You Must Make This Shift | How Stoicism Helps You Deal With Big Challenges

Marcus Aurelius ruled over millions of people, and he didn't care what any of them thought about him. Well at least, he worked hard to not care about what any of them thought of him. We see that throughout Meditations where we see him repeatedly talk about focusing more on his own actions than other people's opinions. The accidental byproduct of this focus was that those millions of people loved Marcus. This is usually how it goes.---And today, Ryan puts his Stoicism to the test by taking on the challenge of running up the treacherous 8 mile road to the Cerro Gordo Ghost Town (@GhostTownLiving) in California. Watch the full video here.🎧 Listen to the full Ian Happ interview here.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, 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.

• 0:02Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. On Tuesdays, we take a closer look at these Stoic ideas, how we can apply them in our actual lives. Thanks for listening and I hope you enjoy.

• 0:26Ryan Holiday?

  You must make this shift. Marcus Aurelius ruled over millions of people and he didn't care what any of them thought about him. Well, at least he worked hard not to care about what any of them thought about him. We see that throughout meditations where we see him repeatedly talk about focusing more on his own actions than other people's opinions. The accidental byproduct of this focus was that millions of people loved Marcus. And that is usually how it goes. After a great rookie season with the Chicago Cubs in 2017, Ian Happ had a rough second year. And then he started the 2019 season by being sent back down to the minor leagues. On the Daily Stoic Podcast recently, Happ talked about the mindset

• 1:11Ryan Holiday?

  shift that helped him get back to the majors.

• 1:15Speaker 01

  You know, instead of wondering why, or trying really hard to impress a coach or somebody that makes the decisions, to say, you know what, I'm gonna believe in myself and put in the same work and, you know, at some point, they're not gonna be able to keep me out of the lineup. I found myself caring more about what the guy that made the decisions thought and kind of getting away from my process and what made me a really good player and trying to do kind of the things that wouldn't get me put on the bench, you know, and the end result of that is always like... You do the things to get you put on the bench.

• 1:53Ryan Holiday?

  Shifting his focus from the externals to the internals, Hap worked himself back into the Cubs lineup. And this past season, he made his first All-Star team and picked up his first Golden Glove Award in the process. That's what happens when you care more about what you are doing and less about what others are thinking. As Mark Serelius writes, ambition means tying your well-being to what other people say or do. Self-indulgence means tying it to the things that happen to you. But real success, real mastery, real sanity, that, he says, comes only by tying it to your own actions. So that's why we, as Stoics, shift our focus to the internal stats and the scoreboards.

• 2:38Ryan Holiday?

  We focus on the things we control, the choices we make, the work we put in, the standards we hold ourselves to. We trust in that and know that the rest will take care of itself.

• 3:03Ryan Holiday?

  There's an Epictetus line. He says, "If you only enter competitions where winning is up to you, you'll never be defeated." I think he means racing against yourself, setting your own standards. Then success is in your hands. So what I like about challenges, the way I think about it in my life is, who am I racing against? Who am I trying to beat? If I'm trying to beat myself, if I'm trying to push myself, if I'm trying to win just by trying, by doing it, then I'm in the right headspace and I'm thinking about it the right way.

• 3:28Speaker 02

  Seven-ish? Seven-ish. Okay. Plus or minus. But the problem really isn't the miles. It's right now, we're at 3,500 feet in elevation. The town's at 8,500 feet in elevation. So that's 5,000 feet elevation gain. And 5,000 feet is about a mile. So you're gaining about a mile. So I'm basically going uphill one mile. So seven distance, but then seven, or one mile of that is basically straight up. Yes. Okay. You think anyone's ever done this before? Ran up it? Yeah. Not like willingly, you know, maybe back in 1800s. I had a message like the back. The rollers washed out and they had to get a message up right in the middle of the night. But I don't think willingly anybody has run up this in a while. Okay. I think the real question with it all is how long is it gonna take? Do you have an estimate of how long you think it's gonna take?

• 4:12Speaker 02

  So I did seven miles earlier this week. Let me see. It took me under an hour to do seven miles.

• 4:18Ryan Holiday?

  Probably like 40, 50 minutes to do seven miles. I would like to think less than double that.

• 4:23Speaker 02

  So less than two hours. The other caveat is, under three days ago, the entire road got washed out, so you're gonna have rivets.

• 4:30Ryan Holiday?

  That's not so bad.

• 4:31Speaker 02

  And rocks.

• 4:32Ryan Holiday?

  I live on a dirt road like this, this is where I practice.

• 4:36Speaker 02

  Dawson, do you guess higher or lower? I think it's higher.

• 4:39Ryan Holiday?

  You think, how long do you think it's gonna take?

• 4:40Speaker 02

  2:45. 2:45?

• 4:42Ryan Holiday?

  I don't want the snake sitting in there for two hours under it. We're taking guesses on how long it's gonna take me to do seven miles on the road with about 5,000 feet of elevation climb. What's your guess? Hour and 40, 20 minutes. Well, I appreciate you believing in me, I don't have any expectation of doing that, but we'll see.

• 5:01Speaker 02

  My guess is three hours and 35 minutes.

• 5:06Ryan Holiday?

  Alright, I can definitely beat that.

• 5:07Speaker 02

  Um, comment below how long you think it's gonna take trying to run seven miles. We need an official clock here.

• 5:13Ryan Holiday?

  Here, wait, wait, wait. Well, I'm gonna start, I'm gonna start a run on my...

• 5:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, well...

• 5:17Ryan Holiday?

  Where's the starting line? Is the sign the starting line?

• 5:19Speaker 02

  The sign, touch the sign, and then touch the porch, the porch of the museum is the end.

• 5:22Ryan Holiday?

  Which I'm going to collapse on?

• 5:24Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 5:26Ryan Holiday?

  There's no turns I can take, so I can't get lost, right?

• 5:28Speaker 02

  No, it's straight the road.

• 5:31Ryan Holiday?

  Alright, I have to touch the sign?

• 5:32Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 5:59Ryan Holiday?

  The first few miles, everything was going great, felt easy, and it starts creeping up. The climb is just relentless. I tried to catch myself at about what felt like halfway, which should have been about three and a half miles. I tried to go, "Don't think of this as halfway." The problem is, when you start to get optimistic, when you start to think you're on the downside of it. As a rider, this happens all the time, you go, "I'm at the halfway point, I'm about to submit it." There's all these false finishes, right, or false checkmarks. You think you're further than you actually... And then when you realize how much further there is left to go, this is when it crushes you. This is when it kills you. You have to have the discipline to rein in that sort of preemptive celebration,

• 6:42Ryan Holiday?

  that sense that you've got it. The halfway point, you have to remind yourself, isn't even close to halfway done. And in fact, the last 10%, that might be as hard as a full 50%. And so it gets harder as you go, especially on a trail like this where the climb was just. I said to myself when I was starting, like, it levels off. There's moments, I thought I'd remember ups and downs. Now, this was just up and up and up and up the whole time. There's one point where I'm running and it's real steep. And I'm like, struggling with it. And then I remember when I drove my truck up here last time, our truck overheated at that point. So you think about how steep and relentless a climb has to be

• 7:27Ryan Holiday?

  to knock out an F-150 four by four with a big engine in it. Of course I was struggling. And so I had to remind myself, you know, I'm just a human being.

• 7:41Speaker 02

  So, you're just about halfway?

• 7:44Ryan Holiday?

  Four and a half miles. I better be further than halfway.

• 7:47Speaker 02

  I'd say you're about halfway.

• 7:50Speaker 02

  You're about halfway.

• 7:52Ryan Holiday?

  You know what they say? They say halfway is 90% left.

• 7:55Speaker 02

  Right, so.

• 7:57Ryan Holiday?

  Now's the hard part.

• 7:58Speaker 02

  You're doing, you're doing good time, though. You're under an hour.

• 8:01Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, this is 13 minute miles.

• 8:03Speaker 02

  That's pretty damn good.

• 8:12Ryan Holiday?

  One mile left.

• 8:15Ryan Holiday?

  I should probably tell myself it's two.

• 8:20Ryan Holiday?

  The last mile is always the hardest.

• 8:23Ryan Holiday?

  You wouldn't think you could just keep going up.

• 8:26Speaker 02

  And up.

• 8:32Ryan Holiday?

  The important thing about confidence is like when you know you can do something. Like, I know I can write a book because I've written a book. I know I can run real far because I've run real far. I know I can push my body further than my body thinks it can go. When you know that, you have a kind of confidence that lets you go, okay, this is physically possible. I'm probably not going to die doing it. So then it becomes a matter of sheer willpower.

• 9:01Ryan Holiday?

  The key is to not look behind you and not think too far ahead. Just one foot in front of the other. But it's hard when you get a flash forward of how far left to go. That's how Marcus really said, you can't be crushed by your imagination as a whole and all the shit that is to come. I think they got the distance wrong. It's already 675. There's got to be quite a ways to go. The shorts have held up well, the shirt too. There's a John Wooden thing where he...

• 9:29Ryan Holiday?

  First day of practice, he has the best recruits in the world. They think he's going to give them all this sage advice. And he goes, gentlemen, this is how you put on your socks. And then he says, gentlemen, this is how you lace up your shoes. And you're like, what? And his point is, if you don't do that right, if you don't sweat the small stuff, you don't get the big things right. The devil's in the details, as they say. I like these socks. The 10,000 socks are decent.

• 10:02Ryan Holiday?

  Alright. We're set. Let's finish this shit.

• 10:10Ryan Holiday?

  Hey Brett. Yeah? Do you have anything to eat?

• 10:16Ryan Holiday?

  I got it.

• 10:18Ryan Holiday?

  Two hour... or one hour, 59 minutes and 26 seconds.

• 10:24Ryan Holiday?

  Because I'm on this tour for discipline, I think what I wanted to test myself and test my discipline, which is why I had the idea that I would run from the bottom of Cerro Gordo to the top of Cerro Gordo. It was a physical challenge unlike really any I'd done before. I knew that it wasn't about speed. It was really about like, could I push myself? Could I last longer even when I was uncomfortable and tired and exhausted and totally out of gas? I talk about Shackleton in Discipline is Destiny. You think about, he had this motto, "By endurance we conquer." And you think about what he's subjected to. You think about what, how badly he would have quit. And you think about what a skill that is. It's a muscle to develop, this sense of fortitude and strength

• 11:09Ryan Holiday?

  and unwillingness to quit. And you have to seek out things in your life that allow you to test that and by testing it, make it a little bit stronger. The key thing that humans have to cultivate in life is the ability to endure, to survive, to hold on, to hold fast to the things that are important to them. That to me is the ability to bear, to endure. This is how we conquer. This is how we get through difficult times. This is how we show the world who we are and what's important.