The Daily Stoic - Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants To Be | Ask Daily Stoic

Episode Date: August 26, 2022

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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. in answering their questions, I can answer your questions, give a little more guidance on this philosophy we're all trying to follow. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wundery'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. Put your ass where your heart wants to be. Marcus Aurelius would have been more comfortable in bed. There was part of him that would have liked to stay under the covers and stay warm. But he got up, he got to work. He wasn't always feeling it, he wasn't always excited, but he chose each day to use Stephen Pressfield's wonderful phrase. And the title of his new book, he chose to put his ass where his heart wanted to be. By grabbing this journal, by heading to the forum, whatever it was, Marcus really was taking a tangible physical step towards being the person

he wanted to be. The good emperor, he knew he needed to be. It was doing this day in and day out that made him a great man. It wasn't his brilliance, it was his determination that did it. It wasn't his good intentions, it was his good habits. He faked it some day, sure, but that's how he made it. Marcus got up and did, as he said, what his nature demanded, he was willing to wear himself down doing it. Because that's what he had in his heart.

Because that's what he knew he was meant to do, and no amount of the resistance or fear or laziness or difficulty was going to get in the way. And I love Stephen Pressfield's work so much. He was actually just out at the Painted Ports. We did a daily stoic podcast interview, which you can check out. I'll link to it in today's show notes. And he signed a bunch of copies of his books, The War of Art, Turning Pro, Gates of Fire, A Man in Arms, and most of all, the new book, put your ass where your heart wants to be. I think you'll like it.

Check it out. We'll link to that in the show notes. And if you haven't read Stephen Pressfield, man, you absolutely have to, and check out this podcast interview. I think you're gonna like it. So, I love the comment that you made earlier about we color or we die in every situation that we come across. So, with the idea that we're convinced of so much that just isn't so unregular basis, What have you found with some of these professional sports players or business leaders or the wisdom of the agents to really challenge our perceptions to get to

as close of a treat as we could be? Yeah, I was actually just talking to Les Stevens, the GM of the Rams, who he was talking about for years. Everyone has attacked him as the GM of the Rams. We was talking about how for years everyone has attacked him as the GM the Rams were trading away their first and second round draft. If you're ruining the future of the franchise, how can you do this? And he said to me, he's like, it occurred to me that the way sports television works is that somebody has to take a positive take and somebody has to take a negative take. And first, and on top of that, the negative take is almost always more interesting to

make sure a more compelling point of view than the positive take. And so we said about the balance, what other people think and say about me, and my reasons and my research and my professional expertise as to what will work and what my what my plans, right? And he was, uh, or do they are on, uh, entering their their second Super Bowl in not so many years? And that strategy has paid out, but every step of the way it was attacked and criticized. And so I think one of the things that I really like from the Stokes is about, I heard the screen expression did on it. If you listen to what other people say

and are worthless as a compass, right? Like you have to know what you're doing, what's important to you, why you came to the conclusion that you did, and then you have to get to a point where the chatter over here or the doubts over here don't impact you so much. Grant, his replacement this right there. You know, he had to go, and it wasn't working,

but he had to have this sort of understanding of himself and his capabilities and the plan that he was on, that he was moving towards where he needed to go. Even though the world was almost gaslighting him, at that very moment, telling him that, you know, you're done, this is not working, you working, blah, blah. So my first book was a book about marketing. My second book was my book, The Ops School's Way.

My publisher offered me less than half for that book than my first book, a French. Not so good a French, it's real. Pretty good, it would sell 5,000 copies. It sold a million and a friend, this. Realized it. Pretty much it was so 5,000 copies. You know, it sold a million and a half copies now. I knew why I was doing what I was doing. And I kind of wasn't convinced I was right, but I had a sense based on the research

that I did in the understanding. And also, what I wanted to spend my time doing, why that was a good idea of it. And then once you do that, you have to be able to tune out or ignore those other things. And so when you think about the stone as being in positions of leadership or public figures or creators,

you have to cultivate that ability to tune out everything, but what you know and what you can verify for yourself. Great thing. Time for one more. In the back. Oh, back. Thanks for your talk. Ironically, I've been using synagogues for a while.

I feel like. Oh, wonderful. Yeah, but I have a question. Specifically, it's about time, because it has a great philosophy to get this example of Cody Bryant. He had asked to do an interview. They just looked at him 15 minutes and said, no, I can't hit me in a couple of weeks.

Yeah, I spent time in my dog, right? Yeah. And he dies in the planefish. And so he ran up time. And of course, it's one way that we don't know how much we have, right? It's only a year of physical resource. I don't want to ask a specific question. Knowing how valuable time is in kind of a Denver's relation with fascismination you say no. Yes. For people who didn't quite hear that story, there's this beautiful moving story about Floppy Bryant,

right, before he died, he was asked to do some big interview series for ESPN and he said, I want to spend time with my kids. Get me up later. And you didn't know that he had like a week or two left to live. But that's how it went. I think I mentioned more in puts time in perspective because it makes it, I think, mentor Mori puts time in perspective, because it makes it... I think one of the reasons we say yes to all the big breaths to do is that we lie to ourselves and we think that we have unlimited time.

We know, so I can go, what can I do if I have cancer? What would I do if I found out I only had a certain amount of time left to live? They go ahead and change so many things. We do have them, they assert only a certain time left to live. Every person who's born knows they're going to die. I think what the majority of the practice does from us is that what's time and perspective. The other way that I think about it in a slightly less morbid way is simply that everything I say, yes to me, is saying no or something else.

So you think you're being nice by saying yes to all these different things, but you're not seeing all these invisible indirect blows as a result of these things, even if that's just not being as good at the other things. And then, conversely, all the things that you say yes to inevitably being saying no is something else. And be comfortable saying no because it's your time, it's your life. You know what you're here. I heard this great observation about this pre-pour just

to San Fernando, honor, because I think with it strong with this, probably with a men, is one of her aides that, what I loved about Sandra was that she never said sorry, she pulled me, she said no. Right? She didn't go sorry, I can't. She just said, I don't want to. So I figured, she didn't say sorry, I said, I don't want to, I'm not going to.

Right? So just understanding that no, is this thing that you control and the boundaries are important and that you can't be great at what you do doing everything. You're saying yes to everything, you're saying no to a lot of things as part of that. And then remembering, who ultimately gets that leftover time? For me, I've always had a propensity to say yes to lots and lots of things. Find the time cram and in there and they can work. Having kids who are illustrators is like,

oh, that's what I'm stealing the time from. Right? Stealing time from the career. Two-year-old, one-year-old, it's time that you won't get again. Them people are again. And this is also true for everything you do in life. They say, you know, say yes to something that you don't want to do, you know, you shouldn in life. They say, you know, say yes to something we don't want to do,

we don't need to do, we shouldn't do. We can't hear where it rolls, they say something, something more important. You know, the Stoics in real life met at what was called the Stoa, the Stoa, Poquile, the Painted Porch in ancient Athens. Obviously we can't all get together in one place because this community is like hundreds of thousands of people and we couldn't fit in ancient Athens. Obviously, we can all get together in one place because this community is like hundreds of thousands of people and we couldn't fit in one space.

But we have made a special digital version of the stove. We're calling it Daily Stoic Life. It's an awesome community. You could talk about like today's episode. You could talk about the emails, ask questions. That's one of my favorite parts is interacting with all these people who are using stoicism to be better in their actual real lives.

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