You’re Not As Beloved As You Think | Prepare For The Storm

“It’s easy to let self-importance set in. Look at the car they sent for you. Look at how big your office is. Look at all the people who report to you. Look at the awards you’ve won. Look at the recognition you’ve gotten. You’re a pillar of your community. You’re the best in your field.”Ryan discusses why we have to protect ourselves from the perils of ego, and reads The Daily Stoic’s entry of the day, on today’s Daily Stoic Podcast. This episode is also brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs. LinkedIn Jobs is the best platform for finding the right candidate to join your business this fall. It’s the largest marketplace for job seekers in the world, and it has great search features so that you can find candidates with any hard or soft skills that you need. And now, you can post a job for free. Just visit linkedin.com/STOIC to post a job for free. ***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow Daily Stoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicSee 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, and some analysis from me. And then we send you out into the world to do your best to turn these words into works.

• 0:40Ryan Holiday?

  "You are not as beloved as you think. It's easy to let self-importance set in. Look at the car they sent for you. Look how big your office is. Look at all the people who report to you. Look at the awards you've won. Look at the recognition you've gotten. You're a pillar of your community. You're the best in your field." Marcus felt this pull. Seneca did too. Cato and Postidonius as well. How could they not? They were important. They were respected. They were a cut above the rest. Ego was a natural temptation for them, as it is for you, as it is for anyone in a position of leadership or influence, which is why we have to actively work against it, to remind ourselves that we're not nearly so popular or special as we think. "What would people say if I die?"

• 1:25Ryan Holiday?

  Napoleon once asked his staff as they fell over themselves with compliments and assurances of his indispensability. He corrected them. They would say, "Ugh." Napoleon knew that as a conqueror, he rode the razor's edge. He knew that the mob he'd rode into office could ride him out just as quickly. And more importantly, he knew that you have to look past the trappings of success. You have to ignore the flatterers and dismiss the sycophants if you want to have any chance of surviving your time at the top without spending all of it looking over your shoulder. Marcus reminded himself that on his deathbed, there'd be people happy to see him go, and it made him a better ruler as a result. "Ego is the enemy. Pride goeth before the fall. Self-importance is a lie."

• 2:13Ryan Holiday?

  Prepare for the storm. This is the true athlete, the person in rigorous training against false impressions. Remain firm, you who suffer. Don't be kidnapped by your impressions. The struggle is great, the task divine, to gain mastery, freedom, happiness, and tranquility. Epictetus's Discourses 218. It's cool how that works, right? That's 218 in the Discourses, and today is February 18th. Epictetus used the metaphor of a storm, saying that our impressions were not unlike extreme weather that can catch us and whirl us about. When we get worked up or passionate about an issue, we can relate to that.

• 2:56Ryan Holiday?

  But let's think about the role of weather in modern times. Today, we have forecasters and experts who can fairly accurately predict storm patterns. Today, we're defenseless against a hurricane only if we refuse to prepare or heed the warnings. If you don't have a plan, if we've never learned how to put up storm windows, we will be at the mercy of these external and internal elements. We're still puny humans compared with 100 mile-per-hour winds, but we have the advantage of being able to prepare, being able to struggle against them in a new way. You know, a couple of things. I do think it's funny that this entry is from 218. I think the Stoics would say that's fitting, which is a nice little coincidence.

• 3:39Ryan Holiday?

  But you may also recall that this part, "The struggle is great, the task divine, to gain mastery, freedom, happiness, and tranquility." This is the epigraph to my book, Stillness is the Key. This is what we are doing, right? The goal of Stoicism is to get to that place of stillness, to get to that place of ataraxia, where we're not at the whim of these internal and external forces, where we're in control of our own lives. That's where we're trying to get, and it takes work. The people, you know, we have this idea that the Stoics have no emotions, but that's not what it is, as we've said many, many times. No, it's that the Stoic has domesticated those emotions, to use Nassim Taleb's analogy.

• 4:20Ryan Holiday?

  The Stoic has managed to prepare, to listen, to notice the warning signs. They're not at the mercy of their impressions. They still feel them, they still see them, but then they're... They're protected against them. That's the work that we're trying to do. So we prepare for the storm. We think about it in advance. And then we also put up the defenses necessary. Right? It wasn't until I moved to the South where I really had to sort of come to terms with even the idea of extreme weather. Where I grew up, yeah, it would get hot and every once in a while would snow. But, you know, there wasn't, there wasn't flash floods and there wasn't hurricanes and there wasn't tornadoes.

• 5:04Ryan Holiday?

  My, the first weekend when I moved out to the country on our farm, we had a hundred year storm and it was quite scary. I've had to evacuate for hurricanes. I've had to deal with all of that. But as it happens, you get more comfortable with it and you realize there's sort of a playbook for responding. But a lot of people don't want to follow the playbook. They don't want to listen and then they're caught off guard by it. And I think, I think Epictetus's analogy holds true then for, for, for life itself. People know that they have a temper. They, they know the world is going to be frustrating. They know that, that their first reactions or impressions can be misleading. And yet, instead of taking the steps to prepare for them, instead of putting themselves

• 5:46Ryan Holiday?

  in a position where they're protected from this in some way, they just go, oh, we'll see what happens. Right? I don't want to be inconvenienced. No, you gotta, you gotta prepare. You prepare for the storm and then you're also strong so you can endure the storm. That's what this philosophy is about. That's why we're studying it here. I hope you can do this. I hope you can become, as Marcus Aurelius says, like the rock that the waves crash over and, and things fall still. But better yet, you know, if you can get out of the way of the waves, I mean, you should. So, prepare for the storm, be ready. Wishing you all a great day, great 218. And I'll talk to you again soon. And of course, ego is the enemy is the title of my book, which without being egotistical,

• 6:31Ryan Holiday?

  I'd like to say is pretty good and I'm proud of it. But you can also get an ego is the enemy challenge coin in the Daily Stoic store. We have a pendant version and a poster as well. So check it out. It's a reminder, ego sucks us down like the law of gravity. So be careful.