Pod Insights The Daily Stoic | Wondery+ Tie Yourself to the Mast | Ask Daily Stoic About this episode It’d be wonderful if we always did what we know we want or need to do. But that’s not how the world is. It is filled with temptations, distractions, and forces tugging us toward the rocks.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:05 Ryan Holiday? Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a Stoic-inspired meditation, designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life. Each one of these episodes is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women, help you learn from them, to follow in their example, and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. For more, visit DailyStoic.com.
0:55 Ryan Holiday? It's one of the most critical and dangerous moments in perhaps the greatest story ever told. Odysseus ties himself to the mast of his ship, because it's the only way to resist steering towards the beautiful sound of the sirens. It's an ingenious little trick that makes him the first person to ever hear the sirens and live to tell the tale, "to avoid fatally crashing into the rocks where countless ships lay wrecked, their sailors lured to their deaths by a temptation they could not control." On an episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast, the behavioral scientist Katie Milkman talked about this as being the original example of what they call in behavioral science,
1:38 Ryan Holiday? "a commitment device, a way of deliberately constraining ourselves to help us achieve our goals." It's talked about in every behavioral science book and every behavioral science class, she explained, "because we think of it as the original example of someone facing temptation and coming up with a clever workaround to prevent giving in." Every sailor knew that the sirens were deadly. Every captain warned his crew about those beautiful voices that lured their ships to destruction. They all knew that following the sound meant death. And that knowledge should have been enough, but it wasn't. Ship after ship crashed, sailor after sailor couldn't help themselves.
2:21 Ryan Holiday? What made Odysseus different wasn't that he had more willpower or discipline than the other captains, was that he was wise enough to know that he didn't. He understood that in those moment with those beautiful voices calling, he'd be just as weak as everyone else. So he came up with a way to protect himself from himself. It would be wonderful if we always did what we knew we needed to do, but that's not how it goes. The world is filled with temptations, distractions, and forces tugging us towards the rocks. So what we need are commitment devices. We need constraints that protect us from our weaker selves, that keep us on the right course. We need to tie ourselves to the mast.
3:05 Ryan Holiday? And by the way, that's what I do every single year with the Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge. I sign up for 21 days of Stoic inspired challenges because I know that if left to my own devices, I'm just going to continue as I always was. I'd love to have you join me and thousands of other Stoics all over the world who are doing that very same thing, inspired as it is by Odysseus. For 21 days, you won't have to figure out how to improve. You won't have to design your own program. You won't have to rely on willpower. You just open the email and do what it says. One challenge, one action, one step forward for the first three weeks of the year. Right?
3:46 Ryan Holiday? Our willpower waivers, sometimes we aren't who we want to be, but if we do this, not just signing up for it, but we do it with other people, maybe we can get a little bit better. Right? We all need help staying the course. That's why I'd love to do this course with you and I'd love you to do it with me. It's one of my favorite things that we do. As I said, we've been doing it for almost the last 10 years now. I have all sorts of habits and practices in my life that I do each and every day because I picked it up in these challenges because I made the commitment, I paid the price, I did the thing. And I'd love to see you in there. You can sign up right now at dailystoic.com/challenge. And if you join Daily Stoic Life or If you are a Daily Stoic Life member, you get this challenge and all our challenges
4:29 Ryan Holiday? that we do throughout the year, plus our courses, plus a bunch of other awesome stuff, totally for free. So you can sign up there at dailystoiclive.com or just go to DailyStoic.com/challenges and I'll walk you all through it. I hope to see you in there.
4:52 Ryan Holiday? Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another Thursday episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. We know what trauma does to the body, like mental, emotional, spiritual trauma, but then also like you get in an accident, you injure yourself playing sports, something happens to you, right? The body can take a beating. And so we know the negative consequences of that. But there's also this thing I talk about in The Obstacle is the Way, this idea of post-traumatic growth. How do you bounce back? How do you learn from it? How do you grow as a result of what's happened? And back a couple of months ago, I went to the Annual Assembly of the American Academy of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation. Basically, doctors who help
5:33 Ryan Holiday? people recover from brain and spine and nerve injuries. These are people who help patients through like the worst things that can happen to the body, right? Strokes and spinal injuries, amputations, burn recovery, mass shootings, trauma from accidents, trauma from war, right? The roughest stuff. They have to help people recover, rehabilitate, rebuild, learn to move again, and most of all, not to give up. So this was a pretty interesting audience. They wanted me to talk about turning trials into triumphs, which obviously I know about from the Stoic perspective, but I felt like they had a lot to teach me from a medical standpoint. So it was a lovely conversation. Maybe I'll bring you a chunk of the talk at some point,
6:15 Ryan Holiday? but this is the Q and A that I did after. I think you're really gonna like it. I was interviewed by Dr. Scott Laker, who moderated the Q and A. And anyways, let me just bring you a chunk of this. I think you'll like it. And by the way, if you want to come ask me a question, I'm gonna be doing two talks, San Diego and Phoenix here in February. You can grab tickets for that at DailyStoicLive.com.
6:40 Speaker 01 I'm gonna combine two questions here. How do you counter when people conflate being stoic from being a stoic? And if you could combine that with, how do you balance stoicism with optimism?
6:51 Ryan Holiday? Yeah, I mean, when I think about Marcus Aurelius's life, what he went through, and I only got into a fraction of it, he buried half of his children. But this guy got out of bed every morning, to me was a profound act of optimism, to say nothing of the fact that he tried to get up early and get after it. Like, that's a person who obviously believes in a better future, believes in one's ability to make a difference, who believes that what they do matters. So, sometimes from the writings of the Stoics, it can feel a little dark or depressing. But life is a little dark and depressing, especially when you're dealing with stuff they were dealing with, and I'm sure some of the stuff that you guys have to deal with on a daily basis. It would be almost insulting to just put rose-colored glasses on it.
7:35 Ryan Holiday? That being said, how do you keep going? How do you stay at it? How do you stay interested, stay engaged? That, to me, is where the hope is. So, the optimism isn't, yeah, you know, just pasting a smile on it. To me, the optimism is in what you do.
7:54 Speaker 01 If you're comfortable sharing, what's an example of how you've implemented this mindset in your own life? I know you mentioned a few, but there's still more questions.
8:01 Ryan Holiday? Yeah, I mean, it's funny, when you write about obstacles, people always go towards like, what's the biggest obstacle you've ever dealt with? Like, as if it's this thing you apply once to like, well, you know, my whole family died in an accident, and then this terrible... Like, it's this sort of catalog of horrors, or this singular obstacle or difficulty that you managed to persevere through. And I, obviously, I've gone through some things like that. But I think most of what this philosophy applies to is like, the everyday frustrations and difficulties and limitations of being a human being, right? And so, I think we can apply it just as easily,
8:45 Ryan Holiday? and certainly I try and don't always succeed, to apply it to traffic and airline delays, and, you know, things that I just bought that broke two seconds after I took it out of the box, or, you know, conversations with my children, or conversations with employees. Like, you're just... Always waking up and dealing with constraints, limitations, unexpected things. And to me, Stoicism is like, well, that, dealing with that.
9:16 Speaker 01 This is such a good, hard question.
9:19 Ryan Holiday? Great.
9:20 Speaker 01 You're gonna love it. Would you think of Viktor Frankl's approach of logotherapy as a form of Stoicism?
9:27 Ryan Holiday? So, logotherapy comes from the Stoic idea of the logos, which is the Latin word for the way or the word. So, he is explicitly borrowing from the Stoics there. And, you know, one of the most inspiring people that ever lived, Viktor Frankl, he survives four different concentration camps. He loses not just his family, but his life's work. And as he comes out of it, he writes this book, Man's Search for Meaning, which is an incredibly moving book about how, basically what we're talking about here, that, you know, suffering is unavoidable. Part of meaning and purpose in life is, in fact, how we deal with that suffering. There's a lovely other book I'll recommend for people who liked Man's Search for Meaning.
10:11 Ryan Holiday? They published a collection of essays and letters from Viktor Frankl during the pandemic. And I think Daniel Goleman, who wrote Emotional Intelligence, did the foreword. But the title of the book itself, I think, is illustrative. It's called "Yes to Life", and then the subtitle is "In spite of everything", which, to me, is the essence of both Stoic philosophy and logotherapy.
10:33 Speaker 01 I'm gonna add something to this question. So, the question initially starts is, "Do you have any thoughts as to why these principles are not more prevalent in today's society?" I think the flip would be, "Why do you think they're gaining so much traction now?"
10:45 Ryan Holiday? You know, there's the Chinese saying, "May you live in interesting times." It's probably not a great sign that Stoicism is resurgent. If I could trade some of my book sales for a slightly less insane world, I'm happy to take that hit. Of course, you know, Stoicism did have this big resurgence in the pandemic because people were dealing with the kind of things that I think we thought maybe didn't happen anymore. But in fact, these things always happen. Like, people go, "This is so unprecedented." It's very precedented, all of it. Economic, social, cultural, political. This has all happened before, unfortunately. I think we used to teach philosophy in the ancient world. We taught philosophy as a kind of operating system for life and leadership.
11:30 Ryan Holiday? We don't do that so much anymore. Obviously, religion took a big part of that. And then there's been a decline of sort of religious adherence, at least in the West. And then it wasn't really replaced by anything. And I think part of what lit me up about Stoicism at nineteen, as I was reading it in my college apartment, is I was like, this is exactly the kind of guidance and insight that I needed that I hadn't ever really heard from anyone.
11:56 Speaker 01 I've recommended one of your books, Daily Dad, to many of our residents. How would you recommend bringing Stoic philosophy into people either early in their career, like in here, or even early in their career, like my eleven-year-olds?
12:08 Ryan Holiday? Yeah, I have an eight-year-old and a six-year-old. And they, of course, are not interested in Stoicism at all, because I'm interested in it. But I think we mostly learn these things through stories, right? And part of the reason I try to write in stories is that I want to see how the things are applied. So I think it starts with the stories that we tell, not just from the ancient world, but as we're teaching or guiding people, how do we take an example of something in our own life and explain how we apply these principles? Or conversely, one of the things I learned as a research assistant is like, you don't just tell the story about how it worked.
12:52 Ryan Holiday? You tell the story about what happened when you didn't do it, or how it didn't work. The cautionary tales, I think, are just illustrative. But if you want to teach people these ideas, the main thing you can do is to model them and to be that example of the person who is rising to meet the challenges, who's, you know, humble despite their success, who's sort of radiating that calm and poise. Like, the best thing we can do is model them. And that's good for them, but it's also pretty good for us.
13:20 Speaker 01 There's no other easier way?
13:22 Ryan Holiday? I wish, I wish, you know, you could just get them to use ChatGPT or something, and it would teach it to them. But I don't think it's, I don't think it's ever gonna go that way.
13:30 Speaker 01 Well, thank you very much. One of your other books, The Daily Stoic, today, I'm not going to quote Epictetus, I'm not bold enough. But this is what you wrote to it. "You have two essential tasks in life: to be a good person and to pursue an occupation you love. Everything else is a waste of energy and a squandering of your potential." That's from today's writing. So I thought it was very serendipitous. Ryan, thank you very much on behalf of the entire Academy.
13:53 Ryan Holiday? Thank you guys very much for having me. Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. I just wanted to say, we so appreciate it. We love serving you. It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple of years we've been doing it. It's an honor. Please, spread the word. Tell people about it. And this isn't to sell anything, I just wanted to say, thank you.
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