What Are Your Panic Rules? | Don’t Mind Me, I’m Only Dying Slow

Ryan explains how you should think about panic, and reads The Daily Stoic’s entry of the day, on today’s Daily Stoic Podcast. GiveWell is the best site for figuring out how and where to donate your money to have the greatest impact. If you’ve never donated to GiveWell’s recommended charities before, you can have your donation matched up to $250 before the end of the year or as long as matching funds last. Just go to GiveWell.org and pick podcast and enter DAILY STOIC at checkout. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/emailFollow 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.

• 0:04Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Thursdays, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from the book The Daily Stoic, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful co-author and collaborator, Stephen Hanselman. And so today, we'll give you a quick meditation from one of the Stoics, from Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, then some analysis from me. And then we send you out into the world to do your best to turn these words into works.

• 0:44Ryan Holiday?

  What are your panic rules? It's easy to know what you should do. It's easy to decide what you want to do. The problem, as always, is that life gets in the way of these well-laid plans. Other people get in the way. Friction, apathy, inertia, indecision. They all get in the way. Les Snead, the general manager of the Los Angeles Rams, explained to me on the Daily Stoic Podcast a while ago that inside the Rams organization, they talk about having panic rules. What do you do when everything gets mixed up? When the other team calls an audible? When the coverage is confusing? When the play breaks down and there's havoc on the field? When the play clock is running down? And the play call hasn't come in yet?

• 1:28Ryan Holiday?

  Because the headsets aren't working. "When there's chaos and your brain is panicking," Snead said, "go to your panic rules. Slow down and go to your panic rules." And this isn't just an on-the-field thing. As a GM, Snead has to have panic rules too. Like when a player gets in trouble, when there's a controversy, when there's a tempting, high-risk, high-reward player who hits the waiver wire, when somebody wants to renegotiate a contract, when he's being savaged in the press. If you don't have panic rules, you're liable to make panicked decisions. You're liable to do something emotional, something short term, something that violates your principles and hurts your cause. Stoicism, in theory, is a philosophy.

• 2:13Ryan Holiday?

  As a practice, it might also be seen as a set of panic rules. "Just that you do the right thing" is an amazing, pithy, and prescient panic rule, straight from the mouth of Marcus Aurelius. "The rest doesn't matter," he concluded. He's saying, "Don't get distracted, don't overthink it, don't be led astray." In the language of football, play to the whistle, stick with your man, know your assignment. Remember, you always have the option of having no opinion. Another panic rule from Marcus's writings, meaning that when things are crazy, you should step back. Wait until you've made up your mind before you say or do anything. Don't just add your judgment on top of things based on reflex. If life was easy and perfect, we wouldn't need panic rules.

• 2:57Ryan Holiday?

  But it isn't. Things are complicated, they go awry, we get mixed signals, we get overwhelmed. And when that happens, we must always revert at once to our panic rules. The key is to make them really simple, so simple that we can't screw them up. And then, once we've gotten a hold of themselves and gotten through them, less might say, we can huddle up, catch our breath, call the next play, and hopefully do better next time. And look, I've got one of the Daily Stoic Challenge Coins. This is the amorphatin one. But the idea, I think, even on these Challenge Coins, is they're sort of a panic rule in brass, in your pocket, a reminder, hey, something happened, what's my basic principle?

• 3:39Ryan Holiday?

  What is the most core thing that I believe I don't want to forget? There it is. So you can check those out, of course, as always, at stuart.dailystoic.com.

• 3:51Ryan Holiday?

  Don't mind me, I'm only dying slow. Let each thing you would do, or say, or intend be like that of a dying person. Marcus Aurelius's Meditations 211. And I'm reading to you today from the Daily Stoic, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living by yours truly and my co-author and translator, Stephen Hanselman. You can get signed copies, by the way, in the Daily Stoic store. Over a million copies of the Daily Stoic in print now. It's been just such a lovely experience to watch it. It's been more than 250 weeks, consecutive weeks, on the bestsellers. It's just an awesome experience. But I hope you check it out. We have a premium leather

• 4:33Ryan Holiday?

  edition at store.dailystoic.com as well. But let's get on with today's reading. Have you ever heard someone ask, "What would you do if you found out you had cancer?" The question is designed to make you consider how different life would be if you were suddenly given just a few months or weeks to live. There's nothing quite like a terminal diagnosis to wake people up. But here's the thing, you already have a terminal diagnosis. We all do. As the writer Edmund Wilson put it, "Death is the one prophecy that never fails." Every person is born with a death sentence. Each second that passes is one you'll never,

• 5:13Ryan Holiday?

  ever get back. Once you realize this, it will have a profound impact on what you do and say and think. Do not let another day tick away in ignorance of the reality that you are a dying person. We all are. Can today be the day we stop pretending otherwise? You know, actually, today's entry, "Don't Mind Me, I'm Only Dying Slow," comes from the title of one of my favorite songs by the singer-songwriter Jackie Green, who I go way back with. If you haven't listened to it, it's great. You can check it out on Spotify. But-

• 5:49Ryan Holiday?

  This idea that we are dying every day, this goes to the core of Seneca's teachings. You know, he says, "We're dying every minute, dying every day, because the time that passes belongs to death." So even put aside the fact that, you know, you do have a terminal diagnosis, we all do, and that we could go in at any moment, even if I could tell you for certain that you would die at age 81, or whatever the actuary tables say, it doesn't change the fact that, as Seneca says, "The time that passes belongs to death." Because once it occurs, as it's tick, tick, tick, ticking away, even as you listen to this, as I, as I'm recording, I'm looking down at my Zoom H6 recorder,

• 6:34Ryan Holiday?

  and I'm watching the red numbers of the clock go, you know, to 22, to 23, to 24. As time passes, I'll never get those seconds back. You won't ever get those seconds back. But I think that you just spent them on something valuable, and that me saying it, something valuable, because it's a reminder that time is passing. And if we lose sight of this, we end up wasting this precious resource we have. As we kill time, as we waste time, time is killing us, time is wasting us. And that's why the exercise of Memento Mori is so important. That's why the Stoics practice it. That's why the Stoics talk about it.

• 7:16Ryan Holiday?

  That's why I have this Memento Mori coin on my desk, why I carry it in my pocket. The idea, as Marcus says, that you could leave life right now, let that determine what you do and say and think, is just so important. It puts things in perspective. It reminds us of the stakes, right? That signing up to do this thing you don't really want to do, that you don't have to do, that you know is pointless, to do them slowly or pointlessly, to do them half-acidly, to, to, to do something you don't need to do. This is to give up something you will never, ever get back, to just let the phone suck in your attention, and two hours later, you realize...

• 7:59Ryan Holiday?

  You just wasted all this time scrolling through TikTok or whatever. That's to waste your most precious resource, right? To let time transpire, to delay or defer a dream or a thing that you needed to say or do. To say, I'll get to this later. I'll pursue what is important to me later. I'll step up and do this later. You might not get later. And now is now. Now is your time. That, to me, is what memento mori is about. It's both humility, but it's also a form of empowerment. It's a reminder of the stakes. It's a reminder that we only get to do this once. And we only get so much time.

• 8:43Ryan Holiday?

  And that, again, there is no guarantee that it'll be 80 years. Could be 34 and a half years for me, right? Could be one more day for you. Covid floats, remains floating in the air. I hope you're all vaccinated. I hope you're safe. I hope you're being smart. But even so, you can do everything right. And just like you can do everything right, get hit by a bullet falling from the sky or a bus crashing up over a sidewalk. Or you can be the victim of a random terrible crime, right? Life is merciless. Statistics are merciless.

• 9:28Ryan Holiday?

  They are random. Even if, in the aggregate, they are in our favor, it doesn't matter to you, the individual. So do not waste time. Do not take life for granted. Let each thing you would do, say, or intend, as Marcus Aurelius reminds us, be like that of a dying person. I've got a bunch of memento mori reminders. As I said, I have this chunk of a tombstone that sits on my bathroom counter. And then, of course, I have the memento mori coin. We also have a memento mori pendant. And I've got a memento mori print, the Dance of Death print in my office that hangs very ominously at eye level. It's a great reminder.

• 10:13Ryan Holiday?

  You can check all that stuff out in the Daily Stoics store, of course. Or just write it down on a piece of paper, stick it on your computer monitor. And as Shakespeare says, check it three times a day.