The Daily Stoic - Every Day Is A Day To Give Thanks | Ask DS

Episode Date: November 28, 2024

As you gather around your family and friends this Thanksgiving, of course, appreciate it and give thanks for all the obvious and bountiful gifts that moment presents. Just make sure that as you go back to your everyday, ordinary life that you make gratitude a regular part of it.Ask DS:How can we recognize what we are good at?We all have egos, what can we do to keep it in check? + more!Feeding America | Every year instead of contributing to the corporate indulgence of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, we encourage our listeners to make a donation. Every $1 donated helps provide at least 10 meals. It only takes a little to make a big difference. We donated the first $30,000, and we’d like your help in reaching our goal of $300,000. Just head over to dailystoic.com/feed and together we can make a significant dent in a big problem.💡 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✉️ 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. We've got a bit of a commute now with the kids and their new school. And so one of the things we've been doing as a family is listening to audiobooks in the car. Instead of having that be dead time, we want to use it to have a live time. We really want to help their imagination soar. And listening to Audible helps you do precisely that. Whether you listen to short stories,

self-development, fantasy, expert advice, really any genre that you love, maybe you're into stoicism. And there's some books there that I might recommend by this one guy named Ryan. Audible has the best selection of audio books without exception and exclusive Audible originals all in one easy app.

And as an Audible member, you choose one title a month to keep from their entire catalog. By the way, you can grab Right Thing right Now on Audible. You can sign up right now for a free 30-day Audible trial and try your first audiobook for free. You'll get Right Thing Right Now totally for free. Visit audible.ca to sign up. 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 who are 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 happened to be someone there recording. Thank you for listening and we hope this is of use to you. Every day is a day of thanks. The Stoics saw gratitude as a kind of medicine, that saying thank you for every experience was the key to mental health. Convince yourself that everything is a gift of

the gods. That's how Marcus Aurelius put it. That things are good and always will be. And it didn't just mean you should do this on special days like Thanksgiving, which the US is celebrating today, but on all days. Yes, it's great to be thankful for the usual candidates, for our families, for our health, to be thankful for the food that is laid out in front of us. But we should also find a way to say thank you for the less obvious things for the setbacks for the people who wronged us for having our life disrupted by the pandemic for the loss of a job or whatever difficulties we might be experiencing that nagging pain in your leg thank you it's making me take things slow that troublesome client thank you it's helping me develop better boundaries. That mistake you made, thank you for

reminding me to be more careful, for teaching me a lesson. That damage from the storm, thank you. The damage exposed a more serious problem that I'm now solving. And on and on and on. When Epictetus talks about how every situation has two handles, this is what he means. You can decide to grab on to anger or appreciation. You can pick the handle of resentment or of gratitude. You can look at the obstacle or get a little closer and see the opportunity. So as you gather around your family and friends this Thanksgiving or Christmas or any other celebration you might partake in, of course appreciate it and give thanks for all the obvious and bountiful gifts that this moment presents.

Just make sure that when the moment passes, as you go back to your everyday ordinary life, that you make gratitude and thanks a regular part of it. Again, not simply for what is easy and immediately pleasing, but for all of it. For every day and every thing. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another Thursday episode of the Daily Stoke podcast. I have traveled all over the world,

been to lots of cool places, lots of places that most people haven't been. But for someone who grew up in California and has now lived in Texas for many years, I think it was kind of unusual that I'd never been to Cancun. I'd been to a bunch of places in Mexico, but for some reason never Cancun. It wasn't until March of 2023 that I got to go.

I was invited by a bunch of senior leaders at PepsiCo Mexico to give this talk. I was only there very briefly, got a bunch of snacks from at PepsiCo Mexico to give this talk. I was only there very briefly, got a bunch of snacks from PepsiCo for my kids, so that was fun. And I sat down, PepsiCo Mexico's president, Robert Martinez, did this awesome job moderating a Q&A.

And if you are looking for how stoicism can help you as a leader, I think this Q&A will help. And if you want an even deeper dive Q&A and some more thoughts on Stoicism and leadership, check out the Daily Stoic Leadership Challenge. It's a nine week course built around Mark Zerillis' leadership philosophy. It also involves me asking a bunch of leaders,

leaders in similar positions as someone like Roberto, who, you know, heads of sports teams, generals, entrepreneurs, leadership experts, I got to do some Q and A's with them, and then people got to do some Q and A's with me. I think it's one of the best things we've done. You can check out that Daily Stoic Leadership Challenge in the show notes, I'll link to that.

Remember, if you sign up for Daily Stoic Life, you get that challenge for free, plus a bunch of other awesome stuff. But in the meantime, here's me talking to some senior leaders in Mexico for PepsiCo. So you were mentioning about having evidence on something that you put out. How do you distinguish?

Yeah, it's a tricky thing. It's a tricky thing. But I think it's important. Every company has a board of advisors. Who's on your individual board of advisors? Who do you show the stuff that you're working on to your colleagues, to your peers, to your mentors? So let's say when I was deciding to become a writer, I wasn't just like,

I'd never published anything before, I'd never showed my work. I had great writers who I'd showed my work to who I met over the years. Like I had evidence outside myself, right, that gave me some sense that I wasn't, you know, fooling myself, right? And I was it you know fully myself right and I think you know how they have a sounding board that you run your stuff by it's really

important whether your business or or you know you're creative site. One of the ways to make sure it's not your ego is to get impartial and surfer to give you you know the honest feedback. You're very successful writer feedback. You're a very successful writer, best seller. You give all these conferences. How do you ground yourself? How do you not have an ego?

How do you, I mean, you talked about your day, but that's more around how you plan your day. Sure. Maybe it's part of that. But then what else do you do? And, oh, I cannot have this conference with Pepsi, no, not the greatest because they hired me and stuff. How do you work around that? Well, I think it's important. because they hired me and stuff. I didn't work around that.

Well, I think it's important. Everyone has a ego, and if you don't think you have one, that's the most egotistical thing you could do. But I find that doing the task is inherently humbling. If you're focused on how you can get better as opposed to, look at how awesome I am, look at what I've done, you're going to naturally, I think, be humbler.

So, like, what I try to do is, whenever I finish a book, I start the next one. Because when I start the next one, you're starting with page zero or page one, and it's blank and it's intimidating, and it's not gonna be good for a long time. So, like, by throwing myself into the next project, I feel like I'm not only protecting myself against the ego

of like, look how great the last one is selling, look at all the cool things that I've done, look how proud I am of what I've published, but I'm also insulating myself against the failure too. Like, so I've had books that have done really well out of the gate and I've had other books that took a long time to take off. And I really didn't sweat either one

because I had this other thing that was kicking my ass every day and that was taking up the most of my focus. And so Amazon has this slogan of like, it's always day one, right? Then you're always starting anew and fresh. And part of that is not being sort of rigid and set their ways and complacent.

But I think it's also always reminding yourself that you're starting at the beginning and to not get too full of yourself. Right, amazing. You're talking in the book about, and you talk today about, a little bit about the Patriots, and then we heard about the Spurs.

You talk a little bit about Bill Belichick and how he started, and he was like the guy doing the job that nobody wanted to do. You probably now know him as the sixth-time Super Bowl-winning coach, and probably Brady was there also. How do they remain equal in a multi-billion dollar business with all the hype they get around, et cetera, et cetera?

How do they ground themselves? Well, I think it's a similar thing in football, right? The team that wins the Super Bowl, not only play the longest season, but then they have the most trouble retaining talent and coaches. They have the worst draft picks the next year. So they're starting that next season behind the eight ball. Everyone else got knocked out earlier and has been thinking about how they're gonna do

the next year, right? And so realizing that actually your success, you could take this too far and become paranoid and never happen, but if you realize that your success is actually putting you in a position of disadvantage. Now you've got the most competition, people are the most familiar with what you just did right. You're the person they're trying to be, you've got a target on their

back. You realize, I think really quickly, the margin for error is so small that if you introduce ego or complacency or entitlement, you're going to get, you're ass kicked. I mean, I was looking, if I spoke to the Los Angeles Rams a couple of years ago, and they ended up winning the Super Bowl last year, and then this year they didn't even make the playoffs, right? And I'm not saying that's out of ego, it was this team that got ravished by injuries, but it's realizing that, hey, like,

just because you were successful before, does not, it is not to be taken for granted that you will continue to be successful. You have to stay hungry, you have to focus on ceaselessly solving problems, and you have to look at what you're doing next, right? And I think that's a way to just be so locked in that you don't have, you could look at

how awesome your career was after you retire, you know? But if you're looking at it in the moment, you're taking an eye off the ball. 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

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