Life Comes At You Fast (Pt III) | Don't Be Inspired, Be Inspirational

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

• 0:03Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Friday, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from The Daily Stoic, my book, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful collaborator, translator, and literary agent, Stephen Hanselman. So today, we'll give you a quick meditation from the Stoics with some analysis from me, and then we'll send you out into the world to turn these words into works.

• 0:44Ryan Holiday?

  Life Comes at You Fast, Part Three. It's not exactly a representative sample, but it's a pretty diverse one. Mothers and fathers, executives and artists, entrepreneurs, and academics, young and old, white and black, and everything in between. A quick rundown of the experiences of the people who've come on the Daily Stoic Podcast over the last several years gives you a sense of what life can have in store for any of us. When he was young, George Raveling's mother was institutionalized and effectively turning him into an orphan. Julia Baird, as she writes in her wonderful book Phosphorescence, was diagnosed with rare abdominal cancer. She endured several painful surgeries for its removal, all while going through a difficult heartbreak. Brent Underwood was celebrating being featured in The New York Times for living in a ghost town. He went to sleep

• 1:29Ryan Holiday?

  and then woke up to find the place was on fire. Jake Seliger, who had never smoked a day in his life, was diagnosed with mouth cancer. Captain Brett Crozier was on track to make admiral when he was stripped of command and bounced out of the Navy for doing the right thing. Randy Blythe was suddenly arrested when his band landed in Prague, charged with responsibility for a fan's fall at a concert. Zach Braff was hit back-to-back when he lost his sister and his father, all in a few months. Lieutenant Dan Carey was shot down over Vietnam and spent 2,000 days as a POW alongside James Stockdale. Some of these folks drew on Stoicism specifically, but as a group, they all had to look inside themselves and find strength they were not previously sure they possessed.

• 2:13Ryan Holiday?

  That's actually something Captain Carey said on the podcast, echoing Seneca, that no one is sure what they're capable of until they are tested. But life will test all of us. Life comes at us fast. Fortune behaves as she pleases. A moment of triumph can turn into a disaster in seconds. Twenty years of peace and prosperity for Marx, who realized his predecessor, became twenty years of war and plagues and natural disasters for him. Things can go from bad to worse. Seneca buried a young child and then found out he was to be exiled on false charges. We study this philosophy as a way of preparing. We study the example of these brave and inspiring figures as a way of drawing lessons and insights for our own future battles and difficulties.

• 2:55Ryan Holiday?

  And we study that so that, once we make it through those battles and difficulties, we can share our hard-won wisdom with future generations, just as so many did before us.

• 3:14Ryan Holiday?

  Be inspirational. This is the May 10th entry in the Daily Stoic. Got the hardcover right here. "Let us also produce some bold act of our own and join the ranks of the most emulated." This is Seneca's Letters 98. "It was common in Greek and Roman times, just as it is now, for politicians to pander to their audience. They would lavish effusive praise on the crowd, on their country, on the inspiring military victories of the past." How many times have you heard a political candidate say, "This is the greatest country in the history of the world"? As orator Demosthenes pointed out,

• 3:55Ryan Holiday?

  "We'll gladly sit for hours to hear a speaker who stands in front of some famous or sacred landmark praising our ancestors, describing their exploits, and enumerating their trophies." But what does this flattery accomplish? Nothing. Worse, the admiration of shiny accolades distracts us from their true purpose. Also, as Demosthenes explains, it betrays the very ancestors who inspire us. He concluded his speech to the Athenian people with words that Seneca would later echo and still resonate centuries later. "Reflect, then," he said, "on your ancestors who set up these trophies, not so that you may gaze up at them and wonder,

• 4:38Ryan Holiday?

  but that you may also imitate the virtues of the men who set them up." The same goes for the quotes in this book and other inspiring words you might hear. Don't just admire them, use them and follow their example. I would actually argue that two of the greatest orators, political leaders, leaders period in American history, Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. Did a particularly good job of exactly what we're talking about here, right? What Lincoln does, right, is he incorporates the Declaration of Independence, which is

• 5:19Ryan Holiday?

  not technically part of the Constitution, but he incorporates it into the American story. And he makes it central to the story that he tells Americans at that time during the Civil War, in the lead up to the Civil War. This idea that we were founded on this idea that all men are created equal. He was saying, not just, "Look at how great the country is, look at how amazing we are, look how superior..." He was saying, "Look, four score and seven years ago, we made a promise, right? And we're not living up to that promise, right? That's what slavery was." And he forces Americans to stare that in the face. He changes the national narrative.

• 6:03Ryan Holiday?

  He roots this conflict, which was fundamentally about slavery, into something that transcends slavery. He makes it about human dignity. He makes it about freedom. He makes it about equality. Then you flash forward, right, 100 years later, and I think most famously, I've talked about this with a bunch of guests on the podcast. Martin Luther King Jr. Gets up in front of the Lincoln Memorial and he says, "I'm here to cash a check," right? He says, "Lincoln said it." Before Lincoln Jefferson said it, but we're still not living up to it.

• 6:43Ryan Holiday?

  I want the thing that our ancestors, that your ancestors, that you purport to believe, right? He says, I want us to actually live up to that. And that's what I've so found so inspiring. And that I come to think of it, and I think it's important we talk about this during an election year. I've come to see America as having a series of foundings and a series of founders, right? So it's not just what happens in the late 18th century, but then America is re-founded during the Civil War. It's re-founded during the Civil Rights Movement. And then I think you could argue we're in a battle for the soul of America right now.

• 7:28Ryan Holiday?

  I think you could argue many different nations are battling for their souls right now. Democracy is on the ballot. It's also on the battlefield. And we're having to ask ourselves, we're looking at whether these ideas are going to triumph, right? Whether the, whether we're going to sort of bask in the undeserved legacy or inheritance of our ancestors, or we're going to try to live up to it. And again, I think we can apply this to Stoicism too, right? There's a passage at the beginning of Meditations. I'll grab it for you because it always, it always leapt out at me. This is Marx realist, book one, 14. He's thanking his brother Severus.

• 8:13Ryan Holiday?

  He says that basically Severus taught him to love my family, truth and justice. And he says, "It was through him that I encountered Thrasia, Hvidius, Cato, Dion, Brutus, and conceived of a society of equal laws governed by equality of status and speech, and of rulers who respect the liberty of their subjects above all else." Now, that is a beautiful idea in theory, an inspiring idea in theory. Is that the Rome that Epictetus lived in? Is that the Rome that Justin Martyr, the Christian Martyr, who dies at the hands of Rusticus, who's Marx realist's philosophy teacher? No, it is not.

• 8:58Ryan Holiday?

  But it's a good idea. It's beautiful in theory. And then our job is to try to live up to it, to get a little bit closer to it, to get a little bit closer to embodying and living up to those ideas. And in some cases, to write our own new and better ideas. Because we don't have to leave things as they were in the past. We can have innovations. We can have creations. We can have new ways of conceiving things. Anyways, that's today's episode. I'll leave you there. Hope you have a good weekend. I'll talk to you soon.