This Is Always The Answer | Robert Greene's 6 Stoic Concepts For A Fulfilling Life

It’s not that the Stoics had no temper or no fear or no moments where their life felt unfulfilled. It’s that they controlled those emotions and replaced them with love. 🪙 Get your own Amor fati medallion, as a reminder to treat each and every moment—no matter how challenging—as something to be embraced, not avoided. So that like oxygen to a fire, obstacles and adversity become fuel for your potentialCheck it out at https://store.dailystoic.com/📚 Pick up your next favorite Robert Greene book at The Painted Porch: https://www.thepaintedporch.com/🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast🎥 Watch top moments from The Daily Stoic Podcast on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and 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.

• 0:05Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a Stoic-inspired meditation, designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life. Each one of these episodes is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women, help you learn from them, to follow in their example, and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. For more, visit DailyStoic.com.

• 0:56Ryan Holiday?

  This is always the answer. It's about being tough. It's about being rational. It's about doing your duty. It's about truth. It's about controlling your passions. That's all Stoicism, no doubt. But what is beneath it? What is at the root of it? In Meditations, Marcus Aurelius says that he learned from Sextus that the core of it all was love. "To be free of passion," he said, "but full of love." What's fascinating is how similar this is to something that Rich Roll, talking on the Daily Stoic Podcast a couple of months ago, said that he heard directly from the Dalai Lama earlier this year. Everyone had prepared questions, Rich said, big questions about life and happiness and transcendence. But Rich said that no matter what the question was,

• 1:38Ryan Holiday?

  the Dalai Lama's answers always came back to one thing. Here's what he said.

• 1:43Speaker 01

  Essentially, the answer every time was some version of love. Like, no matter what eludes you or what aspect of your life feels unfulfilled, the answers that you seek will always be found by exploring the nature of love.

• 2:01Ryan Holiday?

  Giving or receiving?

• 2:02Speaker 01

  Both. Just love in its broadest...

• 2:06Speaker 01

  Definition, I suppose. And he kept using the metaphor of looking at a mother's love for a child. Like, if you struggle to conceptualize or grasp what I'm talking about when I, when I say "love," just look to the mother's love of a child, or look at an animal's love for its child, like the animal mother, like the cow, or the dog, or what have you. That was sort of the, the, the repeated refrain over the course of the two days, which, on one level, is like, very reductive and simplistic, but, but if you kind of step back, is actually perhaps the most profound thing that he could share.

• 2:45Ryan Holiday?

  Of course, the Stoics would agree with this. They weren't unfeeling robots, they didn't stuff things down, they weren't solitary hermits, they were brothers and sisters and husbands and wives, fathers and mothers. They were deeply engaged in their communities. They valued virtue as something practiced in service of others. We should not be aspiring to have no emotion, especially to be free of love. It's not that the Stoics had no temper, or no fear, or no moments where their life felt unfulfilled, it's, it's that they tried to replace those emotions with love. They loved their fate, that's what a morfati means. They loved people, they loved every minute they were alive, love, love, love. That's what's underneath it all. That is always the answer.

• 3:35Robert Greene?

  You're gonna have failure in life, people are gonna 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.

• 3:51Ryan 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 Stoicism... ...philosophy, you've 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, that connect

• 4:35Ryan Holiday?

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

• 4:44Ryan Holiday?

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

• 4:47Robert Greene?

  Yes.

• 4:48Ryan Holiday?

  Which is the idea that it's also Nietzsche 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.

• 5:03Robert Greene?

  Yeah.

• 5:04Ryan Holiday?

  Where does that fit in with our human nature?

• 5:06Robert 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.

• 5:30Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 5:30Robert 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 Amor Fati 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.

• 6:15Robert Greene?

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

• 6:23Ryan 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 gonna happen. He's worried about this negative news article that's gonna come out. I was talking to him about it and I was saying, "Look, like, it's gonna happen, and it's gonna 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?

• 6:54Robert 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 gonna happen to me and is gonna 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 gotta do this phone call," or, "Oh, I forgot to email that person,"

• 7:39Robert Greene?

  or, "Damn, but this interview's coming up and I don't wanna do it." So much of the thoughts are anxieties that you're anticipating

• 7:45Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 7:46Robert Greene?

  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.

• 8:15Robert 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, uh, it'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, the 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.

• 9:01Robert 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.

• 9:46Robert 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 is, 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.

• 10:12Robert 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.

• 10:54Robert 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.

• 11:10Robert Greene?

  You know who one of the great Stoics of the 20th century was?

• 11:14Ryan Holiday?

  No.

• 11:14Robert Greene?

  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.

• 11:59Robert 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.