Your Weakness Can Be Your Strength | A Week Without Complaining

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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. 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.

• 0:44Ryan Holiday?

  Your weakness can be your strength.

• 0:48Ryan Holiday?

  Almost every sport has a dominant body type. Basketball players are tall. Quarterbacks, too, have to be tall enough to see over the offensive line. Swimmers tend to have long torsos. Gymnasts tend to be on the shorter side. And over generations, the way a sport is played selects for a certain type of athlete. But just because height, or speed, or body type is a strength, it doesn't mean that athletes lacking these attributes are weak or out of luck. In fact, often the opposite is true. In the new HBO documentary on Tony Hawk, it talks about how early pool and vert skaters needed a certain amount of strength to yank the board up and out of the ramp to get air for a trick. And as a skinny kid,

• 1:32Ryan Holiday?

  Tony Hawk simply didn't have this strength. And it seemed like a disadvantage up until the very moment that it drove him to innovate ollieing as he rode up to the lip and thus changed skateboarding forever. It's a classic example of, as Marcus Rila says, "How the impediment to action actually advances action." What stood in the way, Hawk's inability to perform a certain type of task physically, became a new way, which his mind and creativity and courage was able to create from nothing. And it's funny, we sit here and we curse ourselves for not being as well-funded as our competitors, for not having the contacts or the network of our peers, for not being able to go to a better school or live in a certain place, for the market

• 2:15Ryan Holiday?

  being what it is right now. And yes, it is unfortunate. It would have been preferable for things to have been more fair, been easier, been simpler. But without that unfairness and difficulty in the world, we'd have been deprived of so many innovations, so many breakthroughs, so many better ways of doing things. We can turn our weaknesses into strengths. We can convert our advantages into disadvantages. Indeed, that's what every great company, athlete, and artist has ever done. If you haven't read The Obstacle is the Way, we have a really cool new leather edition in the Daily Stoic Store. The book sold a million copies. It's in 30 languages. It's the first book that I wrote about Stoicism. I'd love to have you check it out, which you can do in the Daily Stoic Store.

• 3:04Ryan Holiday?

  A Week Without Complaining.

• 3:09Ryan Holiday?

  Epictetus spoke often to his students about the need to give up blaming and complaining. In fact, he saw it as one of the primary measuring sticks of progress in the art of living. "How much of life is wasted?" pointed fingers. "Has complaining ever solved a single problem?" Marcus Aurelius would say, "Blame yourself or no one." This week, try constructive feedback over complaining and responsibility over blame. And if something goes wrong, spend some time reflecting on what the true causes were. Don't waste a minute with complaints in your journal or out loud. This is from this week's entry in the Daily Stoic Journal, "366 Days of Writing on Reflection in the Art of Living",

• 3:51Ryan Holiday?

  by me, Ryan Holiday, and my co-author Stephen Hanselman. You can get this anywhere books are sold, although we also have signed copies in the Daily Stoic Store and, of course, at my bookstore, The Painted Porch, here in Bastrop, Texas. But we have three quotes from Epictetus today about complaints. He says, "You must stop blaming God and not blame any person. You must completely control your desire and shift your avoidance to what lies within your reasoned choice. You must no longer feel anger, resentment, envy, or regret." That's the Discourses 322. For nothing outside my reasoned choice, he says, can hinder or harm it. My reasoned choice alone can do this to itself. If we would lean this way whenever we fail and would blame only ourselves and remember

• 4:34Ryan Holiday?

  that nothing but opinion is the cause of a troubled mind and uneasiness, then by God, I swear, we would be making progress. That's Discourses 319. And then he also says in Incoridion 1:3, "But if you deem as your own only what is yours, and what belongs to others is truly not yours, then no one will ever be able to coerce or stop you, and you will find no one to blame or accuse, you will do nothing against your will, and you will have no enemy, and no one will harm you, because no harm can affect you." It's funny, just as I was sitting here, I was thinking to myself, man, it's so hot. It's hot in my office, I have to turn off the AC when I record. But one of my favorite quotes from Marcus Aurelius about complaining, which I actually

• 5:18Ryan Holiday?

  also have in sort of fictionalized in The Boy Who Would Be King, he says, "Don't be heard complaining at court, not even to yourself." Right, there are so many parts of Marcus Aurelius's job that we get the sense that he didn't really like. He's kind of an introverted person, he's a good person, he wants to do what's right, he's not an ambitious person in the sense he doesn't want to dominate or win or everything. And so it must have been so frustrating to be around these obnoxious, annoying, you know, dishonest people, these professional politicians, basically. But he catches himself, he's like, it's not even enough not to complain publicly. And of course, everyone would have indulged his complaints, he's emperor.

• 6:02Ryan Holiday?

  But he says, "Don't even complain in your own mind." And that is some higher level shit right there, isn't it? Right, to not only be able to stop yourself from complaining. I think it was Will Bowen, he had the no complaint challenge. Every time, you know, you say a complaint, you have to move the bracelet from one wrist to the other. And the idea is, can you leave it on one wrist for 30 days? Can you get it in one spot for 30 days? No complaints. But imagine how most of us would fail if even thinking about a complaint, not even verbalizing it disqualified us. But that's the challenge of the Stoics. And I think- Epictetus, though, is more honest. He talks about just progress.

• 6:45Ryan Holiday?

  The less blame, the less complaining, the more responsibility you're taking, the more constructive you are, that's what matters. Are you making a little bit of progress every day? Are you moving forward? Are you complaining less? Right? I think that's a fair way to think about it. So I thought the complaint, but I didn't say it. That's progress. But maybe next time I can just go, the temperature is what the temperature is. If I want to do this thing, that's what I have to put up with. So, you know, so that's what it is. It doesn't, thinking about it doesn't help me. It doesn't make me any cooler. Right? It just makes me frustrated. And that's why we try not to complain. So don't be heard complaining today, not even to yourself.

• 7:29Ryan Holiday?

  That's the standard we're ascribing to. But could we just make some progress? We just blame only ourselves or ideally no one? That's progress. Let's do it. Let's work for it. Let's make ourselves a little bit stronger as a result.

• 7:54Ryan 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.