The Daily Stoic - It's Not What Happens. It's How You Bear It. | Ask Daily Stoic

Episode Date: December 2, 2022

It doesn't matter who you are, the facts are the same. Marcus Aurelius was Emperor. Epictetus was a slave. Two different fates, but the same reality. Most of life, most situations are out of our control. All we can do is respond to them well. All we can do is endure them.✉️ 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 Facebook See 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. But on Fridays, we not only read this daily meditation, but I try to answer some questions from listeners and fellow stoics who are trying to apply this philosophy, whatever it is they happen to do. Sometimes these are from talks.

Sometimes these are people who come up to talk to me on the street. Sometimes these are written in or emailed from listeners. But I hope in answering their questions, I can answer your questions, give a little more guidance on this philosophy. We're all trying to follow. [♪ Music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in 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. It's not what happens, it's how you bear it.

It doesn't matter who you are, the facts are the same. Marcus Aurelius was emperor, Epictetus was a slave, two different fates, are the same. Marcus Aurelius was emperor. Epochetus was a slave. Two different fates, but the same reality. Most of life, most situations are out of our control. All we can do is respond to them well. All we can do is endure them. In December 1950, the United States was deep into the war in Korea. It seemed likely that the conflict would spiral out of control. What would happen next? What could one do? Was it hopeless? Whose fault was it? into the war in Korea. It seemed likely that the conflict would spiral out of control. What would happen next? What could one do? Was it hopeless? Whose fault was it?

As Secretary of State Dean Ackerson struggled under this burden, he got a letter from his old friend, the foreign policy visionary, George Keenan. It's advice that bucks you up whether you're fighting for the future of the free world or just trying to make it through high school. And here it is. In international as-in-private life, what counts most is not what happens to someone, but how he bears what happens to him. For this reason, almost everything depends from here on out on the manner in which we Americans bear what is unquestionably a major failure in disaster to our national fortunes.

If we accept it with candor, with dignity, with a resolve to absorb its lessons and make it good by doubled and determined effort, starting all over again if necessary along the pattern of Pearl Harbor, we need lose neither our self-confidence nor our allies nor our powers for bargaining. But if we try to conceal from our own people or from our allies the full measure of our misfortune, or permit ourselves to seek relief in any reactions of bluster or petulence or hysteria, we can easily find this crisis resolving itself into an irreparable deterioration of our world position

and of our confidence in ourselves. We've talked before about this kind of paradox in Stoicism. The Stoics were boldly optimistic and ruthlessly pragmatic. They always believed that they could endure the worst circumstances and they accepted the brutal facts of those circumstances. They saw the unquestionable major disaster and the unprecedented major opportunity. As I write in Lives of the Stokes, Zena loses his entire fortune in a shipwreck, but by bearing this with grace and fortitude he was able to discover a philosophy that changed the world. Marcus was the leader of Rome through a series of crises that matched Truman's a war in a 15-year pandemic. Cato faced a

republic on the brink of collapse. Seneca, Musoneus, Rufus, Agrippinus, Rutilius, and Helvides, all were exiled. These were difficult moments, but they bore them well, with confidence, dignity, candor, and most of all, unflappable perseverance. They might have temporarily bemoaned it, but they knew as epictetus knew that becoming an Olympic class athlete takes sweat. So they stuck to it just as you must. I really do recommend lives of the Stoics, the art of living from Xenota, Marcus Aurelies. You see that the Stoics were just like you, just like us in this moment. They faced adversity, they faced it well, and

they managed to learn real valuable lessons that they pass along to us in their writings. So you can check that out. Anywhere books are. So I'll help you like it if you want to support the podcast just check out the book. We should probably talk around so as to be able to me, I mean, in reading your other words, I know that that's kind of the foundation of baseline for so much of what it is you do. Number one, for those that don't know, what is it? Number two, in burning questions for me, how, like why? Like, how did this focus on philosophy, and specifically the stoics, especially for a 20-something-year-old guy,

is mind blowing to me, how does all of that come to be? Well, to go to another sort of lesson you learn about the market is, so I wrote that, I wrote, trust me, I'm lying, it came out, it debuted on the best soloist, it got a lot of attention, so well, I did another book called Growth Hacker Marketing, which is about sort of how startups

market themselves that did better than expected. And then when I went to my publisher and I said, okay, for my next book, I wanna write about an obscure school of ancient philosophy for which I did not study in school and have, you know, no credentials for. They were like, okay, they were not excited. And to be perfect on is thinking less than half what I got paid for my first book.

That's not the direction you want to be going in as a creative. You don't want to be paid less as you go on. And so actually, I recently I asked my editor, I had her on my podcast so, actually, I recently, I asked my editor, I had her on my podcast and I said, you know, what went through your mind as I came to you with this book? And she said, honestly, we were just hoping you would get this out of your system.

We hoped that you would write it and then you'd go back to doing what you obviously should be writing about, which is marketing books. And so, I had a sense of what I really wanted to do. And I also had a really strong sense of what the audience actually wanted, because I've been writing about Stoicism on my blog and I could see that this was really actually helpful to people. But it was a risk.

I mean, a friend of mine, not a great friend, predicted that the obstacle is the way it would sell 5,000 copies. It sold over a million copies and it's in 30 languages. So there's a lesson, I learned this in Hollywood, it comes from William Goldman, the screenwriter. He says, nobody knows anything. At the end of the day, nobody knows anything about what's going to work. Which means you might as well trust yourself, right? You might as well, you know, trust your gut if you've earned that trust. So I came up with the idea to do that book

and there was a lot of obstacles that ended up ironically doing well, a book about obstacles. But to me, what stoicism is about and why it's resonated is that it goes to the fundamental realities of what it means to be a human or an entrepreneur, a business executive or a person alive during a pandemic. Stoicism is basically the idea that we don't control what happens to us, but we control

how we respond. And so Stoicism is a philosophy built around how to respond. There's four virtues in stoicism, courage, justice, wisdom, and self-discipline. And so, I just had the sense that this really ancient set of ideas, this way of living, which dates back to Zeno who I was telling you about. Marcus Arelius, Epictetus, Ceneca, Cato, maybe you've heard of some of these figures, maybe you haven't. But these were real people who were using these ideas in a real difficult world. I just had the sense that life is still life, things are still unpredictable.

How do we deal with that? That's the journey we're all on. And so what I wanted to do is translate those ideas into a modern kind of business context. So I still got to dig a little further. How does this happen? Like how does Ryan Holiday wake up and say, stoicism? I've got to go study this ancient philosophy.

I've got to read meditations and I got to understand a realist, and then I'm going to not only understand it, I'm going to go write the obstacles the way based around all of this understanding. Like, how does that happen? Was it an influence? Was it something you read? Was it a feeling you always had throughout your life?

Like, what drove that? What made that your passion? Well, I told you about that story about Zeno, sort of going up and asking, you know, where can I find someone like that? And that was kind of the journey I was on. I went to a conference, sort of like this one when I was in college, and I went up to the speaker,

and I just said, hey, do you have any book recommendations? Like I just said, hey, what are you reading? Is there anything that might work for me? And the speaker recommended Epic Titus and Marcus Realis. And I actually went back to my hotel room and I bought those books and then I read them. You know, you were joking. You're like, some people might be ordering these books

right now or they were supposed to read them. Life is defined by not the opportunities were given, but the opportunities we take advantage of. I think even Marcus Aurelis, somebody who loans him a copy of Epictetus, a Greek slave, or Roman slave who comes to study philosophy, he didn't have to read it, right? Like how many books sit unopened on people's nightstands or sit gathering dust on somebody's bookshelf?

So for me, it was the ask, but that's only like 1% of the equation. The 99 that counts is, I read the book and I listened to it and then I followed that started me on a journey, right? And a lot of people read something and go, oh, I heard about that. That's interesting. But do you really go down the rabbit hole? Do you commit like are you in charge of your education or are you just letting things happen to you? You know, so for me at that age, I think it was, I had a lot of questions. I had a lot of things I wanted to learn,

but I also had the drive and the discipline to really commit myself to it and to follow it where it led. So you come out and you write obstacle, right? So that was the first, I mean, I should start studying stosism. Opsilose the ways is the obstacle you choose to go attack or write that book about stoicism, forced you to learn even more than yet, you probably got it before at least initially. What lessons did you gather in writing the book?

And putting that book together, going through the process, what did you learn? What did that both teach you? Yeah, I think one of the things I learned on that book, just from like a market, let's call it a marketing and messaging standpoint. I was like, I'm fascinated with stoicism. I've read all these books about stoicism. I want to teach people stoicism.

So I went and I read all the books about stosism. Like I read the books of stosism like the ancient texts and then I read all the more modern books. And what I found over and over again why they were so uninteresting to me is that they were just repeating, they'd be like and then Sena said this and then Marcus said this and it was a lot of analysis, right? And I thought but that's not that's not why people read books. People read books for analysis, right? And I thought, but that's not why people read books. People read books for stories, right? People try to learn. And that was actually something that I got from Robert Green.

Robert Green's books are the laws of power illustrated by history, right? And so when I decided to write about stoicism, what I tried a lot of things that didn't work first as I experimented and tinkered until I came to the right format was, oh, okay, the way to teach these ideas is not to explain them, it's to illustrate them. There's a reason Jesus speaks in parables. There's a reason that what we remember are anecdotes and jokes and stories,

not facts and figures. And so what I tried to build that book around was an illustration of the ideas. And I think that's why it resonated, not just in a way people didn't expect, but it resonated with people who, they were like, not only if I not read any books about philosophy, they're like, I if I not read any books about philosophy,

they're like, I've read a book since high school. You know, you want your thing to be accessible, ideally you want to crack an audience like, I didn't want to write a book that competed with all the other philosophy books. That's a market like this big, right? I wanted to write a book that made philosophy interesting to people who thought philosophy was inaccessible to them. So if you have read, or even if you haven't read obstacles the way, what are, you know, my crack that will go up to which ironically it is on my bed, my desk next to my bed, because I left it there and grabbed the other ones.

I've cracked it open for paraphrasing conversations, but what are the water to take away? That you want your reader to draw from that specific book. And he says, objective judgment now at this very moment. Unselfish action now at this very moment, willing acceptance now at this very moment. He says, that's all that you need. To me, that's the perfect encapsulation of what stoicism is about.

And it's actually the formula for overcoming obstacles, but it's also the formula for enduring success and for anything. It's, you know, how do you see things clearly? How do you take action, but not any action, the right action? And then also, how do you bring the determination and perseverance and grit, you know, required to triumph over inevitable obstacles and difficulty? That's what stoicism is about. And so the book is split up in the three disciplines, a discipline of perception, the discipline of action, and the discipline of will.

And it's illustrated with stories or people who actually did that in moments that are like ones we've all experienced and then moments way beyond anything any of us have ever experienced. That's my Memento Mori coin. I think about it all the time playing with it on my desk right now. Something I carry always. It's probably the thing I get asked about the most when I bump into people in public.

It's just been a game changer for me. I have a bunch of different Memento Mori reminders, of course. But if you want to get this one, which we make here, in the US, in a mint in Minnesota that's been in business since 1882, you can check it out in the Daily Stoke Store, or if you're in Bastrop, you can stop by my bookstore here, the Painted Portrait Man Street, where we sell them as well. It's Game Changer, so check it out. Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoke early and ad-free on Amazon Music, download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and add free with

Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts. Hey there listeners! While we take a little break here, I want to tell you about another podcast that I think you'll like. It's called How I Built This, where host Guy Razz talks to founders behind some of the world's biggest and most innovative companies, to learn how they built them from the ground up. Guy has sat down with hundreds of founders behind well-known companies like Headspace, Manduke Yoga Mats, Soul Cycle, and Codopaxi, as well as entrepreneurs working to solve some of the biggest problems of our time, like developing technology that pulls energy from the ground to heat in cool homes, or even figuring out how to make drinking water from

air and sunlight. Together they discussed their entire journey from day one, and all the skills they had to learn along the way, like confronting big challenges, and how to lead through uncertainty. So if you want to get inspired and learn how to think like an entrepreneur, check out how I built this, wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen early and add free on the Amazon or Wonder yet. Check out how I built this wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen early and add free on the Amazon or Wondery app.