Pod Insights The Daily Stoic | Wondery+ Follow Your Arrow | 7 Stoic Keys To Being A Great Leader (Ryan Holiday Speaks To The U.S. Military) About this episode They were different. Some of them were downright weird. Cleanthes made quite a spectacle of himself in Athens, a philosopher who did manual labor for a living. Cato walked around bareheaded and barefooted, violating most of the social and class norms of his time. Marcus Aurelius was seen reading books at the Coliseum, indifferent to the popular past times that got everyone else excited. Agrippinus, one middle Stoic who lived in the time of Nero, cared nothing for the niceties and obeisance expected of the citizens of Nero’s tyrannical regime. As we explain in Lives of the Stoics, Agrippinus claimed that he wanted to be the red thread in the sweater of life—the little bit of color that stood out and made the garment beautiful.-Ryan Holiday speaks to the United States Military about some of the key Stoic ideas behind being a great leader in the modern world.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow 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.
Transcript 0:02 Speaker 00 Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. On Tuesdays, we take a closer look at these Stoic ideas and how we can apply them in our actual lives. Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy.
0:26 Speaker 00 Follow your arrow. They were different. Some of them were downright weird. Cleanthes made quite a spectacle of himself in Athens as a philosopher who did manual labor for a living. Cato walked around bareheaded and barefooted, violating most of the social and class norms of his time. Marcus Aurelius was seen reading books at the Coliseum indifferent to the popular pastimes that got everyone else excited. Agrippinus, one middle Stoic who lived in the time of Nero, cared nothing for the niceties and obeisance expected of the citizens of Nero's tyrannical regime. As I tell the story in Lives of the Stoics, Agrippinus claimed that he wanted to be the red thread in the sweater of life, the
1:10 Speaker 00 little bit of color that stood out and made the garment beautiful. All the Stoics went their own way. Like the great Casey Musgraves line, "They followed their arrow wherever it pointed." For them, getting ahead, being well-liked, being cool, this was not interesting. They aimed at something more meaningful: virtue, self-sufficiency, excellence. Sometimes this took them in a direction that people understood and respected, like running for office. Other times, it didn't. What do you mean you wouldn't cheat to win that office? Sometimes it made them seem very strange. Sometimes it made them seem very stubborn. But as the centuries passed, it certainly made them stand out. We see them as unique and inspiring individuals. We see them as independent, free thinkers, men and women of principle.
1:54 Speaker 01 If I wanted to be like everyone else, like the mob, one Stoic said, then I wouldn't have become a philosopher. It's actually Chrysippus that said that. And sometimes people ask me, like, what of my books am I most proud of? I usually say Conspiracy, which is my book about Peter Thiel and this whole crazy story, because it was the most different of all my books. So it was the most challenging to do. But the other one I say is Lives of the Stoics, because it was also challenging and unique. But I learned so much about who the Stoics were as people, not what they said, but what they did. And so I'm super proud of that book. If you haven't read it yet and you're interested in Stoicism, I think it's awesome. You can check that out anywhere books are sold. Audio book, I read. So if you like my voice, you can grab that. Or you can go to store.dailystoic.com to grab a signed copy.
2:52 Speaker 01 And this choice to use what we are facing to do good, to be better, to move forward. This is the most essential choice that we have. While we don't control what's happening around us, we do control our emotions. We control our opinions. We control our views. We control how we choose to see things.
3:13 Speaker 01 To live is to fight, Seneca said. The Latin expression was vivere militariest, basically saying that life is a battle. We're fighting against obstacles. We're fighting against opponents. We're fighting against ourselves, right? Against fear, doubt, fatigue, and all these other things that get between us and what we're trying to do, which is to be great, which is to win, just to achieve glory and greatness. And many of the Stoics themselves were soldiers. Marcus Aurelius leads troops into battle. Cato not only serves in the military, but is famous for living on the ground with his men. And then flash forward to many years in the future, Frederick the Great would march into battle with the Stoics in his saddlebags. And when James Stockdale is shot down over Vietnam, he says to himself, I'm leaving the world of technology and entering the world of Epictetus.
3:57 Speaker 01 He's relying on his Stoic training in this moment of great peril and difficulty. I'm Ryan Holiday. I'm lucky enough to have not just... Written a number of books about Stoicism, but talk about it to special forces operators, to military bases all over the world. In today's episode, I want to talk about some Stoic lessons from military history, not just what the Stoics can teach people in the military, but what people in the military, their virtues, their values, their lessons, can teach us here in the real world.
4:28 Speaker 01 This is Franklin Buchanan. This is Matthew Maury, controversial heroes here at the Naval Academy. You can imagine it was risky to give up everything, to give up your appointments, to risk death in the US Civil War. For what cause did they choose to do that? The worst cause that you could possibly imagine. And they were immensely courageous to take that risk, but it's a hollow courage. Not a hallowed courage, but a hollow courage, because the cause makes all. Lieutenant Bradley Snyder, who gave me some great thoughts as I was writing my book on courage, not just an American hero, but an incredible Paralympic athlete. He said, "Look, it's not just about throwing yourself on the grenade. It only matters if you're throwing yourself on the grenade to protect someone else, right? If doing that
5:11 Speaker 01 will save someone else, otherwise it's kind of stupid." How and why? The cause makes all. Cicero says that the Stoics defined courage as "the virtue which champions the cause of the right." No one has attained true glory. Courage is ultimately about what you risk it for, right? The cause makes all. This is John Lewis. John Lewis, of our great American heroes as well. He's arrested many, many times in the pursuit of civil rights. He's beaten many, many times. I think he's arrested almost 50 times. He's beaten almost to death on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. If there was anyone that had cause or justification to
5:51 Speaker 01 be bitter, to be cynical, to doubt, to question what America was or what America could become, it would be this man, because he experienced it all firsthand. Imagine being beaten nearly to death for trying to use a bathroom in a bus station. That is your constitutional, God-given right. And that's what he experiences. And yet, he's not bitter.
6:14 Speaker 01 In fact, he is always hopeful. This is Elwyn Wilson, who beat him to death nearly in that bathroom, who decades later, when John Lewis became a congressman, looked in his soul and decided that he knew he was wrong and that he was gonna own it and he was gonna apologize. And he wanted to meet John Lewis in person. And John Lewis was brave enough to meet him in person, but braver still to forgive and accept him. And he would write in Elwyn Wilson's book, as it happens, Elwyn Wilson's middle name was Hope, John would write, "With faith and hope, keep your eyes on the prize."
6:52 Speaker 01 If I could take you way back, we're gonna go back about 2,000 years. Marcus Aurelius is the emperor of Rome. It's been 20 years of peace and prosperity and stability. And then suddenly, a plague breaks out. It's actually brought back by soldiers from the eastern provinces. They bring it back to Rome. It overwhelms Rome in every capacity you can imagine. Unlike COVID, it doesn't last for one or two or three years. It lasts for 15 years. Millions of people die. They have no ability to develop vaccines or they have no ability to stop the virus. They don't understand it. And it's all on Marcus Aurelius's shoulders, right? What can go wrong will, that's the life of a leader. And this goes wrong. Then there's a series of historic floods. He spends more than half of his reign at war.
7:37 Speaker 01 It's one thing after another for Marcus Aurelius. Actually, one ancient historian, a contemporary of Marcus, says, "Marcus does not have the good fortune that he deserved and his entire reign is involved in a series of troubles." Right? And Marcus staggers under the weight of this. But we have his journal, we have Meditations. This is the book that he writes to himself, his private journal. This is a book, actually, that General Mattis carries with him on 40 years of deployments. But Marcus writes in Meditations this prescription for us that we can use in moments of adversity in our own life. He says, "The obstacle," he says, "Our actions can be impeded, but nothing can get in the way of our intentions or our dispositions."
8:20 Speaker 01 We always have the ability to accommodate and adapt. And adjust, he says, the impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way. This is the essence of Stoic philosophy, right? The core of it, which is basically that in every situation, even if it's not one we wanted, even if it's not one we chose, even if it's one that's not our fault, we have the ability to use it to practice erite or virtue or excellence as it's translated. Right? You have the opportunity to be excellent. We don't control what happens. We control how we respond to what has happened.
8:59 Speaker 01 We control our ability to choose, to use this, to move forward in some form or another, personally, professionally, right? The disadvantages are also advantages. We have the ability to shoot, to sit there and decide, here's all the things I can't do because of what's happened, but here's all the things I can do. Right? And some of those things in interpersonal contexts might be as simple as just putting up with it. Forgiving, right? Giving someone a second chance, moving on, letting it go. Right? But in every situation, we have things that will allow us to move forward and things that will keep us where we are.
9:40 Speaker 01 And this choice to use what we are facing to do good, to be better, to move forward, this is the most essential choice that we have. As that historian was saying, that Marcus doesn't have the good fortune that he deserves. He didn't want a plague. He didn't want wars, right? He didn't want betrayals. He didn't want natural disasters. He didn't want the one thing after another that seemed to happen. But the reason Marcus Aurelius is Marcus Aurelius, considered one of the greatest and wisest, most impressive leaders who ever lived, is because of what he did with it. As that same historian would say, I admired him all the more for this very reason, because amidst unusual and extraordinary circumstances, he both survived himself and preserved the empire.
10:25 Speaker 01 Marcus used it as a platform, as an opportunity to practice erite or excellence or virtue. He stepped up and was a great leader, not in spite of the situation that he was in, but because of the situation that he was in. And if it had been otherwise, if it had been easier, if it had been clear, if it had been the way that he wanted. His life would not have been the same. So when we say the obstacle is the way, that is what we are saying.
10:55 Speaker 01 What I think is so impressive about someone like Marcus Aurelius, you have the most powerful man in the world. We're supposed to hear that absolute power corrupts absolutely. But again, there's no scandals, there's no deviations, there's no relapses. And yes, he is very, very strict with himself. But historians would note the interestingness that he says, the strictness is limited exclusively to himself. And actually, Marcus writes this in Meditations. His maxim for life was to be tolerant with others, but strict with yourself. And it's important that we see discipline this way. Colin Powell, it's an anecdote. As the Gulf War was beginning to be sketched out, he's pulling all-nighters, not by choice, but by reality. As he was pulling these all-nighters in his office,
11:41 Speaker 01 he kept it a secret. He kept it a secret because he didn't want anyone else to have to shoulder the same burden that he was shouldering. Right? He kept it a secret so that his staff wouldn't have to pull the same burden that he was pulling, wouldn't have to be away from their families the same way he was. This is what truly disciplined people do. Friends of Gandhi noted that despite his insanely high standards for himself and his impoverished way of living, the minimalism with which he went through the world, that he never judged his friends, he never insisted that they live up to the same standards, he never made them feel less than for not behaving the way he did. The same was true for Lincoln. One of his secretaries would write that he never asked perfection of anyone.
12:26 Speaker 01 He did not even insist for others upon the high standards he had set for himself. Actually, what Lincoln loved more than anything was pardoning. He loved the chance to give people second chances. This is a young midshipman named Chester Nimitz, class of 1905.
12:46 Speaker 01 This is him shortly before he went into Annapolis on a beer run and was spotted and made eye contact. And then when he was back on campus the next day, he noticed that the man he had made eye contact with was a newly appointed officer. And Admiral Stavridis, again, class of 76,
13:09 Speaker 01 notes that what Nimitz learns from this, he says, "The young man instantly learned a lesson in whether and when to punish people who make atypical mistakes." Right? This moment of mercy, this moment of clemency, saves Nimitz's career. And we can imagine he appreciates it because he needs it again about two years later, when he runs a ship aground and is court martialed. Right? It should have been the end of Nimitz's career, but instead, again, he's given clemency and grace. He's given a letter of reprimand instead of being bounced out and goes on, of course, to save the free world. Right? The history of the 20th century would be very different without this moment of grace,
13:54 Speaker 01 without these two moments of grace. Right? We think about what people need, tolerant with others, strict with ourselves. And it's called self-discipline. Right? It's easy to think of discipline as this thing you enforce or this thing that is enforced on you, and that is a reality of life. That is a reality of the life you've chosen. But self-discipline is what we're talking about when we talk about virtue. It's the virtue of self-discipline. It's something you signed up for. Right? It's standards you hold yourself to. Right? You can't go around enforcing your standards on other people because they're your standards.
14:35 Speaker 01 I argue that the most dangerous enemy, to the air force, to your men in uniforms, to the nation, each and every leader, is not an external threat. The external threats are real, but most empires collapse from within. The enemy is inside this room. It's inside everyone in this room. It's either chumbers. Entitled, arrogance, self-confidence. Cyril Coney says that ego sucks us down like the law of gravity. And this is true for individual people. This is true for politicians. This is true for businesses. And it's true for an empire. Alexander the Great, his insatiable ability, his inability to listen, to know what enough was, and eventually leads to his ruin.
15:20 Speaker 01 George McCall, he can't get it through the set in Civil War. He's not in charge. The president is in charge. A power fuse, right? Genius figure, fascinating guy. From the Air Force perspective, Bruce Goose is just wasting billions of dollars of taxpayer money. You look at General MacArthur, again, a brilliant man. He crosses that river in Korea and almost starts World War III. This is what ego does. People forget that Richard Gibson is elected in the largest landslide up to that point in American history. But he can't stop himself. He has no restraint. He has no sense. He's just no sense in what's okay, not okay, and eventually brings about his own ruin.
16:03 Speaker 01 An NFL coach I know, he says that ego is the leading cause of unemployment in the NFL. I argue it's the leading cause of unemployment in a lot of professions. It's certainly the leading cause of people not fully living up to the potential that they have. And so we have to understand ego's not the enemy because ego wants us to think that we're infallible. Ego wants us to think that we're invincible. Ego wants us to think that we're a gen- we're a genius. I love this line from Papadides. He says, "It's impossible for a person to learn that which they think they already know." This is where ego gets in the way. It prevents us from learning the things that we think we're too smart already about. It prevents us from asking questions, prevents ourselves from being hungry, and makes us complacent.
16:48 Speaker 01 The physicist John Wheeler, the inventor of the hydrogen bomb, he says, "As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shoreline of ignorance." Ego says, "I know everything there is. I figured it all out." Humility says, "I learned all this stuff that I didn't even know, that I didn't know about." And Socrates, his wisdom is located in the fact that he's aware of what he doesn't know. The Socratic method is about asking questions, listening, and not talking.
17:15 Speaker 01 This idea that it's not all about you. I was just reading Adam Stavrius's new book, To Risk It All. He talks about Tammy Michelle Howard. And he talks about how there's a whole movie about a rescue of Captain Phillips and the Navy SEALs get all the credit. But she's the one that murdered the raid. She was the theater commander there in the ocean. She's the one that brings this all about. He says, almost nobody knows that she appears in the movie only as the voice giving the orders to shoot. He says, but everyone would know who she was if the mission wasn't successful. When you think about leadership, it's the ability to step back, to delegate, right? To let other people take the credit, but to ultimately take the responsibility and blame
17:57 Speaker 01 when it doesn't go your way. He talks about in the book how all sorts of press attention was offered to her after the success of this raid in Munich, book deals, Sultanate of Britain. She turns it all down. It's not what she wants.
18:15 Speaker 01 This concept of the golden mean, which is really interesting. He actually uses courage as the way to explain or articulate what temperance or self-discipline is. So he says bravery is on one end of the spectrum and recklessness is on the other end of the spectrum. So you have cowardice and you have recklessness. And in the middle, the middle ground is actually courage or bravery. Putting oneself at risk unnecessarily or taking risks that didn't need to be taken, that's not courage, just as running away from risk and avoiding all risk and never putting yourself out there is cowardice. In the middle is what you have to, is where you want to be. And understanding that a lot of self, a lot of the areas that
18:57 Speaker 01 we're talking about in self-discipline are this way also. You know, I was just thinking about this. So I try to run and work out almost every single day. I hurt my foot pretty badly earlier this week. I tried to run on it Monday and then I tried to run on it. No, I guess this would be Saturday and Sunday. I ran on it Saturday and Sunday and it took the injury and it made the injury much worse. And the result is, you know, I'm probably going to have to take the rest of the week off. I probably have to go to the doctor because I didn't have the discipline. To listen to my body and say, hey, this isn't going in the right direction. You know, actually taking a break here might prevent this injury from getting worse. Instead, I pushed through that. I wasn't disciplined about my self-discipline. And as a result, actually, my discipline is going to suffer.
19:41 Speaker 01 And so we have to understand that temperance is really that balance, that tension, that sort of midpoint between two vices. That's why Aristotle calls it the golden mean, sort of the golden average, is really where we want to try to be most of the time.
19:59 Speaker 01 While we don't control what's happening around us, we do control our emotions, we control our opinions, we control our views. We control how we choose to see things. And that this lens, the lens in which we look at things, is not just the first step, but the primary step in responding to adversity or difficulty. The Stoics said, look, positive visualization is well and good, seeing things going well, imagining success. But we also have to practice a kind of negative visualization, a preparation for adversity, so that when things do go sideways, which they inevitably will, we'll be prepared for them. This is what the training that all of you undergo is for, whether it's in a simulator, whether it's a drill, whether it's basic training.
20:45 Speaker 01 The Stoics would talk about how we have to undergo a hard winter training so that when we face difficulties, we're able to say, ah, yes, this is what I trained for. So Marx's Swiss doesn't meet with the good fortune that he deserved, but in another sense, he meets for exactly what he trained for, which is adversity and difficulty. So this idea of the discipline of perception, how we see things, that events are outside us and objective, but our opinions about them, our view on them, is something we control that is subjective, that we have to try to see these things as clearly and with as much agency as possible is the sort of first part of this discipline of Stoicism. The next discipline would be the discipline of action. What do you do about it?
21:28 Speaker 01 There's a famous story about Eisenhower after the invasion of Normandy. They're facing this massive Nazi counteroffensive and he calls everyone in in a conference room, not unlike the one that some of you are sitting in right now. And he says, "The present situation is to be regarded as opportunity for us and not disaster." He says, "I only want to see cheerful faces around this conference table." But it doesn't end there, of course, right? It's then what are the actions that they're going to take? What is the plan we're putting into action? What is the action that we are taking that's going to allow this disaster to actually be an opportunity? In the case of Eisenhower there, he's realizing that if they can absorb this counteroffensive,
22:10 Speaker 01 if they can sort of bend and not break, it's actually going to turn into a massive overreach for the Nazis. The Battle of the Bulge, that bulge looks like it's in the favor of the Germans for some time, but inevitably, inexorably, it becomes very clear that this is a massive trap. Patton describes it as having stuck their head in a meat grinder. He realizes that by, when they can eventually get to the point where they sew the bulge up or the pocket up, it's basically the beginning of the end for the Nazis. And that's what Eisenhower realizes in this moment, right? That's the discipline of perception.
22:49 Speaker 01 But the action is then doing the work, methodically chipping away at this thing, putting the plan into action. That, of course, is the most critical discipline.
23:05 Speaker 01 The other area where Stoick talks about as a concern is an exercise from a later Stoic in Hyrcus, who talks about our circles of concern. And Stoick starts with oneself, right? As the individual, what's up to me? And then there's your family, your friends, there's your unit, there's your state, there's your country, there's your, you know, ultimately, there's all of humankind, then there's all living beings. And he says, certain work of philosophy is to kind of pull these outer rings inward, that although it is an individualistic philosophy, we're all part of this larger organism. Marx, who has talks about the common good like 40 times in Meditations, like just an incredible amount.
23:50 Speaker 01 So you have a God that's in charge of this singular empire, but what he's actually talking about much more often is not himself, but this sort of collective good. So it is kind of confusing. We think of Stoicism as this individualistic philosophy, and it was individualistic in the sense that it was humble about, you know, the power that we have as individuals. It did ultimately, though, believe that we're all connected as a community, to find a way to work together and do good for each other. People they were put here for you to either put up with or do good for. And I like that contrast. As far as an organization, I do think it's important that as a leader, first off, model the behavior that we want to see. That's one way to bring certain values into the organization.
24:32 Speaker 01 I'm not sure this is let's waste more time talking about what a good man is like. Let's just be one. Obviously, modeling is a huge part of it. I've been setting the values of the organization. Whenever I talk to sports teams, I think these are the highly paid people in the world, most motivated people in the world, people who have studied the game more than anyone else in the world. And like, what do they have? They have like a bunch of slogans on the wall. They're like, play hard, you know, post it like. And even at that level, Bill Belichick is like, do your job. You would think that being paid thirty million dollars a year would be a good reminder to do your job, what your job is. But even at that level, like the best organizations are like, what are our values? How do we repeat them to ourselves over and over and over again until, you know, they
25:17 Speaker 01 become kind of a muscle memory? And then the last thing, and I talked about this at the Navy Academy yesterday, where I gave a talk, was talking about discipline. I was saying that at its highest level, discipline is a can outstretch hand and not a weapon. Right? We tend to think of discipline as this thing that we enforce as opposed to a standard that we aspire to and that we help others reach. In Meditations, Marcus Christ, who served at Express, is one of his personal mottoes, he said, "Tall with others, strict with yourself." Depending on our level of proficiency with these ideas, you just sort of expect other people to get there and to punish or judge or write people off who are not able to get there.
26:01 Speaker 01 But I think the great leaders, they not only don't do that, they find a way to elevate others with them to try to bring people to it. So organizationally, when you think about these two ideals, it's not like, no, this is this way or the highway. It's like, this is what I do, and this is what I know, this is what I'm aspiring to. And how do I bring people with me? How do I help get that out of people? I think that's, that's the journey of leaders and organizations.
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