The Daily Stoic - Nothing Can Stop You From This | This Is The (Stoic) Secret To Sanity And Success

Episode Date: September 17, 2024

What the Stoics meant when they said there was an opportunity in every obstacle is that in every obstacle lies the opportunity to practice virtue. “The Obstacle is The Way” is a way to win at life, but the ultimate victory isn’t achieved over the world or others, it’s gained by overcoming yourself, by choosing virtue when you have every reason not to, by doing, as Marcus wrote, only what your nature demands of you.📕 Get a signed, numbered first-edition of the 10th anniversary edition of The Obstacle Is the Way by Ryan Holiday at dailystoic.com/obstacle✉️ 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.

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Welcome to the Daily Stuart 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. The real secret about obstacles. One way to go through life is to turn away from the things that are hard. You can close your eyes and ears to what's unpleasant.

You can take the easy way, forgoing difficulty wherever possible. The other way is the stoic way to see hardship as an opportunity, not as an obstacle, to use all that stands in your path as fuel to make you brighter and better. Our actions may be impeded, Marx really writes in meditations,

but there can be no impeding our intentions or dispositions because we can accommodate and adapt. The mind adapts and converts to its own purposes, the obstacle to our acting. And he concluded that there was a simple formula for overcoming any negative situation we can encounter in life, not just for thriving, not just in spite of whatever happens, but because of it.

The impediment to action advances action, he says. What stands in the way becomes the way. When I first read those words, I couldn't have known that they would inspire my first book on stoicism. The obstacle is the way, let alone that that book would be published in something like 40 languages and sell 2 million copies in English alone. And it seems crazier for me to think that it's been 10 years since that book came out. And here we are on the eve of the publisher putting out this expanded 10th anniversary edition, which I'm really excited about. And we have some signed numbered copies that you can get only from the Daily Stoke.

I'll link to that below. Basically, the idea at the center of that book is that there are hidden advantages in every problem, that businesses and teams and people can take seemingly impossible situations and triumph over them. Hard times can be softened, Seneca writes in one of his essays, tight squeezes widened, heavy loads made lighter for those who can apply the right pressure. But what I've come to understand in the intervening years is that the Stoics were getting at something a little more profound than the

fact that every downside has its upside. What the Stoics meant when they said there was opportunity in every obstacle was that in every obstacle lies the opportunity to practice virtue. That even the hardest, most heartbreaking moments of life can be transformed by endurance, by selflessness, by courage, by kindness, by decency.

And this was true of success as much as it was adversity because with success comes temptations, distractions and stress. How great is it in those circumstances then to be humble, to be disciplined, to be decent, to be generous, to hold true to your values as vices swipes at you and unwarranted venom is spat in your direction. It's challenging, but that's the way of Stoicism.

And those who walk that path eventually learn that it is as deeply rewarding as it is challenging. Because sure, the obstacle is the way, is a way to win at life, but the ultimate victory isn't achieved over the world or others, it's gained by overcoming yourself, by choosing virtue when you have every reason not to, by doing as Marcus Aurelius wrote,

what your nature demands of you. And that's one of the things that I wanted to put in this new 10th anniversary edition of the book, that it's not just how to be more productive or how to persevere, it's that Stoicism can and must make you a better human being. There's a bunch of stories and lessons that I've learned.

There's little things that I fixed, changes I wanted to make. And all of that came from writing this email every single day from the interviews that I did on the Daily Stoke podcast to hear from the people who read the book and used it in their lives. So this new edition of the obstacles weighs in a new book, but it is also more than just a reprinting of what I wrote a decade ago. It's an evolution of a fresh line of dialogue and that

great conversation of stillness and that stretches back so many thousands of years. And we do, we have this short run of signed numbered first editions and the Daily Stoke store is the only place you can grab them. And there's some cool bonuses. You can get an original page from the audiobook here that I read during the audiobook and you can see I'm still changing and tweaking it up until the very last minute. I'll throw you a link to that in today's show notes or just go to dailystoke.com slash obstacle and you can grab it there. And thanks everyone who supported the book over these years. It's just been an incredible, wonderful, amazing experience

and it was surreal and strange to be working on an anniversary edition of the book. And I couldn't have done it without all of you. So I hope you like it. Talk soon. ["The Last Supper"] Work in incredibly long hours, working yourself to the bone, not taking care of yourself. It seems glamorous and cool, but it's actually destructive.

It's actually a result of poor discipline. People think the secret to success is 80 hours a week. It's pulling all-nighters. And look, there's a part of Stoicism that is about discipline, about will, about pushing yourself. I mean, look, this is what Marcus Aurelius opens book five of Meditations with.

When I read this for the first time as a young man, it hit me incredibly hard. He says, at dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself, I have to go to work as a human being. He says, or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm. And he says, but it's nicer here. And he goes, so you were born to feel nice? And he talks about, look, there's a limit on how much time we should eat and sleep and relax and that we have a purpose, right? He says, people who love what they do, wear themselves

down doing it. They forget even to wash or eat. He says, do you have less respect for your own nature than the engraver does for engraving, the dancer for dance, the miser for money, or the social climber for status? He says, when you're really possessed by what you do, you'd rather stop eating and sleeping than give up practicing your arts. So look, I agree that getting up early is important. I agree that laying in bed all day is no way to success or fame or having a big impact on the world. And yet I have also seen where this leads. So I was a director of marketing at American Apparel for a long time.

And there's a lot of reasons why that company failed, but I'll tell you one that I don't think enough outsiders understood. So Doug Charney, the founder of American Apparel, had this open door policy. And when he said he had an open door, that he was an accessible CEO, he meant it. Any employee at any level could call him or get in touch with him. And if you had a problem, he would listen to you. He was involved in all facets of the business.

And this was positive in the sense that there was never a problem that he didn't know about. When there was an opportunity or a spark of something, he could really turn it into something that he didn't accept laziness. He had eyes and ears everywhere. He could jump on anything that needed to be jumped on and he could put out any fire. Now, the downside of this was actually the same as the upside. So you can imagine when the company was small, this worked, but as it grew, suddenly it had a few stores, then it had more stores. Now it has 250 stores in 20 countries. What did that mean?

It meant that no matter what time it was, someone somewhere had a problem. It meant that in some time zone, there was someone up who needed something. And I would say that slowly Dove's quality of sleep eroded to the point where by 2014, he was basically not sleeping at all. I remember he would call me sometimes and fall asleep on the phone, like sleep was something

he was actively avoiding until the very last second that it grabbed him. I remember there was this transition from one shipping facility to another that was sort of impulsively and poorly planned out. It could have been done slower. He rushed into it. And at some point he moves into the factory, it's kind of like with Elon Musk where everyone's sort of celebrating

that the hands-on CEO is sleeping on a cot in the factory. But actually this was a result of poor decision-making, I think from sleep deprivation and he exacerbated it and it got worse and worse and worse. There was a famous scene where Dovis called in front of the board, sort of the lowest moment, the stock price is in the toilet, and he's mainlining Nescafe, like he's pouring Nescafe powder in cold water and drinking it to stay awake in front of the board. They were horrified and ultimately they fired him and his shares went to nothing. So there you have it. One

of the fastest growing fashion brands in the world, a company that was doing hundreds of millions of dollars in sales. It's not destroyed from the outside. It's not a competitor that came and destroyed it. Dove destroyed it. And Dove really destroyed himself in the process. He made a lot of mistakes. He did a lot of things he shouldn't be doing. But I think at the root of it was like he was out of his mind with sleep deprivation. He just wore himself to the bone and he became someone very different than the person that was responsible for the success that had done the good things that were part of the company. This is obviously an extreme version of a story that happens all the time. Arianna Huffington, who actually carries a little note card with a quote from Marcus Aurelius with her, she tells this horrifying story of waking up on the floor

of her bathroom as she's building her business, covered in blood. She'd fallen and shattered her cheekbone on the bathtub as she passed out from sheer exhaustion. Now look, Elon Musk seems to have been slightly more successful at balancing this than Dove has, or at least so far. But so many of the crises that he's working 23 hours a day

to solve could have been resolved by a person who is actually not so bleary eyed, not taking uppers to stay awake and ambient to go to sleep. It's a vicious cycle where you make mistakes because you're cognitively impaired from sheer exhaustion and burnout and overwork. And then you have to work harder and harder and harder to stay afloat.

I'm getting a little far from my point here, but what I'm trying to say is that working incredibly long hours, working yourself to the bone, not taking care of yourself, neglecting sleep, it seems glamorous and cool, but it's actually destructive. It's actually a result of poor discipline. John Steinbeck talks about, he says, the undiscipline of overwork. He says it's the poorest of economies. You're trading sleep for working hours,

but you're actually getting worse work out of it. I try to remind myself whenever I'm working late at the office, whenever I have some deadline I'm having to crush myself to hit, whenever I'm not taking care of myself because I've committed to too much, that I'm cheating myself, I'm cheating the work, I'm cheating my health, and I'm cheating my family.

And that this isn't discipline, this is the result of a lack of discipline. So let's go back to this quote from Marcus Aurelius, right? He's saying, yeah, you gotta get up early when you have trouble getting out of bed in the morning. But why do so much of us have trouble getting out of bed in the morning. But why do so much of us have trouble getting out of bed in the morning? And look, if you're someone like that, you want to get up early, but you struggle, you hit the snooze button a million times, you just cannot drag yourself

out of bed in the morning. At The Painted Portrait, we carry a book. I actually think it's the perfect book for you. Discipline in the morning is easier when you've been disciplined at night. Seneca talks about how, look, the mind has to be given over to relaxation. He talks about taking wandering walks. But I think sleep is a big part of this too, turning the brain off, you know, letting it reboot, letting it reset. He said, you know, if you don't do this, he says, eventually the mind will break as surely as the anvil breaks the hammer. Like you can only stretch yourself so far. You can only put so much on yourself

before not only you get to the point of diminishing returns where it starts to be counterproductive. You know, the Stoics talk about this idea of memento mori. It's funny, we'll say, oh, I'll sleep when I'm dead, but you are hastening that very death by not taking care of yourself. The secret to sanity and success is sleep. And this requires discipline to put down the phone

that you're scrolling on, staying up late, reading terrible news or watching stupid videos. It takes discipline to put that away and to go to sleep. It takes discipline to manage your schedule and prioritize your health. It takes self-awareness to know, hey, I'm too tired. I'm not thinking straight here.

I gotta call it a day. I'm not thinking straight here. I gotta call it a day. I gotta think about this and make a decision about it tomorrow. I'm not in a good place to do this right now. In one of his letters, Seneca talks about this man. He says he's a cautionary tale. He said, this man has never seen the sunrise or the sunset.

He was saying that this guy is just working himself to the bone. He said, it's so funny, right? We all fear death. We don't wanna die. He said, it's so funny, right? We all fear death. We don't want to die. He says, but these people are burying themselves alive, burying themselves alive in triviality, in work, in bad boundaries.

And it's that vicious cycle that's trapped so many successful and smart people. This is so great. He says, let's lengthen our lives. He says, cut the night short, save some of that for the day's business. So as I'm prioritizing sleep, I'll give you two, I think, important rituals.

Because yeah, stoicism is rising early, getting after it, as Mark Struh is talking about, but the evening is important too. And if you're working until you drop dead of sleep, as Dove was doing, what you're not doing is putting the day up for review, as Seneca said, taking a few minutes, reflecting, putting time in your journal,

thinking about what you could have done better, where you fell short, who you wanna be the next day. The evenings also, when I take a little quiet time to do some reading, I like to sit up in my bed and read the Stoics. I have this copy of Meditations next to my bed, and I pick up this book that I've had for so many years. I flip through it, and I always find something in it. We can imagine Marcus Aurelius, the most

powerful man in the world, writing in the Midnight Dimness, as one historian described it, these little notes to himself, having this continuing that great conversations with the ancients. He's talking to Epictetus, he's talking to Zeno, he's talking to Cleanthes and Chrysippus because their words survived to him. And that evening ritual where we have a little discipline, we don't stay up too late, we don't get sucked into our screens, we don't drink until we pass out,

but we have some discipline at night that allows us to be the person who rises early, who tackles the day, who does what their nature demands and does it with sanity and self-control. I'm sure at this point, you've probably heard of eight sleep and maybe you heard about it because I've been talking about it. I've been sleeping on an eight sleep for several years now.

I swear by it, my wife swears by it. If I don't sleep, if I don't get a good night's sleep, I'm not a good parent, I'm not a good person, I'm not a good writer. I'm just grouchy and not in a good space. Also, I like to sit in my bed and read before I go to sleep. And I was actually really excited to find out that 8 Sleep has just upgraded all their stuff and they've launched their newest generation of pod, the pod 4 Ultra. It cools, it heats, and now it elevates automatically and it's clinically proven to give you up to one more hour of quality sleep every night.

Plus the pod four ultra cools up to 20 degrees Fahrenheit below room temperature, which makes falling asleep easy, makes staying asleep easy. I love my eight sleep. Just head to eightsleep.com slash daily stoic and use code daily stoic to get 350 bucks off your pod for ultra. It currently ships to the United States, Canada

and the United Kingdom, Europe and Australia. This idea of ataraxia, right? Being free of disturbances, having some stillness. Obviously you wanna get that when you're awake, you wanna cultivate that time and space for reflection. But sleep is also a wonderful place, letting your subconscious wander, letting dreams come in, emptying your mind completely

and just sinking into the mattress, into the pillow, falling asleep, waking up well rested, waking up with a fresh start. That's what is so special about those early mornings where it's quiet and cool and you haven't been attacked by all the things that you have to do in the day, but you're only gonna be able to do that if you've been disciplined before.

I think it was Schopenhauer who said something like, sleep is the interest we pay on the capital that is called in at death. He was pointing out the foolishness of that, I'll sleep when I'm dead. If you don't sleep, you will die sooner, right? Take care of yourself. And I think about this too,

one of Churchill's friends said, his secret to success was that he discovered the life-giving power of the siesta. That famous experiment about the 10,000 hours, how masters have put in hundreds and hundreds and then ultimately tens of thousands of hours and what they do. One of the things that that scientist found

when he was looking at great violinists is that the best violinist napped more than the amateurs. And so protecting yourself, carving out a little space and time to rest, to recuperate, to recover, to not stretch the mind, to beat it until it falls apart, right? This is a really important part of being at your best and being at your A game.

You can't do what your nature demands. I somewhat disagree with Marcus here. You can't do what your nature demands. You can't be what you're capable of being if you forget to wash and eat and sleep, not sustainably, not for a long period of time anyway, right? And so that's what I tried to remind myself. I wanna keep doing this, to be able to keep doing this.

By definition, I have to take care of myself. So I'm around. I wanna push back on this stoic association with hustle culture and rise and grind. Yes, good habits, rising early, tackling the day, getting after it with energy, hustling, of course. That's important. At the same time, if it's not balanced, right,

all things in moderation, that's what the virtue of temperance is about. Finding the right balance, finding the tension, the yin and the yang of it is so important. Because if you wear yourself out, if you suck the joy and fun out of it, if you suck the health out of it, right, if you do it unsustainably, you will not be able to keep doing it. There was even a study in 2017 that found that lack of sleep encourages or leads to

more repetitive thought patterns. If stoicism is this ability to direct your thoughts, to think rationally, to beat back anxiety or fear or defeatist thinking with the power of your ruling reason. If you're not sleeping, you're not going to be able to do that as well. The muscles, the power, the discipline of perception are not equal under all circumstances. I'm able to be more stoic. I have better command of myself when I have been taking care of myself, when I'm in my right mind.

Ryan on three hours sleep is a different kind of stoic than Ryan on eight hours sleep. And Ryan who has been over committed and overworked and traveling this time zone and that time zone and doing stuff like I was just doing with the book launch, I'm not able to be the person that stoicism wants me to be. Mark Seward talks about fighting to be the person that Stoicism wants me to be. Mark Sturlus talks about fighting to be the person that philosophy wants you to be. You're going to have trouble doing that if you neglect this important part of sanity and success. When I wrote The Daily Stoic eight years ago, I had this

crazy idea that I would just keep it going. The book was 366 meditations, but I'd write one more every single day and I'd give it away for free as an email. I thought maybe a few people would sign up. Couldn't have even comprehended a future in which three quarters of a million people would get this email every single day and would for almost a decade. If you want to get the email, if you want to be part of a community that is the largest group of stoics ever assembled in human history, I'd love for you to join us. You can sign up and get the email totally for free. No spam. You can unsubscribe whenever you want at dailystoic.com slash email. If you like The Daily Stoic and thanks for listening, you can listen early and ad free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts.

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