Pod Insights The Daily Stoic Premium (🔓) Overcoming Adversity In Leadership Roles About this episode In today’s audiobook reading, Ryan talks with 150 Local Business Leaders and Marketing Directors who are Twins Brand Partners about Challenges we face, Overcoming adversity in leadership roles and work life balance.✉️ 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
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:04 Ryan Holiday? Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Sundays, we take a deeper dive into these ancient topics with excerpts from the Stoic texts, audiobooks that we like here or recommend here at Daily Stoic, and other long-form wisdom that you can chew on on this relaxing weekend. We hope this helps shape your understanding of this philosophy, and most importantly, that you're able to apply it to your actual life. Thank you for listening.
0:46 Ryan Holiday? It's good to be here with all of you. Look, I think it would be wonderful if everything went as planned and if life, leadership, and logistics, and beating the market, and running a business, solving people's problems was easy. But it isn't, and certainly the last few years haven't been. I don't know how the pandemic affected all of your businesses. For me, it was interesting. In the fall of 2019, my wife and I fell in love with this old building in the little town that we live in outside Austin, Texas. And we had an idea that was probably crazy under ordinary circumstances and then turned out to be a really insane idea. We had this idea to open a small bookstore.
1:31 Ryan Holiday? And we began the process of opening that bookstore in February of 2020. Construction began the first week of March 2020. So it took a lot longer than expected. It costs a lot more than expected, and then, you know, you couldn't open. So it was fun, to say the least. Elon Musk has compared starting a business to eating glass and staring into the abyss of death. It was a lot like that. Yeah, it was a lot like that. Arrested Development, they go, I think I've made a huge mistake. We certainly said that to ourselves many, many times. And I had to, of course, apply the lessons from my own book, which is this idea from the Stoics that we don't control what happens.
2:16 Ryan Holiday? We control how we respond to what happens, that we can find opportunities inside every obstacle. I wrote this little note to myself staring out into a very full and at the same time, very empty bookstore with no timeline for opening. I said, 2020 is a test. We'll make you a better person or a worse one. And that's sort of what we're going to talk about today. How do you take the things that life throws at you and turn them into something? How do you become better for what you go through? Now, this bookstore ultimately did open and it's going great. My wife and I are still married, so I consider that a success. But it's been a really cool experience and it was, again, a reminder that we have these plans.
2:59 Ryan Holiday? We have these ideas, this intention of how we'd like things to go. Then, of course, life intervenes in both good ways and bad ways, right? So the pandemic was the first couple of years of this insane story. And then somewhere in the middle of it, when, again, we're going, did we make a huge mistake? Elon Musk, who I mentioned earlier, comes along and opens a Tesla factory in the town that we're in. And it's no longer a small town. So it's been this cool experience. Again, you don't control what happens. You control how you respond to what happens. And if I can go back and give you sort of the penultimate example of this, I'll take you back about 2,000 years, year 160 AD. A plague breaks out in Rome. It's a devastating pandemic. It originates in the far east of the empire.
3:43 Ryan Holiday? It's brought back by travelers and soldiers, quickly overwhelms Rome in all the capacities that we felt, COVID overwhelming us not too long ago. And it all falls on this guy, Marcus Aurelius. Unfortunately, they name it after him. It's called the Antonine Plague for his middle name. And actually, if the Antonine Plague was the only thing that Marcus dealt with, he probably would have counted himself lucky. There's a series of historic floods, then Rome's borders are invaded. It's basically one thing after another for this guy. He keeps this diary. This is how we sort of know how he was affected by all these things he was going through. And in this diary...
4:24 Ryan Holiday? I'll get to it in a second. He writes, "It's unfortunate that this happened." And it's sort of the understatement of the century. He kind of catches himself. He says, "No, it's fortunate that this happened to me." But few actually saw it that way at the time. This is from a contemporary historian back then. They said, "Marcus doesn't meet the good fortune that he deserves. His whole reign is fault and a series of troubles." Again, a bit of an understatement. It's one damn thing after another, one crisis after another. What can go wrong, does go wrong, and then things that people didn't think could go wrong, do go wrong. So this is what he's stuck with. And he's trying to practice the same thing I was telling you about. Trying to dye the event with his own color, trying to see the opportunity inside this obstacle.
5:09 Ryan Holiday? He's trying to say like, "Look, is this unfortunate or is this fortunate? Well, actually, we get to decide, right? An event is, and then we decide what it means to us." Shakespeare says, "Nothing neither good nor bad, but thinking makes it so." It's not making a moral judgment. He's saying, "Events are, and then we determine what they mean." The market goes up or down. We call that a bear market or a bull market, but the market just simply is. And in fact, the market is not a thing either. This is a word we've come up with to describe something that's happening outside of us. So it's this idea that we get to decide what the events of our life mean to us, what the news that we've just gotten means to us. That's our choice.
5:50 Ryan Holiday? And so in Meditations, Marcus says that, "Yes, our actions can be impeded." Certainly, this isn't what he wanted to be dealing with. He'd had 20 years of peace and prosperity before they hand him over the reins, and then everything goes sideways. But we can always accommodate and adapt and adjust. We can decide to do something different. We can decide to step up and meet this. We can decide this is an opportunity to do things we couldn't ordinarily do. So he sort of shortens that in Meditations, and he says, "The impediment to action advances action." That stands in the way becomes the way. And so this is really the essence of Stoicism. It's that in any and every situation, even if it's not the one that you wanted, even if it's not what you planned, even if it's not your fault,
6:34 Ryan Holiday? even if it's totally unfair, what it is nevertheless is an opportunity to step up and practice virtue or excellence, right? You can be excellent in any and all situations. It's not saying that, hey, this terrible calamity, this pandemic, this adverse business environment is wonderful and it's going to catapult your business further or forward. But it is an opportunity for you nevertheless to be great inside of those circumstances, right? And every year, every situation is effectively this choice. And for the Stoics, the way they get through that is really this three-part process. And it begins with kind of what we're just talking about, how we see it is obviously going to determine what we're going to be able to do about it.
7:19 Ryan Holiday? And so they call this the discipline of perception. So it's first, the understanding that our perceptions carry with them an immense amount of power. How we see things determines what we're going to be able to do with them or not do with them. The Stoics say that, you know, it's not things that upset us, it's our opinion about things. Actually, I spoke to the Pittsburgh Pirates a few years ago. They had some version of this quote on the wall in the training facility. The idea is, right? We decide if this thing is frustrating or exciting. We decide if this is the worst thing ever or the best thing. We decide what it is. Our opinions determine whether it's frustrating or not, not the event itself, which is of course totally indifferent to us.
8:01 Ryan Holiday? So our first job, the Stoics would say, is what part of any situation is up to us and what is not up to us, right? There's all the things in the world, everything that's going on. And then there's just this really small bit of it that we control. It's up to us. And if we can take it that most people spend most of their time thinking about, feeling about, talking about, right? Wishing about things that were not in their control. What they're doing is neglecting the small part of it that is in their control, right? Don't control what happens. Control how we respond to what happens. Epictetus, one of the great Stoics, would talk about how a skillful ballplayer doesn't say "that's a good throw or a bad throw," they just catch it and they throw it back.
8:44 Ryan Holiday? I love that 2,000 years ago, they're using sports metaphors, they've been with us forever. But this is effectively life, right? The throw is the throw and we have to get where we need to get to catch it, right? And then we have to throw it back. This is our job. We catch it, catch it, we throw it, sometimes we hit it, right? But the point is, it doesn't matter what labels we throw at it, this is not going to be constructive. What we should be doing is doing our actual job in response to what has happened. So Stoics would say that basically we control our thoughts, we control our emotions, we control our decisions, control how we choose to see things. That's basically it, right? In sports, like, we control how we play, we don't control what they say about us on SportsCenter,
9:29 Ryan Holiday? we don't control what the coach thinks. All we control is the little bit of playing time that we get, right? We control what we do, not what other people do, not what other people think, we control what we do. Now, I know there is this understanding of Stoicism in the sort of modern parlance that means has no emotions, right? Stoic robot, the unfeeling animal, etc. This is not what Stoicism is at all as far as philosophy goes. The Stoics were not emotionless, but they did try to be less emotional, particularly in high-stress, high-stakes situations. The idea was you strip the emotion out so you can see it as it is, right? That's less anger and fear, anxiety, greed, hate, despair, ego, pride, right?
10:14 Ryan Holiday? The things that make hard situations harder. I have a little quote next to my desk from the choreographer Martha Graham. I look at it whenever I feel a little bit of imposter syndrome creeping on, or what Steven Pressfield would call the resistance. She says, "Never be afraid of material. Material knows when you are frightened and it will not help." And the point is, right? Feeling insecure, feeling anxious, feeling not good enough, feeling frustrated, feeling behind, right? Any of these emotions are taking away from what I should be doing in this moment, which is being present, looking at the screen in front of me, doing my job, right? So Stoics isn't, again, emotionless, but they are trying to cultivate kind of an even keel, right? Not too high, not too low.
10:58 Ryan Holiday? This is what great athletes have to do, right? If you really feel it when you have a hitting streak, right? You're really gonna feel it when you have a hitting slump, right? And you have to get used to understanding that it's not always gonna go your way. There's gonna be great moments and not so great moments. You wanna try to sort of cultivate in business, in life, in sports, this even keel, right? You're sort of indifferent to when everyone's cheering for you and when everyone's booing you, as long as you know that you are doing what you are supposed to be doing in this situation. Marcus Aurelius talks about being like the rock that the waves crash over and eventually the sea falls still around. In Zen Buddhism, they talk about, you know, you take a cup with muddy water. If you let it sit long enough, right?
11:41 Ryan Holiday? The silt sinks to the bottom and eventually that water becomes clear. And so if we understand that stepping back, controlling our emotions a little bit, not reacting instantaneously or immediately, it allows us to see what's in front of us more clearly. This is General James Mattis, who actually carries a copy of meditations with him everywhere he goes. He talked about how the big problem in the information age for leaders, for businesses, public figures, is that they're always reacting and reacting and reacting in an immediate setting, right? They're not stepping back and thinking. Think about the athletes that get themselves in trouble, tweeting every emotion or thought they have. Brands doing the same thing, right?
12:23 Ryan Holiday? I have never been glad after I lost my temper, right? I have never been proud of the things that I winged off on social media, right? The more I step back and think about what I have to say, what I think about the situation, right, the better that decision is likely going to age. But I want to see this as a discipline, right? This idea of cultivating and controlling our emotions as a discipline. This is Toni Morrison. She would talk about how she needed to cultivate the morning, right? She'd get up very early and in those mornings, she said she needed to make contact with the muses before she saw the sun. And then she said she needed to do her writing before she heard the word "mom." And the idea being cultivate a little bit of space, right?
13:08 Ryan Holiday? Again, instead of waking up in the morning and going straight into your phone, right? Straight into social media, straight into email, straight into the next thing. Cultivating a little space. So I try to wake up very early. If you're not a morning person, there's a book recommendation I have for you. The idea being that a little discipline at night helps you be a little bit more disciplined in the morning. But the first thing I do when I wake up again, instead of touching my phone, is I go for a walk, take my kids outside, push them in the stroller. Now they do that on their own. I have to bribe them now, which I feel no shame about. But the point is, I get outside and I'm just thinking, I'm present, enjoying life, and
13:51 Ryan Holiday? I'm taking that energy back to the work that I do. This is my donkey. His name is Buddy. I bought him on Craigslist for a hundred dollars. But going out, seeing the animals, again, helps me relax. And then I bring that back towards the stress and the tension that I have in my work life. Try to put the phone away. My rule is like, no phone for the first 30 minutes to one hour that I'm awake, right? Don't get sucked into stuff. I was talking to a friend of mine the other day. He said, you know, I wake up in the morning, check my phone to see if there's any fires I have to put out, then I go, you know, have some me time. It's like, but you never don't find the fires, right? You're always going to find them if you start the day looking for that. I try to do a little journaling in the morning. Again, like Marcus is doing, a little bit of reflection, a little bit of space, intentionality.
14:36 Ryan Holiday? Try to look at things, he says, in the calm light, mild philosophy. So I want you to see this as a discipline, because it is a discipline. It takes work.
14:45 Ryan Holiday? And then, if you can do that work, it makes the decisions that you're gonna have to make with the future and makes those decisions earlier. This is Harry Truman, thrust into power in one of the most perilous moments in American history, really not even briefed for the job at all. In those first couple of months, he has to make some of the most momentous decisions in human history, and it's one thing after another. Famously, he has the sign on his desk, "The buck stops here." Right? Leaders have to make decisions, so they better be able to cultivate that perspective that we're talking about, that distance that we're talking about. They better have the discipline not to be emotional about things. Emotion is likely not going to help you with. But more interestingly, I think Truman has another sign on his desk.
15:30 Ryan Holiday? It gets a little bit less attention, but I think is important for any brand and person. This is a quote from Mark Twain, and he had this inscribed there. It said, "Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest." Right? So you have that distance, so you can remind yourself of your personal and brand values, what's important to you, what the right thing is, not what everyone else is doing, not what is easier, not what you're gonna get the least amount of heat for, right? But what is right, right? You step back and you have that time. And actually Truman, talking about what he learned from Marx's Realist's Meditations, would say that the big values, the core virtues that we should base our decisions around, actually I have them tattooed on my wrist here, he says, "The greatest virtues are moderation,
16:15 Ryan Holiday? wisdom, justice, and fortitude." They're also rendered as courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom. Right? Cultivate these, we refer back to these. They help us do the right thing in stressful and difficult moments. And then the other thing that I think helps us with this discipline when we're struggling, overwhelmed, and we're dealing with one crisis after another, which the last few years have been, and certainly the future will promise us as well, is some preparation, right? We think about Positive visualization, right? This is what a performance coach would deal with any athlete about. Imagine it going well. Vision yourself connecting with the ball, right? Go through your practice swings, right? Do all this.
16:57 Ryan Holiday? But the Stoics also practice negative visualization, right? Premeditatio morum, or premeditation of evils. Seneca says we have to rehearse all the possibilities in our minds. Says even exile and war and torture and shipwreck. Sadly, all these things do happen to Seneca, but he does sort of bear them with a certain amount of gravitas and dignity. The idea being that the unexpected blow lands heaviest. He says, um, "The only inexcusable thing a leader can say is, I did not think that would happen," right? Or, "I didn't think it would happen to me," right? If it can happen, it can happen to you, and are you prepared for that? So the Stoics do the positive visualization. They do the postmortem after. They also do the pre-mortem, right?
17:42 Ryan Holiday? What are the contingencies that I'm prepared for? What are the worst-case scenarios? How am I prepared for an uncertain or difficult future? HEB, the grocery store chain in Texas, talks about this during the pandemic, like, they were like, "You don't need to do a run on our store shelves. We're prepared for this," right? "We've war-gamed for a situation exactly like this." And so, as businesses prepare and plan and expose themselves to stressful situations over and over again, doing stress tests, they're able to deal with real stress better. This is what astronauts do. This is what police officers do, firefighters, special forces operators, right? The Canadian astronaut Chris Atfield would say astronauts are not braver than regular
18:25 Ryan Holiday? people, they're just more prepared than regular people. And in his first spacewalk, one of his eyes freezes shut, then on the way back, the other eye freezes shut. And he talks about how in situations like that, there's a number of things you can do that will make the situation better. And then he said, "It's worth remembering, there's no problem so bad that you cannot make it worse also." And this is often what we do when we respond emotionally, we don't take the time to step back, we don't have the solitude, right? When we don't have the discipline to see that, hey, me catastrophizing about this, me telling myself a story about this, it's not making the situation better, it's taking me away from the thing at hand, which I have to do something about. And that leads us to the next discipline.
19:10 Ryan Holiday? Which of course, the discipline of action. It's not just enough to think about it. This isn't about manifesting or the law of attraction. You can't just wish good things to happen and they happen. Conversely, this is why we shouldn't be that concerned about the consequences of negative visualization. You're not like tempting fate by thinking about the worst case scenario. You're making it more likely you'll be able to deal with it. But the Stoics are saying that ultimately, you do have to take action, right? We don't control what happens. We control how we respond to what happens. We control what we do, right? This is the discipline of action. And the problem though, what most people, what most brands, what most industries do, right? They know the threats that are coming. They know the possibilities. They know, right?
19:53 Ryan Holiday? How to solve this or dig themselves out of that. They don't actually do that stuff because it's hard, because they hope it'll magically go away. They hope someone else will do it, right? Or they want to distract from having to do it by blaming other people or whatever it is, right? Ultimately, we have to do something about it, right? We do nothing. Seneca says, "The one thing all fools have in common is that they're always getting ready to start." Right? We say, "I'll do it tomorrow." We say, "I will do it later." This is next quarter's problem or next year's problem. This is my successor's problem. No, if someone's going to do something about it, it should be you and it should be now, right? You could do it today, but instead you choose tomorrow.
20:37 Ryan Holiday? And then you wonder why the problems stick around and why they're harder when you ultimately get around to them. It's an expression that dates all the way back to the 1700s. It's like, if you want to make sure that you experience nothing else unpleasant for the rest of the day, start the day by swallowing a live toad. Eat the frog in the morning. Everything else is pretty good from there. But what I take from that is like you do the hard things first, right? For me, that's writing. Again, talking about the discipline of a day. I try to do the hard thing early in the day when I'm in a good space from the walk and the journaling and the family time. I go right into the hard thing, which is usually writing for me. If I say, "Oh, I'll do the writing later in the afternoon after I have this meeting,
21:20 Ryan Holiday? after I do this other thing," what I'm doing is setting myself up, my future self up, to accept excuses later, right? So I do the hard thing now. I do it first, I cross it off the list, right? If you're gonna do it... Do it is a Latin expression which predates the Nike slogan by a couple of years. Right? If you're gonna do it, do it, right? Amelia Earhart, another great expression, she has this written on the side of her plane. Always think with your stick forward, right? Assume in advance, intend on moving forward, not later, but now, right? And, and you're doing that when you're facing obstacles or difficulties or uncertainty, right? What is the opportunity inherent in that, right?
22:05 Ryan Holiday? What is the opportunity to get creative? To do what you couldn't do under ordinary circumstances? What are other companies, other brands, other businesses afraid to do? When I sat down to open this bookstore, now, obviously, it wasn't a great environment to do it in. And, you know, frankly, this century is not a great time to open a bookstore. People don't read the way they used to. They can buy books easily on the internet, they can get it delivered via audible, right? So we had to think about, given the constraints, given the reality of the market, where do we have an opportunity to do stuff that would stand out, be unique, be different?
22:45 Ryan Holiday? So the average bookstore with our footprint would have approximately 10,000 books in it. It seemed like a lot of work, it also seemed very expensive. My bookstore has 750 titles in it, right? So it's unlike pretty much any bookstore. And it's unlike pretty much any bookstore because I couldn't afford, nor did I have the bandwidth to be like every other bookstore. So we started very small, but all the books are face out, they stand out. And when people step into the bookstore, it feels very different than any other bookstore that they've been in. And now, people come from all over the world to go to this bookstore. It's cool, it's unique. We did the things that, again, if we had an unlimited budget, if we had unlimited time,
23:29 Ryan Holiday? if we were in a different time age, we wouldn't have considered doing, because it would have been easier to do it the way that everyone else does it. You can imagine when I went to my publisher, this was 2011, and I said, hey, I know I've just written a couple of these cool marketing books, but what I'd like to follow them up with is a series on an obscure school of ancient philosophy. They were not super excited. They said, um, what if we paid you half what we usually pay you? Does that sound good? And I had to say yes, right? Because I didn't have any other options. But what I, that forced me then to think about, we're talking about The Obstacle is the Way, is I had to do it very differently, right? How, how not having a classics background, not working at a university, right?
24:14 Ryan Holiday? Again, people not waking up and going, you know what I'd really love to read about is ancient philosophy. I had to find a way to make what I was really excited about palatable and accessible to other people. And that forced me to try a whole bunch of different creative things that I ordinarily wouldn't have done. And now it's worked out, right? The Obstacle is the Way sold millions of copies. All the books have reached all different sorts of people. But I wouldn't have been able to do that without the constraints that are under me. During the financial crisis, Rahm Emanuel would tell Obama something like, you never let a crisis go to waste, right? It's an opportunity to do things that you could not do before. So what in the situation you're in, in the environment that we're going into, right? What could you do that under ordinary circumstances you couldn't do?
24:59 Ryan Holiday? And we saw this during the pandemic, right? Work from home, not possible before, suddenly becomes possible because we had no choice, right? Businesses that were solely in person, that required you to go to a specific place at a specific time to do stuff, suddenly had e-commerce operations. Or five-year plans became five-week plans, right? People were able to speed things up and do things that ordinarily they wouldn't be able to do. And so as you face difficulty and uncertainty and frustrating situations, you cheer yourself up, you find the opportunity to do the things that you couldn't ordinarily do. Because every position does have its advantages, if we choose to see them, right? To think about the things that people are not thinking about, to try what they're afraid
25:44 Ryan Holiday? to try. And if we can be dedicated, disciplined, committed enough to find a way where others don't seem to see one, right? Or even better, we can make one. Edison credited with inventing the lightbulb. That's actually not what he did, right? Also credited with the expression, "An idea is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration." Actually, what a lightbulb was going to be was pretty well established around the time Edison enters the game. They knew it would be a vacuum sealed bulb. They knew a filament would run through the bulb. Electricity would run through the filament, illuminate the bulb, right? What Edison did was not discover any of that.
26:28 Ryan Holiday? Edison discovered was how that would work. Edison doesn't trust, try 100 different filaments, right? Edison tries 6,000 different filaments over several years and ultimately finds the one that is commercially viable. He dispatches agents all over the world. At one point in desperation, he tries hair from his own beard. He's willing to try anything and everything. He has extremely high standards for what he wants a lightbulb to be. But Edison's genius there was his persistence, his endurance, crossing off all the things that didn't work until he eventually found the one that did, right? So he tries one thing after another. And then when he solves that problem, I hate to break it to you.
27:11 Ryan Holiday? We think, get through the hard times, get through the obstacle. What's on the other side of that? More obstacles. Now we had to figure out, how do you deliver electricity to people, right? Which he then had to figure out. He delivers electricity to a block in New York City, right? What Edison was, what was great about Edison, he was a problem solver. Tesla, almost certainly a better inventor than Edison, said, "If you asked Edison how to find a needle in a haystack, he would lay the haystack down and go through it piece of straw by piece of straw until he found the needle." Now, that's not super sexy. It'd be great if you came up with a magical invention that did it. But that is a way to find a needle in a haystack, which Edison does time and time again. Nick Saban calls this "the process," right?
27:55 Ryan Holiday? You don't think about the end result. You don't get too far out over your skis. What is your job in this moment? You do that job. When I was writing my last book, Discipline is Destiny, I started, sat down and... Suddenly, like, the book didn't really seem like it was there. I was really struggling with it. I started to go through my note cards. I read all my books through these note cards. And I found this note card that I wrote to myself. I don't know when, I don't know why, but many months previous, I'd written a note to myself that said, "Trust the process, go through your note cards, note card by note card, and eventually a book will emerge." Which is what happened. I showed up to work every single day, tried to follow my routine, chipped away at it. There was no magical moment where the book revealed itself or wrote itself, but I went through my note cards,
28:39 Ryan Holiday? which became the building blocks of each page. And I showed up, I tried to make a positive contribution each day. There's a writing rule that I love. It says, "Two crappy pages a day." That's all you need. Just do a couple crappy pages a day, and it adds up to a manuscript. Not a publishable manuscript, but an edible, an editable manuscript, right? Something you can polish. So you show up every day, you chip away at it, and you make your progress, right? And that's what I did. The other thing I try to do as part of my sort of discipline of action, is I try to do something really hard every day that gives me a win. Right, so I swim every day. That's my goat there on the fence. I swim every day, or I run every day. I go on a cold plunge every day.
29:22 Ryan Holiday? I do these things because they are hard, they are in my control, and they help me feel like I'm winning. So even if the book is not going well, right? I'm, I know that I'm challenging myself. I know I'm getting stronger or faster, that I'm able to endure a little bit longer, giving myself a win every single day. Seneca says, "We treat the body rigorously so that it is not disobedient to the mind." I tell myself to go for a run, "Go for the run." I always come back, right? Magical. I never just stop halfway and then I live there now, right? I always come back. And so I remind myself that when I start things, I have the willpower and the strength to finish them. I have a routine that practices, that builds that muscle every single day.
30:06 Ryan Holiday? We build up our life, our businesses, we solve problems, action by action. Don't get too far out over this, this, this, this, this. Just focus on the next thing we have to do. This is a guy named Richard Overton. He was my neighbor in Austin, Texas. He was the world's oldest man when he died at 112. And I remember I asked him one time, I said, "Richard, what's the secret to living that long?" I said, "Do you take it day by day?" And he said, "At my age, you take it day by night." And again, I try not to get too far ahead of myself. I just survive the next thing, get through the next thing. It adds up. This is the La Sangra Familia, set to be finished in 2026, which will be the 100th anniversary of the architect's death.
30:51 Ryan Holiday? So it's a little behind schedule. They also just got fined by the EU because they've been building without permits the entire time. But look, it's amazing, it's beautiful. It takes what it takes, right? It takes how long it's going to take. As long as you stay at it, as long as you don't quit, eventually you come back around and you get where you want to go. One of the ways to do that, though, I would argue, is that you've got to say this magic word. You have to say no. This is an action, I would say. It's a hard action, requires immense amount of discipline. You have to say no. Jonathan Fader, Dr. Jonathan Fader is a sports psychologist. He's worked with the Major League Baseball for many, many years. He actually sent me this.
31:36 Ryan Holiday? He sent me this picture, that's Dr. Oliver Sacks, who has behind him a large sign that just says no. And his point was, you have to learn how to say no. No is everything. He was talking to me, he said, "Look, when batters come into the league, they got where they got because they're really good at swinging at pitches." There's an expression, I think it's in the Dominican, something like, "You don't walk off the island." Meaning, you make your name, you make your reputation in baseball by swinging at pitches. You can't hit what you don't swing at. And yet, as soon as you make it into the league... Becomes about actually something much more difficult, which is swing discipline, right? Or pitch discipline.
32:21 Ryan Holiday? Recognizing which pitches you swing at and which ones are pretty good, really good, close enough, right? That you don't swing at. You have to have the restraint to not swing at pitches. You have to have the ability to say no. So I actually have this picture between two pictures of my kids to remind myself that I have to say no, so I can say yes to these two other people, right? I have another little memo. This is a memo from Truman's office that I got from a collector. And it says, "Should we say that because of too many requests, the president must ask to be excused?" And Truman underlines this. And he says, "The proper response is underline." He signs, "Harris Truman." He was telling his team, "Look, now that I'm president,
33:06 Ryan Holiday? I have to say no to the vast majority of requests that come in, so I can do my job, so I can focus on these really difficult decisions that I have to make." For instance, this is an ideal day in my calendar. Nothing scheduled. It's not that I'm not working. It's that I haven't scheduled in a bunch of distractions, right? "Oh, can I pick your brain? Do you want to get coffee? Should we all meet?" You know, no, we probably shouldn't. We should work instead.
33:32 Ryan Holiday? The point is, I have to say no to a lot, right? I get a lot of requests. I have to say no to a lot. Or I can't do the thing that only I can do, which is write the books that I have to write. This is E.B. White. He writes Charlotte's Web. He's asked to be on a presidential commission. Again, pretty prestigious, pretty exciting, pretty fun. "I must decline," he says, "for secret reasons."
33:54 Ryan Holiday? I love that, right? No is a complete sentence. I've heard it said. I love that. Don't make excuses when you say, "I can't because X, Y, and Z." What you're actually saying is, "Please argue with me about why I actually can," right? You're saying, "Let's work together to figure out how I can do this." Really, you're saying, "I don't want to. I shouldn't have to. I've got more important stuff to do." Right? You have to be able to say no. Because by saying no, you are saying yes. Conversely, when you are saying yes to things that you shouldn't be saying yes to, saying no to the things that matter, right? It's one of my favorite tweets of all time. Could the meeting be a Zoom? Could the Zoom be a phone call? Could the phone call be an email? Email be a text? Could the text be nothing? Yes, it could probably be nothing.
34:39 Ryan Holiday? You have to be able to say no to these things, right? You have to ask, as Marx really said, is this essential? Right? Says when you eliminate the inessential, you get the double benefit of doing the essential things better. I talked to the Los Angeles Rams a couple of years ago, and their motto is the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing. Right? What's the main thing? What's the thing that only you can do? What's most important? What is your business really focused on? Right? What is your main job? Do that thing, ignore the other things, so you can do that main thing well. Right? And I'm just talking about this professionally, right? You say, I'm doing this for my family, the family that I never see. Right? I'm saying I'm doing this for them. Are you really? Are you doing it for you?
35:24 Ryan Holiday? Or are you just doing it because somebody else asked you and you don't have the discipline or the confidence to say, I'm sorry, it's outside my purview. Sorry, I don't have time for that. Right? Or just no. So that leads to the final, and I think most essential discipline here, which would be the discipline of the will. Sort of endurance and strength and fortitude needed to survive, to endure, right? To be great. Lou Gehrig, longest streak in baseball for almost half a century. 2,000-plus games. It wasn't like just everything went his way, right? That he never got hurt, he was never injured. No, it was a grueling battle, right?
36:06 Ryan Holiday? This was when the baseball season was longer, when they would often play multiple double headers in the same week, when they traveled between games by bus and train, when they barnstormed in the offseason. Right? It was a grueling game, and they actually found after he retired that he had broken every single bone in his hands multiple times. Right? So it wasn't fun, it wasn't easy, right? But he pushes through this, he cultivates this sort of immense willpower and strength. I think it's very impressive, of course, one of the great baseball players of all time. But I would argue that Gehrig's streak is nothing compared to this lady's streak.
36:48 Ryan Holiday? She basically shows up for work every day without a day off for 70 years. Her job primarily is to say no to things, to not change, right? To not get involved. Job is to not have opinions about things. And she does this remarkably. Every single day for seven decades. Never does she give an on the record interview to a journalist, even though she was often gossiped about and criticized. Right. She would have had so many things that she wanted to talk about. It's not the job. It's not the, that's not her role. She sort of shows up and does this every single day. It culminates, I think, in a tragic but beautiful moment. She loses her husband in the middle of the pandemic. They would have made unlimited exceptions for this lady.
37:32 Ryan Holiday? And yet she grieves alone in a box at the funeral because she doesn't want any exemption from what they were calling then the protocols. Right. Her whole life is about protocols, not because of the pandemic, but royal protocol. What am I supposed to do in this situation? What am I not supposed to do in this situation? I'm sticking with that. That's my job. I'm at it as long as it takes. And by the way, you have to have this job till you die. And she does this and it's amazing and beautiful. I think even more poignant and inspiring to consider now that we know what other members of the government were doing during the pandemic, which was throwing parties and exempting themselves from the rules. Right. That's not what she was doing. Marcus Aurelius talks about loving the discipline you know and letting it support you,
38:15 Ryan Holiday? even in these really painful and difficult moments. This is Dr. Catalin Carrico. She came to America in the 1980s. She escapes communism in Hungary. She and her husband and their young daughter make it here with $900. It's stuffed in her daughter's teddy bear. She worked for the University of Pennsylvania, basically an obscure academic in the bowels of academia. She is forced to reapply for her job every year. She never makes more than 60 grand. People are constantly doubting her research, doubting her intelligence, right? Doubting whether she's a good fit. And she just sort of tirelessly works away on this obscure form of obscure domain of research
38:59 Ryan Holiday? that would become the mRNA vaccine, which suddenly people became very interested in a couple of years ago. This would all be topped off. She's snubbed for a Nobel Prize. But there was a New York Times profile of her and her family and her husband who gets a job like managing apartment complexes so they can cover the bills. You know, he says, "I don't want you to feel sorry for my wi- for my wife. She loves coming to work every day, right? She knew what she was supposed to do. She loved the discipline. She stuck with it. And eventually ends up changing the world, right? And that requires a lot of courage. It requires discipline. It requires endurance, right? This is Shackleton's famous family motto, "By endurance we conquer," by sticking at it, right?
39:41 Ryan Holiday? We don't control what happens. We control how we respond, right? We do control, we don't control how lucrative the niche is or what the market will do or what office we get called to fill, whether things are hard or easy. We do control whether we give up, right? We control whether we quit. We control whether we get back up. We control whether we keep going. This is Edison's factory. You may notice that it is on fire. He's sitting down for dinner with his family. He's America's most successful inventor. A man rushes in, "Your factory is on fire. Your life's work is going up in flames." Edison goes to the scene and he finds his son. His son is standing there, shell shocked, right? They're watching it all burn. It's only partially insured, a big mistake, but
40:23 Ryan Holiday? he finds his son and he grabs him and he says, "Go get your mother and all her friends. They'll never see a fire like this again."
40:31 Ryan Holiday? And I, I love that. He, he recites a line from Kipling's famous poem about treating triumph and disaster all the same. He tells reporters the next day, "I've been through things like this before." Prevents an old man from getting bored. And that's what he does. He takes a million dollar loan from Henry Ford, rebuilds the factory. In six weeks, it's partially back up and running. In six months, it's fully operational. The final act of Edison's life is rebuilding from this tragedy, which was not his fault, which he would not have chosen, right? But he keeps going. He sticks with it. Doesn't give up. And he draws on the experience he's had in the past. It's what guides him in the future, right? We should take that from COVID. We all survived, literally and figuratively, right? The future should not intimidate.
41:15 Ryan Holiday? It's too much, probably hard for it to get worse than some of those early days, right? It's unlikely that, uh, you know, we will experience similar shocks that profound, right? At least for a little while, one would hope. Uh, we should be prepared, but I think we can rest somewhat comfortably there. The point is, we can now draw on the fact that we've been through a historical event of epic proportions. We would ask our grandparents or great grandparents what it was like to live through the depression or World War II. We went through something that in fifty or sixty years will seem incomprehensible to people. We made it, right? The business survived, we survived. And we should know what we should take from that is a sense of our own capabilities. We have been tested and we passed.
41:59 Ryan Holiday? Stoics would talk about this idea of amor fati, which means a love of fate, right? You embrace it. You don't just bear it, but you embrace it. Marcus really says that what you throw on a fire becomes fuel for the fire. And we, we did, we not only got through, but we did things that we couldn't do under ordinary circumstances. We learned things we wouldn't learn in ordinarily, in ordinary circumstances. And this is, won't be easy, right? To keep going. We will relapse and make mistakes. We'll lose track of the prize, right? But we can, as Marcus says, celebrate behaving like a human being, pick ourselves back up when we fail. We can keep going, can love that discipline and let it support us. So I wish I could give you a more cheerful message about how there's only better days ahead.
42:44 Ryan Holiday? But, um, I would actually argue that it's good news that things will be difficult, that things will be hard, that they have been difficult, they have been hard. Uh, it's good news, um, because it's the opportunity, right? It's the opportunity to step up, to grow, to learn, to change, to do things we couldn't ordinarily do. And I gave you that quote about Marcus earlier from that ancient historian who said that Marcus didn't have the good fortune that he deserved, his whole reign is involved in a series of troubles. But that's not the full quote. He wasn't just lamenting how unfair things had been. He was saying that For his part, he admires Marcus all the more because of what he went through. He said amid unusual and extraordinary difficulties, he both survived himself and preserved the empire. Marcus really says great, not in spite of what he went through,
43:29 Ryan Holiday? but because of what he went through. Because he saw that the impediment to action could advance it, the action, that what stands in the way is the way, that any situation, no matter how bad or undesirable, it is an opportunity to practice excellence. And so I will leave you with one more thought, which is this idea that life is brief, right? Covid teaches us that also, right? Life is unexpected, life is uncertain. So it's actually meditate on this fact, right? Instead of denying, instead of pushing it away, instead of only thinking good thoughts that go, yeah, we are all going to die, and we don't know when. They say you could leave life right now, let that determine what you do and say and think, right? Instead of resenting or fighting it, embrace it, right?
44:13 Ryan Holiday? Let that give you some urgency, let it give you some perspective, let it give you some purpose, right? Focus on what truly matters. Don't get caught up in the things that don't matter. Seneca says, just in the way that you balance the books of your business, he says, you should balance the books of life. Postpone nothing, delay nothing, right? Realize, as Seneca says, that death isn't this thing way off in the distance, but it's something that happens now. And the time that passes, the Stoics would say, is as good as dead. So how are you spending that time, right? How are you designing your life? What are you working on? Is it something you're proud of and something that's important? Right? Are you giving this moment that you're in, this moment that you're lucky to have? Are you giving it all that you have, right? Are you doing your best?
44:57 Ryan Holiday? Are you making a positive difference in your industry? Positive difference for the people around you? Right? Are you building something that matters? Is it the legacy that you want to live? Memento mori. And with that very somber, morbid thought, I'm excited to kick some questions around with all of you. So thank you very much.
45:25 Ryan Holiday? Thanks for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Just a reminder, we've got signed copies of all my books in the Daily Stoic store. You can get them personalized, you can get them sent to a friend. The Obstacle is the Way, He Goes the Enemy, Stillness is the Key, the leather-bound edition of the Daily Stoic. We have them all in the Daily Stoic store, which you can check out at store.dailystoic.com.
Previous You Can Do Something About This | Train To Let Go Of What’s Not Yours Next Here’s The Deal | Balance The Books Of Life Page updated September 29, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
