The Daily Stoic - Handle What You Control First | Robert Greene's 6 Stoic Concepts For A Fulfilling Life

Episode Date: May 17, 2023

Life is frustrating. You’re waiting for people to get back to you. You’re waiting for approval on stuff. You’re waiting for things to ship. You’re dealing with bureaucracy. You’re depending on teammates. You’re dealing with the fallout of decisions that weren’t your call, rules you don’t agree with.It’s interesting though how often we complain or chafe against these constraints…yet when the ball actually is in our court, we’re slow. We’re indecisive. We don’t do our best.More than strange, it’s wasteful madness.The Stoics say over and over again that there is stuff in our control and stuff outside our control.---And in today's Daily Stoic video excerpt, Ryan presents six Stoic concepts for living a fulfilling life that Robert Greene has gathered from his decades of observing, studying, and writing about people and power.📺 You can watch the full video on the Daily Stoic YouTube channel.✉️ Get parenting wisdom inspired by the Stoics every day for free at https://dailydad.com✉️ 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 day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. On Tuesdays, we take a closer look at these stoic ideas, how we can apply them in our actual lives. Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy. Handle what you control first. Life is frustrating. You're waiting for people to get back to you. You're waiting for approval on stuff.

You're waiting for things to ship. You're dealing with bureaucracy. You're depending on teammates. You're dealing with the fallout of decisions that weren't your call rules that you don't agree with. It's interesting, though, how often we complain and chave against these constraints. And yet, when the ball is actually in our court, we're slow. We're in decisive. We don't do our best. More than strange, it's wasteful madness. Distot Xe over and over again that there is stuff that's in our control and stuff outside of our control. But this delineation is about more than just putting stuff into categories or learning how to practice the so-called art of acquiescence.

It's a statement of priorities. The things in your control, you have to get them under control. You're never going to be able to make other speed up, but you can use the time they take up to decide what you're going to do when it's time to respond. No amount of yelling is going to make that container ship in the Atlantic go faster, but you can handle everything else you need to handle before it comes in. You can't eliminate the red tape in the DMV, but you can trim the inefficiencies in your own office, and that will still save

you time. Stop beating your head against the wall where it makes no difference. Focus on what you control, handle that first. Actually not even first because that implies it's possible to somehow get to the bottom of all of it. It's a lifelong task getting your own house in order, improving your own processes and decisions, and ultimately dealing with what's up to you. It's funny I talked to lots of people and a good chunk of those people

haven't been readers for a long time. They've just gotten back into it and I always love hearing that and they tell me how they fall in love with reading. They're reading more than ever and I go, let me guess, you listen audiobooks don't you? And it's true. And almost invariably, they listen to them on Audible. And that's because Audible offers an incredible selection of audio books across every genre from bestsellers and new releases to celebrity memoirs. And of course, ancient philosophy, all my books are available on audio, read by me for the most part. Audible lets you enjoy all your audio entertainment in one app. You'll always find the best of what you love, or something new to discover. And as an Audible member, you

get to choose one title a month to keep from their entire catalog, including the latest best sellers and new releases. You'll discover thousands of titles from popular favorites, exclusive new series, exciting new voices in audio. You can check out stillness is the key, the daily dad I just recorded. So that's up on Audible now. Coming up on the 10-year anniversary of the obstacle is the way audio books, so all those are available and new members can try Audible for free for 30 days. Visit audible.com slash daily stoke or text daily stoke to 500-500. That's audible.com slash daily stoke or text daily stoke to 500-500.

You're going to have failure in life. People are going to hurt you. But that is life. That's what it is. So to resist that, to be angry about that means to not love life itself. To me, he's one of the great living philosophers of our time. Certainly one of the best-selling philosophers of our time. His books have sold millions of copies all over the world. His works have changed the lives of athletes and musicians and world leaders. Any directly

changed my life, talking about the Great Robert Green, 48 laws of power, artists of seduction, mastery, laws of human nature, the daily laws. I'm Ryan Holliday, not only have I written a number of books about stoic philosophy, I've spoken about it to the NBA and NFL, sitting senators and special forces leaders. And in today's episode I want to give you not just some really genius things from the one and only Robert Greed, but I want to give you Robert Greene talking about Stoic Philosophy and some Stoic lessons that he's applied that you can apply, that connect Stoicism to his work on power and warfare and strategy and human psychology The thing that you and I made together, which is the Amorathatic coin

Yes, which is the idea that it's also a niche appraise of a sort of loving everything that happens to you not Presenting it not fighting against it not caring around a crud or burden, burden, but sort of embracing it and finding the good in it. Yeah. Where does that fit in with our human nature? Well, it doesn't fit in because it's not natural to us. Our natural frame, our natural starting position, is when something bad happens, why me to feel sort of a grievance, to feel that things aren't fair, to feel that other people aren't giving you what you want or what you deserve.

We start from a position of feeling kind of sorry for ourselves. We deserve more than what we're getting. And so overcoming some of these natural elements of human nature and turning them around and using them for another purpose another way. And Morphati is very powerful in that you train yourself to accept everything that happens. It's sort of a banality to say that things happen for a reason, but there's some truth to it. For Nietzsche, it was, this is life.

Life involves pain. Life involves adversity. You're going to die one day and it's not going to be pleasant. Your friends and family members, they're going to die one day and it's not going to be pleasant. You're going to have failure in life. People are going to hurt you. But that is life. That's what it is. So to resist that, to be angry about that means to not love life itself. Seneca has this thing, but I still struggle with what it means. He says, we suffer more in imagination than reality. Now, I think he's saying, and I was talking to a friend who's sort of dreading this thing that's going to happen.

He's worried about this negative news article that's going to come out. I was talking to him about it, and I was saying, look, like it's gonna happen, and it's gonna either be really negative or not that negative. But you're borrowing the suffering in advance. You're feeling crappy about it before it's happened. I'm just curious, what does that quote mean to you? I often have the ideas I'm meditating.

There's a world out there that has nothing to do with me. It's completely indifferent to Robert Green. The birds could care less about my faith. The trees don't know anything about my existence. The sky doesn't care at all about me, right? Okay, that's the reality, that's the world. But my thinking creates this thing as if I'm the most important thing in the universe.

That everything that happens is going to happen to me and is going to be bad, etc. So to be able to see that thinking traps you so many times into patterns that you've been programmed to respond to situations, a lot of times by anxiety. Thoughts pop up about, I've got to do this phone call or, oh, I forgot to email that person. Or, damn, this interview is coming up and I don't want to do it. So much of the thoughts are anxieties that you're anticipating, what's going to happen, right? If you can just control that, if you can just see that that is the source of your problem and that the world is indifferent to you and that the circumstances are totally neutral and that newspaper article that comes out, you can't control it and maybe the circumstances are totally neutral and that newspaper article that comes out,

you can't control it and maybe the bad stuff will actually in the end rebound to your favor or it'll make you tougher, it'll make you realize certain things. If you can just see them as facts, then you've got the power. My flaws is always been you have to make ideas your own. You have to take with somebody, teaches, and you have to put it into your own experience. It can't just be these dead words, deaths that you kind of digest that have no relevance to your daily experience. You have to take them, they have to come to life within you within your own experience.

So you read a passage and it's not maybe what I'm really going through right now, but you kind of maybe recall some experiences in the past that might be relevant. And then the second day you come up with something that is maybe a little bit closer. And then as you go through it more and more and more, the kind of soaks in, and you see more and more access points to your daily experience. And then it can kind of become something that you internalize. experience, and then it becomes something that you would turn alive. Death is the ultimate barrier for all of us, not just physically but psychologically. I maintain that human beings are messed up, screwed up in so many ways because of their awareness of death and their fear of death.

It is through this fear that we created all kinds of superstitions, that we created the idea of an afterlife. You're enslaved by this fear, you're not aware of it, it's controlling you. Overcoming it is the ultimate freedom. Most people are gonna say, oh, that's not me, as they say, for all of these chapters. Oh, other people, they're irrational not me.

Yeah, oh, I'm not really afraid of death. I play video games and I'm always killing people in it. I watch movies and people are always dying because I'm not afraid of it. Our culture was permeated with cartoon versions of death. Your death is something physical. It's going to happen to you. It's a very visceral thing.

You are afraid of it. And that fear is, creates what I call latent anxiety. It makes you fearful of a lot of things in life and you're not aware of it. It makes you cautious about failure. It makes you cautious about taking risks. So I'm trying to show you that your fear of death is infected you on many, many levels. And so I compare it to this. I use the metaphor in the book. I don't use many metaphors, but this is one I use, is that death is like this vast ocean

that we stand on the shore of. Most animals are not aware of their mortality. We are the only species as far as we know that's aware that's mortality. And here you are on the shore of this immense vast ocean, you don't know what death is or what it's going to be. And you're afraid of it, and you turn your back to it. And we humans have the ability to explore things,

to conquer our fear. And I want you instead of turning your back to actually enter that vast ocean and explore it. And I show you ways of turning your back to actually enter that vast ocean and get and explore it. And I show you ways of exploring the actual thought of your own mortality and how it can free you and inspire you in many ways. Well, you know who one of the great stoics of the 20th century was? No.

Alfred Hitchcock. Directing a film, if you've known other people who've done it is an extremely stressful job. It's like directing an army into a campaign because problems are arising that you cannot anticipate. There's all this pressure, there's all this money. You've got insane egos of actors, producers, etc. It's a constant adrenaline rush going through. You can't control your emotions. So Hitchcock, people would look at him on the set and he'd be falling asleep in the director's chair. He'd look like Buddha, his eyes were closed. Why? Because he prepared for everything. He anticipated everything that was going to happen. And so by the time

the film came, he was completely bored because he knew he was able to control every aspect of the production. What I want to train you, the reader, to look at is to not look at people's, what they say or their appearance, but to look at their actions and the patterns of their behavior. So for instance, I talk about Howard Hughes in chapter four as somebody who's got a very weak character who was a horrific businessman, and people were lured in by his image of this sort of maverick aviator, kind of, you know, great Hollywood person, et cetera.

But if you looked at the patterns of his behavior, you would have seen that he was actually quite toxic. So stop looking at what people say about themselves and look at their actions. Hey, Prime Members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic early and ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free on Amazon music, download the Amazon music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts.

Celebrity feuds are high stakes. You never know if you're just going to end up on Page Six or Du Moir or in court. I'm Matt Bellesai. And I'm Sydney Battle, and we're the host of Wondery's new podcast, Dis and Tell, where each episode we unpack a different iconic celebrity feud. From the buildup, why it happened, and the repercussions. What does our obsession with these feud say about us? The first season is packed with some pretty messy pop culture drama, but none is drawn out

in personal as Britney and Jamie Lynn Spears. When Britney's fans form the free Britney movement dedicated to fraying her from the infamous conservatorship, Jamie Lynn'sars. Follow Disenthal wherever you get your podcast. You can listen ad free on Amazon Music or the Wonder App.