What Will It Bring Out Of You? | What Can Go Wrong… Might

Ryan talks about how our character is exposed in themes extreme circumstances, and reads this week’s meditation from The Daily Stoic Journal. Go Macro is a family-owned maker of some of the finest protein bars around. They're vegan, non-GMO, and they come in a bunch of delicious flavors. Visit gomacro.com and use promo code STOIC for 30% off your order plus free shipping on all orders over $50. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://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.

• 0:05Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Each day, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, illustrated with stories from history, current events, and literature to help you be better at what you do. And at the beginning of the week, we try to do a deeper dive, setting a kind of Stoic intention for the week, something to meditate on, something to think on, something to leave you with, to journal about, whatever it is you happen to be doing. So let's get into it.

• 0:36Ryan Holiday?

  What will it bring out of you? The history of humankind is the history of responding to adversity. Storms, famines, economic collapses, wars, these things happen, and human beings have to respond to them. Suddenly, all our excuses, our idleness, our entitlements disappear. We have to step up. We have to show what we're made of, to become the person we're capable of being. Writing between the world wars, Charles de Gaulle reflected that "When events become grave, the peril pressing, a sort of tidal wave pushes men of character into the front rank." So it went with de Gaulle when surrender broke out in France in 1940, leaving only him standing,

• 1:20Ryan Holiday?

  only him willing to fight. It's a story I tell more fully in Courage is Calling. But so it also went with Marcus Aurelius as the Antonine Plague and flooding and war collided with Rome, which you can see in Lives of the Stoics. So it went with Ulysses S. Grant, whose troubles with drinking were suddenly made inconsequential, in contrast to the character, the commitment, the fearlessness he displayed in the early days of the Civil War. And this is also what we're seeing in Ukraine now, which has been invaded by a delusional and murderous dictator. For months, this slow-moving crisis was managed by Western leaders. For months, pundits speculated and doubted the capacity of Ukraine's president, Volodymyr

• 2:05Ryan Holiday?

  Zelensky, a former comedian and actor. But then the bullets and the bombs began to fly, and suddenly, a man of grim determination and resilience emerged. Suddenly, the character of the Ukrainian people was pushed to the front, literally. May each of us be so lucky as to dodge so serious and so deadly a crisis. There will be no escaping adversity. It is our fate as human beings. Events will become grave, peril will press. Will you step up? What kind of character will be revealed? Will you become the person you are capable of being? We train now for precisely that moment. We get ourselves ready for our time on the front. Because it is coming.

• 2:51Ryan Holiday?

  What can go wrong, might. And this is from this week's entry in the Daily Stoic Journal, "366 Days of Writing and Reflection on the Art of Living" by yours truly and my co-writer and translator, Stephen Hanselman. I actually do this journal every single day. There's a question in the morning, a question in the afternoon. Then there's these sort of weekly meditations. As Epictetus says, "Every day and night, we keep thoughts like this at hand. Write them, read them aloud, and talk to yourself and others about them." You can check out the Daily Stoic Journal anywhere books are sold. You can also get a signed, personalized copy from me in the Daily Stoic store. It's store.dailystoic.com. We call people who dwell on what might go wrong pessimists.

• 3:33Ryan Holiday?

  Some even think that bad thoughts attract bad events. The Stoics found this all to be nonsense. In fact, they had a practice, premeditatio malorum, premeditation of evils, that specifically encouraged musing on the so-called worst-case scenario. Marcus would begin his day thinking about all the ugliness he would see on display in court, not for the purpose of working himself up, but precisely the opposite, to calm and focus himself, to be prepared to act in the proper way rather than just to react. Seneca too practiced meditating in advance, not only on what normally happens, but on what could happen. Epictetus went as far as to imagine losing a loved one every time he would kiss them.

• 4:15Ryan Holiday?

  The Stoics believed that all we have is on loan from fortune and that negative visualization helps increase our awareness of the unexpected. So don't shy away from this in your thoughts. Then we have two quotes today from Marcus Aurelius and from Seneca. When you arise in the morning, tell yourself, "I will encounter busybodies, ingrates, egomaniacs, liars, the jealous and cranks." They are all stricken with these afflictions because they don't know the difference between good and evil. Because I have understood the beauty of good and the ugliness of evil, I know that the wrongdoers are still akin to me, and that none can do me harm or implicate me in ugliness, nor can I be angry at my relatives and hate them, for we are made for cooperation.

• 4:57Ryan Holiday?

  Before I get to the Seneca quote, I would say that the many first times I read this quote, especially when I read it young, I focused on that first part, where you list just how awful and frustrating everyone will be. And I think that's sort of the rudimentary understanding. It's like, look, you know, don't go into the world all rosy-eyed and bushy-tailed, or you're gonna get your heart stomped on, right? You gotta be aware, you gotta be prepared, you can't be naive. Marcus really says, "Don't go expecting Plato's Republic." But it's really the second part of that that's hit me more, right? Why is he doing that exercise? It's so when he's hit by it, when he's hit by a cheat, or a liar, or a person who is, you know, messing around on their spouse, or, you know, when, when he sees somebody do something wrong,

• 5:42Ryan Holiday?

  he's not surprised by it, and it doesn't make him bitter, and it doesn't make him write off all of humanity as a whole. You know, he says, "Because I know better. I know that the wrongdoers are still akin to me." And he says, "And none can do me harm or implicate me in ugliness, nor can I be angry at my relatives or hate them." That's something I've been working on. It's like, I was just dealing with someone who I really care about, and they're just, you know, being, you know, not safe or smart, or who I know them to be. And, and I wanted to unload on them, and I had to go, no, I care about this person. I'm not gonna do that. I'm not going to let, I'm, I should have prepared for this. I shouldn't have built them up in my head. They're a human being, they have flaws, they do the wrong things sometimes.

• 6:27Ryan Holiday?

  I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna cast them out of my heart or out of my life for what they've done. And then this goes into the second Seneca quote. "Being unexpected adds to the weight of a disaster, and being a surprise has never failed to increase a person's pain. For that reason, nothing should ever be unexpected by us. Our minds should be sent out in advance to all the things, and we shouldn't just consider the normal course of things, but what could actually happen? For is there anything in life that fortune won't knock off its high horse if it pleases her?" You know, I have the premeditatio malorum coin here on my desk. And I just look at it, I go, look, look, Murphy's Law is real, man. Things can go sideways fast. I mean, imagine where you were the first week of March 2020.

• 7:10Ryan Holiday?

  Did you see the next 12 months coming? Very, very few people did. But we would have been better had we been more prepared, had we been more realistic, had we been less in our own fantasy world. You know, Seneca says, "The only unforgivable thing for a general to say is, 'I did not think it would happen.'" So of course, positive visualization is thinking of all the good things that can happen. You can succeed, you can break through, you can make it. If it's humanly possible, know you can do it, Marcus says. The same time, the law of attraction is not real. If you think about negative things, you don't attract negative things. You actually make yourself more prepared to wrestle with and deal with and conquer those difficult things. And that is why we do our premeditatio malorum. That is why we think of all the things that can happen.

• 7:54Ryan Holiday?

  That's why we meditate on the people we're likely to meet, so that they can't drag us down, they can't implicate us in ugliness, and they can't make us unhappy.

• 8:05Ryan Holiday?

  Thanks so much for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. If you don't know this, you can get these delivered to you via email every day. Check it out at dailystoic.com/email.