Pod Insights The Daily Stoic | Wondery+ They Are Calling To You | Adam Grant’s 3 Skills for Real Growth About this episode The ancients are there to guide us. We can struggle to live up to their expectations. We can learn from their mistakes
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Ryan Holiday? Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.
0:15 Ryan Holiday? They are calling to you. It wasn't that long ago. It wasn't that far away. Greece and Rome are not a distant land from a foreign past. Marcus Aurelius and Seneca and Epictetus and Zeno and Cleanthes are closer than you think and not that different from you. "The world is young," Emerson said. "The former great men and women call to us affectionately." In fact, Zeno got the same advice from the Oracle at Delphi, who told him that the good life meant conversations with the dead. Books, philosophy, even this podcast, it's a way to convene with them, a reminder that they dealt with the same problems we did, lived in the same world as us. In his amazing book, History Matters, which carried at the painted porch,
1:00 Ryan Holiday? David McCullough noted that there is no such thing as the dead past. The marvelous thing about the past is whenever you reach down into it, all you find is life. The ancients are there to guide us. They give us their example as well as their explicit advice, Seneca's letters or Marcus Aurelius's meditations. We have their speeches. We can watch their plays. We can look up at their statues. We can struggle to live up to their expectations. We can learn from their mistakes. It wasn't that long ago that they lived, you know, and closer to us in some cases than they were to the pyramids of ancient Egypt. So why don't we act like they're out of reach?
1:43 Ryan Holiday? Pick up a book, open the page, listen. They are still calling to us.
2:00 Speaker 01 Given that we only have control over our own character, how do we develop it?
2:04 Ryan Holiday? Yes.
2:05 Speaker 01 And I guess when I was writing Hidden Potential, there was an almost endless list of character skills we could have, I could have dove into. You know, I was sort of overwhelmed by, okay, where do you draw the line? Which ones are important, which ones aren't? And what I did was I ended up reviewing the evidence on the character skills that are most important for sustained growth, for allowing people not just to achieve their performance goals, but to maintain progress over time. And there were three that stood out in the research over and over again. And I've come to think of them as seeking discomfort, being a human sponge, and becoming an imperfectionist. And I think these are, these are skills that we can develop at any age. The evidence is clear that we can even teach entrepreneurs in their 40s and 50s to embrace
2:49 Speaker 01 these skills and that their businesses actually grow at faster rates when they learn them. And we could talk more about that. But I'd love to dig into seeking discomfort and being a sponge and being an imperfectionist a little bit and see, see where you come down on these, because I think there's, there's some stoic overlap.
3:05 Ryan Holiday? I agree. And I would say, I think you actually, you actually just there gave a pretty good definition of stoicism, or at least practical stoicism, when you said, "We can't control other people's character, but we can control our own. And so we might as well focus on that, on improving ourselves." Which to me, you know, there's this idea that stoicism is kind of pessimistic and that we kind of make certain assumptions about other people, or we resign ourselves to certain facts about the world. But I actually think it's paired with a kind of an optimistic view of our own agency, sort of inside that. So it's this idea that, hey, I don't control other people, but I control how I respond to other people. You know, I don't control what, what's happening in the world, but I control who
3:50 Ryan Holiday? I'm going to be inside of that world. I think there's something really great about the idea of like, look, I'm going to leave other people's character to themselves, however they want to do it. And I'm going to assume that I have a pretty good sense of possibilities inside my own, and that's where I'm going to spend the vast majority of my energy.
4:15 Speaker 01 I think that makes a lot of sense. And I think, you know, at some level, it's the best way to influence other people anyway, which is to manage response.
4:22 Ryan Holiday? Of course. Yeah, I mean, that goes to the the culture thing we were talking about earlier. Right? It's like the the handful of cases where you have seen a problematic athlete thrive in a new city or a new team. It's usually not the environment where the whole system is revolving around them. Right? It's usually they are plugging into a strong culture, a strong system, you know, a strong tradition or legacy, and they're subsuming themselves in something larger than than themselves. And they are watching those ideas be modeled by their teammates and everyone else in the organization.
5:04 Speaker 01 Exactly. And I think what's unfortunate for the rest of us is that most of us don't have the chance to plug into that kind of system. And so we have to create it for ourselves. And I think some of that, you know, is the direct work of building character skills. And some of that is being able to piece together the coaching and mentoring that you need to fill gaps in your own knowledge and expertise, which is not not quite as complicated as I think it feels in the moment.
5:31 Ryan Holiday? Let's start with embracing discomfort because I would agree, most good things are on the other side of work that you're willing to do or risks that you're willing to take. And I could see how that is a predictive character trait. A person who is seeking out new things, new situations, new opportunities, they are going to grow more than a person who sticks with what they know and where they're coming from.
5:56 Speaker 01 Yeah, I guess a lot of people have made the point in various ways that discomfort is necessary for growth. I think what we overlook there is there's a knowing doing gap. So we may all recognize that that's true, but we don't put ourselves in enough uncomfortable situations. We don't do it often enough. We don't do it intensely enough to really move the needle on our own learning and development. So. Maybe to to take a personal example, as a when I was a teenager trying to become a springboard diver, despite a severe lack of talent, I would come out of the water and my coach Eric Best would give me a change to make. And I would probably make 10% of the adjustment that he would ask for. And I wouldn't make a bigger change because it felt too uncomfortable.
6:40 Speaker 01 You know, I think a simple example would be when when learning to do a reverse one and a half, so you jump off the board forward and then you do a backward flip and a backward dive. I would have my head back trying to see the water behind me so that I would land on my head as opposed to a back smack or a belly flop. But if your head is back, you can't get into the smallest ball and that slows down your rotation and so you don't make the dive as well. And so Eric would say, put your head in. And what I would do is go from leaning my head straight back to maybe tilting my chin down a tiny bit, but I'm still in this wide open position instead of in a tight ball. And after watching me do that over and over again, Eric would say, make it feel wrong.
7:22 Speaker 01 You have to, you have to make it feel wrong in order to get it right. And I was, I was so caught up in the idea of not feeling uncomfortable that I wasn't willing to make the correction. And I think what I learned through that experience is that most of the time when people give us constructive criticism or even coaching, we overreact to it and then we undercorrect because of the discomfort. And if instead you can say, I'm going to overcorrect, I'm going to take the feedback to heart and do the most uncomfortable version of this, then I may actually miss the mark, but at least then I can find the sweet spot in the middle. Whereas if I'm constantly undercorrecting and avoiding this discomfort, the progress
8:05 Speaker 01 is going to be much more incremental and I'm actually going to stunt my own growth.
8:08 Ryan Holiday? Yeah, it's like you're getting zapped for being over here. So then you go over here and you're getting zapped. So the person's like, I'm just going to stay over here. I'm not gonna, I'm, you, you, I think you're worried about overcorrecting because by definition it implies needing to be corrected again.
8:24 Speaker 01 Yeah, it definitely implies that. And it's also just uncertain. It's unfamiliar. I don't know what that's going to feel like. In the diving case, I might get lost in midair. This might really hurt. And I don't want to have to grapple with, okay, it's either bad or it's uncertain. Like, both of those are undesirable. What I'm overlooking is that if I keep under correcting, then I'm never going to make a fundamental leap. No pun intended. And that, I think, stands in the way of progress.
8:53 Ryan Holiday? Well, one of the tricky things about this is like, when you're younger and when you're earlier in your career, people have more power and control over you, right? So you have teachers, you have coaches, you have your parents. You are constantly sort of submitting for approval and needing approval to do what you want to do to get to the next level. But the sort of paradox of success is that you get more and more autonomy, more and more independence, more and more control. And we tend to spend that capital that we've acquired on comfort, right? Like, I was just thinking about this as I've done all my books with the same publisher.
9:35 Ryan Holiday? And my editor at that publisher is now the publisher himself. So basically, nobody can tell me what to do with my books anymore, which is something I thought I always wanted, right? In the sense that I don't like it when someone says, "Do it this way," or "I don't like this." I didn't like, you know, getting tons of notes back on every manuscript and having to fight these battles about what I wanted to say and how I wanted the book to be and look. So as I've succeeded and sold more and more books, that has gone away. But that also puts you in the pleasant, but also dangerous, situation of having fewer guardrails and checks and fewer things that challenge you. And you get better for making that challenge.
10:19 Ryan Holiday? So I've had to now, I'm now in the process of going, okay, how do I bring in coaches or outside editors or more feedback to compensate for the fact that my success has afforded me less feedback and more comfort?
10:35 Speaker 01 Well, I think the mistake that a lot of people make in that position, and it's a fortunate position to be in, so congratulations, Ryan. It's a luxury that very few people get to enjoy the comfort of. I think the mistake that a lot of people make in that position is they realize, okay, I need feedback and they start to ask for it. And then they end up with basically two categories of useless information. They end up with a bunch of praise from cheerleaders who are only celebrating their best self. And then a bunch of, of, you know, sort of complaints and objections from critics, who are only attacking their worst self. And I don't think either of those are conducive to growth. I think what you want is not a cheerleader or a critic, but a coach,
11:18 Speaker 01 which is somebody who recognizes your hidden potential and then helps you become a better version of yourself. And the big question is, how do you get someone to coach you? That's the hard part, right? You can, you can ask an editor to do that, but you might get a bunch of praise or a bunch of criticism as opposed to a bunch of development. And the, the research that I've been reading on this has a really simple and useful technique, which is instead of asking for feedback, start asking for advice. When you ask for feedback, people evaluate what you did yesterday. When you ask for advice, they tell you what you can improve tomorrow. I think it's probably more powerful than a lot of people realize, because we're usually in the habit of assuming that whatever people tell you about
11:59 Speaker 01 your existing work is going to feed into what you're going to be able to develop as you move it forward. But it's a very different question to say, evaluate what I've done and tell me what's right about it or wrong with it, than it is to say, well, what, what suggestion do you have for me? And it's, I think it's much more actionable to frame the question that way. So curious about whether that's how you've approached coaching or where you have, whether you have other ways to get people to, to give you useful input.
12:25 Ryan Holiday? Yeah, I, I often ask people when I send them my books, I go, what do you think I should cut? Right? What, what isn't doing it for you? Where, where do you feel like it's dragging? Cause I, you know, it's not helpful for me to hear, oh, it's great. I loved all of it, right? That's not information I can do anything with. And so it's not that I'm exactly looking for criticism in the sense that I can, I'll get random criticism from people on the internet that don't like me. I think you're right, that's a useless category of criticism. But I do want to be challenged, like, I obviously think it's good or I wouldn't have written it. So it's helpful for me to hear from people. What they think isn't up to the same level or standard, because maybe they're right, maybe they're wrong. I'll have to make that calculation.
13:10 Ryan Holiday? But I want to hear more about what wasn't working for them. And that's uncomfortable for me than it is to hear about all the things that were going great for them.
13:21 Speaker 01 And what you're doing here is being a sponge, which I love how naturally you segued into the second character skill. I think a lot of people, the image of a sponge conjures up this idea of absorptive capacity that I just, you know, I want to soak up every piece of information that's available to me. If you study sea sponges, as everyone should do, clearly, what it means you find is that they're not just good at absorbing, they're also good at filtering out harmful particles and keeping in nutrients. And that's part of how they survive. And I think that in the process of trying to learn and grow, we all need good filters. So you just described one example of a filter, which is you're seeking targeted advice. You're worried that the book is either too long
14:05 Speaker 01 or there's content that's not going to resonate. And so you want to know what should be cut. And you're asking people basically to filter for you in that sense. You could also think about filters in terms of, you know, what are your sources credible on? So, you know, there are some people that you're probably going to go to for insight on your sports examples, who are not going to be quite as qualified on the entrepreneurship ones and vice versa. And I don't think we're nuanced enough when we think about getting feedback. We tend to sort of weigh all opinions equally as opposed to saying, how well does this person know the content? How also well do they know me and my goals or my audience? And then, you know, some of those perspectives can be discounted. Others are going to be much more relevant.
14:49 Speaker 01 Tim Sikkin calls it the, instead of small wins, the strategy of small losses. And I think it's a great invitation to say, what are the small experiments that I could run? Where the costs of failure are low, but the benefits of learning are high. I guess for me, this is a big part of what it means to be an imperfectionist. To say, I do not need to get a 10 on every project I do. But I should have a different bar, depending on the importance of the project I'm doing. So when I write a book, that's a massive project, to your point. My tolerance for failure is extremely low. And so I won't publish it until my committee of judges independently gives it all nines. But a social media post, like, I'm perfectly happy to put out a six, six and a half and learn from that and iterate.
15:34 Speaker 01 And that's, you know, one, one sort of critic cheerleader mechanism that I can usually surface some coaching from. But this is really hard to do if you expect to succeed on everything that you launch. And I think the, the expectation that you never fail is a sign that you're staying too far in your comfort zone. You're not putting yourself in a position to, to really soak up any new information. And a lot of that stems from excessive perfectionism, where I think the, you know, the expectation is that if I have any flaw, if I make any mistake, that failing is going to make me a failure. And I think the, the sooner we can dissociate those ideas, the easier it is to experiment and, and keep learning.
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