The Daily Stoic - Every Day Could Be The Final Quarter | Ask Daily Stoic

Episode Date: February 27, 2025

The shot clock is clicking down. Let's make every second count.📕 You can grab copies of What You’re Made For signed by George Raveling and Ryan Holiday at The Painted Porch | https://www.thepaintedporch.com/💡 We designed The Daily Stoic Leadership Challenge: Ancient Wisdom For Modern Leaders to mirror the kind of education that produced historically great leaders like Marcus Aurelius. Check it out at store.dailystoic.com👉 Get The Daily Stoic Leadership Challenge: Ancient Wisdom For Modern Leaders & all other Daily Stoic courses for FREE when you join Daily Stoic Life | dailystoic.com/life🎙️ 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. Daily Stoic is based here in this little town outside Austin. When we have podcast guests come in and go, oh, what hotel should I stay at? Honestly, there's not really many great hotels out here, but there are a bunch of beautiful Airbnbs that you could stay in a ranch. You could stay on something overlooking the Colorado River. They've even got yurts in the woods out here. And Airbnb has a million different options, old historic houses.

Usually when I travel, I'm staying in an Airbnb. That is when I'm bringing my kids. We make a whole experience of it. And usually what I do is I pull up Airbnb, I look at guest favorites, I type in, okay, we want this many rooms, this many bathrooms, we want a pool, we want a washer and dryer, whatever it is. And you can find an awesome place to stay in.

And I've been doing it now, crazy me, at least 15 years I've been staying in Airbnbs, basically since it came out. I love Airbnb and you should check it out for your next trip. 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 Daily dailystoic.com. Every day could be the final quarter. In 1994, at age 57, George Raveling's life changed forever. While driving through Los Angeles on a familiar route, something he'd driven hundreds of times, he approached an intersection, checked both ways and proceeded. But in an instant, another car slammed into his, flipping it over and over and crashing him

into the front yard of a nearby house. When George regained consciousness, he tells this story in his lovely new book, What You're Made For, Powerful Life Lessons from My Career in Sports. George is a hero and mentor of mine. I'll tell you about that in a sec. He says that the police officer took him aside and said,

you have no idea how lucky you are. 95% of the time, when I get to a scene like this, the person is dead. George had survived, but just barely. He had a broken pelvis, nine broken ribs, a collapsed lung, internal bleeding, and he spent weeks immobilized and in pain at the hospital. But one day as he was there staring at the ceiling,

a thought consumed him. Why was I spared? What will I do with this second chance? From that point on, he tried to treat every day like bonus time, a gift he wasn't owed, but one that he wanted to make count. And so at 62, he joined Nike as the director of basketball marketing. He became one of the highest ranking executives at one of the world's most influential companies. He would help shepherd the Jordan brand, which changed sports and the business world forever. He achieved awards and honors that he never dreamed of, many of which all happened after

that fatal crash. But I think the stoic message here is that we don't need a catastrophic event to wake us up to the precariousness of life. In fact, as Seneca said, we should go to bed every day saying to ourselves, I have lived, so that every morning when we arise, it is a bonus. It's a challenge, right? We have to embrace this mindset now,

not after a close call or a tragedy. We must begin each day with the quiet acknowledgement that we have been spared, then we have to answer the question, what will I do with this gift? Life is like a game in its final quarter, George writes. The clock is ticking and we have no idea when the buzzer will sound.

Every day for each of us is a bonus. None of us is guaranteed tomorrow. If we wake up, it is because we have been spared. We are in the final quarter. Let's make it count. And I met George Chance encounter about almost 10 years ago now at a UT basketball practice. And he's just become one of my absolute favorite people.

One of my mentors, someone I just love very dearly. And I feel very lucky to have helped bring this book into the world. What You're Made For is not a memoir of George's incredible life, although it is an incredible life. I mean, this is the guy who owned the I Have a Dream speech.

It's the guy that brought Jordan to Nike. He did all these incredible things. He lived twice the life expectancy for a black man born in 1937. But he's got a bunch of amazing advice in here. It's his philosophy. I think about George almost every day. I think you'll really like this book.

We've got some signed copies by both him and me at the Painted Porch. I'll link to that in today's show notes. We will almost assuredly run out of them. So grab those while you can. And if you don't know about George, you're gonna love him, so check it out. Hey, it's Ryan.

Welcome to another Thursday episode of the Daily Stoic podcast. Back in October, I drove into Austin, gave a talk to an interesting group. It was a group of sort of school principals, administrators, executives who were doing a retreat here, a leadership retreat in Texas. And they wanted to ask me questions about Stoic philosophy, about productivity, about life, about learning. And I was happy to oblige. Usually I do a talk and then the audience asks me questions.

This was more of a moderated Q&A. Joe Powers and Arvin Grover were nice enough to ask me some questions. One works at a school in Stanford, Connecticut, and another in Weston, Massachusetts. And they were clearly big fans and very nice guys. So we really got into it. And I wanted to bring you a chunk of that

in today's episode. And if you want some more Stoic principles on leadership, do check out the Daily Stoic Leadership Challenge, which is filled with a bunch of leadership experts and leadership lessons for precisely these kinds of situations. You can check that out at dailystoic.com slash leadership and I will link to it in today's show notes.

Or just sign up for Daily Stoic Life, because you get this and all the other challenges for free. So what is it about this moment, or our inherent need that the principles of stoicism and all your work is key to our success as leaders? Probably doesn't say anything good about this moment. Uh... Stoicism does tend to see resurgences in popularity

when the world feels like it's falling apart. Mark Spreelis is writing during the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. George Washington is putting it on a play about the Stoics at Valley Forge. I do think there is something about Stoicism that is uniquely suited to moments where it feels like it's falling apart.

Actually, the founding story of Stoicism, Zeno is a merchant, and he suffers a shipwreck. He ends up in Athens, penniless, in a bookstore, and this is where he's introduced to philosophy. Stoicism, I think, is fittingly founded in disaster. He says later that he made a great fortune when he suffered a shipwreck because it turns him to philosophy.

So I think stoicism has always been there in moments when it feels like things are falling apart. And that's the idea. It's that we don't control what happens. We control how we respond to what happens. And I think, you know, you need the most help when it's not happening the way you want it to be happening. Maybe as a counterbalance to how you opened that,

one group wanted to know what gives you hope. Oh, yeah, I don't know. Uh... No, um, I think the idea of socialism, so, again, we don't control what happens, we control how we respond to what happens. You can look at sort of moments where it's all falling apart. People are behaving not as they should.

People are doing things they shouldn't do. But what I love about stoicism, what always does get me inspired, is when you see people who swim against that current, or people who are great inside of disasters, or, you know, tumultuous times. So I think one of the things you get when you study history is a sense of kind of despair that, you know, when you study real history,

not in the sort of propaganda version of history. When you study real history, you see, you know, how things actually were. And then that can be depressing. That can sort of take some of the idealism away. But then there's the more inspiring part where you go, oh, not everyone felt this way. There were some people who were way ahead of their time. the idealism away. But then there's the more inspiring part where you go, oh, not everyone felt this way.

There were some people who were way ahead of their time. There were some people who were strikingly decent and good and believed in a better future in the midst of that. So I would say those people always give me hope. We talked a little bit before you got in here about building the inner citadel. Would love your advice, this came from one of our groups, about coaching our teachers to act from their inner citadel when faced with an obstacle, whether it's their students or their parents, et cetera.

Yeah, you know, I was thinking about this during the pandemic because obviously it was very hard on parents and teachers and schools alike, but there was this kind of interesting reaction that we had pretty early on, where we kept talking about how much kids have been harmed by this and how much has been taken away from them, which it's true, it wasn't fair, and it was really tough.

I had two young kids under four when the pandemic started, so it was rough. But I was thinking, you know, when I talked to my grandfather who fought in World War II or my other grandparents who lived through the Depression, they weren't like, oh, it was the worst thing ever, when I talked to my grandfather who fought in World War II, or my other grandparents who lived through the Depression, they weren't like, oh, it was the worst thing ever and we never recovered and it was so unfair, right? They had a sense of how that event shaped them,

how that adversity made them who they were. And there is something about today's culture that, and I think it's good on the one hand that we think about trauma, we think about the effect, you know, we have empathy, we think about how people handle things differently. That's all well and good. But there also has to be a reminder to people of what they are capable of and what they've been through.

Like, if you weren't tough, you wouldn't have made it as a teacher so far, right, or a school principal. And if you wanted things to be easy and straightforward, you, like, you screwed up. You picked the wrong profession. as a teacher so far, right? Or a school principal. And if you wanted things to be easy and straightforward, you like, you screwed up. You picked the wrong profession. There's a letter that James Baldwin writes to his nephew that I think about all the time.

He says, yeah, it's gonna be tough. This is like, he's a young kid coming up. He says, it's gonna be tough. But he says, you have to remember you come from sturdy peasant stock. He says, people who built railroads and dammed rivers and crossed mountains.

He says people who achieved an unassailable dignity amidst monumental odds. I think if we can remember not just where we came from and what people before us have been through, but also what we ourselves have been through. Like you should come out of the pandemic not thinking how hard and awful it was, I think. To me, the sort of stoic approach to that would be like,

I came out of the other side of that. Just now I have like a really true sense of what my capacities were. And one of the things the stoics talk about is that they actually pity people who haven't been through things like that because they don't really know what they're capable of. And, you know, living through a historical moment is not fun.

Living through, you know, failures of the kinds that we've lived through the last decade or so, it's not great, but what should come out of that, the only sort of upside is, you know, we've had to get tough and resilient and creative and that's maybe how I would I would think about it. What's the smallest step you can take as the building block for this operating system that will have the highest impact?

To me the most basic practice of stoic philosophy is this idea of journaling. So how do you have and engage in an active conversation with yourself about these ideas? Stoicism shouldn't be a philosophy that you have read, it should be a philosophy you are reading, and it should be a philosophy you are engaging with. And so I think of that, I tend to do it in the evening, sometimes I do it in the morning,

kind of depends on my schedule, but I just take a few minutes and I'm just having a conversation on the page and it helps me calm down, helps me think about what's important, what I want to be working on. I like to be able to sort of, I use this one journal I like that has like one line a day for five years, it's called the One Line a Day Journal, but I like to be able to see where I was, like the first year you do it at school, the second year at school, by three and four and five,

it's really cool because you can see where you were on that day a year earlier. And it kind of has the effect of what we were talking about. Oh, yeah, last year was difficult too, and so was the year before. And, and, but also there were all these great things that happened that I didn't remember. You get a sense of what you're dealing with

and going through, and it kind of roots you in your own recent past. I really like that. But to me, you gotta create some distance between you and your thoughts, especially if you're in a position of leadership, because you have to, if you're not thinking, like look, if you have a direct boss,

and then they're able to give you feedback, right? They're able to tell you how you're doing, what you need to be working on, what your priorities are. But as you sort of go up the chain, if you're not doing it, no one's doing it for you. And so if we think about the pages of a journal as this way to sort of brief and debrief, prepare and reflect.

It becomes this really powerful philosophical tool. And that is what Marx's Realist was doing in Meditations. It is a totally unique historical document that survives to us the sort of self-talk of the most powerful man in the world, the person who sat atop an empire of tens of millions of people and millions of square miles, not writing a work of philosophy as we think of, but a work of sort of self philosophy. It's a really beautiful thing. Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. I just wanted to

say we so appreciate it. We love serving you. It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple years we've been doing it. It's an honor. Please spread the word, tell people about it, and this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say thank you. If you like The Daily Stoic and thanks for listening, you can listen early and ad free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. Prime members can listen ad free on Amazon Music. And before you go, would you tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey on Wondery.com slash survey. Behind the closed doors of government offices and military compounds, there are hidden stories

and buried secrets from the darkest corners of history. From covert experiments pushing the boundaries of science to operations so secretive they were barely whispered about. Each week on redacted, declassified mysteries, we pull back the curtain on these hidden histories. 100% true and verifiable stories that expose the shadowy underbelly of power. Consider Operation Paperclip, where former Nazi scientists were brought to America after World War II, not as prisoners, but as assets to advance U.S. intelligence during the Cold War. These aren't just old conspiracy theories.

They're thoroughly investigated accounts that reveal the uncomfortable truths still shaping our world today. The stories are real. The secrets are shocking. Follow Redacted, Declassified Mysteries on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to Redacted early and ad-free right now on Wondery+.