Exclusive Preview: Courage Is Calling | Don’t Be Deterred by Difficulties

On today’s special episode of the podcast, Ryan reads a chapter from his newest book Courage Is Calling: Fortune Favors The Brave which is available for pre-order now. If you pre-order the book before September 28, 2021 you can get exciting pre-order bonuses (you could even have dinner with Ryan at his bookstore in Bastrop, TX). Athletic Greens is a custom formulation of 75 vitamins, minerals, and other whole-food sourced ingredients that make it easier for you to maintain nutrition in just a single scoop. It tastes great and gets you the nutrients you need, whether you're working on the go, fueling an active lifestyle, or just maintaining your good health. Visit athleticgreens.com/stoic to get a FREE year supply of Liquid Vitamin D + 5 FREE Travel Packs with subscription. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow 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.

• 0:03Speaker 00

  Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these Stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space, when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal,

• 0:46Speaker 00

  and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On the one hand, I've had a very privileged life, as many of us Americans have. In fact, I'd say all Americans have had a more privileged life than many people all over the world. And I would say any of us alive today have clearly a much more privileged life than even many kings and emperors and wealthy people of the past, right?

• 1:24Speaker 00

  So today's episode, I wanted to talk about what do we do? How do we seek out difficulty and challenges? Because as the Stoics say, they pity the person who has never experienced adversity or difficulty because you don't know what you're capable of. So again, I have a soft privileged profession in the sense that I get to sit in my office and write books. And that's great and wonderful. I'm not in a war zone. I don't have, I'm not battling some life-threatening disease, not a persecuted minority, but...

• 2:06Speaker 00

  That doesn't mean that it wasn't hard to get where I was, just as it wasn't hard to get where you were. And so I want to give you this episode today, an excerpt from the new book Courage is Calling: Fortune Favors the Brave, which is about not being frightened by difficulties, not being turned off by difficulties, and in fact, going towards them. Right? When I think about my career, I trace it back to the scary decision to drop out of college, and then the scary decision to leave my successful corporate job to become a writer, and then the decision to leave one lane of writing, which was marketing, which was lucrative, and I had success in, and people expected, to go towards, as I've

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  said before, the decision to write about an obscure school of ancient philosophy, which my publisher was not excited about, which carried with it certain financial risks. And then now, to tackle this four-book series, which I've never done before, I've never had to write books that were related to each other, I didn't know if I could do it, I didn't know if I could keep up this pace with my family and the new bookstore, which itself was a scary thing. So the point is, not everything that's difficult is good, but almost everything good comes out of something difficult. And that's why in today's excerpt, we're going to talk about not being frightened by difficulties, how to be courageous, brave them, and make the most out of them. And it's an excerpt of the audiobook, which I recorded

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  in my office here in Bastrop, Texas, above the Painted Porch Bookstore, because I couldn't go to a studio because of the COVID surge. But if you like audiobooks, this is a sample. If you read, of course, this is just a way to listen to a sample of the book, which is coming out in just a few days. You can still preorder Courage is Calling at dailystoic.com/preorder. You can also pick it up anywhere books are sold, once it's on sale. But we've got a bunch of awesome bonuses if you do that. Support your local retailers, support me as a retailer, support Amazon, whatever's easiest for you. I hope you check out the book, Courage is Calling: Fortune Favors the Bold, and I'll give you those preorder bonuses if you go to dailystoic.com/preorder. Here is one of my favorite chapters of the

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  new book.

• 4:18Speaker 00

  Don't be deterred by difficulties. Seneca prepared himself for all the possibilities and difficulties of life, but there's no way he thought it would all happen to him. War, shipwreck, torture, exile, all that, plus tuberculosis, the loss of a child, Nero's insanity, slandering, critics. On the one hand, he must have felt this was all unfortunate. On the other, he knew it was making him the person he was made to be. "He has won without glory, who has won without peril," he wrote.

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  "Mucius was tested by fire, Fabricius by poverty, Rutilius by exile, Rugeles by torture, Socrates by poison, Cato by death. One cannot find a great exemplar, except in misfortune," he said. Don't worry about whether things will be hard, because they will be. Instead, focus on the fact that these things will help you, and this is why you don't need to fear them. Our bruises and scars become armor. Our struggles become experience. They make us better. They prepared us for this moment, just as this moment will prepare us for the one that lies ahead.

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  They're the flavoring that makes victory taste so sweet. If it were easy, everyone would do it. If everyone did it, how valuable would it be? The whole point is that it is hard. The risk is a feature, not a bug. "Neque spera terrent." Don't be frightened by difficulties. It's a Latin expression. Be like the athlete knowing what a hard workout gives you. Stronger muscles. There is no better than adversity, Malcolm X would say. Every defeat, every heartbreak, every loss, contains its own seed, its own lesson on how to improve your performance the next time.

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  How could you possibly trust yourself if you had not been through harder things than this? How could you possibly believe that you might be able to survive this if you had not survived other things before? That's the craziest thing about the gladiators in the Colosseum. Would you believe that many of them were actually volunteers? They wanted to see if they had what it took. "We all need adversaries and adversity to exist. Plenty and peace breed cowards," Shakespeare said. "Hardness ever of hardiness is mother." It is not bad that this is happening to you. It's good training.

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  Besides, not everyone would have the strength even to see it that way. This moment is a test. They're called trying times for a reason. It's good that it's happening now instead of later, because later you'll be better for having gone through it today. Got it? You'd think it'd be better if things were easy. You wish you didn't have to take this risk. If only the leap didn't look so damn dangerous. But that's just the fear talking. It's good that it's hard. It deters the cowards and it intrigues the courageous. Right?

• 7:46Speaker 00

  My newest book, Courage is Calling: Fortune Favors the Brave, is now available for preorder. We've got a bunch of amazing bonuses. You can get signed copies, of course. I'm so proud of this book. General Jim Mattis has called it "a superb handbook for crafting a purposeful life." Matthew McConaughey called it "an urgent call to arms to each and all of us." I do hope you check it out. It's my first in the Four Virtues series, courage, temperance, justice, wisdom. Courage is Calling: Fortune Favors the Brave. If you want to preorder it, I'd really appreciate your support. Go to dailystoic.com/preorder.