The Daily Stoic - Sometimes This Is The Only Way To Grow | Ask Daily Stoic

Episode Date: May 8, 2025

It would be nice if we always had smooth sailing. But we don’t.📚 Books mentioned:Ghost Rider by Neil PeartOn Character by General Stanley McChrystal Say Nothing by Patrick Radden KeefeFire Weather by John Vaillant Meditations by Marcus Aurelius (Gregory Hays Translation)🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast🎥 Watch top moments from The Daily Stoic Podcast on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast✉️ 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 Podcasts. Tread Experts is always there, helping you with Michelin tires you can trust. Until May 30th, receive up to $70 by prepaid MasterCard with purchase of four new Michelin passenger or light truck tires. Find your pro at your local Tread Experts. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a stoic-inspired meditation designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life. Each one of these episodes is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women to help you learn from them, to follow in their example, and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom.

For more, visit DailyStelwork.com. Sometimes this is the only way to grow. It would be nice if it was painless. It would be nice if you could just take a pill or get a piece of advice. It would be nice if we always had smooth sailing. But we don't. That's not how most growth comes to us. Marcus Aurelius, as we've said many times, had a rough go of it. Floods and wars and plagues, betrayals, loss. Yet this was also the fire that forged him. He could not have been great without it. In his haunting book, Ghost Rider, one of the best road trip books ever, I think,

we've got it at the painted porch, Neil Pert is writing after the loss of his wife and daughter. He has been devastated by these tragedies as anyone would have. Yet it is only at some distant roadside stop, thousands of miles into his journey across North America by motorcycle, that he begins to think he writes of the ponderosa pine seeds that germinate only after a fire

or certain desert plants that germinate only if their husks are worn away by stones in flash flood, thereby ensuing that they will have enough moisture to grow. An avid reader, Pert, also recalled reading about how many fruit seeds are designed to be eaten and thus dispersed through an animal's digestive system. The metaphor that occurred to me, he writes after meditating on this, concerned the ordeals of new growth. That in order for a little baby seed or soul to grow,

he said, it would have to pass through fire, flood, or shit. Hopefully we will be spared the hammer blows of fate that Marcus Aurelius and Pert received, but we will nevertheless be subjected to adversity. Things will not go our way. We will be chewed up and spit out. We will be burned. We will be flooded. We have to understand that this is a good thing.

This is what we need to grow. And this is how we discover what we are truly made of and how strong we truly are. To me, that's the whole idea of the obstacle is the way and a more Fati to ideas I have, you know, tattooed on my body. We also have some cool sort of physical manifestations of this in the Daily Stokes.

Or I also have behind me in my office, one of those Ponderosa pine cones as a reminder that sometimes it's only adversity and difficulty that can open up what we're truly capable of being. That's what Amor Fati means to me. If you wanna check that out, you can go to store.dailystoke.com and do read Neil Peart's book.

It's one of the most beautiful and haunting memoirs I've ever read. I read it many, many years ago and then I just reread it last year because I thought, hey, why don't we carry this in the bookstore? And now we do. So check that out. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another Thursday episode of the Daily Stoke Podcast. I often bring the sort of Q&A sections from my talks here. Sometimes I'm overseas, sometimes I'm as far out as you can get in America and still be in America, whether I just gave some talk in Hawaii,

sometimes I'm down on the tip of Florida, sometimes I'm in New York, sometimes I'm in all those places in the same week. I travel a lot. I do generally like when I don't have to go very far. Back in January, I dropped my son off at school, drove back to the painted porch, parked my car, and then a car was waiting for me.

It drove me to Houston, gave a talk at the Weston Oaks Galleria to this legal company, and then got to answer some questions. Then I hopped on a plane and flew somewhere further away. It's all blurred together. I don't even remember, but here is me in Houston. Got into Houston, went for a run, gave a talk,

answered some questions. Now I'm back at home. Got a couple of weeks at home, so that's been fun. I've been doing this series on the cardinal virtues in my talks and so I was there in January answering some questions about this idea. When we say the obstacles away, what do we mean?

We mean it's an opportunity to practice virtue. And so here is me answering some questions from some lovely folks and what they called their BAM, their big ass meeting. Enjoy. Hello. Hey, so Juan, I do enjoy your books, especially Robert Green's as well. He's the best.

Yeah, he's terrific. What are some of the books this past year that you've read that this kind of stood out? Or what are you reading now that that is really stands out? Yeah, great question. General Stanley McChrystal has a new book coming out in May that I just read called On Character, which I really, really like. That was the most recent book that just sort of absolutely blew my mind. I read Patrick Radden O'Keefe's book on the troubles in Ireland called Say Nothing,

which I think there's a Netflix show about also. So I really enjoyed that. What else have I read recently that kind of blew my mind? Let's see. Oh, speaking of fires, there's this great book by John Valiant called Fire Weather about the similarly devastating set of fires in Alberta, Canada. You know, we all, we all live in fire country these days, he was saying. So I really enjoyed that book. Trying to think my bookstore is just all the books I like.

That's why I have it. So if you're ever in Bastrop, come swing by. And I got a few out there for you. Yeah. Besides the ones you've read, what would you say is the most important book? Well, I wouldn't choose any of my books. Let's see.

That would be a, I can't write a book called Ego is the Enemy and then say that. There's something to me, and this is kind of my life's work, is talking about Mark Cirrullis' meditations because I think it is just one of the accident quirks and wonders of history that the most powerful man in the world wrote these notes to himself about how to be a good person, about how not to be corrupted by power, about how to deal with responsibility and fame and just everything that was on.

And he was writing this book for himself, not for publication. So there's just something incredibly vulnerable and raw and unperformative about it. And so it's the book that I talk about the most, that I read the most, that I recommend the most. To me, it's just, you know, it's a wonder and I can't get enough of it.

So maybe I'd start there. How much do you consider yourself a modern day philosopher versus historian? Ooh, that's a great question. I don't like that there's that much of a distinction between the two. What I try to do is take philosophical ideas that I did not create because I think most of the good thinking has already been done and I try to

illustrate it with historical ideas. So like my talk was about stoic philosophy, but I mostly used much more modern examples. So that's kind of what I learned as a research assistant for Robert. I try to take philosophical ideas and illustrate them through history. So I guess I wouldn't call myself a philosopher or a historian. I'll leave that to other people. But I try to see myself as a writer. And that's what those are the intersection of those two things is what I tend to write

about. So you had mentioned earlier fables, growing up, Aesop's fables, Sherman and Peabody, that was a big influence to me in the way that I think. If you had to give advice to the parents here today, what one fable would you recommend that they teach their children in the modern age? Ooh, what's one fable?

Well, we talked about Lincoln here, and obviously Lincoln, they said there were two books that shaped Lincoln's life the most, and it was Aesop's Fables and the Bible. And most of his famous images or metaphors come from either Aesop or the Bible. And you know, the house divided against itself cannot stand comes from the Bible. He tells a story about the lion who allows himself to be declawed as a famous fable and then is promptly killed,

which maybe applies to this group. So anyways, I think fables as a way to learn is to me, I mean, Mark's really, you know the Aesop fable about the town mouse and the country mouse? He alludes to that in meditations, and to think those fables would have been hundreds of years old by the time he heard about them, right?

Like that's one of the things that gets me excited. The idea that Stoicism was an ancient philosophy to most of the Stoics also, because we tend to think of like Greece and Rome being like, that was all like in the same period. It's like, no, it was like a thousand years. So I don't know if I have one fable that I would pick off the top of my head that's my absolute favorite, but actually, you know what, I'll give you one. So we're talking about virtue here.

I open all the books in the virtue series with the fable of Hercules at the crossroads. Do you know that one? Hercules, the mythical figure, whether it exists or not, he comes to a crossroads in Greece and it's basically the easy way or the hard way. One way he can have everything he wants right now in his life will never be challenged, he'll never know pain, or he can go this way and he has to fight for all of it, he has to work for all of it. It's going to be challenging, it's going to be hard and one version of this crossroads is it's the crossroads between virtue and vice also. And it's this choice, the choice of Hercules, that not only inspires the founding of Stoicism, Zeno hears this story being read in a bookstore in Athens and it sends him down the philosophical path. But it's actually this

story, the choice of Hercules that John Adams suggests as being the illustration for the seal of the United States. As they were debating, you know, should it be an eagle, should it be this or that? He said it should have been the choice of Hercules. And this goes to his famous quote about how a people without virtue can't protect or survive in a republic, which gives all sorts of freedom as we're talking about today. But just because you can do something, just because a law doesn't forbid you from doing something doesn't mean you should do it.

This is, I think, a challenge people seem to not understand about the First Amendment. You're allowed to say whatever you want. Doesn't mean you should say a lot of things, right? So the idea of virtue being this restraint, this check, right? Mark Sturlus could do whatever he wanted. There was no power over him. And yet, these virtues, these ideas were the check on him

that constitutionally or legally could not be enforced any other way. And that to me is the idea. So maybe the choice of Hercules would be the story I'd leave you guys with. Awesome. Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic podcast.

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