Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants To Be | 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.

• 0:03Ryan 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. But on Fridays, we not only read this daily meditation, but I try to answer some questions from listeners and fellow Stoics who are trying to apply this philosophy, whatever it is they happen to do. Sometimes these are from talks. Sometimes these are people who come up to talk to me on the street. Sometimes these are written in or emailed from listeners. But I hope in answering their questions, I can answer your questions, give a little more guidance on this philosophy we're all trying to follow.

• 0:58Ryan Holiday?

  Put your ass where your heart wants to be.

• 1:04Ryan Holiday?

  Marcus Aurelius would have been more comfortable in bed. There was part of him that would have liked to stay under the covers and stay warm. But he got up, he got to work. He wasn't always feeling it. He wasn't always excited. But he chose each day to use Steven Pressfield's wonderful phrase in the title of his new book, "He chose to put his ass where his heart wanted to be." By getting up, by grabbing his journal, by heading to the forum, whatever it was, Marcus Aurelius was taking a tangible, physical step towards being the person he wanted to be, the good emperor he knew he needed to be. And it was doing this day in and day out that made him a great man. It wasn't his brilliance, it was his determination that did it. It wasn't his good intentions, it was his good habits. He faked it someday, sure,

• 1:49Ryan Holiday?

  but that's how he made it. Marcus got up and did, as he said, what his nature demanded. He was willing to wear himself down doing it. Because that's what he had in his heart, because that's what he knew he was meant to do, and no amount of the resistance, or fear, or laziness, or difficulty was going to get in the way. And I love Steven Pressfield's work so much. He was actually just out at the painting porch. We did a Daily Stoic podcast interview, which you can check out. I'll link to it in today's show notes. And he signed a bunch of copies of his books, The War of Art, Turning Pro, Gates of Fire, A Man at Arms, and most of all, the new book, Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants to Be. I think you'll like it. Check it out. We'll

• 2:30Ryan Holiday?

  link to that in the show notes. And if you haven't read Steven Pressfield, man, you absolutely have to. And check out this podcast interview. I think you're gonna like it.

• 2:46Speaker 01

  So I love the comment that you made earlier about we color or we dye every situation that we come across. So with the idea that we're convinced of so much that just isn't so on a regular basis, what have you found with some of these professional sports players or business leaders, or the wisdom of the ancients to really challenge our perceptions to get to as close a truth as we could be?

• 3:12Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. I was actually just talking to Leslie, who's the GM of the Rams, and he was talking about how for years, everyone has attacked him as the GM of the Rams for trading away their first and second round draft picks. Idiot, you're ruining the future of the franchise. How could you do this? And he's had to, he's like, it occurred to me that the way sports television works is that somebody has to take a positive take and somebody has to take a negative take. And first, and on top of that, the negative take is almost always more interesting and makes for a more compelling point of view than the positive take. And so he said, I've had to balance what other people think and

• 3:52Ryan Holiday?

  say about me, and my reasons and my research and my professional expertise as to what will work and what my, what my plan is, right? And he was, they are entering their, their second Super Bowl in not so many years, and that strategy hasn't paid out. But every step of the way was attacked and criticized. And so I think one of the things that I really liked from the Stokes is about, I heard this great expression that If you listen to what other people say, you're worthless as a compass. Right? Like, you have to know what you're doing, what's important to you, why you came to the conclusion that you did. And then you have to get to a point where the chatter over here, or the doubts over here,

• 4:36Ryan Holiday?

  don't impact you so much. Grant, you know, his replacement is right there. He had to go, and it wasn't working, but he had to have this sort of understanding of himself and his capabilities and the plan that he was on, that he was moving towards where he needed to go. Even though the world was almost gaslighting him at that very moment, telling him that, you know, "You're done, this is not working," you know, blah, blah. So I do, my first, uh, my first book was a book about marketing. My second book was my book, "The Obstacle is the Way." My publisher offered me less than half for that book than they had for my first book.

• 5:17Ryan Holiday?

  A friend, not so good of a friend, that's, realized, pretty good, would sell 5,000 copies. You know, it sold a million and a half copies now. I knew why I was doing what I was doing. And I, I wasn't convinced I was right, but I had a sense, based on the research that I'd done and the understanding, and also what I wanted to spend my time doing, why that was a good idea. And then I, once you do that, you have to be able to tune out or ignore those other things. And so, to, when you think about the Stoics being in positions of leadership, or public figures, or creators, business people, you have to cultivate that ability to sort of tune out everything, but what you know and what you can verify for yourself.

• 6:04Ryan Holiday?

  Time for one more.

• 6:08Ryan Holiday?

  In the back. Oh, yep, in the back.

• 6:13Speaker 02

  Thanks for your talk. Ironically, I've been using Semenics work on my children.

• 6:20Ryan Holiday?

  Oh, wonderful.

• 6:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, but I have a question. Specifically about time, because he has a great philosophy. He gave this example, Kobe Bryant. He had asked to do an interview. It was supposed to take 15 minutes. He said, "No, I can't. Hit me in a couple of weeks."

• 6:37Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 6:37Speaker 02

  "I want to spend time with my daughters, right?"

• 6:39Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 6:39Speaker 02

  Then he dies in a plane crash. And so he ran out of time. And of course, the point's made that we don't know how much we have, right? It's the only irreplaceable resource. But I want to ask a specific question. Knowing how valuable time is, in kind of its inverse relation to the capacity to say no?

• 6:59Ryan Holiday?

  Yes. For people who didn't quite hear that story, there's this beautiful, moving story about Kobe Bryant. Right before he died, he was asked to do some big interview series for ESPN. He said, "I want to spend time with my kids. Hit me up later." And he didn't know that he had like a week or two left to live, but that's how it went. I think Memento Mori puts time in perspective, because it makes it... I think one of the reasons we say yes to all things we're asked to do is that we lie to ourselves and we think that we have unlimited time. We know, that's why we go, "What would I do if I had cancer? What would I do if I found out I only had a certain amount of time left to live?" You think, "Oh, I'd change so many things." We do happen when they assert that we don't have time left to live, right?

• 7:42Ryan Holiday?

  Every person who's born knows they're going to die. I think what Memento Mori and this practice of Stoicism does is it puts time in perspective. The other way that I think about it in a slightly less morbid way is simply that everything I say yes to means saying no to something else. You think you're being nice by saying yes to all these different things, but you're not seeing all the invisible, indirect no's as a result of these things, even if that's just not being as good at the other things. And then conversely, all the things that you say yes to inevitably means saying no to something else. And being comfortable saying no, because it's your time, it's your life. You know, you know what you're here... I heard this great...

• 8:28Ryan Holiday?

  Observation about this Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, because I think women struggle with this probably more than men, is one of her aides said, "What I loved about Sandra was that she never said sorry. She fully said no, right? She didn't go, 'Sorry, I can't.' She just said, 'I don't want to. Sorry.'" Or she didn't say sorry. She said, "I don't want to. I'm not going to." Right? And so just understanding that no is this thing that you control and that boundaries are important and that you can't be great at what you do doing everything. You're saying yes to everything. You're saying no to a lot of things is part of that. And then remembering like, who is, who ultimately, you know, gets that leftover

• 9:12Ryan Holiday?

  time? For me, I've always had a propensity to say yes to lots and lots of things. "I'll find the time. I'll cram it in there. I'll make it work." Having kids is illustrative. It's like, oh, that's who I'm stealing the time from, right? Stealing time from a four-year-old, a two-year-old, a one-year-old. It's time that you won't get again. It won't be for again. And this is also true for everything we do in life. We say, you know, we say yes to something we don't want to do, we don't need to do, we shouldn't do, or that we can't do, we're ultimately saying, "No, something, something will work."

• 9:51Ryan Holiday?

  You know, the Stoics in real life met at what was called the Stoa, the Stoa Pochyle, the Painted Porch in ancient Athens. Obviously, we can't all get together in one place because this community is like hundreds of thousands of people and we couldn't fit in one space. But we have made a special digital version of the Stoa. We're calling it Daily Stoic Life. It's an awesome community. You could talk about like today's episode. You could talk about the emails, ask questions. That's one of my favorite parts is interacting with all these people who are using Stoicism to be better in their actual, real lives. You get more Daily Stoic Meditations over the weekend just for the Daily Stoic Life members, quarterly Q and As with me, cloth-bound edition of our Best of Meditations, plus a whole bunch of other stuff, including discounts.

• 10:35Ryan Holiday?

  And this is the best part, all our Daily Stoic courses. And challenges totally for free, hundreds of dollars of value every single year, including our New Year, New You Challenge. We'd love to have you join us. There's a two-week trial totally for free. Check it out at dailystoiclife.com.