The Stoic Way To Handle Real Problems

In today’s episode, Ryan answers questions about how to apply Stoicism to the real problems life throws at us. How do you stay Stoic when the obstacle is emotional, personal, and human? What does “doing the work” look like when you’re exhausted, burned out, or discouraged? How do you know what’s in your control, what you can influence, and where your energy is best spent? Plus more. 🎟️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/ 🎥 VIDEO EPISODES https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos| Watch the video episodes onThe Daily Stoic YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos:https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos ✉️ 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 See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

• 0:00Ryan 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.

• 0:14Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I told you this, that back in February, I had to fly to Hawaii to do a little chat with a lady named Oprah. That hasn't come out yet, but another honor happened to me on that trip, which is that I did a virtual talk to the team at the Irwin Army Community Hospital in Fort Riley, Kansas. It was a group that included more than 150 healthcare staff members, both military and civilian providers, who all serve at that hospital. And before I hopped on the talk, I heard a bunch of them were listeners of the Daily Stoic Podcast, which was really cool. So on today's episode, I wanted to bring you some of their questions. Some of these are men and women in uniform,

• 0:55Ryan Holiday?

  serving in a difficult, stressful, complicated moment in our history. Appreciate them having me on. I appreciate that Stoicism is something they are relying on, and it was an honor to get to talk to them. By the way, if you want to see me come talk, if you want to ask me some questions, I'm going to be in Portland, I think in two weeks, I'm going to be in San Francisco, Boston, DC, Chicago, a bunch of cities. I'm going to Australia in the fall. You can grab all those tickets at dailystoiclive.com. Most of the shows are almost sold out, so you've got to grab those. I'll sign your books. You can ask me questions, all that kind of stuff. Dailystoiclive.com.

• 1:31Speaker 01

  So how do you apply Stoic principles when the obstacle isn't abstract but emotional and human?

• 1:39Ryan Holiday?

  That's a really interesting way to think about it. So it's like, if you're deciding to take it personally, that can be good in the sense that you're like, this is designed just for me, and this is a test that's going to make me better. And I love this challenge. This might be, there's this expression popular in Stoicism called amor fati, which means a love of fate, where you don't just like, sort of bear the circumstances, but you're like excited about them. So if you're taking things personally that way, like, go for it. That's awesome. But if you're taking it personally, like, I'm being singled out, this is singularly unfair.

• 2:16Ryan Holiday?

  This is, you know, they're out to get me. No one has to deal with as many things that as I have to deal with. You know, now what you're doing is you're taking an objective thing and you're making it subjective in a, in a way that's only making it harder. And I do think it's worth, you know, pointing out like, okay, first and foremost, like the world is indifferent to us, right? Like the, the pandemic doesn't care about you. The hurricane doesn't care about you. The snowstorm doesn't care about you, whether you're in an economic bull market or bear market. The, these things that they, they, they are abstractions and they don't care about you at all and they don't know you exist. And so if you take them personally, uh, or, or you sort of ascribe a personality to them,

• 3:01Ryan Holiday?

  that's going to make it harder to deal with. And then I think something that you bring up that is also a timeless fact of civilization, which would be bureaucracy. That's also not singling, singling you out. It's, it's, it's not deliberate. It could be different. It would be better if it was different, but it's not, right? And it, it's sort of, this isn't to say that we just tacitly accept and resign ourselves to bureaucratic injustices and we don't try to fix them or improve the system. But yeah, if you, if you let that wear you down, you're not only going to have trouble with the individual instance that you're dealing with, but you're going to burn out

• 3:42Ryan Holiday?

  and not be able to be of use to yourself, your family and, and sort of future, uh, you know, patients or people in need. So I, I think just understanding that like, this is a fact of life. This has always been there. This is a, an imperfect solution to an impossible problem. And that, um, you know, our job is to find the little pockets of change or improvement or humanity inside that system is really important. There's actually an interesting passage in Meditations. For a long time, I, I didn't quite understand what, what he meant. This is Meditations, book seven.

• 4:27Ryan Holiday?

  Okay. Book seven, 65. It says, "Take care that you don't treat inhumanity as it treats human beings."

• 4:37Ryan Holiday?

  And I think what he is saying, and this is something that comes as a constant theme throughout meditations, because he is dealing with an enormous, you know, Roman empire. He's dealing with a fundamentally dehumanizing colonial sort of brutal power that it was in the ancient world. I think he's saying to himself, don't become like this thing that you're a part of or that you're fighting against, right? Like, don't, don't, just because the system is inhuman, just because the system is slow, just because the system is depersonalized, doesn't mean that you have to be that way. And I think this is kind of the, the primary struggle of our time.

• 5:22Ryan Holiday?

  Like, we live in a depersonalized, dehumanizing, you know, you could even say outright cruel and dysfunctional moment in American history and maybe even in world history. And, and I think our struggle is to, is to not accept that and become that. So like, when the Stoics are saying, don't be affected by it, right? When they're saying, remain unaffected. I don't think they mean, okay, you see the suffering out there and you go, that's just a part of life, that's not my problem. That's not what they mean when they say, don't be affected by it. What they're saying is, don't be affected, that is to say, changed by a world that largely

• 6:07Ryan Holiday?

  does accept that, right? Like, when you're in a slow-moving bureaucratic system where a lot of people are just doing their job, or saying things like, that's not my job, it's very easy for that to become your attitude, right? And so when the Stoics are saying, don't be affected by it, that's what they mean. They mean, don't become that person, right? When Marx really says, the best revenge is to not be like your enemy, right? In, in some ways, the best way to fight back against bureaucracy, or reactionaryism, or, or any of these sort of trends that can be happening at one time or another, the best revenge is, is to, is to not let that change who you are, to keep being hopeful and good, and...

• 6:54Ryan Holiday?

  Hardworking and compassionate and all the things that you know you value about yourself as a person, that's what we have to to hang on to. And and we have to outlast some of these temporary forces and outlast some of these temporary trends and you know, last as long as we're able to last.

• 7:13Speaker 01

  What does doing the work, though, mean or look like maybe when people are already exhausted, burned out, or just even discouraged?

• 7:23Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I think there's a couple of things there. So first and foremost, you make a good point. So the famous passage from Marx's where he's talking about the obstacle being the way. What obstacle is he referring to? He's actually referring to annoying people. He's saying that like, people can get in our way, people can obstruct what we're attempting to do. But he says, we always have the ability to change what we're trying to do. And that this annoying, obnoxious person presents an opportunity for us to practice different virtues, you know, patience, understanding, creativity, you know, empathy, finding the good, you know, all of that, right?

• 8:04Ryan Holiday?

  So so this is a fact of of life that goes back at least 2,000 years. And I think you also make a good point that he's not sort of superhuman. He's writing in meditations. The reason we have this this book and the reason we're talking about these ideas is because they were not natural and second nature to him, but he really had to work at it. And so if we can see this as a muscle, that's that I think that's also really, really important. As far as as actually putting into practice, I think that's the other thing you raised there, which is great. This isn't something you are or you aren't. It requires willpower, it requires work, and

• 8:45Ryan Holiday?

  The more you are taking care of yourself, the easier that's gonna be. Like, i- if we're saying, hey, obnoxious people are a chance to practice patience. Well, you're gonna have more patience if you got a good night's sleep, if you've been eating well, if you've been, you know, if you have a workout practice that can be kind of a steam, you know, a release valve for you. The more you are taking care of yourself, the easier it is to bring some of these virtues to bear on this situation. Or even something simpler, right? If we take it as a virtue, you know, you wanna get up early, you wanna get after the day, which is something that Stoics talk a lot about. Like, I think it behooves you not to stay up till two in the morning scrolling on your phone. Right?

• 9:28Ryan Holiday?

  Or, you know, it's easier to be cheerful and to see the good in a situation if you're not shaking off a hangover. Right? And so, so how you take care of yourself physically and mentally is really, really important. And then, and then, you know, having these practices, whether it's a journaling practice where, where we sort of can work off some of that frustration or, or sort of fight to be our better selves. If we have, you know, a friend group or a support group where we're, where we're working through things. If we're, you know, taking advantage of, of therapy. If we're not overpacking and over-scheduling our day to the point where we never have two seconds to sit down and just be reflective. Like, all this stuff is really, really important.

• 10:13Ryan Holiday?

  And so, I think, I think we can't just expect ourselves, in, in the same way that an athlete doesn't, you know, treat their body like a garbage can and then expect elite performance. It's about structuring your day, your life, your habits around facilitating being what you're, what you want to be in those high stakes, you know, or tempting or frustrating situations.

• 10:40Speaker 01

  So how do you recommend distinguishing between what we can't control, what we can influence, and then where our energy is best spent?

• 10:50Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I think the Stoics are pretty black and white, right? There's some stuff that's up to us and there's some stuff that's not up to us. You know, the Serenity Prayer, you know, the things you can change, the things you can't change, and then sort of the courage and the wisdom to know the difference. But I think in real life, it is a bit more complicated. There is that gray area of stuff that is kind of up to you, but not fully. I'll give you an example, just a lower stakes one than your world. But like, you could say like, I control my book. I control my writing. I control all of that. But I don't control, you know, whether the audience likes it. Or I don't control how many copies it sells.

• 11:34Ryan Holiday?

  Like, I only control making it. I don't control how it does in the market. And that's true, but then, you know, sort of in the middle there, there's what we might call marketing, right? There's the stuff we have influence over. And the decision to not try to influence it in a way is ceding control and taking away something that maybe you could have made some kind of positive contribution to. Now, I don't want to be flip and go like, "Look, there's some stuff that's up to you and some stuff that's not up to you." You don't control whether the patient gets better or not, right? Because we're talking about a life or death situation.

• 12:17Ryan Holiday?

  And we have to think about, you know, these, "Did you try everything that you could?" You know, "Did you do everything that you could?" Obviously, that matters. At the same time, if we overstate what is in our control or not, if we get, you know, a bit of a God complex, then what happens is when results come in that are fundamentally not a reflection of us, but just a reflection of the reality of life. You know, if you have a, you give someone a medication that has a 20% chance of treating this condition or not, well, 80% of the time, then it's not going to give you the result you want.

• 13:01Ryan Holiday?

  And if you take that personally, that's gonna... That's not only going to harm your ability to bounce back and help, you know, with treatment number two and treatment number three and treatment number four, but it's also going to make it harder for you to show up fully with a clean slate on the next patient as well. And so part of this, like, hey, what part is up to me and what part is not up to me is about seeing life as an infinite series of games, as they say, like in game theory, there's finite games and infinite games, you know, going like, hey, it's interaction after interaction after interaction. If I'm overstating my sense of control, I'm going to give myself credit when

• 13:46Ryan Holiday?

  it's not up to me. And I'm also going to credit myself with failures and setbacks that are not up to me that make it harder for me to sort of start again. And so part of, I think, Stoicism is this idea of like focusing on the process, focusing on what's up to you, and then being willing to not see what comes back as a reflection of you as a person, but just as a reflection of, hey, you're not God, and you don't get to decide how this goes.

• 14:22Speaker 01

  So how can leaders help their teams recognize meaningful progress even when the obstacle isn't fully resolved?

• 14:32Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, that's a great point. Looking for those little wins. I'm just a big believer in momentum. I think momentum is kind of everything in life. And so I'm always trying to break big things down into smaller pieces so I can feel like I'm moving towards them. One of the lines from Zeno, he's the founder of Stoicism, he says, you know, well-being is realized by small steps, but it is no small thing. And so, you know, whether it's a patient, whether it's your own career, whether it's a, you know, a project around your house, or even, you know, a book you're writing, I like to think about how am I making progress as opposed to have I checked

• 15:16Ryan Holiday?

  off the box? One of the writing rules that I love, because a book can be such a big overwhelming and demoralizing process, it's

• 15:27Ryan Holiday?

  Just write a couple crappy pages a day. And the idea is, is, is if you are just, if you are showing up every day and putting something down, eventually you'll get to a, a first draft. And, and first drafts are universally bad. And, but, but you can turn a, a, a bad first draft into a pretty good second draft and a better third draft and fourth draft. And eventually, you know, you'll have something publishable. But you can't improve something that doesn't exist. And so sometimes our, our perfectionism, actually Churchill said this. Churchill said that a better way to spell perfectionism is paralysis.

• 16:05Ryan Holiday?

  And so if, if you need it to be perfect, if you need this sort of singular conclusive solution to a problem, you're often going to, to do, end up doing nothing. But if you're, if you're focused more on chipping away at it, if you're just helping one person, if you're solving one problem, well, then you actually are moving forward. It just might not, it might not be measurable day to day. Like I think about this, I, I talk about this in the wisdom book. Like one of the interesting things about wisdom is that you never, you never actually get it. I say it's kind of like the horizon, right? You're walking towards the horizon and, and you, it's just always getting a little bit further away.

• 16:45Ryan Holiday?

  But if you walk towards the horizon for a long time and then you turn around, you'll look back and see how far you've come. And, and I think that's how we want to think about these problems. Um, is like, hey, am I moving forward? Am I creating momentum? Am I crossing things off? That's, that's really what's up to me. Am I solving the whole thing all at once? You know, um, that's probably not what your individual job is.