This Too Is Always Yours (And Can’t Be Taken) | Ask Daily Stoic
10:57 Share

Thank you.

Maybe you want to kick a bad habit or start a good one. If you're interested in learning how to master your emotions and hearing scientifically backed advice for using your emotions as a tool, may I suggest Shift by psychologist and bestseller author Dr. Ethan Krause? Trust me, listening on Audible can help you reach the goals you set for yourself. Start listening today when you sign up for a free 30-day trial at audible.com slash wondery. That's audible.com slash wondery.

Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a Stoic-inspired meditation designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life. 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, 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. This too is always yours and can't be taken. There has always been fear, fear that tyrants or fate would take something away from us. The ancients worried about being sent into exile. They worried that disease would kill someone they loved. They worried an earthquake could swallow up their house.

And these were reasonable worries. Marcus Aurelius buried multiple children. Lusonius Rufus was sent away multiple times. Pompeii disappeared under a volcano. Today, these worries remain with us and they remain real. A vindictive politician can take away your livelihood. A senseless virus can take away your parents. A hurricane or a forest fire could wipe your neighborhood off the map.

In this way, we are all vulnerable. In this way, we are all, to borrow a phrase from Joan Didion, it sounds like it came from Seneca, hostages to fortune. And yet there is something that can't be taken from us by even the strongest strongman or the most unlucky of external events. Nothing can take from us what we have had. No one can take this present moment from us because in the attempt...

The present moment becomes the past. What we have right now, that is ours. Not just now, but forever. And what are we doing with it? Not using it, but worrying about it. We have our family right now. We have our job right now. We have the dream house right now. We have it in our minds forever too. The memories we made there, the things we accomplished, the love we felt. Let us not let it waste away. Let us not be afraid.

Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another Thursday episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Back in February, I took a long flight from Austin to New York.

I guess to New York, New York to Abu Dhabi. I think that's how it was. Anyways, I was in the UAE and I was talking to this marketing group and I opened with this story of Zeno. And basically, I was saying that right across the Arabian Peninsula from where we were, there was this guy named Zeno who had suffered this shipwreck.

And I was saying that, look, just on the other side of this bit of land here in the Mediterranean, this new way of thinking emerges. And I was trying to emphasize the connection between the East and West, although the East and West were often in conflict in those days. Zeno living in the shadow of the Persian wilds.

Socrates having lived and fought in them. And yet it's this fascinatingly fertile bit of land, fascinatingly distinct and divergent ways of thinking. And yet they share so many interesting things.

And now I'm back, but on the other side of the peninsula. I am recording this from a balcony. My kids are getting ready for bed and I'm going to go in and put them down in a second. You can hear little motorcycles and cars zipping down below me. I am looking out at the sea surrounding Ithaca. That's where I'm recording this from.

And I'm thinking about where I was not too long ago. And I wanted to bring you some of the questions that came up after that talk. I think you're really going to like it. They were fascinating questions. Anyways, I'll bring you that. And then I'll bring you another chunk of this next week. So I'll talk to you all soon.

Hi. Hello. So I would like to know how modern leaders could apply SPOIK principles without coming across as disattached. Obviously, you have to understand that other people feel things, other people are worried about things, other people are not also as strong as you. That's one of my favorite quotes in meditation. He says, "Tolerant with others, strict with yourself."

And so understanding even like this virtue of discipline, which runs through stoicism, it's actually the virtue of self-discipline. So it's not about being unfeeling and being strict and being, you know, a hard ass to other people. Those are things you can decide to hold yourself to. But with others, we want to be empathetic. We want to be understanding. We want to communicate. We want to help them, care about them.

We don't necessarily expect that in return, especially if you're in a position of leadership. That's your job. Their job is not to provide that for you. You've got to go get it somewhere else. And so I would kind of think about it that way. It's just like, do we want a leader to feel what we're feeling or do we want the leader to help us solve the problems that we have? If we're freaking out, we don't want to look up at the person who's in charge.

We're not going to be reassured that they're freaking out also. We want them to be calm. We want them to be focused on solutions. And then conversely, when things are going awesome, we're crushing it and the market's never been better, we want the leader to be thinking about what's happening next, not to be

irrationally exuberant and telling themselves it's because they're a genius and it's always going to be this way. So I think the job of a leader is to be calm and rational and collected. And that might feel a little bit detached, but there is a remove in leadership. They're supposed to be in their own space.

Hi. What are your views on ambition and contentment? Look, obviously, ambition is good for the bottom line. It's good for humanity. It can be the happiness for the individual. There's some balance there.

One of the ways I've started to think about this is I'm very ambitious as a writer, but I'm less ambitious as an author. So like I'm trying to be the best that I'm capable of being because that's very much in my control. And I'm less ambitious about what other people say or think or different benchmarks, right? Like I'm focused on doing what I can do as opposed to

winning awards or getting attention. And what I found though, is that by focusing on one, it actually results in the latter versus when I'm focused on the other part, I'm actually often neglecting this part. So I kind of think about it that way, that the Stokes were saying that if your ambition is tied to things that are in your power,

That's safe. If your ambition is about winning the approval or the affection or the attention of someone else,

Well, you better hope you get it because if you don't, you're going to be disappointed. You've deprived yourself of the ability of just being able to take pride in a job well done, pride in process, pride in all that. So obviously, we have to move the numbers or the business goes under. But I think as the individual, we want to go, hey, you know,

Am I attaching myself to what other people say or do, or am I focused more on what I say or do? And I think one is both more fulfilling and moves the needle more. What is your relationship with selecting methods? And how does that change over time? And how can we sort of replicate that?

So I was a research assistant for an amazing writer named Robert Greene, who I think has been out there before. And I started in a world before AI. I had to transcribe his interviews because there wasn't computer software that could magically do that. And so I spent many, many years doing interviews.

sort of mundane and difficult tasks. But what I was learning in the process was how books work, how storytelling works, how research works. I was getting this base of knowledge, plus I was developing relationships and all these different things that ultimately helped me in what I wanted to do. And I was just learning, you know, this is what a professional does. This is what it looks like. So Robert's been probably the most influential mentor in my life.

and sort of remains so. I mean, someone I still ask advice from all the time. I think as you go on, that relationship can become a bit more reciprocal. Although I would say you can't really pay your mentors back, but you have to pay it forward to someone else. And that's where that kind of leap that we were talking about earlier goes. One of the parts of that center talks about how we learn as we teach. So even in

taking the things that I learned from Robert, passing them on to my research assistants now, and learning from them in a new way, like in having to repeat that anew.

I'm learning from the people that I mentor. So Robert's probably my number one mentor now. I would say, though, I don't think your mentor just has to be someone that you know or works for. I think that's what books are. It's a way to immerse yourself and get access to people that you would never ordinarily get to meet. So I think you have all different types of mentors.

but there is something very special about that sort of in-person day-to-day being able to ask questions, being able to watch them model those traits for you. I think it's very hard to get good at something without that.

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.