The Daily Stoic - Do This. It’s Enough. | Ask Ds

Episode Date: February 15, 2024

As John Adams (detailed in David McCullough’s amazing biography) wrote in his own old age, “You are not singular in your suspicions that you know but little. The longer I live, the more I read, the more patiently I think, and the more anxiously inquire, the less I seem to know…” Yet, Adams, like Marcus, still found himself returning to a set of ageless, universal principles. They found themselves boiling things down to their essence, into real and practical ‘epithets for the self’ as Marcus called them. Adams came up with these three commands, which he passed down to his granddaughter Caroline: “Do justly. Love mercy. Walk humbly. This is enough…”P.S. “Summum Bonum” is a phrase from Cicero that means “The Highest Good,”which for the Stoics meant pursuing a life of virtue. “Just that you do the right thing,” Marcus reminds us, “the rest doesn’t matter.” In a world full of selfishness, corruption, and pain, we need that reminder now more than ever. It’s why we created the “Summum Bonum” medallion for you to carry around in your pocket and remember that no matter the circumstance, no matter how dire or desperate the situation, virtue is always the answer. Grab yours today!✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube   See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. Well, on Thursdays, we not only read the daily meditation, but we answer some questions from listeners and fellow Stoics. We're trying to apply this philosophy just as you are. Some of these come from my talks. Some of these come from Zoom sessions that we do with Daily Stoic Life members

or as part of the challenges. Some of them are from interactions I have on the street when there happen to be someone there recording. But thank you for listening and we hope this is of use to you. Do this, it's enough. Marcus Aurelius didn't just study philosophy when he was young. He didn't just pick a set of beliefs and stick with them.

No, to him philosophy was a lifelong study, a process that he committed to. That's why even as an old man, he was seen famously headed off to attend the lectures from sexist, the philosopher. And while this certainly made him quite educated and quite smart, we can also imagine something else happening after so many years of reading and discoursing

and meditating. What undoubtedly happened is that as he got older, the more he learned, the closer he came to understanding Socrates' humility, the sense that the more one learns, the less certain they are, they know. As John Adams, detailed in David McCullough's Amazing Biography, wrote in his own old age,

"'You are not singular in your suspicions "'that you know but little. "'The longer I live,' he said, "'the more I read, the more patiently I think, and the more anxiously I inquire, the less I seem to know." Yet Adams, like Marcus, still found himself returning to a set of ageless universal principles.

They found themselves boiling things down to their essence into real and practical epithets for the self, as Marcus called them. Adams himself came up with just three commands, which he passed on down to his granddaughter Caroline. Do justly, love mercy, walk humbly. This is enough, he said. My task is to be good, Marcus Aurelius wrote.

The more you learn, the longer you live, the more you will understand that that is your job too. And doing that is more than enough. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another Thursday episode of The Daily Stoke Clock. If you listened to my Sunday episode back in the fall, I had this crazy couple of days where I flew down to LA. I interviewed Arnold Schwarzenegger.

I drove up to Ojai, California. I had dinner with a former podcast guest and friend, the comedian Pete Holmes. Then I did a talk for this amazing group called Mastermind Talks. Jason Gainard and his wife, Candace, I have known them since they started Mastermind Talks. I went before my book, Roth Hacker Marketing came out for the first time. I went the second time when obstacle is coming out. I've been many times over the years. He's been awesome to me.

So I did a long Q&A there, which is what I'm gonna bring you a chunk of today. Then I went back down, did an event with Robert Green, flew home for the night, then flew to Seattle to do another event with Robert Green. So I told that whole story about how you sort of stay, stoic and calm amidst a crazy, overwhelming travel schedule. So that was me talking about it. If you want to hear me in the middle of that craziness, that's where I am in today's episode.

I did about an hour, hour and a half Q&A with a bunch of these interesting entrepreneurs from all over the world. Some are authors, some are in e-commerce, some are influencers, some are fitness people, some are some run call centers. They're just all sorts of interesting entrepreneurs, really nice folks. And if you haven't been to Mastermind Talks, you should. I think they're taking a break this year, but I'm sure you can get on the wait list for next year, everything about coming. Thanks can get on the wait list for next year. Everything about coming.

Thanks to Jason for sending over the audio this and thanks to everyone in the audience who asked some very interesting questions. I'll be bringing pieces of that over the next couple months, but I'll give you a chunk of some stoic themed questions right now. I remember very specifically I rented an Airbnb in Santa Barbara. I was driving from San Francisco to Los Angeles. I just sold my first book and I've been working on it and I just needed a break. I needed to get away and I needed to have some quiet time to write.

And that was one of the first Airbnb's I ever started with. And then when, when the book came out and did well, I bought my first house. I would rent that house out during South by Southwest and F1 and other events in Austin. Maybe you've been in a similar place. You've stayed in an Airbnb and you thought to yourself, this actually seems pretty doable. Maybe my place could be an Airbnb. You could rent a spare bedroom.

You could rent your whole place when you're away. Maybe you're planning a ski getaway this winter or you're planning on going somewhere warmer. While you're away, you could Airbnb your home and make some extra money towards the trip. Whether you use the extra money to cover some bills or for something a little more fun, your home could be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.ca. Hi Ryan. Great talk today.

And what I was hearing throughout a lot of it was a message of authenticity and just kind of being like your weird authentic self. And I also heard you talk about partnership, revenue, you know, and advertising income as an influencer myself, I realize that that's a great deal of how you survive as an influencer, how you pay your bills, or at least how you pay your employees bills. And affiliates and partners a lot of times don't like the weird, like they want to know that I'm going to write, for example, or do a video or a podcast about biohacking or nutrition or something like that. And when I wake up in the morning

and I just want to be my weird authentic self, and I think, gosh, I can do the Kevin Kelly 1,000 True Fans thing. And if I talk about whatever I want to talk about, people are going to come along for the ride. Sure. So I'll talk about God or education or family or parenting or freaking music or pickleball.

And I've started to do that a lot more over like the past year and a half. And partnership revenue has plummeted. Affiliates are dropping like flies. Like all the people that would normally want me to be an influencer are running for the hills because I'm being my weird authentic self. And whereas I don't care because like I can live on like 60,000 bucks a year like a king in Spokane, Washington. I've got like 27 employees and my partnerships manager

is like driving home in the evening to be with her baby and her two year old thinking, gosh, how am I gonna feed my family tonight? Cause Ben's talking about like pickleball instead of what this partner expects him to be talking about like pickleball instead of, you know, what this partner expects him to be talking about. Like, have you ever thought about how to deal with that? Yeah, it's a it's a tension for sure.

I mean, I try to go like, do I own the platform or does the platform own me? Right. And so it would be a shame if success, you know, creating whatever it is that you do, it's a shame that success is like you then don't get to say what you want or what gets you excited. At the same time, if you drive the audience away, then you know that doesn't work either. So, you know you sort of, you understand what the audience

is interested in, but you can't be captured by the audience. You also can't, you know, there's a, I think that's what he was saying in the Iron Maiden quote I was talking about. So you also have a deal with the audience. They're like, this is what we came here for. And so I think there's a tension. I don't know, like, the perfect way to do it. I try to create additional channels where I talk about the thing. So it's like parenting is obviously a big part of my life because I have kids. So if I hijacked daily Stoic and make it the Stoic parent, well, that's a little

self-absorbed because not everyone has kids and so they're like this isn't for me anymore. So I spun off a second thing. Like I have my personal socials, which a lot of people follow that that have also followed a data set, but not all of them. So I try to create separate channels, and then I go, what's the show we're putting on here? What's the show we're putting on here? What's the show we're putting on here? But I would say one thing about affiliates,

advertisers, et cetera, which I have found, is I try to think about, okay, I have this space at the bottom of the emails, there's the pre-roll or mid-roll stuff in the pocket, there's all this space, right? And that's clearly worth something to these people. They're not, they're buying a space for $100, they're clearly making more than $100

or they wouldn't be paying for it, right? So there's a multiple, right? That space is worth more than what people are paying for it, just the advertisers capturing that. And so one of the things that I got into earlier daily stove, not wanting to do a lot of advertising, is just making stuff that I thought the audience would be interested in,

and then using the space to sell my own things, right? So like we have challenge coins, and we have, of course, we have stuff that we make. And so it's like I sell the leftover inventory or obviously what you see with sub-stacks and these other platforms where the people are paying for the content itself and then, you know, they're subsidizing the people who are just getting it

for free. And so I think there's, I think if you create multiple revenue streams or ways of monetizing the stuff, then you have your first off harder to cancel or harder to You're more resilient if one kind of market crashes and then another spot. So I I think having that robust. This is also good Thank you so much for feeding us. Thank you. I want to ask you a question Every publisher and agent knows right now. You're bankable Thank you so much for feeding us. Thank you. Want to ask you a question? Every publisher and agent knows right now you're bankable.

So what was the thing that made the publisher, your very first book, say, yeah? Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, it was sort of a trendy of the moment thing. That's why they were excited about it. That's a bias of publishing, as they want like what's popular right now. I had a plan for how I was gonna segue from that of the moment popularity

to what I wanted to write about. But there was a couple things. I had a platform that it wasn't enormous, but I had like a small email list where people really liked my stuff. And then I also had a big network of other authors who were vouching for me. I've worked for all these different authors.

And so I had, if I didn't have a track record selling my own writing, I had a track record that I knew how to move books, right? And so showing that, hey, this person understands that just having an idea is like 20% of the thing the publisher is buying. They knew I could deliver a book because I've been a research assistant. They knew that I understood book marketing and they knew I understood marketing in general

and that I had people who would help me in that process. So showing that, yeah, you're not this sort of lone wolf that no one's heard of before, that you're like, hey, this is what I'm bringing with me. Hi. Hi. Question. So one of the things that really resonated with me in your talk was like playing the long game

and finding that blue ocean. But also I find like with finding the blue ocean, there's this moment of like, hey, while this is paradise, or also like, is this shark infested and everyone knew about it? And I just didn't know. So what is your process in grounding within yourself of like knowing you're playing the long game versus just being stubborn and like acting out of fear of like some cost? Right. Yeah. It could be that people have already, you know, checked that space out and it's a dead end. I think so so I found something interesting with Stoics.

So there were not very many books that, first off, the Stoics weren't selling particularly well and then there really weren't any books about Stoics and that were selling well. I saw it both as a space that, you know, having been so affected by the work, I knew it deserved a bigger audience. At the same time, I knew from whenever I tried to talk to people about it that it was like immediate disinterest. Like the word stoic in English is about as negative a connotation as you can get.

Philosophy is about as impractical and inaccessible to people as an academic concept could be, maybe other than physics. So I bumped into that wall a bunch of times. So I understood that the reason that it wasn't popular was because of these things. So when I went to write a book about stoicism, my first book was The Obscuse Away, the word stoic maybe appears like three times in that whole book. And most of those are at the end of the book. Like it's a book about solving problems through which stoic philosophy is a lens for doing it.

So it's not a book about stoic philosophy. It became one later when it fit into this sort of larger universe and then the thing was popular, but I understood that that's what it was up against. And every book that I've done since, I've started from that frame of reference, which is like number one, people don't like books. Number two, there are already a lot of books out there

that people do read, you know, like people don't read new books. So how do you get them to care about this thing? I understand that that's like a big uphill climb. So it's funny now that my books have worked, So how do you get them to care about this thing? Understanding that that's like a big uphill climb. So it's funny now that my books have worked, obviously, and I see the proposals, people are like, this is the next obstacle is the way. I've seen other people try to sort of get in that space.

And with few exceptions, most of the other books about stoke philosophy, ones written by smarter people than me, more qualified people than me, have not sold particularly well. And I would say largely, it's not that the books aren't good, some of them are quite good, it's that they're just assuming that people are interested in this topic. And actually the same sort of obstacles and reservations exist. And they don't, they just, like, I'm a nerd about philosophy, I would read all those books, but I am in a small minority.

And so I think a lot of times people see a big market and they go, no one's taken advantage of that. And they don't think of why it's been left fallow or ignored. And if you can sort of step out of your own skin and think about what people's hesitations have been, what are the impediments, like what are the barriers, and then whatever you're doing is designed to get over that. I think that's a really important way to break it.

You don't just go, oh, this is uninhabited. It's like it's uninhabited for a reason. And why do, how am I, how is it gonna go differently for me? differently for me. Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it and I'll see you next episode. Hey Prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic early and ad-free on Amazon Music, download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free with Wondery

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