "Oh, that's not me", as they say in for all of these chapters. The other people, they're irrational, not me. Yeah. "Oh, I'm not really afraid of death. I play video games and I'm always killing people and I watch movies and people are always dying,

• 8:14Robert Greene?

  I'm not afraid of it." Our culture was permeated with cartoon versions of death. Your death is something physical, it's going to happen to you, it's a very visceral thing. You are afraid of it. And that fear creates what I call latent anxiety. It makes you fearful of a lot of things in life and you're not aware of it. It makes you cautious about failure, it makes you cautious about taking risks.

• 8:40Robert Greene?

  So I'm trying to show you that your fear of death has infected you on many, many levels. And so I compare it to this. I use the metaphor in the book, I don't use many metaphors, but this is one I use, is that death is like this vast ocean that we stand on the shore of. Most animals are not aware of their mortality. We are the only species, as far as we know, that's aware of its mortality. And here you are on the shore of this immense vast ocean. You don't know what death is or what it's going to be. And you're afraid of it, and you turn your back to it. And we humans have the ability to explore things, to conquer our fear.

• 9:22Robert Greene?

  And I want you, instead of turning your back, to actually enter that vast ocean and explore it. And I show you ways of exploring the actual thought of your own mortality, and how it can free you and inspire you in many ways.

• 9:39Robert Greene?

  You know who one of the great Stoics of the 20th century was? No. Alfred Hitchcock. Directing a film, if you've known other people who've done it, is an extremely stressful job. It's like directing an army into a campaign, because problems are arising that you cannot anticipate. There's all this pressure, there's all this money. You've got insane egos of actors, producers, etc. It's a constant adrenaline rush going through, you can't control your emotions. So Hitchcock, people would look at him on the set, and he'd be falling asleep in the director's chair. He'd look like Buddha, his eyes were closed. Why? Because he prepared for everything, he anticipated everything that was going to happen. And so by the time the film came, he was completely bored, because he knew he was able to control every aspect of the production.

• 10:27Robert Greene?

  What I want to train you, the reader, to look at, is to not look at people's, what they say or their appearance, but to look at their actions and the patterns of their behavior. So for instance, I talk about Howard Hughes in chapter four as somebody who's got a very weak character, who was a horrific businessman. And people were lured in by his image of this sort of maverick aviator, kind of, you know, great Hollywood person, etc. But if you looked at the patterns of his behavior, you would have seen that he was actually quite toxic. So stop looking at what people say about themselves and look at their actions.