The Daily Stoic - Happiness Is Wisdom. Wisdom Is Happiness. | Ask Daily Stoic

Starting point is 00:00:00 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 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, visitdailystoic.com. It was a rough life, plagues and pain, pandemics and personal loss, stress and temptation. Marcus Aurelius, for all his privilege, did not have it easy.

Starting point is 00:01:12 Yet we ought to imagine him happy. Why? Because he tried to be. All the Stoics did. Not happy in the sense that they smiled all the time or were always having a good time, but happy in the sense that they were fulfilled, that they experienced still-neuxed. and contentment, gratitude, and acceptance. Convince yourself that it's all a gift from the gods, he writes in meditations as a kind of definition of stoic happiness and wisdom, that things are

Starting point is 00:01:42 good and always will be. The primary indication of a well-ordered mind, Seneca said, is man's ability to remain in one place and linger in his own company. Let us contrast this with another powerful person. Elon Musk is smart. He is rich. Incredibly so, with a net worth of around $500 billion. He has achieved success few would ever imagine, and in multiple industries too. But would anyone describe Elon Musk as happy? He would not, as I detail in length in the middle section of the new book, Wisdom Takes Work, which came out day before yesterday, and you can still order signed first editions

Starting point is 00:02:22 for a few more days. Thanks to everyone that supported the book, it has meant so much to me. It was just at Barnes & Noble signing, hundreds of them in your New York City. Your orders are going out here every single day. Again, I really appreciate the support. But back to that message. Elon has described his life as difficult and excruciating. He once compared running a company to chewing glass and staring into the abyss. Inside his mind, he said, is a storm and not a happy one. I can remember even in happy moments when I was a kid, Elon once said, it just feels like there's a rage of forces in my mind constantly. Being in a a big, empty house and the footsteps echoing through the hallway. No one there, he once told a reporter, and no one on the pillow next to you. Fuck, how do you make yourself happy in a situation like that? Here is a man who can solve every imaginable technical problem but can't seem to fix his own life.

Starting point is 00:03:18 Who even unbelievable achievements have not helped. Here is a man who has all the money in the world and yet can't buy the most valuable thing in the world with it. There are a lot of smart people out there, but if they're so smart, why aren't they happy? Life is too short to be miserable. If wisdom doesn't bring you happiness, what good is it? If it doesn't help you live in your own life, spend time in your own company, what use is it? And certainly we can say if your success doesn't bring you happiness in contentment, or at least some sense of self-worth, what is it worth?

Starting point is 00:03:55 wisdom is happiness happiness is a form of wisdom but happiness like wisdom is not an accident takes work lots of it the work that the stoics did the work you have to do while you still can and i'm really proud of this new book i'm i'm happy with it however it does i'm happy with it because i know i did my best and i said what i wanted to say and i think i said something worth hearing so i do hope you hear it You can grab it as an audiobook, as an e-book, and as I said, signed at first editions at Dailystoic.com slash wisdom. You can still grab all the different bonuses. I appreciate the support everyone.

Starting point is 00:04:36 I think you're really going to like the book, and I can't wait to hear from all of you about it. DailyStoic.com slash wisdom. Still come to the dinner where we're going to talk about the book. You can get signed pages from the manuscript, including the page where I worked out this very idea, which forms one of the chapters actually in part three, and a bunch of other awesome stuff, including some bonus chapters, daily stoic.com slash wisdom. Enjoy. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. I've talked here before. We've made whole videos about

Starting point is 00:05:11 it. Therapy has been incredibly helpful to me. It's given me emotional awareness. It's helped me process my feelings. It's helped me deal with stuff as a parent, as a spouse, and just a person in a crazy, busy, noisy, sometimes demoralizing world. And my therapy practice is part and parcel of my stoic practice, right? Analyzing and putting your feelings, your impressions, your views, values to the test. That's what therapy allows you to do. And there's a reason I use online therapy because it's more efficient. It takes less time. That's where today's sponsor comes in. BetterHelp is built around making starting therapy. easier. They connect you with a licensed therapist who is trained to listen and give you helpful

Starting point is 00:05:58 unbiased advice. You just fill out a questionnaire and you can match with the therapist in as little as a couple of days. You can easily switch therapists anytime at no extra cost if it's not the right fit. With over 7,000 reviews and a 4.3 rating on Trust Pilot, BetterHelp is a platform you can trust. You can click the link in the description below or just go to betterhelp.com slash Daily Stoak to get 10% off your first month of therapy. By the time you know, you know, need someone new on your team, you're already behind, right? You don't need to hire someone tomorrow. You need to hire somebody new yesterday. So how can you find amazing candidates fast? Easy. Just use Indeed. When it comes to hiring, Indeed is all you need. Stop struggling to get your

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Starting point is 00:07:25 and support the show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com slash daily stoic. Terms and conditions apply. Indeed is all you need. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another Thursday episode of the Daily Stoak podcast. I was telling you back in December I did this talk in Miami. It was a Q&A. outside, about as beautiful backdrop as you can imagine. Lovely conversation. Well, it was actually my third trip to Florida in like three days. Actually, let me pull up, just to give you a sense of my life. So on Thursday, I was in and out of Miami. I flew out at seven, flew home at six, and then I was home for one day. My wife had a trip. And then on Saturday, I was on a 7 a.m. flight

Starting point is 00:08:18 to Miami and a 615 flight home. And then less than one week later, I was on an 8 a.m. flight to Orlando and a 8 p.m. flight home from Orlando. So that was three trips to Florida in less than seven days, but that is the life of me or of a speaker. And it was lovely to get to go to Florida in December and go for nice runs on the beach. Well, not in Orlando. That was a run around a Marriott hotel complex. But I had two lovely runs in Miami along the water. As I said, I got to answer some questions outside under the sun talking wellness. Debbie Brown, the podcaster, was wonderful at moderating and asking the questions of her own. Let's talk some sociism. These men are grappling with all the things that we are grappling with in this very second,

Starting point is 00:09:14 which is really the juggle of light and dark. You know, it's the, It's the juggling of doing some of that inner shadow work or some of those harder things or sometimes simply having to bear witness to what's happening and not look away. And it's that searching for that deeper thing of why am I here and how can I make this better for myself or make this experience feel more or less X, Y, and Z. Yeah, and it's stoic women too. Obviously, you know, philosophy and history is largely male. that's who wrote the books, that's who could, you know, could afford to do these things.

Starting point is 00:09:52 That's who got permission to do these things. But one of the Stoic teachers, his name was Musoni's Rufis. He has this fascinating lecture that survives to us. And he's talking about this question that people were asking at that time. He says, should women be taught philosophy? And his answer is, of course. He says, virtue doesn't know gender, just like stillness doesn't know gender. We all have different things that rile us up or get us worried.

Starting point is 00:10:14 we all have different concerns and, you know, different things we're working on, but these fundamental ideas stay the same. And just because the names of so many of the Stoic females or the wise women of history don't survive just doesn't mean they didn't exist. Of course they did. And you might even argue they were more philosophical because they didn't need to, you know, publish books and put their names on them and get all the credit, right? There's something. Or they might have been destroyed, like much of women's adding to the world over time, you know, we're always left out of history. Totally. And so one of the famous Stoics is Cato. Cato's daughter, Portia Cato, is held up in antiquity as one of the sort of great Stoic women. She's married to Brutus who assassinations Julius Caesar. And so all the Stoics were in the mix. You know, it's not just a male thing. I think sometimes people today think, particularly because it's popular online, I think people think like Stoicism is just for dudes. And it's very much not. It's been lovely to see the day of Stoic audience. It's probably 50-50.

Starting point is 00:11:13 because we're all just trying to make our way in the world, trying to deal with noise, trying to deal with temptations, trying to deal with our emotions. We're all dealing with the same set of things. I think Stoke philosophy is a, as I said, a tool in that toolkit. Absolutely. And just to speak for women, we come out the womb Stoic. You know, it's like there are so many ways

Starting point is 00:11:34 that we are constantly moving through the world with a quiet courage and, you know, just in a deep ability to be present with some of the harsh realities of being here. and making it beautiful and raising families and bringing joy. So, yeah. Well, my wife likes a joke that one of us writes about stoicism and then the other is a stoic. So. Oh, perfect.

Starting point is 00:11:58 So something that you've mentioned here and really implied, but also mentioned so much in your work, is that obstacles can be opportunities in disguise. How can we reframe those personal wellness challenges that we're having, like the burnout or the self-doubt that happens, how can we really use those to catalyze into opportunities for growth? The idea for the Stoics is that every situation is an opportunity. It's not necessarily an opportunity to make more money or build your business or whatever, right? There's stuff that happens in life that is awful and hard and constraining and removes options, right? Like, not everything is a chance to get healthier also, right? Like, you could find out you have cancer.

Starting point is 00:12:41 You could find out any number of things, right? And so the idea for the Stokes is that everything was an opportunity for you to practice virtue. Everything was an opportunity for you to act with courage or discipline or justice or wisdom. So there might be no benefits to this situation for you, but there could be benefits for other people, right? You could learn something that you're able to communicate from this experience. So what the Stoics are saying is that as you face things in life, big or small, good or bad, you're supposed to go, well, what is this an opportunity for me to do? And what am I being asked of in this situation?

Starting point is 00:13:18 That's the idea. There's one reading of Stoicism where it's like, hey, this is what makes you more productive or more resilient or more successful. And the Stokes were, you know, tough, resilient, successful people. But at a deeper level, the idea is that it's always an opportunity for you to be great, like to do great things, if not for yourself, for other people in the world. For those that wrestle with ego, how do we get ego out? No.

Starting point is 00:13:53 Definitely not me. Never. Yeah. No, it's funny because I wrote this book, Ego is the Enemy. And it's always interesting to hear from people who have strong opinions about the book who have not read it. And then you're like, that's ego. You know, that's the definition of what I'm talking about.

Starting point is 00:14:09 But no, ego is there in all of us, and I rarely find it to be a positive thing. And I don't mean this in the Freudian sense. I just mean, like, you're never like, you know what really bring this team together if we all had bigger egos, right? Ego is a thing that gets in the way between us connecting, between us seeing what's really there, between us enjoying the success we have, right? because there's that sort of insatiability to ego or that almost destructive chaos-seeking part of ego, the thing that makes hard things harder that makes, you know, it seeks out conflict and problems and chaos.

Starting point is 00:14:51 So to me, ego is this thing that gets between us and what we're supposed to do, who we're supposed to be, what we're trying to do. How does someone look at that and kind of make that flexible and do something with it? Well, I'm always, you know, you have strong opinions about things. Somebody sends you an email, you know, you get news about something, working on something. And I often find that my first reaction, you know, you can have the emotional reaction. And then there's often the sort of an ego reaction of like, who are they to say this to me or how dare, you know, that part, that sort of wounded inner child part of yourself that's there to protect you, but is often too protective and shields you from what you need to hear or need to see. And so that's one of one of the questions I'm always asking myself is like, am I doing this out of ego? Am I, am I angry about this feedback that I got because it's not true? Or am I actually angry because I know it is true and I don't want it to be true, right? Or am I insisting on this thing or trying to get this thing? Is, are my motives here self-serving or are they self-less, right? And so I just find that ego is bad fuel.

Starting point is 00:16:10 It's bad. It screws with your compass. And I'm not saying egotistical people are never successful. Of course they are. But what's really interesting when you meet successful people, really successful people, the inner circle of people around them, they know. They see where ego is making it harder for this person. They have to do a lot of work, you know, trying to artfully get around it. They know how that person could have done more or done better or could have done it on the first try and so to the 30th try. In recovery, they talk about ego as an acronym. It stands for edging God out, which is an interesting way to think about it. Even if you don't think about it in a spiritual context, what it's really doing is, you know, making you God. And so the idea of

Starting point is 00:16:58 focusing on someone or something bigger than yourself to me is, again, just one of these ways we kind of push ego away. And it's a constant process. You don't read a book and then never have ego again. You don't have some, you know, humbling failure and never have ego again. You know, I'm sure psychedelics can be interesting in examining these things, but doesn't magically make it go away forever. It's work. let you know I'm going to be doing three more live dates in the coming months. I'd love to see you in Seattle, Washington on December 3rd, San Diego on February 5th, and Phoenix, Arizona on February 27th. The talk in Austin sold out. My tour last year sold out. So grab these tickets while you can.

Starting point is 00:17:49 I did a wonderful talk back in Seattle with Robert Green, which was one of my favorites. So I'm going to be there. You can ask me questions, and I'll be talking Stoicism and the ideas in the new book. Just go to Daily StoicLive.com. 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.

Starting point is 00:18:23 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. Look, ads are annoying. They are to be avoided, if at all possible. I understand as a content creator why they need to exist. That's why I don't begrudge them when they appear on the shows that I listen to.

Starting point is 00:18:54 But again, as a person who has. to pay a podcast producer and has to pay for equipment and for the studio and the building that the studio is in. It's a lot to keep something like the Daily Stoic going. So if you want to support a show but not listen to ads, well, we have partnered with Supercast to bring you a ad-free version of Daily Stoic. We're calling it Daily Stoic Premium. And with premium, you can listen to every episode of the Daily Stoic podcast completely ad-free. no interruptions, just the ideas, just the messages, just the conversations you came here for. And you can also get early access to episodes before they're available to the public.

Starting point is 00:19:37 And we're going to have a bunch of exclusive bonus content and extended interviews in there just for Daily Stoic Premium members as well. If you want to remove distractions, go deeper into Stoicism and support the work we do here. Well, it takes less than a minute to sign up for Daily Stoic Premium, and we are offering a limited time discount of 20% off your first year. Just go to dailystoke.com slash premium to sign up right now or click the link in the show descriptions to make those ads go away.

The Daily Stoic - Happiness Is Wisdom. Wisdom Is Happiness. | Ask Daily Stoic

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