Will You Dance or Throw A Tantrum? | No Time For Theories, Just Results

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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 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, Rilis, 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.

• 0:52Ryan Holiday?

  Will you dance or throw a tantrum?

• 0:57Ryan Holiday?

  Adversity is the worst, right? Experiencing fortune's habit, as Seneca put it, of behaving however she pleases is brutal, right? Exiles, illnesses, financial setbacks, shipwrecks, floods, and famines, these types of reverses are bad, right? They don't have to be. Xeno's shipwreck led to the founding of Stoicism. Seneca's exiles informed some of his greatest writing. It's because Marcus Rilis did not receive the good fortune that he deserved, as the ancient historians noted, that we so admire him. Without the plague and the floods and the wars, he would have been an ordinary man, even forgettable. Epictetus was shaped and informed, yes, ultimately improved by the terrible crucible

• 1:39Ryan Holiday?

  of those years in slavery, just as Vice Admiral James Stockdale was by his time in the Hanaway-Hilton during the Vietnam War. Since their lives proved it, we can imagine the Stoics would have liked the line from Don Draper in Mad Men. Let's also say that change is neither good nor bad, he says. It simply is. It can be greeted with terror or joy, a tantrum that says, "I want it the way it was," or a dance that says, "Look, something new." But the Stoics knew that it was more than just a game of perception. It's what you do about it. It's how you respond. You choose to see the events of life, neither good nor bad, just objective, just reality. Yes, that's part one, but part two is the most important.

• 2:23Ryan Holiday?

  It's the making them good. It's seeing it not just as new, but as a new opportunity and then making good on it. As Stockdale said, making it something that in retrospect you'd never have traded away.

• 2:40Ryan Holiday?

  I don't know if you can hear that, but that is my amor fati pendant, which I carry with me. And when I'm not carrying it, it sits on my desk. We also have a cool pendant version of it as well. The Stoic idea of amor fati, a love of fate, that's what he's saying. Don't see it as something bad or unfair or annoying, but see it as something good, something great, something that specifically chosen for you. That's what amor fati was. I was introduced to this concept by the great Robert Greene, who helped me make these cool pendants. You can check that out at the Daily Stoic store. Just search amor fati or click the link in today's episode.

• 3:25Ryan Holiday?

  No time for theories, just results. 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. Spend 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 edition at store.dailystoic.com as well. But let's get on with today's reading. When the problem arose for us, whether habit or theory was better for getting virtue, if by theory is meant what teaches us correct conduct,

• 4:08Ryan Holiday?

  and by habit, we mean being accustomed to acting according to this theory, Musonius thought habit to be more effective. That's an excerpt relayed to us from Musonius Rufus, which is listed in his lectures. But I prefer the quote from Hamlet. "There are more things in heaven and earth for I see than are dreamt of in your philosophy." There is no time to chop logic over whether our theories are correct. We're dealing with the real world here. What matters is how you're going to deal with the situation in front of you, whether you're going to be able to move past it and on to the next one. That's not saying that anything goes, but we can't forget that although the theories are clean and simple, situations rarely are.

• 4:53Ryan Holiday?

  Marx realist says a version of this, waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one, he says, don't go around expecting Plato's Republic. You don't live there, right? We live in reality. And I talk about this a lot on the podcast. So often philosophers ask these abstract questions. I just talked about this on my episode with Paul Bloom, which is coming up. He talks about how, you know, we discuss the trolley problem, or do we live in a computer simulation? We talk about these ideas, when in reality, it's much more practical. Life and Stoicism, like you get accidentally CC'd on email and one of your coworkers says something not nice about you. Are you going to let that go or are you going to blow it up? Right? Your order is messed up at a restaurant.

• 5:38Ryan Holiday?

  Are you going to try to think about the person who did that? What their life is like? Or are you going to go full Karen? Right? You're tired and exhausted and your kids are being a nightmare. How do you respond? Right? That's what Stoicism is to me. There is an element of physics to the Stoics and there's logic too. But the Stoics tried to apply the philosophy to what they actually did to their lives as people, which is what we're trying to do. I've talked about this before too. You know, you watch what's happening in the news and you go, oh, why can't this politician? You know, why isn't this person voting this way? They're just trying to keep their job, blah, blah, blah. And then it's like, when was the last time you ever risked your job? Right?

• 6:22Ryan Holiday?

  How often do you do things that are in your financial best interest, but maybe not in the interests of the world? It's there that Stoicism is supposed to be applied, right? Stoicism is not a standard we hold other people to. It's not a game. It's not a lens through which we debate things. This is like a sports show where they go, who's the best? Is it LeBron James? Or is it this? Could, is Kevin Durant good? Cause he only won a championship with, with, uh, with Golden State and hasn't anywhere else? No, it's, how are you as a teammate? Right? Are you achieving and doing your best? Are you a team player? Right? It's about you.

• 7:07Ryan Holiday?

  It's, you can spend all your time thinking and debating and questioning. You can, you can waste your whole life doing that, but who cares? You have enough problems in your whole life. You have things you should be dealing with. That to me is what Stoicism is, right? That's what we're trying to do. That's what I want this podcast to be about. That's why I pick up meditations by my side of my bed. Oh yeah, I was doing that today. I don't want to do that anymore. That's what I flip the rep to. That's what, when I'm writing, I'm not only writing to accomplish that, hopefully for other people, but that's what I'm looking for as a writer. That's what I'm trying to do. And I hope that's what you take from this podcast too.

• 7:51Ryan Holiday?

  No time for theories, just results. Is habit or theory better? Habit is better, man. Habit, make the stuff a habit. That's what we're trying to do. Make it a practice, build it into the muscle memory. Make it part of who you are. Try to get to a point ideally where nobody even knows that you study philosophy. But when they look at your actions and go, that lines up, right? That lines up with the code. And I think if you look at Marcus Aurelius's life, you don't have to know he studied philosophy to get the sense he was a philosophical guy, that he lived according to those four virtues. That's the most powerful thing he said about courage, temper, justice, wisdom. It's how he lived.

• 8:35Ryan Holiday?

  And so it goes for you. And so I tried to make it go for me. None of us are perfect at it. The theory is much more interesting. The theory is easy. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter one bit compared to the actions.

• 8:53Ryan Holiday?

  Being able to control your anger is a difficult but worthwhile goal. Will take time and effort, won't be free. But by changing your perspective and developing techniques to control your temper, it will ultimately be achievable and life-changing. So take the first step on the path to a calmer and more fulfilling future. Check out Taming Your Temper: The 10-Day Stoic Guide to Controlling Your Anger. You can just go to dailystoic.com/anger.