We Must Create Order From Chaos | Ask Daily Stoic

The world is crazy. Plus, we have our own crazy lives to worry about—that pile of work, the kid who might be coming down with a cold, the house project that must be finished.🎥 Watch George Raveling’s FULL interview on The Daily Stoic Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJ-ZQ2p0WhY📕 You can grab copies of What You’re Made For by George Raveling 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.

• 0:55Ryan Holiday?

  We must create order from chaos. The world is crazy. There's so much going on, so much to follow, so much to be concerned about. Plus, we have our own crazy lives to worry about. That pile of work, the kid who might be coming down with a cold, the house project that must be finished. How do we make sense of it all? George Raveling, the legendary basketball coach and one of our favorite people, talks about this in his new book, What You're Made For, which I feel lucky enough to have felt brought into the world. And we just had George on the podcast as well. George was overwhelmed by self-doubt when he was tapped to run one of the biggest divisions at one of the biggest companies in the world.

• 1:38Ryan Holiday?

  That was at Nike in his 60s. He had no prior corporate experience and wasn't sure how he'd manage all the responsibilities before him. But then a mentor gave him a pretty simple system. He said, "When you leave the office every day, leave a yellow pad in the middle of the desk. And when you come in in the morning, write down the three most important things you gotta do that day in that order. And that day, do not do anything else but the first thing on the pad." He said, "And then when you get the first one done, go to the second one. And that will put structure to your day and give you a sense of purpose." And basically, George says that this simple system ended up working wonders. The whole daunting, overwhelming role suddenly began to feel manageable.

• 2:23Ryan Holiday?

  And he says, "This experience reinforced a belief that had guided me throughout my career and life, that one of our fundamental purposes as a human being is to create order and structure from the chaos of existence." And the Stoics believed this too. That's why they were so big on habits and routines. In a world where so much is out of our control, committing to a routine we do control was, you know, a way of establishing and reminding ourselves of our own power. Without a disciplined schedule, procrastination sets in, chaos and complacency and confusion. What was I supposed to do? What should I wear? What should I eat? Where do I start? Should I tackle this problem or that one? And this is torture. Seneca would say that life without design

• 3:06Ryan Holiday?

  is erratic. We must create order. We must design routines and systems. And when we do, chaos and uncertainty and disorder and complacency and confusion are boxed out by the order and clarity that we have built. And you should absolutely listen to George's episode on the podcast. I think it was fantastic. One of my favorites. I very rarely fly out to do them, but I flew out to do that one with George, sat down and had a lovely conversation. And you should check out the book, What You're Made For, it just came out. Look, how many books you think Michael Jordan writes the foreword to? George, I said, George, I think you should ask Jordan. He said, okay. He sent a message and then we got confirmation a few days later that Jordan would be happy

• 3:47Ryan Holiday?

  to. You know, I haven't worked on many books where that's been the case. I don't even know if I've ever seen a book where that was the case, because that's just who George is. It's a lovely little foreword and I think a lovely little book. What You're Made For: Lessons From Ravelling's Life in Sports is available everywhere. We've got copies at the Painted Porch. I'll sign your copy if you want. I'll link to that in today's show notes. Grab it.

• 4:16Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. So I was telling you recently that I'm a dropout of UCR. That's UC Riverside. So even though I didn't graduate from there, still where I went to school influenced me almost more than any other institution. I mean, UCR is where I met my wife. UCR is where I was introduced to Stoic philosophy. I was covering an event for the college newspaper. It's where I wrote some of my first books. I covered a bunch of things, actually, for the college newspaper, and I can still remember them. I saw Elizabeth Wurzel speak. She's one of the first famous authors that I ever saw. I remember I did a story about a gay Eagle Scout who had been like sort

• 5:00Ryan Holiday?

  of kicked out of the Boy Scouts. I remember I watched some like pickup artist or dating artist, and I just was like, oh, this is just so lame. Definitely don't want to be that person. I covered a bunch of different events over the years for the UCR Highlander, which is one of the first places that I ever wrote, the first office that I ever had, the first time I was ever paid to be a writer. You know, it's where I got started, really. But if I go back even further, when I enrolled at UCR, I got a scholarship. It's called the Chancellor Scholarship, and then I was in the honors program. This was all to help cover the bills. If you were in the honors program and you lived in the honors dorm, it covered some of your tuition and rent. Anyways, the beginning of our freshman year,

• 5:42Ryan Holiday?

  in the summer, we went to this seminar hosted by the honors department, and the speaker was this woman, Susan Straight, who's a novelist and a writing professor at UCR. And she was the first author that I ever met. And I've had her on the podcast subsequently. You can listen to that episode. She's going to come on again. I'm excited about that. Anyway, she reached out and said, hey, would you want to come do an event at UCR? And I said, oh, my God, yeah, this would be incredible. It's full circle. And so I was at the university theater back in early April. And first off, I was introduced by Professor Straight. So that was full circle. And then I was interviewed by the Chancellor, Chancellor Wilcox. It was just absolutely incredible. And the whole honors program was there. It was mandated,

• 6:25Ryan Holiday?

  like the ones that I had went to when I was an honor student. And so that was all sort of full circle and strange and surreal. And I will bring you a chunk of that now. Enjoy.

• 6:40Speaker 01

  And is that, I think, applicable even more so today than it has been in other parts of your life, given that it's most politically in the rest of the world?

• 6:48Ryan Holiday?

  I mean, I think there's something, you know, like that Chinese expression, "May you live in interesting times." There is something about the periods in which Stoicism is relevant that probably says something about the time that it's in. But I mean, you know, and this was, I guess, 2006. It felt urgent and relevant then. It feels relevant 20 years later. And I think one of the fascinating things that I took from the Stoics is that Stoicism was not ancient philosophy to the Stoics, and yet it was. There's a passage in Meditations where it strikes me that, you know, Marcus is realizing that Stoicism is 500 years old when he's reading it. Like, so it was as distant to

• 7:32Ryan Holiday?

  him as Shakespeare is to us. And he's just sort of meditating on how, in that 500 years, and indeed for all time, people have been doing the same things, having the same problems, getting in the same fights, prioritizing the wrong things. This is just what human beings do. And so I certainly think there's something about this moment that feels very Roman, unfortunately. But when you read the Stoics and then the people who are influenced by the Stoics, there is this timelessness to like, "Oh, somebody wrote this down and got it a long time ago."

• 8:04Speaker 01

  I'm one of the people that shouldn't give a hope to. And I studied up for tonight. There are times when it's almost the broken cup. It's one of those where it's as pessimism as optimism.

• 8:15Ryan Holiday?

  Yes. The broken cup being the Zen parable about, "The cup is already broken, the cup is already broken." Yeah. When I read Meditations for the first time, I found it empowering and inspiring. As I've dealt with it more and more, and as I've come to study not just Mark Schulz, but all the Stoics, I look at the time that they lived in. I look at what they went through. Marcus Aurelius is, you know, he loses his father at a young age. He's thrust into power. He doesn't want this. There's a plague. There's a historic series of floods that lead to a famine. There's wars. He buries half of his children, and he had 12. I go back to that passage about, this is why you got to get out of bed early in the morning.

• 8:57Ryan Holiday?

  That he got out of bed at all, in some respects, is a statement of profound resilience and hope. So, but there is something, I think, a little dark, a little depressing about the Stoics. But then, when you realize that the world was and is dark and depressing, and what Stoicism is, is this refusal to give in, this refusal to despair. It does, I think, accept pragmatically and realistically, not just who other people are, but our limitations as human beings, to change that. But then to try anyway is, to me, actually, kind of inspiring.

• 9:34Speaker 01

  It's kind of the notion of giving up versus asking for help.

• 9:37Ryan Holiday?

  Well, there is, there's a passage in Meditations, and it's funny. I, so I have my copy, which is now 20 years old. It's no, pretty worse for wear. I found some time ago, but I opened up a copy and a receipt fell out. And the receipt was for the Borders in the Riverside Plaza. And, which is obviously no longer with us. It was also, then it became, I think, Forever 21, which is also no longer with us. So this is all very Stoic, as the things you remember cease to exist. But, but I realized that this was my wife's copy, which she had bought after I talked about it too much on our first date.

• 10:16Ryan Holiday?

  One of the passages that, that struck me in my copy that I've seen where I underlined it, it's Marcus Aurelius says, um, You are like a soldier storming a wall. You have fallen. And again, he's talking to, when he says "you," he means "him." And I think that's what drew me to it. It's so personal, but he says, "You are like a soldier storming a wall. You've fallen and you can't get up and you have to ask a comrade for help." And then he says, "So what?" Question mark. And I just loved that. I loved the nonchalance of that. And the contrast to the stereotype of the Stoic is unfeeling and invulnerable and invincible. I mean, yeah, you can be those things if you are the kind of person that sees yourself

• 11:01Ryan Holiday?

  as part of a team or part of a large organization. You know, the Stoics believe that we're all sort of interconnected and interrelated and couldn't be separated from each other, that even the obnoxious and frustrating people were part of this team. Again, I think the more you unpack what Stoicism is, the more and more, I think, exciting and invigorating and deeply human it is.

• 11:22Speaker 01

  Do you think that, sort of concepts?

• 11:24Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 11:25Speaker 01

  Think about your experience here at UCR and offer some perspective for students now who are in the middle of trying to develop those kinds of supporting networks and trying to be independent and trying to be Stoic and in many senses.

• 11:36Ryan Holiday?

  One of the things that struck me after I left, and I had this great opportunity to go work for a writer, which is the only reason I left. I loved, I think some people drop out of college because they hate college. And I've gotten so many emails from people over the years, "I'm thinking about dropping out of college." And I always look, if the email says they're failing out of college, I say, "You definitely can't leave." Right? If you have something better, you know, maybe it's... But so I loved college and I hated to leave, but I had this chance to do what I was here to learn how to do. But one of the things that struck me after I left was how many resources and what access I had here that I had never taken advantage of.

• 12:17Ryan Holiday?

  I've joked about this before, but I wrote a good chunk of my first book in the Rivera Library, which I don't think I stepped foot in while I was a student.

• 12:32Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. I just wanted to say we so appreciate it. We love serving you. It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple of years we've been doing it. It's an honor. Please, spread the word. Tell people about it. And this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say thank you.