The Daily Stoic - Dr. Nate Zinsser, Josh Peck, Annie Duke, Amy Morin, Paul Bloom, and Yung Pueblo on Building Better Habits

Episode Date: February 1, 2023

Ryan looks back on some of the best discussions of 2022 that he and his guests had about building better habits. Featuring Dr. Nate Zinsser on looking for the positive aspects of your life while maintaining objective awareness, Josh Peck on his journey getting sober, Annie Duke on the power of walking away from things that don’t align with your beliefs, Amy Morin on overcoming mentally challenging situations by gaining perspective, Paul Bloom on the importance of recognizing our own bias, and Yung Pueblo on why serving the common good is the most valuable metric to measure great work by.To develop better habits in your own life, check out Session 2 of the New Year New You Challenge on February 1st! Enroll now to secure your spot or gift it to a friend.✉️  Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check 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 Daily Stoic Podcast, where each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating, and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are, and also to find peace and wisdom in their actual lives.

But first, we've got a quick message from one of our sponsors. Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic podcast. It all comes down to habits, right? Aristotle said that virtue wasn't this thing that you had or you didn't, was a habit you practiced. And by practicing the habit, you became that thing or closer to embodying that thing. And that's what the stoics were working on. Marcus Arellis is writing the stuff down and practicing and talking about them.

That's what Stoicism was. It was a set of habits, a set of practices, a way of thinking and acting, so that in the little moments, so that in the big, big moments, our training shined through. But I'll get to today's episode, which is all about habits, all about personal development. We talk with Dr. Nate Zinser about how we build confidence. Talk to Amy Moran, whose book, 13 Things Mentally Strong People Don't Do. And then we talk to the poet, young Pueblo. We talk to Paul Bloom, the psychologist, about recognizing our own bias. We talk to my friend Annie Duke, whose new book on quitting, I recommend

quite heartily. We talked to Josh Peck, whose new book Happy People Are Annoying about making the next right decision, some of the lessons he learned in sobriety. I think we're going to like this compilation. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wondery's podcast business wars. And in our new season, Walmart must fight off target, the new discounter that's both savvy and fashion forward. Listen to business wars on Amazon music or wherever you get your podcasts. I'll give you an expression I have said several times and tell me if you agree, disagree, or how it drives with the ideas in the book. But I've come to say, I don't believe in myself. I have evidence.

I really like that. It drives beautifully with what I'm saying in the book. I have evidence because I've looked for it. I haven't left my attitude, my confidence up to chance. I have deliberately sought out that evidence as I carefully filter the memories from my past, and as I carefully filter the way that I talk to myself. So all that evidence builds up what I referred to as a mental bank account. And that helps me walk into a game, a class, a test, a performance of any sort, with a pretty good sense of certainty that I'm going to do it right. Yeah, because to me confidence is not this sort of... Confidence is not just, oh, I believe in

myself. Confidence, to me, is a knowledge of what one is capable of doing. And that is different to me than just faith, which one might take without evidence. Confidence to me means like I know because as you said I did the inner work but I've also seen the demonstrable evidence of what I'm capable of. Yes I think it involves a little bit of both of those things faith you know if you look at it as evidence of things unseen, okay? I maybe haven't seen all the actual possibilities, but I've sure seen enough of them, you know? And so I really like the idea of looking for evidence, okay? Rather than, as you put it, you know, sort of self-belief in a vacuum.

Everybody. Because your mother said you're special. Yes, yeah, mom said I'm special, henceforth, it must be true. Boy, if that was the case, I wouldn't have a job because just about everybody's mom, you know, in certain, you know, I suppose there's some rare exceptions, unfortunately. Pretty much everybody's mom said,

hey kid, you're damn special. You know, you're great. Unfortunately, that in and of itself is very insufficient to the demands and situations of the real world that we're living in. Right, there's attention. And the other thing I like to say is, if you don't believe you can do something, chances are you won't be able to do it. But just because you believe you can do something doesn't mean you're going to be able to do it. So where I think confidence and belief is tricky is like, how do you believe or know, have confidence you can do something that you've never done before.

You talked about Eli Manning. Once Eli Manning has won a Super Bowl, then it's pretty easy to be confident that, hey, I could win another Super Bowl. But the tricky thing is how do you know that you've got what it takes to be an NFL quarterback? How do you know that you've got what it takes to be a Super Bowl champion?

Or I think about this when I left my job in my life to write my first book, how did I have confidence I could do a thing that I've never done before and that is really, really hard and a lot of people can't do? Well, you want to answer that question yourself? How did you write that very first book? To me, where that confidence is, and I think this is what you're talking about in the book, the confidence is in the discreet or the component parts of that task. So, do you know that you're a hard worker? Do you know that you don't quit? Do you know that you've done the work?

You don't know that you could do the ultimate thing. You don't know you can run a marathon until you've finished the 26th mile. But if you have run the smaller distances up until then and you know you'd rather be carted off in a stretcher before you quit, then you can be confident you're going to come across that finish line. Absolutely. There is an element, a small element of delusion in this process. I've got this idea that I can do something that I've never done before. I am going to look for all kinds of evidence that I can indeed do it. And that's really the internal search that I set all of my clients and all of my mentees to execute. But there's always that little bit of unknown.

I've never written a book. I've never made a division one athletic team. I've never passed a college Ivy League-level physics course. Okay, are you gonna look for evidence that suggests you can do it? And are you going to look for evidence that suggests you can do it? And are you going to entertain just a little bit of self-delusion or possibility that I can do it? Hey, I think you did this once upon a time kid when you got on that bicycle with the two wheels and dad shoved you or mom shoved you down the street and you probably didn't get it right.

You might have crashed into a telephone pole or sprawled out on the sidewalk. So indeed, you had evidence that you couldn't do it, but yet you had some idea that it was possible. Yeah. You saw other kids. Maybe as, you know, mom and dad probably did say, yeah, you can do this. You can do this. You have to entertain a little bit of self-delusion that even though I've never done it, it can be done. But then again, building on those small incremental episodes of experience. Yeah, I got three pedals.

Yeah, I got five pedals. Yeah. Okay. Hey, now, oh, my bicycle writing subroutine has now been rewritten to the point where I have that wonderful aha moment, and I'm speeding down the driveway or circling the block, and I'm doing it all by myself and isn't that freaking wonderful. When I was writing my book, Courage is Calling, I read this sort of operations manual, a handbook for the US Army that I think George Marshall

wrote. It was published in 1944. I'm going to read you this quote because it strikes me as what you were just talking about the idea of, you know, how do I know what I have what it takes? When you're talking to men and women that are going to go out into combat potentially, that's the big doubt. Do I know what I have what it takes? But let me know what you think of this quote.

This is from the Army Life Handbook, 1944. It says, fear. Before you're actually in battle is a normal reaction. It's the last step of preparation, the not knowing. This is where you'll prove you're a good soldier. That first fight, that fight with yourself will have gone. And then you will be ready to fight the enemy. In your book, you call this the first victory.

Absolutely. I think Marshall had probably read the art of war by Sunsah. And he may have seen that same chapter that jumped right out at me. The idea that if you're going to win, you win the inner battle against self-doubt, et cetera. First, before you go into that initial engagement, if victorious warriors win first and then go into battle, wrote Sunsah while losing warriors, go into battle and just hope to win.

battle and just hope to win. So it's that initial decision. I know what to do. I've got the right equipment. I've got the right teammates. We've got the right plan. We're going to commit to it. Even if we've never done it before, but we're going to commit to this plan because we've got the tools because we've got the guys to the left and to the right. We've got the right folks. Here we go. So the gap you're talking about, that little bit of delusion, like the, I think I've done the training.

I believe in myself or I've confidence in myself. I think I've got this. Obviously, you know, let's say going into battle or writing a book or whatever it is, there is that not knowing. So there, you have to, there's a little bit of a stretch, which I think we can say is part of confidence, but it strikes me there's a fine line there between the confidence of I got this and the ego of I'm invincible, I'm perfect, I can do anything. How do you distinguish that? I'm sure you see a lot of quiet, confident young men and women, and also perhaps a slightly more boisterous,

egotistical brand of young men and women, and how do you make that distinguish between those two things? I think the difference is very obvious, and I don't have to make, I don't have to distinguish it. I see it and they see it very clearly. Most of the folks who end up at West Point are not the boisterous chest beating. I'm the greatest thing that ever walked down the pike type of individual. They're much more the, I guess you could say a little more cautious, kind of type of person, you know, they're very determined, but they know that they're getting to something big. And it can be a little bit intimidating. So they're more careful about their confidence. And I have to hope their confidence keep up with the competence that they develop through their 47-month experience to the point where they are competent to be platoon leaders,

and they are also confident in their competence to be platoon leaders. ["Potence to Be Platoon Leaders." ["Potence to Be Platoon Leaders." Walk me through that rock bottom moment, because you do talk about it in the book, but what, it's kind of a cliché trajectory of like, child actor, it gets hooked on drugs, gets sober, turns their life around, but how does that go for you? Because I would have thought, that moment watching you being,

even though we're roughly the same age, you are someone who done all this stuff. So I would have thought like this guy's like on the top, this guy's on top of the world, this guy has all the stuff, this guy's crushing, he must be so happy, but you were the exact opposite.

I think that basically to just like give quick touchstones, you know, I grow up incredibly overweight, 100 pounds overweight. So then I lose 100 pounds, but I'm the same head in a new body. And so I discover this new medicine that is way more efficacious and food and less calories. And I basically trade a Prius for a Ferrari.

And I spend the next four years totally in chase of being a cliche, setting my life on fire, ruining relationships, and show business, just becoming known as unreliable, and just tough to work with. I'm either running from the police on a regular basis, mostly because I called them myself, because I assume there was some sort of incentive for being the first to alert them. There isn't in case you're wondering.

And then, and basically breaking my mom's heart on a regular basis. So that's where I find myself at 21, about two months before I get sober. And sort of the big thing that I've always wanted my whole life was, I hated being different from as far back as I can remember being the son of an only child of a single parent or being overweight or what have you. I just wanted to be normal. And then when I fell in love with acting, I didn't want to be the funny, fat guy and I didn't want to be the kid actor. I just wanted to be an actor. And so what I talk about in the book was there was this moment,

somehow I had booked this, the biggest part of my life when I was in the midst of, in the depths of my drug addiction, a movie called The Whackness with my favorite actor, Serben Kingsley, and the movie got into the Sundance Film Festival, and it was my dream to not only be at this festival, but I was finally a real actor, not a kid star, not the funny fact,

I a real actor. And we're at the screening the night, you know, the movie premieres and Quentin Tarantino is there. And suddenly, I'm like, literally amongst the people I so look up to. And I wake up the next morning and the reviews are coming in and the reactions great. And I immediately tell everyone in the house I'm saying that I need to leave right now. I'm getting on a plane I'm out of here.

And people are screaming at me. They said, Josh, why? Like this never happens. And it may never happen again. And you're gonna leave, enjoy this. And I just, as soon as I was a member of the club, you know, it's that great saying. Like I never wanted to be a part of a club that would have me as a member. And it was one of the most impactful moments in my life that I realized, good or bad at

the highest of the high or the lowest of the low, I am bottomless. And nothing be it food, drugs or proceeds can fill up this hole in my soul. And I got sober two weeks later. And I think it's undoubtedly correlated that sort of spiritual bottom. Do you think about, because I've've written about this before how many people have moments like that where they get to the top of whatever it is they hit a best seller list or they sell their company or they you know the cover of magazine they went a gold medal Super Bowl whatever it is. And then they realized that it was never going to do the thing for them that they wanted it to do because that's I think that's what drives so many of us right. Some you wanted your dad to be proud of

you. You wanted to not feel like a loser. You wanted to feel cool. You wanted to be comfortable in your own skin. Whatever that driving thing is for each person that drives you to achieve greatness at some profession, then it turns out to be anti-climactic. How many of us turn away from that moment, like instead of actually listening, we're like, oh, I just need to do it more. Totally. No, I mean, we wake up, you know, I find, I can only speak for people like me, right?

So addicts, We respond great to catastrophe So your wife walks out on you you lose your job. You get a DIY. It's it's like this this exogenous kind of Punch to the face of like wake the hell up look at what you are doing But it's short lived. And what you do in that moment is what is truly that crossroads moment. There's like a saying where a guy calls you who's drunk and has been drunk for a long time and asks for help. Don't let him take a nap because he might rest up a bit and he might eat a sandwich and

have a little bit of time go by and think, man, I wasn't that bad. So you're right. There are certainly people who have these moments every couple of years or what have you, and instead of taking action to maybe getting help, they double down on whatever got them there in the first place. Yeah, and it's not even just it's help, it's just like understanding the truth of it, right? So, like, you sacrifice for years and years, to become, let's say, a superbowl when in coach

and you've neglected your family, you've neglected your help, you've done all this stuff to get there, and then it's anti-climactic. There's this moment where you go, oh, it wasn't worth it. You know, like, it wasn't what I thought it would be. And then, yeah, you go to sleep that night, then you party a couple days,

and you wake up a week later, that the breakthroughness of that epiphany, it has a short shelf life, and then it expires, and then you just go back to how you've always been. You don't make the change, because you've lost, you know, it's expired. It's moved on. You lost the freshness of it wore off and then you just go back to who you always were.

Yeah, I've heard Paul Gilmartin who has this great podcast, The Mental Owners Happy Hour talks about a friend of his who summited Everest and was at, you know, sort of base camp and explaining what it was like, slowly getting up as the sun was coming to a tis peak and reaching the peak and looking down at pulses. And when you reach to the top, was your father's love there? Like, it's so true. It's right. I mean, I think we're all, you know, it would be so fun to ask

like someone who's like the goat, like Tom Brady. I suspect someone like him, it's about the doing. He's like, what would the word be? He's just like, it's for him, it wasn't about the end result as much as like just being great in every single moment and the byproduct of that was major success. But who knows, maybe he hated his dad, I don't know. No, I get it. It's like you think like this will make my parents proud. And then only as you get older, you go, you shouldn't have to make your parents proud.

That's the whole point. Your parents are supposed to be proud of it. It's a faulty premise. You can't do that. Do you know what I mean? If your parents weren't proud of you before, just for being a human being that they loved, they're not going to be proud of you when you climb Mount Everest or you make it to Sundance for the whackness or you make a million dollars or whatever the thing is, you it was you were never gonna get it And I think it's coming to that painful conclusion that you're gonna have to live a different kind of life and Get what you want from some other source

That's where we have the the constant Amnesia or the lie to ourselves or we we fill that hole with drugs or alcohol or sex or whatever it is. Yeah, everything that I've ever put before, everything of the material world that I've used to make me feel okay has always had diminishing returns until it just literally, it becomes just a capital and negative in my life. And it was food and drugs. And then it was prestige and romance and all these things.

But for better or for worse, it never, like my synapses, they get tired. You can only take so much molly before you have no more serotonin left to give. Like my synapses just get tired. And it goes, whatever this thing is, the secret sauce that worked at one time doesn't so either you have to find something else or go to some you know Agile truths that have always worked to give people fulfillment

But what's interesting to those I think we so want epiphanies right so we we not only want those breakthrough moments But then people also want to hear okay He gets sober and then he was like a functioning, contributing member of society from that point forward. What I found so fascinating about your story is you get sober, and then you talk about, you were still, I don't want to say you were a dick, but you still could not get out of your own way

for like several years. So like the drugs were removed, and that was a positive step. But I liked what you said earlier, where you said, the only thing you were doing right was not being high step. But I liked what you said earlier where you said, the only thing you were doing right was not being high, even though it looked like you were being high. You were still had all the other destructive tendencies, ego, et cetera, and that didn't go away for a while either.

Absolutely not. And the only prerequisite, I like in 12-step that they say, the only requirement for members of is a desire to stop drinking or using. You don't even have to have stopped yet, because the reality is, is like, I don't mean to say this in a negative way. It's just the unfortunate truth. Addiction is winning, right? I'm not sure there's any actuaries in recovery,

but like, I've heard the number thrown around. It's like 95% of people who either go through rehab or have some sort of detox have an issue with drugs and alcohol or substance stay using throughout their life. Sure. So we're already the luck. I'm already the lucky one that I'm able to then end there

or momentarily pause this thing. And now I've been given admittance to this sort of world of possible growth. And how much I wanna key into that, how much now inner work I wanna do, because I finally have been allowed into this place where I'm tools are possible and resource is available to start working on these things that got me to drink and use and eat in excess and facing these negative patterns that addict or not in general, I don't think most people want to look at these negative patterns

That we accrue that usually are all stems from instinct to run wild, right? We have these instincts to procreate to find shelter to be able to fill our bellies And that's all good except it becomes well I need a few people to procreate with and it'd be great to have a couple shelters And if I'm going to fill my belly, it should be with like caviar and champagne. And suddenly these natural instincts overblown start to bring us a lot of discomfort and disease. So look, I know a lot of guys who are sober 30 plus years and they're overweight,

smoke two packs a day and are divorced and are always right. And I don't want what they have. They're overweight, smoke two packs a day, and are divorced, and are always right. And I don't want what they have. And conversely, and not to say it. And there are a couple guys with that much time that are like men and women who are like, you know, the Maharishi that I just look up to in such a big way.

But conversely, there are people who have a couple months or a couple of years, and they're so, you know, they're doing so much work on themself and they're so clued into like those principles and I'm like, God, they have less time so than me and I'm so attracted to how awake they are. Hey there listeners, while we take a little break here, I want to tell you about another podcast that I think you'll like. It's called How I Built This, where host Guy Razz talks to founders behind some of the

world's biggest and most innovative companies, to learn how they built them from the ground up. Guy has sat down with hundreds of founders behind well-known companies like Headspace, Manduke Yoga Mats, Soul Cycle, andoto-paxi, as well as entrepreneurs working to solve some of the biggest problems of our time, like developing technology that pulls energy from the ground to heat in cool homes, or even figuring out how to make drinking water from air and sunlight. Together, they discuss their entire journey from day one, and all the skills they had to learn along the way, like confronting big challenges, and how to lead through uncertainty.

So if you want to get inspired and learn how to think like an entrepreneur, check out how I built this, wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen early and add free on the Amazon or Wondery app. I wanted to start with something when we talk about quitting. I know you're like, you don't like some of the euphemisms or different words for quitting, which I get. But it is interesting, specifically like if we're talking about poker or we're talking about sports, it's a series of finite games, right?

So folding is quitting, but it's not the same as getting up and leaving the table, right? And so- Well, it's getting up and leaving the hand. Right, but with the assumption that you are staying at the table, right? So like, I think a lot of people see quitting as this permanent, conclusive thing when really some of the most important things to quit could also be described as like tactical retreats or folding or whatever, that there it like I think one of the reason, I guess what I'm saying is one of the reasons I think we have this aversion to quitting, which

central to the book is wide, we think this is such a bad word, is that we think we failed to make the distinction between sort of holistic quitting and quitting a specific game that you're or hand that you're likely not to or that you're unlikely to win. Oh gosh, that brings up so many thoughts. Yes. So, first of all, I agree. So let me say, first of all, that the holistic quitting, actually leaving the game also should not have a negative connotation.

Sure. Because when you do that when the time is right, that gets you to where you want to go faster, which is counterintuitive, but it's true, and I'm sure that we'll get into that. It's also how you would leave with your winnings intact, potentially. Well, it is how you would, or leave in a situation where, yeah, you're taking a loss, but now you're not going to continue to put more money into the situation, or in the case of like a relationship or a job or a project or a product or whatever that you're not putting more time or attention, really valuable resources into something that isn't worth your time, and it's

actually preventing you. It's blocking you from being able to put it into things that are worth your time. But to your point, those things are all quitting when you do it within some sort of broader project. So I don't know about you, but like there's all sorts of stuff in my writing that I quit. I, there were at least two completely written out narratives that were in the proposal that sold the book quit that did not end up in the actual book and it wasn't because they weren't good narratives. I actually think they're really good narratives and they were fun and I think that I wrote them very well. Just in the end when I sort of looked at the book and you know were they adding enough to it know where there are other narratives that were better? Sure. Did I need to tighten the book? Yes, all those things that cause you to dump things.

And in fact, I think that you can't write a great book without lots of quitting. You have to be throwing stuff out all the time. You write things all the time that you have to just sort of let go of. And so that is also quitting. So I think that that's something that we also need to realize. To realize is that there's something that we also need to realize.

Is that there's also a quitting that we don't see, which I think is just incredibly important to understanding the endeavor itself, right? What does it mean to be walking away from things and not walking away from things? And it doesn't just have to be the broader goal. And then the last thing I would say is like, I think that you can get kind of infinite almost in terms of what is your broader goal. So we think about the broader goal is, is like, say to finish the book. And then we would make the distinction between deciding that I'm not, this isn't the book

for me and I know I've gotten part way through it, but I'm just gonna dump it, right? Which would be sort of your view of like holistic quitting versus internal to that throwing out a chapter or maybe some section of a chapter or something like that. But I think that that's actually kind of the wrong way to think about it. And this is where I think poker really can help us. Which is when I was playing poker,

we had a saying among some of the elite players that poker's won lung game. That folding in a particular hand matters very little or quitting or losing in a particular game. So that would be what you would call sort of the holistic thing. Matters very little. What matters is that over your lifetime, that you're playing this game,

that you're making sure that you're betting your money as much as possible in a situation that's what we call positive expected value where you're gonna earn money. You're getting a positive return on investment. And I assume that that's true for like, why do you write books? There's some goal that you have

that's much longer than any single book that you might write that you're trying to achieve. Let's call it happiness or fulfillment or and part of that might be expressed for you through communicating these ideas that you think are going to make other people's lives better. And that's something that's going to occur over your whole lifetime. It doesn't have anything to do with one particular book or one particular podcast for anything, but you know, that kind of thing. And I think that we need to start thinking in that way a little bit more so that we can be okay with letting things go.

No, you're right. I mean, you talk obviously about getting to the outside of things. And it can feel like when you are quitting something, the more inside of it you are, the harder it is to quit. The bigger your view, the more zoomed out you are. If you're seeing this as a hand inside of a game or a game inside of a weekend of games or a game inside of a career of games, then you have more perspective. You're actually freer and more able to fold or quit what should be folded and what should be quit. Then you are, if you are too much on the inside or too up close with the specific thing in front of you and then you're feeling all the inhibitions and doubts and biases that

make it hard for you to take a loss. Yeah, so I think that's that word that you just said, loss. I think it's so important in terms of really understanding the context around this quitting problem. Sure. So, Richard Thaler, author of Nudge, Nobel laureate, he's done some really cool work on what's called mental accounting. So when we start something, we open up a mental account for it.

So like the simplest way to think about it is if you buy a stock, you have something on an actual physical ledger, right? But you also have opened up a mental account. So here's the thing I've started. It's now on my mental ledger. And as you start that, that could either be winning or losing, right? So we would call that being in the gains or in the losses, meaning if I buy a stock, then I buy it at 15, it it goes to $40, I have not sold it yet, right? I'm carrying this loss now. But I haven't lost past 10s. I'm just

in the losses, I'm in a state of having a loss on paper. And that's also true when we have a project that's failing, or we have a goal we have yet to achieve, right? So we set some sort of goal and we're short of the goal. We're in the losses. Now, if you continue with what you're doing, if I hold the stock or I keep heading toward that finish line, I keep trying to achieve that goal that I have yet to achieve,

maybe I can turn it around. So maybe I don't actually have to lose, even though I've got this loss that I'm carrying in the mental account. Maybe I can actually wipe that off with my mental books. But if I quit, if I sell the stock, if I shut the project down, if I throw the book out the window, whatever, that's the moment where I go from being in

the losses to having lost. It's the moment where I go from in a state of failing to reach my goal, to having failed to reach my goal. But realize first unrealized gains or losses. Exactly. That's a jackly right. And man, that is a powerful force. Because the line, I think the best line

of anybody that I talk to comes from Richard Taylor who said, quite simply, we don't like to close mental accounts in the losses. And what we have to realize is that being in the losses is a cognitive phenomenon, not an actual phenomenon. So I can give you an example. If you're trying to run a marathon, the goal is 26.2 miles. If you run 16 miles of that marathon and you quit, you have gained 16 miles. Okay, so that's the reality is you've gained 16 miles, but the cognitive state is in the losses

because you're short the goal. Right. So we need to make that distinction. So it's so much so that if you buy a stock at 50 and it goes to 80 and you hold it and it goes back down to 60, you're in the gains, you've made $10, but you're not cognitively in the gains. You're in the losses cognitively. So this is like this really huge force, this really big problem of not wanting to convert losses on paper and to realize losses. And because it's a cognitive phenomenon, it's not even rational what it like that you're losing or winning. It's just how are we processing? How are we like feeling that feels? Obviously, a known of your work for a long time and then your work is so viral that it's like, you almost crossed over your lists or those things that you see. It's like a cliche where you're like, I guess somebody said that at some point before it

became a generally unattributed piece of wisdom. Yes, yes, I think that's one of the reasons why it kind of went viral as people were became a genuinely unattributed piece of wisdom. Yes, yes. I think that's one of the reasons why it kind of went viral as people were like, seems like this, like we should know this, but they just never seen it all in one place before. Yeah, I remember once I gave a talk to the Pittsburgh pirates and they had this quote on the wall, like I was there to talk about stoicism and I was like sort of like, you know, you probably wouldn't think, you know, stoicism, professional baseball,

but I was like, literally as I walked in, you have a quote from Epictetus on the wall, you just think it's like one of those sportsisms. Like you didn't even know that this is from a 2000 year old Greek slave talking about like the essential, like sort of predicament of the human experience, it sounds like something Yogi Barra must have said or whatever. Right, exactly.

But I think what's fascinating and probably the why they're so universal is when I was reading the story of how they came about, these weren't just like this thing that you whipped up one day, there's quite a bit of pain and adversity behind the 13 rules. Yeah, and so that's what a lot of people didn't know. And the article first came out, it was literally just a list of 13 things. And so people thought, oh, that's interesting. And then a literary agent had seen it and called me and said, oh, you should write a book.

And I said, oh, well, there's a little more to the story. And I don't know if I want to make it public on a therapist. And as a therapist, we don't usually share our personal story. So it was a matter of them thinking, do I want to share my personal story? And the reason I wrote it wasn't because I was trying to go viral, it was just a letter to myself

that I hadn't imagined putting on the internet. And then when I did, I certainly never imagined that all these people would be reading it. And we'd still be talking about it a decade later. Well, I want to get into the writing it to yourself because I think there's a very big stoke tie in there. But for people who don't know, there's a sort of almost a triumphant, I don't want to say that there's a sort of almost a triumphant. There's sort of like this, like, there's a positivity to the rules that I guess that's sort of saying, belie, the hard one and heart breaking experience that seems like they went into making them.

What was that for you? What is that story? Yeah, so I was a therapist and thought, I'll go out and I'll teach other people all of these life lessons. But my mom passed away when I was 23 and that was really early on in my career. And I thought, oh, now it's not just about telling other people, hey, you should try these things, but it was about,

oh, how do I do this in my own life? And early on, I was really just looking at different people hearing different stories. I was in a small town in rural Maine close to where I had grown up. And suddenly, I was meeting all kinds of people from different walks of life. People that I would have maybe normally never met. And if I met them, I would have never known their background. And as I was hearing all of these people who were sharing their stories with me,

it just became really clear that some people go through some really hard things in life, awful things. And they come out of it, and they're still hopeful. And they say, gosh, you know, that was awful. I wish I hadn't been through it, but they really attributed that awful thing with teaching them some life lesson, or they said, I grew from it. So even though I'm a therapist, and I'm supposed to be teaching them, I was really learning from a lot of people like, what makes these people tick? How do they still get up every day, even though life keeps pushing them back down?

And again, as a therapist, I was supposed to teach people what they're doing well. I was taught, you know, build on people's strengths. When they come in, you're like, yes, keep doing that one thing. And I thought, yeah, but sometimes people just have one bad habit. What if I don't point out that one bad habit that they're doing? And so it occurred to me, like, you know, a lot of these people who are growing from their

pain just didn't have these certain bad habits that a lot of other people did. And then on the, it was the three year anniversary to the day that my mom died, that my 26 year old husband died. And he had a heart attack. Obviously, when you're 26, you're not supposed to have a heart attack. You didn't have any heart issues that we had known of before that. And like, I'm a widow, I'm 26. I don't have my mom.

And it was like the lowest of the low. I just couldn't even imagine like my two biggest fears had basically come true in life. And this thing is, it's like some sort of cruel twist that it also happened on the same, you know, February and the same date. And like, what are the chances of that even happening? But meanwhile, I'm a therapist and I am supposed to make a living live in a house and solve other people's problems. And I think, like, how do I do this?

How do I help other people? And, and then how am I going to keep this roof over my head? We had bought a house, but it was based on the fact that we had two incomes. And I only was down to one. And the last thing I wanted to do was move the thought of having to pack up and move in that moment was not enticing. And that's how I ended up becoming a writer was a side hustle that earned in the beginning.

I earned $15 an article. So I waited my spare time just for because as a therapist you can only work so many hours as a therapist. So after working on the weekends, I wanted to do something to earn money and it was heartbreaking. So I wasn't in the state to really go out and get a job, but I could write an article from my couch some days anyway. And I learned a lot, like I just that's the painful experience. I learned a lot, it was awful, it was horrible, and I wish nobody would ever experience that kind of pain, but it taught me a lot. And years later, life, you know, I learned a grown building this new life for myself, and I got remarried, and I thought life is going to be good

again. Here we go. And then my father-in-law was diagnosed with terminal cancer. And there was this moment where I thought like, why does life keep doing this to me? Every time like something good happens or I finally feel like my heart's starting to heal, like the other shoe drops. And I know that that's how life is inherently. But on the other hand, I'm like, why does it have to keep being like the people closest to me? Which I grew up as a kid with separation anxiety. So to lose somebody was my worst fear in life. And I think why does this keep happening and It was actually in that moment when we knew my father and law probably had two months to live And I'm thinking I can't deal with this. I can't handle one more loss that I thought well

What am I gonna do? It's not that I thought, well, what am I going to do? It's not like I have a choice. And but really boil down to there are a lot of things I feel like I can do right now. I don't have the energy to say, I'm going to write 17 pages in a gratitude journal. But you know what I can do? At least I'm not going to feel sorry for myself today. So that's where the list came from is I sat down and I said, if I want to be mentally strong right now, what do I do? And what does that look like? And I wrote a list. And when I was done, it happened to have 13 things on the list came from. As I sat down and I said, if I want to be mentally strong right now, what do I do and what does that look like? And I wrote a list and when I was done, it happened to have 13 things on the list. Everybody always thinks that there was like a magic in the number that I picked 13 for

a specific reason. No, that was just what I learned as a therapist and through my own journey. And then I found that list helpful because I thought, again, I don't have the energy. I don't really have the capacity to do a lot, but as long as I don't do these certain things, I'll get through today. I thought, if it helps me, maybe it will help somebody else. And so I published it online thinking, uh, 12 people will read this, but like 50 million people read it in the course of a few weeks. And before I know it, I'm on national TV and everybody wants to know how to be mentally strong, but nobody knew. It was like the secret I had of like actually, I didn't write this article because I'm the epitome

of mental strength. I wrote it because I felt like I was at the bottom of the barrel and I just really didn't have any strength in that moment. I am very familiar with your work because I took this would have been in like 2007. I took your Yale intro to site class that was like one of the first classes that ever went online for people to take. Yeah, I hope you liked it. It lives on on YouTube. I loved it.

I think I took a lot from it, but one of the things I specifically think about all the time is you told some story in that class about, and I think about it when I think I took a lot from it, but one of the things I specifically think about all the time is you told some story in that class about, and I think about it when I think about language, is you were talking about somebody was being told to drop their weapons by the police and he said, give it to them and then they ended up getting shot because you could interpret, give it to them as either lay down your weapons or open fire. Yes, you've changed the example, your example also works. It's lit them habit. Yes, lit them habit. But it's the same thing. It's exactly the same thing as the double meaning.

And it's a way to sort of appreciate linguistics matters. Yes, and the context that whatever frame of reference or assumption we're making can change how we decide to interpret the thing. Yeah, exactly. Which I guess is actually a very stoic idea, is the words are objective, the stoics would say that things are objective, but our opinion about them is not. And so the words don't mean anything,

but it's the, what we decide to take from them can be the difference between their surrendering or their about to shoot us. There's a quote by Anaias Nyn which I'm thinking right now is very stoic. It's, we don't see the world as it is. We see the world as we are. Yes, that's exactly right. Well, I've been thinking about your work a lot lately because I'm doing this series right

now on the Cardinal Virtues. I did courage, I just finished discipline. And then I am starting justice. And I was sitting down this morning writing about justice. And I read your book many years ago on justice and babies, which I've always thought that was a very clever title, just babies. I'm glad you say that the title in some way was a disaster because I thought I thought it was a clever two, but apparently 95% of you, I have Amazon review saying, this book is about more than babies. I am so pissed off.

Well, I do like us like that. Well, to go to the idea of justice, what I was trying, I was wrestling with this morning, what's interesting about justice is in a sense, justice either renders all the other virtues either meaningful or meaningless, if you think about it, right? Because courage in pursuit of evil, we don't particularly admire or wisdom in pursuit of selfishness or even discipline in pursuit of selfishness doesn't, doesn't work. So it has this ability to immediately render the thing that you are pursuing, meaningless or meaningful. I was curious what you think about that.

I think that's fascinating. There is a while ago, I think, was Bill Marr said to 9-11 terrorists, we're brave. You can't doubt a day we're brave. You've got to take it off the air for some amount of time for that. Some people's conception of courage includes a notion it must be for a just cause. It doesn't count as courage otherwise. Yes. The serial killer who takes bold chances doesn't count as brave. Other people have a sort of narrower conception of virtues of these other virtues that doesn't convey their moral knowledge.

You may have discipline in the course of some terrible activity. You know, Adolf Eichmann was known for his discipline and his careful thought and his flow, but plainly his goals were not good ones. Well, I think that doesn't require bravery to say storm a cockpit of an airplane and plunge it into the uncertainty of pain or death or whatever that is. But I don't think anyone would describe that as virtuous, right? So it's maybe what we're really making the distinction is like the act and then virtuous nists, which I guess are separate things.

Yeah, I think that that's right. You could kind of break them apart. There's also a debate in philosophy which speaks to this, which is, should we all try to be maximally good, maximally virtuous? There's a wonderful paper by Susan Wolf called Moral Saints, where she argues that a life devoted entirely to goodness would not be a good life at all.

You can imagine somebody whose life is spent entirely doing good things. Every minute, figuring out what's the most moral thing to do, if you're utilitarian, you're trying to maximize the pleasure of other people. Maybe you might be trying to build up your own virtues. And she says that person would be living a boring life because you wouldn't go out for a bear with them

or you wouldn't, they'd be lousy friends, maybe lousy parents, because that can be other moral things. And so what she views virtue not as sort of a pinnacle thing, of which everything is subsumed under it, but rather one good thing among many. Huh. I was just reading Orwell wrote this obituary of Gandhi

when he died. And it's actually really fascinating. But there's a quote in it and it sort of ties to what you're talking about with suffering and sacrifice in your last book He said no doubt alcohol and tobacco and so forth are things that is Saint must avoid But St.hood is also a thing that human beings must avoid which I imagine goes to the same point Which is that trying to be holier than thou or perfect is actually not a recipe not only for a good life

But gets one into trouble. It gets one into trouble. Certainly makes one a lousy friend. I want my friends to be partial to me, otherwise what makes them friends. But true. To take it to extreme, a friend is the person you call up to ask to bury your body with. And now, some of us don't go that far, but you may view that again friendship as yet another virtue, in which case we shouldn't see this as virtue versus non-virtue, but rather virtues and conflict. Well, there is attention between all the virtues, right?

Not just in the sense that, okay, courage and pursuit of an evil end, one might not consider to be a virtue, but also moderation being a check against courage in the excess or wisdom being the thing that helps you understand what you should be courageous or moderate about. If you're all of one, you're almost certainly being out of balance with one of the others. I think that's right. And I think often political and moral disagreements between people of good faith and people who are basically normal good people. Yeah. Can often be seen as which of these you prioritize. One thing I'm doing research on, along with an interested in is loyalty. Psychologists don't talk about loyalty very much in morals.

Psychology philosophers don't talk about it that much. But for many people it's just it's just psychology philosophers don't talk about it that much. But for many people it's just, it's this hugely important virtue. And it clashes with other things. If I have a friend who's doing awful things, maybe abusing his graduate students in some way, a lot of moralics just calls on me to stop this, to get to fix this. Sure. Loyalty says, no, I go to my friend first. I try to resolve this without getting him into trouble. And you hear an example about that. And what you think I should do depends on how you value loyalty versus how you value our debt to strangers and so on. Yeah, it's a tricky thing.

I'm thinking about that for this book too. One of the characters is going to be Harry Truman who's sort of this small town politician who brings this sense of loyalty to politics. But he famously goes on six days after being inaugurated, goes to the funeral of a corrupt political boss who he knew from his early days. And people said, how could you do this? And he said, what kind of man doesn't go to his friends funeral? And the argument was the president of the United States, right? You have certain obligations,

not just to the people that you know or that you grew up with or helped you in your career, but you have obligations to be above certain things, to set a good example, so on and so forth. So loyalty is that tricky thing because it's like, are you abandoning them as a person casting them out as your life or are you drawing a line and not being complicit

in, let's say, illegal or unethical activity? That's, I think, the tension that we run into when it comes to loyalty. I think it is, in your example, illustrates that some institutional roles by their nature are supposed to sort of have priority or velocity. Yes. I'm planning to put it loyal to my friends and my children, But if I'm looking for a research assistant and my son applies, I'm not supposed to, I'm not supposed to say you can't even apply for this. Because nepotism is considered wrong.

It's an inner of an abuse of power. Somebody might hear us talking. I think this is a kind of abstract discussion of bears on nothing in real life, but we're both on social media. And there, I have seen this more than once the issue comes up where somebody I know, or somebody I respect gets into some sort of trouble. And there is a decision of whether to be loyal or to be prudent.

Yes. And decisions always harder when you actually don't agree with the person. When you say, oh, no, you, you know, I don't know if we're wrong. You're wrong. Yeah. We're wrong.

And saying that face to face, but I actually think anyone, I have a very low opinion of someone who goes on Twitter or Facebook or whatever, and says publicly, I repudiate my friend. What a jerk he is. You sort of touch on this in your empathy book. The empathy and sympathy you would feel for someone who's being cast aside matters, but if there is any position that you don't want to be motivated by these personal concerns, it might be matters of state and foreign policy. Yeah, I think it's a useful way to think about morality and to really frame it nicely here that we have, you know, an innate suite of moral emotions and moral capacities.

And these are sort of our development situators, powerful moral universals. But sometimes doing the right thing involves transcending them and overriding them. And so, you know, my book on epithets, sort of a case study on this where I say, look, it's very natural, I see somebody in pain who looks like me, who speaks my silence, my friend, to take their side.

Buyers, sexist bias, racist bias, nationalist bias is bread and a bone. But we can be smart enough sometimes to override it, to set principles, to have institutions to say, look, even though I care so much more about my neighbor than somebody 1,000 miles away of a different, who speaks a different language, I can recognize rationally that my neighbor

has no more intrinsic value. So I agree with that. On the other hand, I think some biases, I'm not so radical. Some biases that are family and that are friends are good. We wouldn't be people without them. Yeah, and look like most of the things that matter in life can't be measured, right? Yeah. And so when you realize that, it's quite freeing because like, why is it, why is a poem a success because it did 100,000 likes or shares or whatever? And then one does a thousand, but it saves somebody from suicide or it sets up some creative breakthrough for yourself or it's the one that somebody who becomes a close friend discovers you through.

Like all the things that really matter in life can't be measured, there's the, from the little prince, you know, he says, it is only the heart, it's only with the heart that one can see rightly what is essential is invisible to the eyes, right? It's like the things that you are actually trying to accomplish in writing or art or with basically anything in life, you know, it's almost unquantifiable, it's ineffable. So the idea that like some number of hearts or shares are between just going to capture whether it was a success or not is impossible, it's insane. You know what's funny, I think the real measurement of success, I have like these two that kind of stand out for me personally,

is when I have a book out, if it's good enough for you to gift it to a friend. Yes, that's when I'm like dang, I'm like that was good. Like you know, we did a good job and that's unquantifiable. I don't know how many times that happens, but I'll see it a number of times through people sharing stories and someone saying thank you, I got this from so and so. And to me, it's like, that's really powerful. And the other side of it is,

too, is when you share things, it's always great occasionally when a celebrity shares some of your work or they share one of your books, but it's not Kim Kardashian who's making you famous. It's it's actually the person who has 200 followers because if they share your work and they're like this is good their friends are going to really listen to them like their friends their family they're going to be like whoa I'm going to check this out and that has a way bigger impact than someone who has millions and hundreds of millions of followers. Yeah, sometimes I'll take it like, you know, someone, let's say famous or important will like the book. And it's like, okay, there's a certain quantifiableness to the impact there.

But then to me, the other thing is like, okay, I thought what I was saying was true in my experience. And then this person has spent 20 years in combat, and it's true in their experience, who are this person was in a concentration camp or this person, you know, and you're like, like, again, how do you quantify? It's not even validation, but it's like the proof that you tapped into something true, that the work actually was good. It's equally true. You hear someone, you're like, you know, this got me through my cancer diagnosis or my divorce or the loss of a child. And you're just like, yeah, how many copies is is standing up for that person worth? Is it a thousand?

Is it 10,000? It's, it's definitely more than one, you know, and, and you can't measure that. And that's not going to be captured in be captured in, hitting the list in a given week. And I guess the stokes would say it's all an external, it doesn't matter, but it does matter. When you do something for someone, when your work is of service, that's the most valuable metric that there is. Yeah, and I think, I mean, you're making me think too,

because I've been following your work for a long time, and I've been coming from this background of Burmese Buddhist meditation that I've taken really seriously, and it shocks me. The things that you share, the things that I've read from your books, how there is this powerful alignment in the truths that keep reoccurring over and over. We're talking about understanding the fleeting quality of life, understanding not to be dominated by external situations, understanding the power

of equanimity. Like I see this, like you, you know, the way that you write about this, it's like, so to me it shines a light that thus, like those of us who seek wisdom, we're sort of heading in the right direction, even though we're coming at it from different time periods, different cultures, and to me, it's inspiring to me that we're moving in a similar direction. That's something I get so much for filming out where you're researching something, and then

you find a connection between two unrelated schools, or you find two people who never met, who lived thousands of years apart and had very different experiences saying fundamentally the same thing. You're like, oh wow, okay, there's some truth here. There's some independently discovered pre-existing truth that's going on here. And like I'm sure you found that too, where like you found some way that some words rhymed or an observation in one of your poems. And then you found it in another poem or a very similar and you're like, Oh, this is a human thing.

I found this is a very human. I tapped into something fundamentally human here. Maybe I can't use it because I'm one else used it or maybe I can, but, but like, okay, this is a core human truth here that we're both touching on. Yeah, and it's powerful too, because like that means that those of us who even aspire to developing a life where there is the potential for happiness, the potential for peace, the potential for a mental clarity, it's like, okay, if we have those things as our ideals, then on the way to achieving them and developing them, these truths will re-occur. And it's like no matter where you're

coming from, it's like, okay, if you really want to, you know, have peace, then you need to deal with your reactiveness. You need to deal with how intensely you're reacting to the outside world and realize that your perception and your reaction are being created by your own mind. And these things are just, yeah, it wows me a bit. Yeah, it's like an intrudetective, you know, he's quoting Nietzsche times a flat circle, which is in ecclesiastes, which is in the Stoics. And you're just like, okay, this idea,

it's not just, it's true that history is the same thing happening over and over again. This idea of the things happen over and over again. But then also, us discovering that history is the same thing happening over and over again, that there are these elements of recurrence, that is in and of itself a recurrence, right? Like each generation, each philosophical school, each religious tradition sort of gets under the hood. And it's like, yeah, this is how stuff works.

I'm curious for you, like when did stoicism become this like central point of your life? Like, did you study in high school? Did you go to a classics school or no? No, definitely not. I was in college and I got introduced to a epictetus in Marx's Relics and it sort of hit me like this ton of bricks. And it's funny, do I have it?

This is my very old copy with lots of notes. It's like 16 or 17 years old now. It definitely puts some miles on it. But I think, what I think, what I think's cool about stoicism is it kind of, it seeps into you, right? Have you ever read any Heraclitus, the poet? No, I would have read that.

You would like, he's this sort of Greek mystic poet. He does these kind of short epigrams. Actually, let me, oh, here they are. These are very Instagram-y poems that he has. Let's see. From the strain of binding opposites comes harmony. The harmony past knowing sounds more deeply than the know. What else do we got? The Sun, Timekeeper of the day and season overseas, all things. His famous line is that no man steps in the same river twice. The biggest, yeah, the biggest truth. That's the foundational thing that made Herman has to sadartha work. That was just the key, the key

truth. Yeah, so again, is one of those ideas that somebody has at some point and then it gets into the ether and then is independently discovered and rediscovered. But I think each time I read the Stokes, I come back and I get something new out of them, right? So like what I was looking for when I was 19 was advice about purpose and resilience and self-sufficiency in all these things. And then I'm rereading it in the middle of a pandemic and I'm thinking about justice,

I'm thinking about connection, I'm thinking about mortality because now I'm 15 years older, the world is falling apart, I have children, you know, who you are when you pick up the work, you get something different out of it each time. And so my journey of sort of with the still, I think people think about these things as this like epiphany, you know, this moment on the road to Damascus. And there is that, I think, but there's also, it's more of a seeping gradual thing. It gets into your blood and it changes you.

I think great art, great work, great insights, that's what they do. I think what I'm wondering too, right, so from what I've observed of the mind, it's incredibly malleable and it carries so much heavy conditioning that over time, we don't even realize how much we're accumulating. We'll react with anger over and over and over again, and obviously that makes it easier to then react with anger in the future. Sure. When you make that break from the past and whatever it is that's inspiring, inspiring you to do better, whatever method, I think one thing that sort of

stands true along many methods is that repetition is key. Yeah. It's like, you just, you just have to try again and again and again and over time, you'll build new positive habits, new conditioning that actually supports your happiness and your freedom. Thanks so much for listening to the Daily Stoke Podcast. If you don't know this, you can get these delivered to you via email every day, check it out at dailystoke.com slash email.

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