Stoicism Requires You to Stay a Student | Codie Sanchez

You might have a great idea, some success, or the confidence to risk everything. But you still have something to learn. 🎥 Watch the full episode with Codie Sanchez https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTRmrzSCbaI here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTRmrzSCbaI 👉 Follow Codie Sanchez on Instagram @codiesanchez https://www.instagram.com/codiesanchez/?hl=en, onTikTok @Codie_Sanche https://www.tiktok.com/@realcodiesanchezz, and on YouTube @CodieSanchezCT https://www.youtube.com/@CodieSanchezCT 📚 Books Mentioned: Grab signed copies of Main Street Millionaire by Codie Sanchez https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/main-street-millionaire-how-to-make-extraordinary-wealth-buying-ordinary-businesses?_pos=1&_sid=c81c995fb&_ss=r at The Painted Porch | https://www.thepaintedporch.com/ https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/main-street-millionaire-how-to-make-extraordinary-wealth-buying-ordinary-businesses?_pos=1&_sid=c81c995fb&_ss=r Check out Codie's NEW book: Own Or Be Owned: Build a Business So Good It Doesn’t Need You https://www.amazon.com/Own-Be-Owned-Business-Doesnt/dp/B0HHHQGM5R/ref=sr_1_1?dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.-Yha9_8hiy84MDJdIfZ_l_WB6rIibRo6fW6R5d2JYdrOnGAwnP_bxpMmXMsr-byz_vo2MgrD5ONsZEs0k7JMC0tt_9IRBBqR46RICF_w-bwxwlmNLsSh21qOYlr9UM9tTLFJGVgTYi_156ZdcyU0AzAwKwWjLfnl-Hk-X4Vd3Q6HL1u04-Iy2gMa6bboMuRgCPOQiSKQ6aSRMxr6R8o19sUtIS27v_LWA-oOx3fSmyE.a7BscwJBp_WjUEuQ3pC2Xc0POKuul3o-9Jat2FJGipo&dib_tag=se&hvadid=792616487958&hvdev=c&hvexpln=67&hvlocphy=9028217&hvnetw=g&hvocijid=4884664957672881089--&hvqmt=e&hvrand=4884664957672881089&hvtargid=kwd-2491378420740&hydadcr=780_1015364367&keywords=own+or+be+owned+codie+sanchez&mcid=92fcea59fad53b488497e5ceee67902d&qid=1791913629&sr=8-1 🎟️https://www.dailystoiclive.com/DAILY STOIC LIVE https://www.dailystoiclive.com/| Ryan Holiday is coming to a city near you https://www.dailystoiclive.com/! Grab tickets here https://www.dailystoiclive.com/ | https://www.dailystoiclive.com/ 🎙️AD-FREE https://dailystoic.supercast.com/| Support the podcast and go deeper into Stoicism by subscribing toThe Daily Stoic Premium https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ - unlock ad-free listening, early access, and bonus content:https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ ✉️ FREE STOIC WISDOM https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail | Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email athttps://dailystoic.com/dailyemail Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Ryan Holiday?

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• 0:45Ryan Holiday?

  So join the 3.3 million employers worldwide that use Indeed to connect with quality talent that fits their needs. And listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to help your job get the premium status it deserves at indeed.com/podcast. Just go to indeed.com/podcast right now and support the show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. If you're hiring now, then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

• 1:28Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. It's crazy to me, right? We've been doing this daily Stoic thing for 10 years. I've been doing this writing, researching, philosophy thing for 20 years. And I know a thing or two, but I'm just constantly humbled by like how much I don't know. Like, like how, first off, how many new things I'm learning? And then how often I'm having to learn the same lesson again and again, in a new way, in a new context. That's just what it is, right? Like you never get the hang of it. There's always something new. There's always some new situation, new crisis, new problem. You have to become a student and then you have to stay a student. I talk about this in the ego book, but I talk about it a lot in the wisdom book.

• 2:13Ryan Holiday?

  Like the Stoic virtue of wisdom is embodied in that idea of Marx really seen leaving the palace in Rome. Where are you going? I'm off to see sexist, the philosopher to learn that, which I do not yet know. That's what it is. You're waking up every day and you gotta go learn that, which you don't know. You gotta read, you gotta ask questions, you gotta listen to podcasts, gotta have a mentor. That's one of the things we're going to talk about in today's episode. You might've caught some of the previous installments of this little deep dive, but, but we had Codie Sanchez out a couple of months ago, and we walked through how each of the Stoic virtues applies to business. Courage, it's putting yourself out there, going after it. Discipline, that's staying at it.

• 2:56Ryan Holiday?

  Justice, that's the ethics, that's the integrity, that's the values you bring to the business. And then this is wisdom. You know, how do you learn from the experiences of others? How do you make sure that you remain humble? So it doesn't humble you? How do you stay hungry? How do you focus on all there is to know, not just what you do know? And that's what we get into in today's episode. Cody is an entrepreneur and investor. She's the founder of Contrarian Thinking. She's also the author of Main Street Millionaire. She has a new book that just came out on September 18th called Own or Be Owned? Build a Business So Good It Doesn't Need You. Again, that's something I am learning and working on.

• 3:40Ryan Holiday?

  Like, how can I not be so central to everything? Cause I have other priorities, I have other things going on. You know, you get burned out in some ways. How do you build a business that scales that work? And then, and the way you learn it is by talking to and working with and modeling yourself on people who are a bit further on, who have learned these lessons in painful ways and have come back to share that with you. You can follow Codie on Instagram, at Codie Sanchez, on TikTok, at Codie Sanchez with an underscore in between. You follow her on YouTube, at Codie Sanchez CT. I've been admiring some of the stuff she's been doing on YouTube and trying to learn from it, right? That's what this is all about. You can grab signed copies of Main Street Millionaire by Codie Sanchez at the Painted Portrait. We don't have signed copies of Own or Be Owned, because it wasn't out yet when she came out to do it.

• 4:25Ryan Holiday?

  But you can check the show notes to listen to the other episodes or watch the full episode on our YouTube channel, which I will link to.

• 4:32Ryan Holiday?

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• 5:14Ryan Holiday?

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• 5:39Ryan Holiday?

  My kids actually saw an ad for this the other day on YouTube and they asked if we could try it and we did, we had a lot of fun. Whatnot is a totally different platform for buying stuff. It is a live shopping app. It's really fun because I think you want to see who's selling you this stuff. You want to see what they have to say about it. Whatnot is where sellers shine and find their people, repeat customers that come back to see your face instead of just a logo. Whatnot is the largest dedicated live shopping platform. Beauty, collectibles, electronics, luxury fashion, even cookies. Sellers are building real thriving businesses. Anyone can sell. Your business can be big or small, can be just starting. And people selling on whatnot sell 10 times more than on other marketplaces.

• 6:21Ryan Holiday?

  Cause you're not just listing products, you're building real connections with buyers. Whatnot users spend something like an hour a day on the app. They're not just browsing, they're engaged, they're buying, they're coming back. You go live, you show up products in real time and you turn what you love into real income. Search whatnot, W H A T N O T in the app store, download and start selling right away. Okay, so the last virtue is, is wisdom, which I think people tend to think of as like this thing that you have at the end of your life, not a thing you're accumulating through the course of your life, right? Like, like it's not this place that you arrive. It's more of a process. It's a byproduct of, of learning and experience and mentors and all these things.

• 7:01Ryan Holiday?

  But it is, it is weird how often people will be like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna risk my entire life, all my money to go start this business. And then, by the way, I'm not going to read any books about it. I'm not going to ask for anyone's advice and I'm going to totally learn it on my own as if nobody has done this before. It's crazy.

• 7:22Speaker 01

  One of my lessons that I learned early on in life is like, I remember talking to one of my mentors. He gave me a piece of advice that was basically like, whatever you learn from somebody, try to be the person that they tell other people about. And I thought about that and I was like, oh yeah. Because all my success stories, people who have listened to me and gone on, I can name them.

• 7:42Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 7:42Speaker 01

  You know, and we have a lot. And so if you are the person that listens so intently to other people on your journey and then tells them a little thank you, like, hey, Ryan, I just read your book. It was incredible. Thank you so much. Here's a small thing. You get those all the time, right? But what I love about that little drop, he's not asking you to respond. He's just saying, this is great. And if you're doing it with people who aren't that well-known on the internet, most people have never given somebody advice and have them say, thank you, I used it and it worked. And then given somebody advice and then have them say, thank you, I used it and it worked. And if you do that a few times, you turn people into mentors that you didn't even really mean to. And they certainly didn't mean to mentor you, because that's a big, you know, burden. And so I think you're crazy to not take the wisdom of others and apply it to your life.

• 8:26Speaker 01

  I've always tried to be the best student of anybody I learned from.

• 8:29Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, it's, we sort of celebrate learning by experience as if that's not the least efficient, most expensive way to learn. I mean, it's obviously great and you have to, there's some things you can only learn by experience, but like the idea of learning it by trial and error, when people have been in your exact position and written books about it, people have been in your exact position and made catastrophic mistakes that there are exposes and articles about. Like even, you know, just opening a business on this main street. I'm looking around, we're doing it and it's like, why are all these shops empty? And it's like, I went around, I asked the Chamber of Commerce, I asked all the real estate, I was like, why do things not last in this town? And it's like, oh, there are these reasons. And some of those reasons are avoidable.

• 9:14Ryan Holiday?

  Some of those reasons are, give me feedback on things I have to do differently. But it's just the idea of like, look, somebody went out of business in this space that you're trying to open this store in, right? Why? It would probably be good for you to figure that out before you've taken out a home equity line of credit on your house.

• 9:31Speaker 01

  Oh, a hundred percent. I mean, it's one of the things that keeps me up at night. If there's one thing that scares me, it's that we talk about buying businesses on the internet and then somebody just goes and buys one.

• 9:39Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 9:39Speaker 01

  And then they go, what the fuck did I just do?

• 9:41Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 9:42Speaker 01

  And I, it scares me, which is why we, we originally had a course on buying businesses and now we don't. And the reason why is because I don't think that that is enough. I think you have to actually have a group of people around you for the full year you were going through this process.

• 9:56Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 9:56Speaker 01

  And you need people to call on the dead of the night and you need them, you need to see other people's reps real time. You need to see all the mistakes they made. You need to look at the case studies. And so we actually killed it because we were like, not only is a book not enough, a course isn't enough. You have to actually have real humans and almost treat it like a mini MBA. And so I feel so strongly in that, like every chance I get, I often think about how Warren Buffett, the only thing he does most days is read and learn.

• 10:22Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 10:22Speaker 01

  And then, you know, let's call 5 to 10% of what he does is action.

• 10:26Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 10:27Speaker 01

  And, you know, 90 to 95% of what he does is data accumulation. And I think a lot of people these days would say that's mental masturbation and you're, you're pushing it off. But if you are committed and disciplined, the type of person that is going to make a move, but you do it from a data and knowledge basis, your likelihood of success is just so much higher. I mean, we know, we know in our group, about 30 to 40% of people who join buy a business. The average amount of people that buy a business is like 0.03%.

• 10:56Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 10:57Speaker 01

  Now, there's some bias there because this is a self-selected group and all of those things, but. I wonder why, again and again, we are so willing to get distracted by all the little learnings in life, but not go deep into the one learning that might actually change our life.

• 11:12Ryan Holiday?

  It's very unlikely you're going to be successful at something that you have not made yourself a student of. And the industries, startup entrepreneurs are especially guilty of this. Like Silicon Valley, they're like, oh, this is a huge industry. I'm going to, I'm going to disrupt an industry that I, by the way, know fuck all about. Like, like, I read an article about it and I'm a customer, so obviously I understand it. And it's like, no, you don't understand the incentives, the, the history, the, the evolution of it. You don't understand why certain things are the, the way they are. And that isn't to say that they all should be maintained, but there's a logic to them. And most of them can be traced to some kind of underlying decision or regulation, or it evolved that way for a reason.

• 11:55Ryan Holiday?

  And if you don't know it, then you could be right about knowing why it should change, but you don't actually know how best to change it. You don't know why it's particularly entrenched. You actually have to like do a deep dive into this thing way more than like, oh, it would be cool to do this.

• 12:11Speaker 01

  You know, it's funny, we have a venture capital fund and the number one indicator of success in our portfolio companies is who has lived this problem for more than 10 years.

• 12:20Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 12:20Speaker 01

  And so I almost always will choose lived experience and pain is the direct driver to profit over almost anything else.

• 12:28Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 12:28Speaker 01

  And of course there are exceptions to this, but usually those are second or third time founders.

• 12:33Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 12:33Speaker 01

  So their lived experience is building companies and can sort of see the widget factory in every single industry. But yeah, I mean, if we, like some of our best performers, I'm like, Dino, it's a Ronics, it's a, you know, autonomous ship builder. It's worth, I don't know, $8 billion now. And he was in the Navy and he saw firsthand the problem with, you know, shipping and the problem with acquisitions because he did part of it. And so, you know, I think oftentimes there, there's like a little bit of a veneer today on being new, being young.

• 13:06Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 13:06Speaker 01

  And in reality, most millionaires are 50 plus.

• 13:09Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 13:10Speaker 01

  Most billionaires are in their seventies.

• 13:12Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 13:12Speaker 01

  Most people who start a business are in their thirties or forties. This is not always a young person's game. Like you're not broke, you're just early.

• 13:19Ryan Holiday?

  Yes. And you should be like, hey, this is the part of my career that is setting me up to be that person who is successful in their thirties and forties and fifties. What I'm doing now is learning, developing all different kinds of experiences. Like also, it's like, hey, yeah, you could be totally right about this problem in this industry and how much potential it has. But you haven't learned a bunch of the skills required for you to actually realize that, whether it's how to lead people, whether it's managing pressure and stress, whether it's emotional maturity, there's all these other things. And sometimes you can be so right and you can have such a monopoly, or you can have such a big target that you can kind of learn those things on the job.

• 14:00Ryan Holiday?

  But chances are you are not ready for the thing that you think you're going to be successful at and you, you could use a lot more time learning and experimenting and all of that.

• 14:10Speaker 01

  I remember like the exact moment when I knew I was going to go do my own thing.

• 14:13Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 14:14Speaker 01

  And I was on a walk with my CEO at the time and I was building out a business in Latin America. It was pretty big and successful by then. And I was like, we need to do this and we've got to do more direct sales and we've got to be online and a lot of the stuff that I'm doing now today. And I remember he's an older gentleman, you know, very, very wealthy billionaire many times over. And I have a lot of respect for him. And he looked at me as I was going on my rant and said, here, we get rich quietly. We don't do it that way. And we're on a boat going right. And if you want to go left, you got to get your own boat.

• 14:46Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 14:47Speaker 01

  And at the time I was really mad. I was like, you're an idiot. You don't get it. You're going to miss the internet, you know, me with my non billions.

• 14:55Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 14:56Speaker 01

  And so I knew I had to leave. But now I look back at that moment and I'm like, what a gift this man gave me. Because he told me like, hey, if you are really committed to this and you already know this market and all these things, just go do it yourself.

• 15:07Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. And he had the discipline not to, not to be distracted by what you were saying, but also the discipline not to be like emotional or condescending or threatened by what you were saying. He could just be like, hey, this is where I'm going. I have a sense of my path and this is the path that you want to go on. I'm not threatened by that. I'm going to encourage you to do it. But like, he's basically also saying, you have a lot to learn. Like you have a lot to learn.

• 15:31Speaker 01

  And you know what? And he was right. I mean, thankfully I went out and did my own thing, but without the, you know, five or six years working for him, I would not be where I am today.

• 15:40Ryan Holiday?

  Totally.

• 15:40Speaker 01

  And so I think sometimes you can get into a company or a job and you'll know you're ready to leave when you're like, no, no, I know the way.

• 15:47Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 15:47Speaker 01

  And I, I've seen it and let me show you and it's working and they won't let you continue that way. And I hear a lot of people, that's the moment that you know, you need to go try it for yourself. And then the same thing, say, hey, you might be right. I might be wrong. Do you think I'm crazy for going and trying this by myself?

• 16:04Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 16:05Speaker 01

  And I bet nine times out of 10, they're going to say, no, go try it.

• 16:08Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 16:09Speaker 01

  And if it fails, come back to me.

• 16:10Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. And keep the door open because you're going to have a million questions and you're going to need a lot of advice while you're doing it. And that's part of remaining a student of what you do too.

• 16:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and I don't actually think you should almost ever burn the bridge unless they are a terrible person that has done awful things that you do, that you never want to engage with. And often I think, especially when you're a young employee, they're not, even if you think they are. You just don't understand yet because you're not a CEO.

• 16:35Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 16:35Speaker 01

  And so otherwise, don't burn the bridge. Actually keep it there. You know, you might, you might need to be some commerce later over that bridge. You don't even have to go back, just send some stuff.

• 16:54Speaker 02

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