Practice Everything. Be Ready for Anything. | The Real Power You Have

Ryan talks about the importance of practicing premeditation malorum, and reads this week’s meditation from The Daily Stoic Journal, on today’s Daily Stoic Podcast. List your product on AppSumo between September 15th - November 17th and the first 400 offers to go live will receive $1000, the next 2000 to list a product get $250. And everyone who lists gets entered to be one of 10 lucky winners of $10k! Go to https://appsumo.com/ryanholiday to list your product today and cash in on this amazing deal. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://DailyStoic.com/emailFollow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Each day, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, illustrated with stories from history, current events, and literature to help you be better at what you do. And at the beginning of the week, we try to do a deeper dive, setting a kind of Stoic intention for the week, something to meditate on, something to think on, something to leave you with, to journal about, whatever it is you happen to be doing. So let's get into it.

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  Practice everything. Be ready for anything. You go through your entire pre-speaking routine, and then moments before you're scheduled to address the group, there's a last-minute change, and you don't go on for another 30 minutes. You're in the middle of pitching your company to a group of investors, and Zoom freezes. You're throwing a no-hitter, and as you walk out onto the mound for the ninth inning, lightning strikes, and you have to turn in and head to the locker room to wait out the weather. We've all had our routines disrupted. We've had our plans dashed. We've been in the zone and then forced out of it. But this is why the Stoics had their premeditatio malorum practices. They wanted to, as Seneca said,

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  "practice for any and every possible disruption, be it exile, or war, or shipwreck, or just a travel delay." A couple of weeks ago, NBC's Sunday Night Football analyst Tony Dungy, himself a Super Bowl champion as both a player and a coach, spoke during the 75-minute weather delay between the Bills and the Chiefs. He speculated about what the two teams would and should be doing as they waited for play to resume. And then he said, "Believe it or not, Danny Green used to practice this. When I worked for him, we had practices where he'd stop it for 25 or 30 minutes, and then get started again to see who could adjust and get ready for everything." The pros: prepare.

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  The greats: get ready for everything. Martellus Bennett, who told us on the Daily Stoic Podcast that the New England Patriots even practiced this before the 2017 Super Bowl, actually going through the motions of the longer halftime so they wouldn't be thrown off by or get cold from the extra 15 or so minutes. How good are you if you need everything to go perfectly? How great are you if you can't handle change? You must practice everything. And be ready for anything. That's the idea of premeditatio malorum. We have this really cool premeditatio malorum reminder. It's a challenge going in the Daily Stoic store, which you can, of course, check out at store.dailystoic.com.

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  The real power you have. There is fleeting power and there is real power. Fleeting power can be taken away while real power is in our minds and our bones. The former tends to be along the lines of wealth, fame, high position and the leverage that all those things give us over others. The Stoics thought that this kind of power was inferior to the real power that each person possesses. The power of our minds to reason and make judgments and choices based on the real worth of things. You can have both kinds of power too, but only if you keep the first kind of power subject to the kind of power that the Stoics actually cared about. And this is from this week's entry in the Daily Stoic Journal,

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  366 Days of Writing and Reflection on the Art of Living by yours truly and my co-writer and translator, Stephen Hanselman. I actually do this journal every single day. There's a question in the morning, a question in the afternoon. Then there's these sort of weekly meditations. As Epictetus says, "Every day and night, we keep thoughts like this at hand. Write them, read them aloud and talk to yourself and others about them." You can check out the Daily Stoic Journal anywhere books are sold. You can also get a signed personalized copy from me in the Daily Stoic Stoic at store.dailystoic.com. So Chrysippus, who I talk about in Lives of the Stoics as well, he says, "This is the very thing which makes up the virtue of the happy person in a well-flowing life, when the affairs of life are in every way tuned

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  to the harmony between the individual divine spirit and the will of the director of the universe." Then Epictetus says, "Don't trust in your reputation, your money, or position, but in the strength that is yours, namely your judgments about the things that you control and don't control. For this alone is what makes us free and unfettered, that picks us up by the neck from the depths and lifts us eye to eye with the rich and the powerful." That's Discourses 326. And Meditations 1219 says, "Understand at last that you have something in you more powerful and divine that causes the bodily passions and pulls you like a mere puppet. What thoughts now occupy my mind is it not fear, suspicion,

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  desire?" Something like that. I think the fact that we can talk about Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus as peers, even though one was utterly powerless and the other possessed all the worldly power there was, is an amazing illustration of what Epictetus is saying. When he says, "For this alone is what makes us free and unfettered, that picks us up by the neck from the depths and lifts us eye to eye with the rich and the powerful." And in fact, you know, Epictetus works in Nero's court. He is a slave of one of Nero's high-ranking officials or secretaries. And in Epictetus's writing, we get a sense, we

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  get him really realizing and trying to communicate later to his students that like, he realized that as a slave, he had a better life than many of these people, that he was freer. He watches at one point, uh, uh, somebody sucking up to Nero's cobbler. Like, the guy that makes Nero's shoes is getting flattery because the person wants to get closer to the emperor. And, and Epictetus realizes that that person who's doing that is of course freer and richer and more privileged than Epictetus in, in essentially every way.

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  But is then voluntarily debasing themselves is a slave to their need for power, or recognition, or money, or whatever it is, that person is willingly a slave. And Seneca, in that same court, talks about this. He says, you know, nothing is more shameful than this sort of form of voluntary slavery. Nothing is more shameful than these people who are addicted to a mistress, to their estates, to, you know, being, you know, the most famous or popular person in Rome. And so I just, I think it is a powerful statement that the Stoics, that amongst the Stoics, some of the most powerful and influential

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  and inspiring were the least powerful and recognized. Cleantis is a manual laborer, but he's considered a peer of Hercules because of his ability to endure things, because of his judgments, because of his incorruptibility. Marcus Aurelius was not the greatest conqueror of the Roman emperors, but he is one of the most impressive because he conquered himself. He possessed the throne. The throne did not possess him. And so this idea of being free of chasing the real power, which is power over oneself, power over one's wants, power

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  over one's opinions, power over one's actions, power over, you know, those impulses that might drive you to do this or that, that's real power. There's a line in one of Stephen Pressfield's books where Alexander the Great is taunting this philosopher, and he says, "What have you done? I've conquered the world." And the philosopher says, "I have conquered the need to conquer the world." And I think Pressfield is saying the same thing the Stoics are saying, the same thing that Epictetus is saying. He's probably drawing on Diogenes, the cynic, but that there is a level of power above the level of raw power that people

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  chase and debase themselves with. So that's your question, your thing to think about today. What kind of power are you chasing? What are you pursuing? Are you really as powerful as you think you are? Or does power have power over you?

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  Thanks so much for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Again, if you don't know this, you can get these delivered to you via email every day. Just go to dailystoic.com/email. So check it out, dailystoic.com/email.