How To Keep Hope Alive | Ask Daily Stoic
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Each one of these episodes is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women to help you learn from them, to follow in their example, and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. For more, visit dailystoic.com. How to Keep Hope Alive.

It was a phone call that seemed like one they'd had hundreds of times, except something was off. It wasn't exactly a blaring alarm or a huge red flag, but George Ravling decided to keep his former player, James Donaldson, on the phone. And then he drove over to his house to see him. And the next day, George called James back, and the day after, and the day after, and the day after.

And it turned out later that James had called to say goodbye. Financial struggles, personal loss, and overwhelming guilt had pushed this 7'2 former NBA player to the brink. And it was a simple act of kindness, of interest, of friendship that saved him. We have a story from Cleanthes, one stopped a man in Athens who was berating himself.

You're not talking to a bad person, Cleanthes said, and then walked away. As Seneca reminds us, wherever there is a person, there is an opportunity for kindness. And it is a wonderful thing when we get one exactly when we most need it.

As George writes in the To Keep Hope Alive chapter in his new book, What You're Made For, Powerful Lessons from My Career in Sports. It was a book I was lucky enough to help bring into existence. And George is one of my absolute favorite people in the world. He says that sometimes hope is as simple as giving someone a reason to get through until morning. It's quiet persistence. It's small, consistent acts. It's showing up day after day and saying, I'm here for you.

With George's help, James emerged stronger from that dark chapter and became a mental health advocate, a community leader, and an author, sharing his story to help others who felt like they couldn't go on. And that same act of hope and guidance that George gave him, James now extends to others. And having been the recipient of little acts of kindness and hope in our own lives, we must do the same.

And look, I said that George is one of my favorite people. And when his son reached out and said, hey, my dad was thinking about doing a book, would you be able to help? I could not have jumped at it faster. And as it turned out, neither could my agent or my publisher. And the result is this book, What You're Made For, it's a book that I wrote for a

It's the only book I've ever written that has a foreword written by Michael Jordan, which is pretty insane. Charles Barkley blurbed it because George basically knows everyone in sports. He knew Wilt Chamberlain. He knew Jerry West. That's the NBA logo. He also knew Martin Luther King and owned the I Have a Dream speech. It's an absolute incredible life. He's one of my absolute favorite people.

I'll link to that in today's show notes. And if you don't know who George is, you should, and you should get his email, The Daily Coach, which he does with my friend, Mike Lombardi. Enjoy.

Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another Thursday episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I went to go swimming at Barton Springs and I get there, drive all the way out there, do the whole thing. I get out of my car, I walk in, it's kind of still a little chilly, surprisingly cold that morning. And I get there and there's a sign, it's closed for spring cleaning for the next two weeks. I was like, what? No, oh no, no.

But it sort of snuck up on me. It is spring and it's here. And that's going to mean some warmer mornings in Barton Springs. It's always going to stay the same temperature. But yeah, it hit me that spring is here. I mean, I should have known because we've been working on the Daily Stoic Spring Forward Challenge, which we do every...

every year. And it's this, you know, as we spring the clocks forward, as the weather gets better, as we start our spring cleaning, the idea is like, let's clean up our lives. Let's spring forward in our lives. Let's grow and change. And let's turn over a new leaf, so to speak.

So we do that every year and it's going to be awesome. It starts on March 20th. But in today's Q&A, I wanted to bring you some questions from the 2024 Spring Forward Q&A. People ask some great questions. So you hear them. And if you want to participate in the Q&A with us at the end of the challenge, well, you just got to sign up. DailyStoke.com/spring.

I will see it in there. It's going to be awesome. If you want to use the code DS pod 20, you can get 20% off the challenge just for daily stoic podcast listeners, 10 days of stoic inspired challenges. I will see it in their daily stoic.com slash spring. If you use code DS pod 20, you get 20% off. Hey, this is a great challenge. I really enjoyed it. Thanks for doing it.

Yeah, thank you. So my question is, it's more about critiques of stoicism, because I feel like with something that has such a large part of my life, I think it's only reasonable to see opposing perspectives. So and I think it's clear that the stoics aren't perfect, but what they have just adds so much value to my life. And many critiques of stoicism, I think they lack an understanding of the fundamental values of stoicism. So

Like they never researched it in the first place. And many critiques actually fall into the like the common misconception that Stoics were just emotionless. And I noticed even Nietzsche tends to fall into that misconception because he has a very thought provoking criticism in his book, Beyond Good and Evil. And what I want to know is, is there any genuine critiques of Stoicism on the figures that

like actually have merit or like the stoicism? Of course. Yeah. But first off, I love this. You shouldn't accept anything uncritically or unquestioningly. And we should look for the flaws in not just stoicism, but we should look for what's good in other schools of philosophy to add

or to supplement stoicism. So first off, I love the impulse. And I would say that you're also right. Most of the critics of stoicism tend to be these sort of straw man critiques. I'd prefer a steel man where someone's going, okay, here's what's good about stoicism. Here's where they're coming from. But here are the following weak points in the arguments. Now, I'm actually thinking about this because we're working on a video for

for Daily Stoic's YouTube channel about what the Stoics get wrong. I think we could sort of put these into two categories. So

One would just be like, what are the assumptions of the time that are incorporated into stoicism that are flawed? You know, slavery being one, there's a sort of a casual misogyny in the Stoics. You know, Marx really is saying, what kind of soul do you have? Do you have a woman's soul? You know, he doesn't mean that in a complimentary way. Right. So there's a kind of a casual racism, misogyny, you know, the,

The Romans saw anyone who didn't speak Latin as being a barbarian, right? So baked into Stoicism is just the assumptions of the world 20 centuries ago that is not always correct and in often cases is not correct. And then there's maybe a second category. Actually, I maybe say there's three. A second category would be the mistakes that the Stoics make.

So Marcus Aurelius deciding to elevate his son Commodus to succeed him is obviously a catastrophic error. Cato's high-mindedness alienates Pompey and drives him into the arms of Julius Caesar. This is a major strategic error. There's a Stoic named Rutilius Rufus who's brought up on these ideas

He's a contemporary of Caesar and Cicero. I talk about him in Lives of the Stoics. He is brought up on these fake corruption charges for which he's not guilty. And he believes that his duty as a Stoic is to not even defend himself. He just sort of quietly is martyred. You know, he doesn't utter a sentence in his defense. This is probably a strategic act.

error, you know, Seneca working for Nero. This is another mistake that a Stoic makes. So we have the mistakes of the Romans at their time, which is incorporated into Stoicism.

And then we have the mistakes of the Stoics themselves, which are many. And then I would argue we also have just some philosophical problems. I think the Stoics don't really talk anything about the idea of collective action. So they talk about whether something is in your control and what's not in your control. But if...

everyone only focused on the things that were in their control. We would never be able to pool our limited amounts of control, right, and change the world. And I think this leads back to those first two things. There is a certain amount of resignation to the Stoics in the face of injustices or flawed systems or inequality. Even you could say like the plague or

any type of problem. I don't see in Stoicism much in the way of a robust toolkit for solving the problems of society or moving the ball forward or creating progress. So I think that's one. You know, I think the Stoics talk a lot about flirt very close to the idea of...

or a sort of a determinism that I don't exactly buy either. So I think there's a number of flaws with the philosophy itself, but I guess we could talk about this for hours. The Stokes were not perfect. They were flawed people. They made mistakes.

and there are flaws in the philosophy itself, what those are going to jump out differently to different people. I think it's just important that we don't turn stoicism into a dogma and we don't hold the Stoics up as being more than what they are, which is just human beings. Hey, Ryan, thank you. So as a father, husband, creator, writer, there's moments where you don't feel like doing something, a thing. Yeah. You can push through it.

But at what point do you decide pushing through it isn't, it's like a, it's diminishing your returns. At what point do you say, no, not this right now. I'm just going to not do this and do something else or don't do anything at all. When do you make that distinction?

Yeah. I mean, I think the larger question here is, you know, sometimes you push through that resistance and then other times that resistance is telling you something like, how do you know when to stick and how do you know when to quit? It's tough. And I don't think there's a harder and fast rule or like, you know, this is the checklist and it tells you sometimes it's obvious, sometimes it's not. But I had Annie Duke on the podcast a few months back and she has this book on on

on quitting and she's sort of looking at it from the perspective of a, of a poker player, you know, a poker player quits, uh,

quits hands all the time. There's a difference between quitting a hand and quitting a game and then quitting the game itself. So I kind of like her distinction. I come back to that often. Am I quitting in a larger sense or am I just folding a specific hand to go do something else? But I wrote a piece a few weeks ago, and I think it's up on my Instagram right now. I'm dealing with this. Sometimes

You know, your body is telling you, hey, you need to rest, you need to recover. And you push through that or you ignore that at your peril and you end up, you know, by trying to save a few minutes or trying to push something through, you end up hurting yourself. So I'm trying to work on the temperance of not always pushing through.

Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. I just wanted to say we so appreciate it. We love serving you. It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple years we've been doing it. It's an honor. Please spread the word, tell people about it, and this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say thank you.

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