The Daily Stoic - Let Go To Get This | Ask DS

Episode Date: October 31, 2024

Having goals and desires in life is fine but needing things to go a certain way to be happy? These pained, intense, anxious moments reveal the most futile and servile versions of ourselves.Ask DS: How do you differentiate between self-confidence and ego?Does our ego create blind spots? + more!🪙 We are the creators of our anxiety. Which means we can also be the ones to do something about it. Gain a powerful tool in your fight against anxiety and get the Daily Stoic Anxiety Coin today! https://store.dailystoic.com/🎟 Ryan Holiday is going on tour! Grab tickets for London, Rotterdam, Dublin, Vancouver, and Toronto at ryanholiday.net/tour✉️ 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 podcast. I've been traveling a bunch for the tour that I'm on and I brought my kids and my wife with me when I went to Australia. When I'm going to Europe in November, I'm bringing my in-laws also. So, we're not staying in a hotel. We're staying in an Airbnb. The first Airbnb I stayed in would have been in 2010, I think. I've always loved Airbnb, that flexibility, size, location. You can find something awesome. You want to stay somewhere that other guests have had a positive experience. I love the guest favorites feature that helps you narrow down your search to the most popular, coolest houses. I've been using Airbnb forever. I like it better than hotels. So I'm excited that they're

a sponsor of the show. And if you haven't used Airbnb yet, I don't know what you're doing, but you should definitely check it out for your next family trip. 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. Let go to get this.

Whenever Epitetus saw an anxious person, he always asked himself, what do they want? What are they after? For if a person wasn't wanting something outside of their own control, he said, why would they be stricken by anxiety? We all fall into this trap. What does the anxious father worried about his children want

for the world to be safe and grief to never find him? The frenzied traveler, what does she want for no bad weather and for traffic to parts so she can catch her flight. And the nervous investor that the market won't dip and instead that every investment should pay off. Having goals and desires is fine, but needing things to go a certain way to be happy,

getting worked up, getting excited, nervously pacing about things we can't control, lashing out at people we love, at strangers behind the service counter, all because everyone in the world isn't following the script we wrote in our head about how things should go. These pained, intense, anxious moments reveal the most futile and servile versions of ourselves. It's almost like we believe if we exchange our peace of mind for stress and worry the whole world will reward us with what we want.

This is why Epictetus's famous phrase is so important, that there's things that are up to us and things that are not up to us. The thing that's on the back of the anxiety medallion, the one I have on my desk right here. The idea is that we need a reminder to identify what is in our control, what we can shape and influence in life, and most control, what we can shape and influence in life, and most importantly, what we could not. A stoic learns to let go of those things we can't control.

A stoic accepts things won't always turn out how we want. And when a stoic does that, what we receive in return is moments of peace and quiet. If you can cut free of impressions that cling to the mind, Marcus really said, free of the future and the past, we can make ourselves as Empedocles says, a sphere rejoicing in its perfect stillness. You can argue that stoic philosophy

is basically a set of tools designed to help us combat our stress and worries, to help us focus on what we control. And that's what we've been working on with this medallion. It's like a little advice. It's a fidget, if you know what that is. Rolling into my fingers now is recommending one to someone the other day who came to my office

and was struggling with something. Just like a little reminder that goes, hey, is worrying about this changing? Is it making it better or is it making me feel worse? The idea is like, where are you putting that nervous energy, the one you have right before a big presentation or a big first date or an important test or when I'm getting up on stage before an audience?

How can you calm yourself down? How can you remind yourself what part of this is up to me? What am I wanting here? Am I wanting the right thing or not? Anyways, that's what the medallion is there for. As Seneca says, he who suffers before it is necessary suffers more than is necessary. And as Marx really said, the idea is that the anxiety is within you.

The situation is not causing it. You are bringing it to the situation. Check it out. I'll link to it in today's show notes. I have one here on my desk. I think it's one of the coolest things we've ever done at Daily Stoic. I think you'll like it. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another Thursday episode of the Daily Stoic podcast.

Back in March of 2003, I had a cool opportunity. I flew in, flew out, gave a talk in Cancun to a bunch of leaders at PepsiCo, actually PepsiCo Mexico. My kids were very excited because of all the delicious snacks that I got to take home, all these fascinating Mexican candies and crunchies and such. But for me, it was cool.

Now, obviously my Spanish is terrible, despite three, four years of Spanish in high school and then another one or two in college, I'm terrible. But the president of PepsiCo Mexico, Robert Martinez, did a wonderful job translating and grabbing the questions for me. It was a lovely place. I went for a quick run along the beach

and then I flew home. So thanks to Pepsi for having me out. They were asking me like, how does ego create blind spots? My answer was, I mean, I'll tell you a blind spot that I do see having written the book. So the question I've gotten most from ego is the interview. Obviously this would never be true here, but people go, my boss has a huge ego, what can I do? Right? It's never, I have a huge ego, what can I do?

It's my boss has a huge ego. Right? And this sort of goes over joking about earlier, which is that we are really good at identifying the flaws in other people and putting them to the microscope and going hey you know they'd be so much more successful if they could just do this this for this but then we don't seek out that feedback ourselves right there's a sorry again my examples are very very American but there's a famous story about Pete Carroll who's the coach of the Seattle Seahawks obviously in sports they watch a ton of film. They break down every single play.

Here's what you could have done better. You know, even the quarterback, even the stars are the subject of relentless play-by-play breakdowns on film. And one year at the end of the season, he did a film breakdown of all the coaches. And the coaches had to watch film of how they coached and he was saying like he's never seen the coaches more unhappy and he watched how bad they were at taking feedback, the same feedback that they put the players to all the time. And so I don't know if this totally answers your question, but I think because of ego, the big blind spot we have is to our own flaws, our own issues. We spend a lot of time meddling and other people giving other people advice, you know,

speculating about what they should do and then we leave ourselves more or less as is. Where do we actually have the most impact? Where can we make the most improvements? It's in ourselves. Then someone asked me, how do you differentiate between self-confidence and ego? Yeah, I mean, one of the keystone virtues is the virtue of courage, right?

I just wrote a book about courage a few years ago. Courage is the source of all the advancements and innovations and changes in the world. Courage is obviously super important. So I'm not saying that. But what I would say is if you don't believe you can do something, if you don't think you can do something, you're definitely not going to be able to do it. The problem is, the problem with egoism, just because you believe you can do something doesn't mean that you can do it, right? The key variable there is reality,

is competence, is skill. And I think confidence is better than ego if we could define confidence as based on something real, right? Like I've said before, or I joked before, I don't believe in myself, I have evidence, right? I have evidence of what I'm capable of because of the things that I've done. Now when I quit my corporate job to write a

book, that, that, how did I know I can succeed? Well I didn't. I didn't know that I could succeed. I thought that I could succeed and I knew that I wasn't a quitter. I knew that I practiced. I knew that I had good mentors. I knew that I was good at asking for advice and I also knew that if I did fail, who cares? It wasn't gonna be that like I'm not gonna end up under a bridge somewhere. I'll just I'll have to deal with that failure. It will hurt and I'll grow and I'll change and I'll go in a different direction and so I think understanding that again thinking you're perfect,

thinking that everything you do turns to gold, that you're a genius, that you know, that's a really dangerous attitude. But also thinking that it's impossible that everyone's better than you, that the game is rigged, you know, those are also kind of egotistical things to think. But if you go, look, I work hard, you know, I ask questions, I've got a great team, you know, there's a lot of opportunities, a lot of really dumb people have been super successful, you know, you can do it. And I think that is a really good balance of those extremes. And actually, you know, I showed that at the beginning, I showed that picture of Plato's Academy. Aristotle

famously had the idea of the Golden Mean. Do you know what this is? The Golden Mean says that every virtue sits as a midpoint between two vices. So for courage, he said there's recklessness on one end, right, which is too risky, it's dangerous, it's, you know, not thinking about the consequences. Now on the other hand, there's cowardice, which is afraid to take risks. So, and he said, courage is in the middle, right? It's the right amount, at the right time, right situation. And I think that's true for confidence too. If you don't believe in yourself, you're not going to be able to do anything. If all you have is belief in yourself, that's probably dangerous too. In the middle, you want competence and competence and a sense of what you're capable of. And then someone asked, you know, how do you keep your team members interested if not through passion, right?

If the Stokes are saying that passion is bad, that being passionate is something to be wary of, how do you keep them motivated? I mean, the sports is a great example, right? You have to care, you have to want a way, you have to be invested. But if you're wound so tight, if you sweat every little thing, that's when you that's when you get in trouble with the refs. If you're down too much, you get defeated or despondent, right? You want to keep that sort of even keel. So yeah, it's important. Motivation is really important. Getting the team, you know,

emotionally invested is important. But if we're too emotionally invested, well what happens when you have the perfect project set up and then COVID happens? Or invested is important but if we're too emotionally invested well what happens when you have the perfect project set up and then COVID happens or some other thing right so I just think I'd much rather have a team rooted in a really great purpose a really great sort of cause bigger than themselves then a team really sort of wound up and worked up and excited. You know, I'd rather have confidence than excitement. Hey, it's Ryan.

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