The Daily Stoic - BONUS: How Rory McIlroy Fueled His Comeback with Stoicism

Episode Date: April 20, 2025

Last week, Rory McIlroy won the 2025 Masters Tournament, securing his first Green Jacket and completing the career Grand Slam. Nearly five years earlier, The Golf Channel profiled Ryan in a feature on Rory McIlroy, showing how 'The Obstacle Is The Way' helped Rory reset his mindset and fuel what would become one of the most remarkable comebacks in golf history.🎥 Watch this on The Daily Stoic YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsegDV9aZvk📕 Pick up a copy of the 10th Anniversary Edition of The Obstacle Is the Way by Ryan Holiday at dailystoic.com/obstacle🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast🎥 Watch top moments from The Daily Stoic Podcast on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/📱 Follow us:  Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to the daily stoic early and ad free right now. Just join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. The Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake presents The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Filled with breathtaking battles, mythical creatures, and unforgettable characters. This new adaptation of C.S. Lewis's classic will mesmerize the whole family. Don't miss this epic adventure, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, this season at the Shaw Festival. For tickets, go to shawfest.com. 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 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 DailyStelic.com. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to a bonus episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. This is a bonus episode because it was a bonus surprise. Very cool thing that happened last week.

So if you were watching the Masters, Rory McElroy has this incredible victory, not just over the competition, but over himself. He's been trying almost for a decade to finish up his Grand Slam. Incredible, it didn't look like he was gonna be able to do it and then just out of nowhere, he pulls it off. And so many people sent me this clip.

So right after he wins, the Masters coverage cuts to this discussion. And let me just sent me this clip. So right after he wins, the master's coverage cuts to this discussion. And let me just play this for you. A few years ago, I sat with Rory. I did a story. He had been doing a deep dive reading the Ryan Holiday books about the Stoics, the Epictetus, the ancient Greek philosopher.

And this is a quote from Epictetus. And Rory was really into this. It's not what happens to you, but how you react to it, that matters. That was it today. Which, you know, again, not expecting it was cool. My dad's a big golfer, so he saw and sent it to me. Because of that clip and because of the win, I wanted to actually show you some of this larger context

of how Rory had come to stoicism. Almost five years ago, the Golf Channel profiled me in that piece about Rory and his reading habits. I thought I would just play that episode for you. You can watch a video of it if you want. I'll link to it in the show notes. It's just, you know, incredible. Obviously the person who did all the work here is Rory.

I just love the idea though of the stoics holding up under all different sorts of pressure, working for people in all different lines of work. And I don't know, maybe there's something in here that applies to you in some sort of internal or external obstacle you are trying to get over. Maybe it's, maybe it will inspire you to tackle some kind of project. I wanted to throw this bonus episode together in honor of that incredible.

Feet. If you notice, I actually wrote about Rory a little bit in right thing right now. You know, part of what I think has been so impressive is that he hasn't just been able to focus on golf. He spent the last couple of years sort of fighting for the integrity of the PGA Tour against the sort of threat of the live golf league where he turned down millions and millions and millions of dollars

because he thought it wasn't the right thing to do. And how does he get rewarded for that? Well, he basically gets screwed over and sort of hung out to dry. And so, you know, he was going through personal things. And then also it's just really hard to be elite at anything and to be elite at something for as long as he's been elite

and to be elite at a game as humbling as golf, you know, to not just give up and to call it. It's just an incredible feat of human performance. And I think, you know, the Stoics help us do things like that. So enjoy this bonus episode and I will talk to you all soon. Probably doesn't seem like golf and Stoicism have anything in common. And that's certainly not what I was thinking about when I was writing the book. So I was super surprised to hear that Rory McElroy, now the number one golfer in the

world, one of the highest earning golfers of all time, the best athletes in his sport, read both Obstacles the Way and Ego's the Enemy. And he actually said Obstacles, I think his favorite book. So the Golf Channel is here and they want to do a session where they sort of probe that I guess he got interviewed about it too so I'm a little nervous but it should be pretty cool it's so difficult to watch a nightmare day there's one word for it word is choking mentally it was a demolition of Rory McIlroy. When Rory McIlroy buckled

beneath the weight of expectations, the kind that come with a swing you can hang in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he turned not to a new coach for help, but to Epictetus, the ancient Greek philosopher known as a Stoic. What the Stoics believed is that we don't control what happens,

but we always control how we respond. Everything that happens to us in life is an opportunity to practice excellence or virtue. Ryan Holiday wrote, the obstacle is the way, the timeless art of turning trials into triumph. So in his quest to improve, Rory hit more than just golf balls. He hit the books. Just a journey of personal growth and development

and trying to be the best golfer I could be, be the best person I could be. The moment that you stop wanting to learn, that's not a great place to be. fundamentally the book is about how do you react. Golf is a game where because it's so mental, the reaction or the disposition you bring is most if if not all, of the battle. Oh, you're kidding. Yeah, that's a lack of concentration, a lack of poise.

Now he's in trouble. It might not be how you want it to go, but you still have a chance to be like your best self in that situation. Run it, gun it, chasing the crown. No chains, no rings to keep me down. It's forced me to embrace difficulty, embrace impediments in my way. I used to shy away, and now I don't seek out failure, but if it comes, I welcome it. No failure stung more than the 2019 Open

when the first round 79 brought both pain and a chance for growth. Sometimes you go out in the first round and you're trying to play your way into the golf tournament, and that's never really been in my nature. That's something that I'm going to try to improve on. It made me realize I need those failures to get to the point of winning four times, winning player of the year and all that. Rory McIlroy is a two-time FedEx Cup champion. The modern athlete must learn not only to deal with failure, and in this sport even the best will lose 95% of the time, but also shut out the noise. And with social media, it's never been louder.

With referendums, harsh judgments rendered every minute, refreshed and rehashed. That led Rory to another book, Digital Minimalism, by Cal Newport. Social media can be like poison for these deep-rooted human instincts we have. The people that you actually encounter are not a fair sample of the people out there in the world. Rory is reading these books on technology, he's reading books on stoicism because he realizes what happens between the years is a significant contributor to what actually happens on the course. One of the hardest things about the judgment, about the comments,

is learning not to read them. It's taken me a while to not read anything that's on Twitter or anything that might be said about me in a forum or online or media article. It's going to optimize for outrage. it's going to optimize for trolling, it's going to optimize for aggressive pushback because that's what keeps people's eyeballs on it. I have opinions of the people around me that I value but someone that's never met me and makes a comment or a judgment on a presumption of who they think I am or what they think I might be like.

I try to lock my phone in the bedside drawer for the weeks of majors and just do anything I can to just get away from that. The future of high-performance athletics is going to treat the smartphone and its role in the athlete's life just as importantly as weight routines, just as importantly as diets. And you think Rory is ahead of the curve on this? He's that type of athlete, yeah, looking for every edge he can get and I think we see it's working. Working in part by tuning out a world in which with one click you can hear the roaring chorus of the rarely satisfied, always in need of more. You move up in the FedEx Cup standings, this sort of changes your goals.

How do you assess looking ahead to 2020? What's next for you? We kind of unthinkingly ask people that and we don't really think about what it's implying. What it's implying is that what you've done is not enough. This can create a poverty in the sense that they're never satisfied, they're never happy. In his quest for a balanced existence, Rory's contemplated these profound subjects,

even the heavy garment of fame. The more time I've spent in the spotlight, the more uncomfortable I've become with it. Rory McIlroy had the spotlight of sports on him, bigger than it's ever been. I can't imagine how he feels. I used to love the adulation, but now you crave that anonymity. That's an old idea considered by another Stoic, Marcus Aurelius. Marcus Aurelius says, you know, what is cheering, but the clacking of tongues?

What is clapping, but the smacking of hands? What he's trying to remind himself is that these things that maybe you wanted early on or you thought would be amazing are actually not that meaningful and what matters is the love of the process, the doing. Love what you do, not what it brings you. Progress, not perfection. Practice in golf, yes, but virtue as well. Books as part of the process. And ultimately, a purpose deeper

than shooting 65. It's a part of my life that I take very seriously and I want to make the most of but I have other purposes. I have responsibility to be a good husband, a role model to people that might want to emulate me. That's all a part of my purpose. Hey, thanks for watching Daily Stoke. If you want to learn more about stoicism, you can check out some of our other videos

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