The Daily Stoic - 7 Viral Speeches About Stoicism | Ryan Holiday Speaking

Episode Date: December 12, 2021

On today’s episode of the podcast we’ve compiled some of Ryan Holiday’s best and most viral talks about Stoicism. Few writers have done more to bring ancient solutions to help solve our modern problems than Ryan. By age 33, his philosophically driven bestselling books have sold over four million copies and spent more than 200 weeks on bestseller lists. Ryan provides a framework for overcoming obstacles, scaling new challenges and battling both the ups and downs and life. Profiled by the New York Times, Sports Illustrated and ESPN, Ryan counts among his clients and followers some of the biggest names in business, tech, culture and professional athletics.Book Ryan Holiday to speak at your event, go to: https://ryanholiday.net/speaking/If you are looking for gifts for family members and friends, the 2021 Daily Stoic Gift Guide is here to help! This year’s guide features a bundle of books signed by Ryan Holiday, our new page-a-day desk calendar, the four virtues medallion, and more. Click here to give the gift of Stoicism this holiday season!KiwiCo believes in the power of kids and that small lessons today can mean big, world-changing ideas tomorrow. This holiday season, give the gift of a fun, hands-on holiday experience with KiwiCo. KiwiCo is a subscription service that delivers everything your kids will need to make, create and play. Get 50% off your first month plus FREE shipping on ANY crate line with code STOIC at kiwico.com.DECKED truck bed tool boxes and cargo van storage systems revolutionize organization with a heavy-duty in-vehicle storage system featuring slide out toolboxes. DECKED makes organizing, accessing, protecting, and securing everything you need so much easier. Get your DECKED Drawer System at Decked.com/STOIC and get free shipping.Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://DailyStoic.com/dailyemailCheck out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview stoic philosophers, we explore at length how these stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend when you have a little bit more space when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal, and most importantly to prepare for what the week

ahead may bring. As you know, stoicism has had a big impact on my life and it's helped me so much through the last 15 years, and it's something I a big impact on my life and it's helped me so much through the last 15 years. And it's something I tried to share with others sometimes. That's a book recommendation. One of the things we've tried to do over the years is create some physical embodiments of stoic philosophy. Just sort of physical reminders of these ideas.

I've got the Marcus Arelius bust on my desk. My whole office, my home even is sort of reminders of these ideas from the ancient stokes. Maybe that's something you would want this time of year or as you're looking to give something to someone in your life to introduce them to the ideas of Stoses and maybe that's members of your team or your unit. Maybe that's a friend you know who's going through something. Anyways, we put together a 2021 gift guide of these things. You can check that out at dailystoke.com slash gift guide.

It's 10 awesome gift ideas for the stokes in your life. The obstacle is the way leather bound book, the daily stoke leather bound book. We've got action guides, we've got digital courses, there's the daily stoke life membership. We've got signed personalized additions of all my books, awesome stuff like that for you or for someone in your life Check that out at dailystod.com slash gift guide

Hey, it's Ryan welcome to another Sunday episode of the Daily Stoded Podcast I still remember the very first public talk I ever gave as an author. It was in Brazil in 2012. It was not good. I'm sure it's on the internet somewhere, but I really struggled with. I was nervous. I was not confident. Didn't know exactly what I wanted to say, but I've now given literally hundreds, possibly thousands.

I think it's more like hundreds. It's definitely more like hundreds. Talks all over the world. I was even supposed to give a talk to Antarctica a few years ago that fell through, but if I had that, I think that would put me on every continent or close to, I think that would be every continent. Anyways, it's been a joy of mine to talk about

stuicism to all sorts of different crowds, from NBA locker rooms to military bases to hedge fund boardrooms to nonprofits, even schools. It's been a joy of mine. I learn a lot, you know, giving the talks, seeing what the audience work. But anyways, here in today's episode, it's a collection of some of my most popular talks, viral moments from talks here there that have been posted on the internet. And yeah, it's been fun. I hope you like it. I hope there are some lessons here that will help you apply stosism in your actual life. And hey, if you want to have me come talk to one of your groups, you can check out my website, RyanHoliday.net, and

there is the speaking info there. Sadly over the last two years, most talks have gone virtual, which has been cool obviously to keep people safe and not having to travel far away from home. I've definitely appreciated that, but I do miss the rush of being in front of an audience going to cool places, meeting cool people. One day that will be back, but for now, this video will have to suffice. Here's some of the best, most viral moments from my talks about stoicism

for your Sunday morning afternoon or wherever you happen to be in the world. It begins with getting up early. On my farm, I like to wake up early. I don't have an alarm clock. My kids are my alarm clock. They get up insanely early, but I'm up, right? And I never, ever in my life, have regretted

getting up early. It's been hard in the moment. I get that. Mark's to really see even talks and meditations. He goes, I don't want to get up. And he says, why not? This is a conversation with himself. He says, it's so warm here, right?

And he says, but is this what you were put on this planet to do to huddle under the covers and stay warm? Because no, get up and do what you were meant to do, right? So I've never regretted getting up early. I'm always glad after that I did it. The hard part is actually doing it. But I wake up early and in these moments before other people, before the obligations, before the interruptions,

before the distractions, you are free. It is quiet. You're in control. You don't have to be anywhere. You don't have to do anything. You are still. These mornings are so important. The writer Tony Morrison talks about how, as she was starting as a writer, she had a job

in publishing, but she had to find time to actually do her writing. She couldn't do it in the afternoon when she was fried and tired. She couldn't do it at night after she'd just gone through an exhausting day. She had to get up early. She said she would get up at around 4 a.m. And it became this ritual of writing. She needed to be mid sentence, mid paragraph,

whatever it was as the sun came up. Watching this transition from darkness to light was the sort of magical sacred time that she did what she needed to do. Right? And so the mornings to me are really important. How you start the day determines how successful the day is going to be. And then if you stack these on top of each other, this is where you're going to be successful. Right? So I get up early, I do my work. We'll talk a little bit more about this, but I get up early, I want to own the morning. And of course, not everyone's a morning person.

As I said, Mark's really not a morning person. That's not the point. If you're having trouble getting up early, if you're not a morning person, I do have a magical secret, a really easy strategy that will help you get up earlier better. And it's actually the title of a book I like to read to my kids, which is, go the fuck to sleep.

The secret to waking up early in the morning is going to bed early, right? People, well, I can't wake up early. And then it's like, well, what's your evening routine, right? So part of the morning routine is about the evening routine. Wrap up the evening correctly. You start the day properly. I think one of the things I found myself doing during the pandemic, you're exhausted, you're tired, you sit down

on the couch, you feel like I can't do anything, but just sit here and scroll on my phone, or sit here and watch Netflix. That is precisely when you have to have the discipline and the willpower to get up, go in your bedroom and go to fuck to sleep, right? When you're tired, the solution is to go to sleep, not to sit there and veg out. So this is philosophy for doers. This is philosophy. Marcus Aurelius is the most powerful man in the world in his own time. He's the emperor of Rome. And every night he practices stoic philosophy. He sits down and he writes notes to himself about how to be a better person.

And that works, survives to us in a book called Meditations. And I was introduced to Meditations. I was about 19 years old. This is right before I dropped out of college. I had to buy it on Amazon. As you can see here, this is not working. Long before the days of Amazon Prime, I had to buy a few other books and wait several days

for it to arrive. And as I did, I tore this book apart. It's what the economist Tyler Cowan would call a quake book. It shakes everything that I think that I know about the world. Now admittedly, I'm 19 years old, so it's not a whole hell of a lot. But it shakes everything to the core for me. And really, actually, this is a picture of me

reading meditations after the next web conference here in 2013. I went to Rome. This is me on the Appian Way where Marcus would have come to and from the city. And really, it's a single passage in this book that has the most resonance for me. And I'll show that to you now. He's saying, are actions may be impeded,

but there can be no impeding our intentions or dispositions because we can accommodate and adapt. The mind adapts and converts to its own purposes, the obstacle to our acting. And then he concludes with the maxim that I've tried to live my life by. He says, the impediment to action advances action What stands in the way becomes the way and so this is the critical tentative stoicism

Essentially in any and every situation no matter how bad or seemingly undesirable it is we have the opportunity to practice a virtue and and virtues a bit loaded so we'll replace that with excellence everything that happens to us is a chance to practice excellence. And this is, I think, best illustrated by a quote from Andy Grove, who's one of the CEOs of Intel, he's saying, bad companies are destroyed by crisis. Good companies survive them. Great companies are improved by them.

The stoics say over and over again, we don't control what happens to us. We control how we respond. And so we can always respond well. We can always respond with excellence. And we can turn this obstacle into an opportunity. And that's what I ultimately sat down and wrote a book about. This is how I've tried to approach my entrepreneurial ventures.

That's how I try to approach my writing as a person who wakes up every day and struggles to try to be better at something. It's always harder than you expect. There are always more difficulties than you would want there to be, but we have to learn how to love that. The Stokes have this concept of a more botty, which really just translates to a love of fate. It means that instead of fighting the things that happen, instead of resenting the things that happen, we say, ah, this is wonderful.

This isn't something I have to put up with. It's something I get to do, right, Mark Sirrelius? It's not unfortunate that this happened. It's fortunate that it happened to me. And in fact, Mark is sort of talking about this idea of a Morafati, says that, you know, what you throw in front of a fire, you throw on top of a fire becomes fuel for that fire. He says it turns it all into flame and brightness, turns it into heat, it uses it as fuel.

That was actually one of my favorite pieces of advice that I got early on as a writer. It's like, look, this is going to be hard. You're going to screw up. Things are not going to go your way. Life is going to be hard. You're going to screw up. Things are not going to go your way. Life is going to happen to you. But the good news is all that stuff is fuel. It's all material. You can transform it into art.

You can transform it into connection. You can transform it into sentences and books and whatever it is that you make. But it's not just writing that that's true for. It's all fields, right? If we didn't have our experiences, we wouldn't be able to have the insights, the connections, the ideas that allow us to move forward as creators and leaders. So we need this stuff to happen. And instead of resenting it, instead of running from it, we want to absorb it.

We want to want to turn it into flame and brightness. But think about what Mark is just saying, saying what you throw on top of a fire is fuel for the fire, it consumes it. Except that's not strictly true, right? If the fire is weak, if the fire is going out, if the embers are growing cold, what you throw on top of the fire can put that fire out. So you have to cultivate this discipline of the will, this commitment, this tribe, this passion, this fire.

And that's what allows you to transform the negative things, the adversity into opportunity, into fuel, into advantages, right? That's what we're trying to cultivate. And when you look at the greats of history, that's what they do. They take the worst things that have ever happened to them and they transform it. Malcolm Little goes to jail, a criminal he emerges from jail as Malcolm X is time in prison Transforms him. You could argue the same is true for Nelson Mandela. The same is true for so many people that Something happens to them. The thing that they never would have wanted to happen. The thing they fought from happening

And then they're able instead of resenting it instead of fighting it instead of waiting for it to be over They embrace it. They use it, they are transformed by it. The Bahamas What if you could live in a penthouse above the crystal clear ocean working during the day and partying at night with your best friends and have it be 100% paid for? FTX Founder Sam Bankman Freed lived that dream life, but it was all funded with other people's money, but he allegedly stole. Many thought Sam Bankman Freed was changing the game as he graced the pages of Forbes and

Vanity Fair. Some involved in crypto saw him as a breath of fresh air, from the usual Wall Street buffs with his casual dress and ability to play League of Legends during boardroom meetings. But in less than a year, his exchange would collapse. An SPF would find himself in a jail cell, with tens of thousands of investors blaming him for their crypto losses. From Bloomberg and Wondering, comes Spellcaster, a new six-part docu-series about the meteoric rise and spectacular fall of FTX, and its founder, Sam Beckman-Freed. Follow Spellcaster wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to episodes ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. It's easy to think about other people's ego and you can spot that pretty easy and you know when people's ego is holding them back. But where does your ego hold you back? That's what I want you to think about, right? What is ego preventing you from learning or doing? Where are you making decisions out of ego and how is that causing problems for you? A pictetus, one of the stoic philosophers, I think he encapsulates where it egos

really holds his back. It says, it's impossible for you to learn that which you think you already know, right? If you think you're as good as you can be, you're right, because you can't get any better, right? If you think you know as good as you can be, you're right because you can't get any better. If you think you know everything, you're right because nobody can teach you anything. And so what we actually find is that the truly great in sports, in business, in life, in literature, what they're actually defined by is this incredible humility, this hunger to learn.

They are perpetual students of their craft, right? Ralph Waldo Emerson, every person that you meet is better than you in something, and that's what you want to focus on. There's a great physicist, and he was saying, look, the more I learned about physics, the more I found out that I didn't know. What he said, as your island of knowledge grows,

so does the shoreline of ignorance. As you get better, as you're in this league, a longer amount of time, as you go from playing to coaching, or playing to announcing, or playing to business, what you're constantly going to be exposed to is all the things that you didn't even know. You didn't know. So if you're the kind of person who reacts negatively to that, like if you didn't even know, you didn't know. And so if you're the kind of person who reacts negatively to that, like if you don't know something, you stick your head in the sand, you get defensive, you get turned off, you're not gonna get any better.

But if you're the kind of person that likes being a student that's perpetually obsessed with learning and getting better and sees it is actually confident enough to say, I don't know, right? I don't know. Tell me about it, right? I find myself all the time people ask me a question about something because I don't want to admit, I don't know about it. I pretend that I know and then they skip over teaching me about that thing, right? And so if you think you know everything,

you don't get any better. And this is where Ego tears us apart. Ego also prevents us from collaborating effectively with other people. Pat Riley talks about the disease of me, how it tears teams apart. And Cleveland, the city of Cleveland is a great example of this, right? How many championships did LeBron James and Kyrie Irving leave on the table because they couldn't get along, right? Shack and Kobe, it's the same thing. Michael Jordan, you know, incapable of getting along with his teammates because he couldn't, these great people can't understand

that not everyone is wired just like them. They can't understand their motivations. They can't understand that different people are needing and wanting different things. They live in a world other than your own bubble, right? Kyrier, having such a sad example of this, right? He actually didn't want LeBron to come back to Cleveland.

Wrap your head around that. The best player, maybe in the history of your game, wants to come home and bring a championship to your city, and he says, no, but now I'm not going to be the number one guy on the team anymore. Kind of bullshit is that, right? And the same thing ends up happening to him when he goes to Boston. And look, the same thing's going to happen to him in Brooklyn if you can't figure out how to keep this ego in check.

But the bronze not blameless in this either, right? It doesn't occur to LeBron that this had been Kyrie's team and that Kyrie wasn't hadn't made as much money as him and that Kyrie wasn't as famous as him and that Kyrie was, you know, not getting the same special treatment as LeBron. It totally catches LeBron by surprise when Kyrie demands to be traded, right? And this is ego on both sides. It's teammates living so much in their own bubble, so much in their own head, so ignorant of what other people are going through, what other people want in need,

that they leave wins on the table. So the disease of me, it's not just costly, and it makes us miserable. It does make us miserable. But it tears teams apart, right? And if you think back even again to the Bible, the story of David and Goliath is ultimately a story of ego first confidence, right? Goliath thinks he's invincible. No one can beat me. Look how big I am. No one's beaten me before.

Obviously, I'm unbeatable. David hears the challenge from Goli, and he says, I think I can do that. But I'm small. I don't have the advantages that Goliath has. And this is why he fishes a few stones from the river. And he attacks Goliath in a surprise. He hits him with a stone with his sling. And then this is a famous painting of the story. He cuts off Goliath's head with his own sword,

but engraved here on the hill is the acronym HOCS, which stands for Humility Kills Pride. This is what, this is the timeless cycle in prize fighting. The underdog beats the overconfident champion, becomes the champion, becomes overconfident, becomes e champion becomes overconfident becomes egotistical stops training stops getting better and then boom they're beaten by a younger version of themselves right that's the cycle that's what ego does so confidence and ego isn't the same thing confidence is an understanding of

our strength but also an awareness of where we're weak, of where we need to get better. Ego is this sort of delusional sense that we have no weaknesses and we have unlimited strengths. And so we see in philosophy, there's no ancient philosophical school or religion that says, Ego is great, we need more ego. Ego is the key to happiness, right? They all say the opposite for a reason. And then that leads us into the last lesson I wanted to talk with you guys about. This is the idea of an inner scorecard, right? How do you measure success? How do you actually determine what success is for you, right?

Is it winning? Is it making lots of money? Or is it being the best version of yourself, right? Warren Buffett. Super rich, super successful by any external scorecard, right? Any external measure. He's one of the best investors and financiers to ever live, right? And yet, he's saying that it's more important to live by an inner scorecard than an outer scorecard. But this is a picture of Nick Saven, ecstatically raising a national championship trophy.

How is he unhappy in this moment, right? When I spoke to Alabama a couple years ago, he and I talked about this. He was saying that at the reason he can sometimes look unhappy when they're up by 45 points or when they just wanna championship, is that he's holding himself and the team to a higher standard than just winning, right? John Wooden said the same thing.

He's like, look, what matters is, did we do in a game, what we set out to do in practice? Whether we win or lose is secondary to that So if they if you lose, but you did everything right, right? That's okay, but if you win on a fluke or because the other team blew it and you did everything wrong That you don't get to you don't get to give yourself credit for that success And this is what this idea of an inner scorecard, versus an outer scorecard,

what the one of the ways you keep ego from creeping in is that you hold yourself to a higher standard than winning or losing, right? So I've got bad news. You're all gonna die. Every single one of us in this room is going to die. There's no exceptions to this rule. I'm not known for my predictions,

but I feel pretty confident about this one. It's a fact. In fact, death is the one prophecy that has never failed. And I'm not disputing the fact that there have been all sorts of amazing amazing important breakthroughs in technology and in medicine. Here's a graph of life expectancy even over just the last couple hundred years. It's definitely going in the right direction, right? We're living longer than ever before. This is wonderful. I would never deny that.

But the heartbreaking fact remains that of everyone who has been born, the mortality rate remains at a steady 100%. And it's not going anywhere anytime soon. It's just a reality of life. Everyone that's born dies. In 1569, a French nobleman named Michelle de Montenna was thrown off a galloping horse. It was a horrendous accident and as he lay sort of broken and bloodied on the ground, he was more or less given up for dead. His friends carried his limp body back to

his house and he said he could feel life sort of dancing on the tip of his lips. It was coming in and out of consciousness. And he actually remembered feeling that if he went to sleep, he would never wake up. He was, his grasp on life was, was that tenuous. And somehow, Montenna does survive. He, he lives. And this experience fundamentally changes him. He'd sort of idled through life up until this point. He'd mostly done what other people wanted him to do, wasn't particularly motivated.

And this experience, this brush with that, this reminder of his mortality, it energizes him. In a few years later, he publishes his first book of essays. He actually invents the essay. He becomes one of Europe's most celebrated writers. He becomes a confidant of the king. He serves as a diplomat. He travels all over Europe.

And he even becomes mayor of his hometown. It's a fascinating sort of rejuvenation of his life. And in a way, it's kind of a timeless story, right? A brush with death changes life. We hear about someone who finds out they have cancer and they quit their job and they dedicate themselves to some cause. And it's the turning point in their lives.

We hear about someone who finds out they don't have long to live and it reminds them to reach out and reconnect with someone It rejuvenates their relationships and sometimes I think we even think about what we would do if we found out That we had a short time to live if we were in the doctor's office and the doctor came in and he put his hand on our shoulder And he said, you know, you have cancer. You only have a short time to live Well, the interesting thing is we do have cancer, right? We do only have a short time to live. The prognosis was terminal the day you were born, right? And that's the bad news, right? The bad news is

you're going to die. The good news is, now that I've reminded you of this fact, now that we're here talking about this uncomfortable truth, you have a choice, right? How will you live? How will you respond? Who will you be knowing that your death is eventual reality, right? And this is what we're gonna talk about today. This is what I'm thinking about.

And what's so interesting is that in the modern world, we can lose track of that connection to death, right? In the ancient world, death was a fundamental reality. It was a direct part of people's day-to-day experiences. The plague could come and decimate an entire town or an entire country. A war could break out, and everyone might lose a family member, or they might have to fight it

themselves and witness death up close. Death wasn't always so antiseptic and distant, right? We were familiarized. People used to die in their own homes. They had this experience, this day-to-day contact with death. But what's interesting is even though death was way more familiar to people not long ago, there are, they built forms of reminding themselves of this fact, pretty constantly. There's actually two genres of art. There's one, which is Vanitas. And if you've probably seen paintings like this,

or you might notice this next time you walk through a museum, like half the paintings all have a skull on them for some reason. This is a reminder of mortality. That's what that skull was supposed to represent. This is a famous Vanitas painting. It's time in the hourglass, it's life, which is the flower and then the skull is the death. And you see this in countless paintings

across history. You see it on tombstones and you see it in buildings. What's interesting even is there's another genre called the Dance Macabre, the Dance of Death. And there's almost these comical paintings showing skeletons reminding people that they're mortal. There's a church in Prague that's actually decorated with the bones of the priests and the monks who serve the church.

Decor decorated and scattered throughout Europe is something called the cadaver, they're called cadaver tombs, and they show what the person looked like in life, and then they show what they look like now. And often they have this Latin inscription on them, which just means like, what I am soon you will be. This morning I went to St. Stephen's Basilica,

and you can see a mummified hand. It's 1,000 years old. This is the same sort of reminder. This is why we're supposed to see these things. Montagne actually liked to play a drinking game with his friends. They would hold up a painting or a picture of a skeleton, and they would say, drink and be married for when you are dead. You will look like this.

So inspired by their example, a few years ago, I started carrying a coin in my pocket. It's got the three symbols from that first painting I showed you. And on the front, it says, Memento Mori. Remember death. And on the back, it has a quote from Marcus Aurelius who said, you could leave life right now. And actually, the full quote is, you could leave life right now, let that determine what you do and say and think.

Good leave life right now. And it's true, right? Even with all the medical advancements that we have, even with all the technological breakthroughs that hopefully lie in the future, this won't help you if you get hit by a bus, right? This won't help you if you get drafted to fight in a war. This won't help you if you go out for a walk

and your heart just decides to give up, right? These things happen. So I'm interested in how we can use this. I think you should take the thing that you're most afraid of, that you're most intimidated by, that's the most uncertain and uncomfortable, and you should look at it. You should stare at it. You should take these obstacles that we face in life and use them to your advantage. That's what this idea of the obstacle is the way. Means, it's how do we find a way forward through the thing that is most scary and most uncertain. And the good news is actually, when you stare and think about death, that it can have an energizing effect, right?

When you know that your life is short or potentially uncertain, it concentrates your mind. It gives you focus. It gives you priorities. A key part of my morning routine, getting centered, getting to that place of stillness is my journaling practice. I've done this for a long time, but I really locked into it in the pandemic because it was overwhelming.

We have so much going on, so many conflicting feelings, scared, nervous, worried, what about this, what about that, all the things you have to do, all the things you're frustrated about, all the things that are unfair, the journal is the perfect place for that. I use a bunch of different journals, I have a journal, it's weird, I know I do my own journal,

but there's a question that I ask each day, I answer the question, I have a gratitude journal I do, there's a really good journal. I love called the One Line a Day Journal. So if you're people like, where do I start? I can't get started, I try to start, it's not worked. I love this one because everyone can do one sentence a day. Right, and what I love about this journal

is I'm now five years into it and there's five slots on each page. So I can see where I was a year ago, two years ago, three years ago, four years ago. You can see it's this awesome way to track progress to track your moods. You can see how you have patterns. But the point is, it doesn't matter how you journal. It doesn't matter if you do it on your phone, it doesn't matter if you do it on a note card, it doesn't matter if you do it in a book. I don't really care. But the idea is take some time to sit down and reflect and

explore your thoughts. Right? I do it in a lot of different ways. I do it when I'm I don't really care, but the idea is take some time to sit down and reflect and explore your thoughts. I do it in a lot of different ways. I do it when I'm traveling. I do it at home, but I always sit down and I do this journaling. Even my work itself, I do on note cards. I'm always writing stuff down. Work it out on a piece of paper.

There's something special about that, which goes to something I wanted to point out, which really struck me. I'm sure many of you read Anne Frank's diary when you were in school, you've heard of it. You think about how insanely stressful and scary that would be, it'd be insanely stressful and scary to be a 13 year old girl, let alone locked in an attic with your parents

and another family worried about, worried about what's happening in the world, but she has this great line in her diary, I think about she says, paper is more patient than people. Instead of vomiting your thoughts on your employees, on your friends, on your coworkers, on the driver in front of you who's taking forever,

put it on the page. The page is forgiving and patient, it keeps secrets, doesn't care, doesn't care if you're contradicting yourself, it doesn't care if you're being a baby, it doesn't care if you're whining, just put it down on the page, the page will help. And I love the idea of having distance between you and your thoughts. Part of the reasons we're worked up and anxious and stressed is that we're trapped in our heads with all this stuff, right?

And you get it out and you see it from a distance and you go, I don't even agree with my own thoughts here, right? I don't even like this. I'm not going to choose to carry this around. So putting it down on the page is just really important. These are some of Kennedy's doodles during the Cuban Missile Crisis. He was right notes to himself thoughts, but you can see his sort of brain storming working out of the stressful situation he's in.

And this is what journaling can help us do. I was in Milan a few years ago, and I got to see some of Da Vinci's journals, right? And I think it's also important, just as a creativity exercise, right? The journaling, the working, the sketching out, this is what creates the work, right? You can't have the last supper without the journals, right? The journaling, the working, the sketching out, this is what creates the work, right? You can't have the last supper without the journals, right? So the idea of exploring, keeping a commonplace book, a place you collect ideas, you work out your thoughts, this

is a really important exercise. I think discipline is something you accumulate, it's something you build on. I'm actually in the middle of doing this series of four books. So the cardinal virtues, Christianity and Instauses are courage, temperance, which is self-discipline, justice and wisdom. And I think these four ideas are sort of the framework, actually cardinal comes from the Latin word, cardos, which means hinge. The like success life of being good person hinges on courage, self-discipline, justice, and wisdom.

So I sort of see them as being related to that. But I find that chaos is way more stressful and harder than order and discipline. So by creating structure, and again, as we move into a more remote sort of work world, or where things are in flux or chaos, if the discipline is not being imposed on you, it's going to have to come from you. So it's this internal thing that you have to work on. And I think it's good, but it's just a challenge. And I've seen so many people struggle to adjust

to no one's telling me what to do. This is so wonderful. And then the break they're like, oh shit, I have to tell myself what to do. Really think about like, what do you want your life to look like? What do you want a day in your life to look like? Now a lot of times we just have these kind of vague ideas of what success is and it's usually more responsibility, more money, more recognition. But if you haven't really thought about what you want your data look like, it's hard to

evaluate opportunities as they go. And so I found increasingly I enjoyed writing, I enjoyed thinking, I enjoyed having more autonomy over my life, all those things. And I hope this isn't a bad thing to tell a bunch of people out of a company. But I just was really thinking about what I wanted my life to look like. And that gave me a lot of clarity about the decisions that I needed to make. Because oftentimes, again, we unthinkingly say yes because somebody offered, because it sounds cool, because it is more lucrative.

People do this all the time. They really like their job, but then someone wants to post them to a company, and the only improvement is that it's more money. And it's like, what are you going to do with that money? Maybe you actually really like the freedom or structure that you have in this or it's wonderful.

They only have a 10 minute commute. And now you're going to have an hour of commute. We don't really think about how these things fit in the larger context of our life and the sort of stillness or happiness or productivity we need to be great at what we do. And so I think we evaluate decisions or opportunities on the wrong set of criteria. My new book Courage is Calling is now officially a New York Times bestseller. Thank you so much to everyone who supported the book. It was literally and figuratively overwhelming. We signed almost 10,000 copies of the book, which just, you know, it hit me right here.

And I appreciate it so much. If you haven't picked up a copy or you want to pick up a sign copy as a gift, please do. You can get your copy at dailystoward.com. Slash Courage is calling, or you can just go to store. That dailystowic.com. Hey, Prime Members, you can listen to the daily Stoic early and add free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and add free

with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts. Celebrity feuds are high stakes. You never know if you're just gonna end up on page six or Du Moir or in court. I'm Matt Bellesai. And I'm Sydney Battle, and we're the host of Wondery's new podcast, Disantel, where each episode we unpack a different iconic celebrity

feud. From the build up, why it happened, and the repercussions. What does our obsession with these feud say about us? The first season is packed with some pretty messy pop culture drama, but none is drawn out in personal as Britney and Jamie Lynn Spears. When Britney's fans form the free Britney movement dedicated to fraying her from the infamous conservatorship, Jamie Lynn's lack of public support. It angered some fans. A lot of them. It's a story of two young women who had their choices taken away from them by their controlling parents, but took their anger out on each other.

And it's about a movement to save a superstar, which set its sights upon anyone who failed to fight for Britney. Follow dis and tell wherever you get your podcast. You can listen ad free on Amazon music or the Wunder app. upon anyone who failed to fight for Brittany. Follow Dissentel wherever you get your podcast. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wondering App.