The Daily Stoic - How Stoicism Can Help You Persevere and Succeed

Episode Date: October 10, 2021

​​On today’s podcast Ryan speaks to a group of entrepreneurs about one of the biggest threats they will face in pursuing their goals: themselves. Our egos can stunt us, alienate us, tarnish our successes and deepen our failures, which is why it is so maligned by the Stoics.Watch the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOvvZBPcF_IThe Jordan Harbinger Show is one of the most interesting podcasts on the web, with guests like Kobe Bryant, Mark Manson, Eric Schmidt, and more. Listen to one of Ryan's episodes right now (1, 2), and subscribe to the Jordan Harbinger Show today.Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow 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 weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend when you have a little bit more space when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal and most importantly to prepare for what the week

ahead may bring. Hi I'm David Brown, the host of Wunderree'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. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another weekend episode of the Daily Stoke podcast. You might not think of me as a business owner, but of course, that's what I am. Every author is an entrepreneur. You work for yourself. You have to sort of eat what you kill. You have all these sort of collaborators and people who work with and for you, but at the end of the day, you work for yourself. But also, Daily Stoke, as it's grown and grown and grown, has

become its own business. And now for almost 10 years, I've had my own marketing business, brass check as well. And Stoicism has been a philosophy that's guided me in that. I've, you know, even one of my first articles was Stoicism 101, Stoicism for Entrepreneurs. But Stoicism is great for a small business owner because you're responsible. And there's so much that you don't control And all you really control is how you respond and I think you see companies fall apart because of the CEO or leadership

They don't know, you know as we say you go as the enemy You see people put their lives in to something but they don't actually prize what's important, and so that success is meaningless. Really I think what stoicism is is a sort of set of principles, a guiding philosophy that helps you as a business owner and executive that helps you in the real world. And I don't think it's a coincidence, of course, that Zeno himself began his pursuit of philosophy coming after the collapse of his small business. He was a dimerction.

And so today's episode is about how stoicism can help you, is about how stoicism can help you persevere and succeed specifically, I think, in business. So I hope you like these lessons, and I'll talk to you soon. What happens as an entrepreneur when at the early stages everyone tells you your idea is crazy, it's not going to work, you absolutely shouldn't do it, do not quit your job, do not invest this money, do not go down this road, it will only lead to ruin and then it turns out that you're right and they're wrong, right? This is what every successful entrepreneur story looks like. So what a lot of people do if you're motivated by ego if you don't have a good check on

your ego is you learn from this and never listen to other people. It takes everyone who's giving you feedback, everyone who's expressing doubt and it tells you that they're haters and you absolutely shouldn't listen to them. And sometimes when people are telling you, stop, don't do this, they're preventing you from driving right off of a cliff. So I watched Ego destroy this company that I loved and I think everyone has seen Ego tear apart people in their lives, businesses that they're a fan of, bands that they're a fan of, you, we're pretty good at spotting other people's egos, we're much less good at identifying

where Ego's causing problems in our own lives. Just as an example, I write this book about egos and probably the most common question I get is, how can I do something about my boss's ego? It's never, how can I do something about my own ego, which of course ironically is ego. So ego is this force I argue that sucks us down like gravity.

Zero, Connolly, a British writer, he said that. And look, if ego was a problem, a sucks us down like gravity. If you're never getting off the couch, it's not really a big problem. You're already down there. The problem is all of you have employees who count on you, investors who count on you, families who count on you. When you're out doing big things in the real world, ego has some real world consequences. And so that's what we're going to talk about today. Ego is the timeless element in the story of catastrophic collapse. This is John DeLorean, the inventor of the DeLorean motor company.

Super talented executive at GM, brilliant inventor, brilliant engineer. His playbook for DeLorean is essentially the playbook that Elon Musk has now run with Tesla, but it didn't work out. Why didn't it work out? Someone wants to scraw DeLorean's leadership style is chasing colored balloons.

He would go to whatever the fancy, sexy, exciting thing was, he was an extreme micromanager, and then ironically, not interested in solving the really tough, complicated problems that didn't have easy solutions. He loved the marketing side of things micromanager and then ironically not interested in solving the really tough complicated problems that didn't have easy solutions. He loved the marketing side of things because that's where the validation and the fun is, but actually delivering on the promises of the marketing was another. He actually collaborated on a book called, on a clear day, you can see general motors.

He wasn't even close to general motors, but that's what ego sort of puffs us up. And then as the wheels start to come off, literally if the Dwarri Motor Company, instead of deciding, hey, I'm gonna get really serious about this, hey, I've got to fix these problems, hey, I've got to look in the mirror and see, what the root of these problems is. He decided that a $50 million cocaine deal

was the way to secure some much needed bridge financing. Not a good idea for anyone fundraising. And it ends ultimately in handcuffs, Howard Hughes, another sort of brilliant mind, but becomes increasingly untethered from reality as fewer and fewer people can tell him. No, Richard Nixon, people forget Richard Nixon was reelected in the largest landslide in American history. But he would talk about how he'd always seen himself as the underdog.

He sort of was stuck in this vision of himself as the little guy, because that's what he was his whole life. He remembered being bullied. He remembered being kicked around. And so he brought this kind of paranoia to the White House that made him constantly lash out and picked fights with people, which ultimately proved to be his undoing. Celebrity feuds are high stakes.

You never know if you're just going to end up on page 6 or Du Moir or in court. I'm Matt Bellesai. And I'm Sydney Battle, and we're the host of Wundery's new podcast, Dis and Tell, where each episode we unpack a different iconic celebrity feud. From the build-up, why it happened, and the repercussions. What does our obsession with these feuds 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's lack of public support it angered some fans a lot of them It's a story of two young women who had their choices taken away from them by their controlling parents, but took their anger out on each other. And it's about a movement to save a superstar, which set its sights upon anyone who failed to fight for Brittany. Follow Disenthal wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on Amazon music or the Wonder App. So if you go as so destructive, why is it so common? Well, I would argue one, we don't have a lot of good examples, but also doing things is scary, and so we sort of take the edge off in the form of Ego.

This is Billy McFarlane, the creator of FireFest, right? Selling a festival is fun, delivering on an island festival, not so fun. He actually called me before he went to prison. He wanted me to talk to him about writing a book. So again, not learning the lesson of his failure in any way. Again, we love the social media. The image of being an entrepreneur, selling the brand of being an entrepreneur,

but actually delivering it as something else. Steve Jobs, right? Steve Jobs should have been fired from Apple. They absolutely made the right decision firing him from Apple. He was totally unmanageable. He was way behind way over budget. He would burst into tears at the slightest provocation. I think we can often take the wrong lesson from someone like Steve Jobs.

There's all sorts of way less talented people that sort of see themselves as a Steve Jobs-esque figure. But like the second chance that Steve Jobs, there's all sorts of way less talented people that sort of see themselves as a Steve Jobs-esque figure. But like the second chance that Steve got, that was extra. That was a stroke of good fortune. Most stories don't have a redemption like that. So we have to look at the opportunities that ego is closing off for us, Kanye West, of course. I would argue that in the studio Kanye has to be humble

and obsessed with craft. You couldn't make the music that he makes if he wasn't. The problem is he can't once he leaves the studio contain the ego and it sort of constantly gets him into trouble. Elizabeth Holmes, she loved, again the idea of seeming like Steve Jobs, she even mimics the turtle neck sweater. The problem with faking it to you make it is that's just another way of saying fraud. And Elizabeth Holmes story again is a story of a person who marketed their way to the top but didn't like the actual delivery of a product that worked. This is 6'9", Akashi 6'9, now facing life in prison. A strange drawing hip-hop decides to join a gang and commit armed robberies after

he became a successful rapper because he liked the street cred of it, I guess, right? But now he will not record another song. Then of course, it's impossible to talk about ego without mentioning this guy. Trump is a great example wherever you sit politically of how ego takes a really hard job being president and makes it harder and harder and harder every single day, right? He is constantly making enemies that he doesn't need to make. He's bringing on investigations.

The Tony would need to happen. What ego does is it sort of picks fights. It makes us the center of things. We don't need to be the center of. And it's just, again, the enemy that we're going to talk about today. So my argument is, look, building and leading things are scary. And Ego is kind of a defense mechanism

from dealing with the reality of that fear and that tear. Ewan must describe starting companies as eating glass and staring into the abyss of death. Maybe you guys can relate to that a little bit. I know I can't. But he keeps starting companies, right? And so Ego is kind of like a defense mechanism against that, but it ultimately makes that thing scarier and harder

and less likely to succeed in the long run. So my argument is doing anything important is scary, Stephen Pressfield calls that fear of the resistance. And instead of facing the resistance, instead of facing it with our eyes wide open, Ego creeps in to kind of numb us in the way resistance, and instead of facing the resistance, instead of facing it with our eyes wide open, ego creeps in to kind of numb us in the way that really talented sensitive people are attracted to drugs or alcohol.

Ego is like a numbing agent. And actually in alcoholics anonymous, they describe ego as a conscious separation from. And what they mean is it's kind of a buffer, a bubble that we put around ourselves. And while that might feel good in the short term, the problem is what that separates us from are the most important things, both in business and in life. So I would argue that it's a conscious separation from our employees, from our customers, from our friends,

from our family, most of all, from truth, right? As entrepreneurs, we need truth. We need real feedback. We need real data on what's happening and how things are working. And if ego is there corrupting that or misleading it, that's when you end up making really bad decisions that lead your business to stray

or lead your personal life to stray. Remember, Courage is calling Fortune Favours the Brave, is now available everywhere, and go to your local bookstore and pick it up, and come to the painted porch, and pick it up. We are still offering the pre-order bonuses we've extended it to the end of this week so you can get that at dailystilic.com slash pre-order but you can also get audible you can get e-books you can get whatever you want from wherever you want it but I would very much like you to

support the new book courage is calling Fortune favors the brave. 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 with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts. download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and add free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts.