The Daily Stoic - The Lancer Brigade’s Leadership Experience - Ryan Holiday in Conversation with Col. Jonathan Chung

Episode Date: August 15, 2021

Today’s episode of the podcast is a conversation with Lancer Brigade’s Col. Jonathan Chung and Ryan Holiday which originally aired on The Leadership Experience Podcast. They talk about the Stoic concept of alive time vs. dead time that was originally introduced to Ryan from his mentor Robert Greene, what it means to see obstacles as opportunities, why things shouldn't go “back to normal” when the threat of COVID-19 has dissapted, and more. \DECKED truck bed tool boxes and cargo van storage systems revolutionize organization with a heavy-duty in-vehicle storage system featuring slide out toolboxes. DECKED makes organizing, accessing, protecting, and securing everything you need so much easier. Get your DECKED Drawer System at Decked.com/STOIC and get free shipping.Talkspace is an online and mobile therapy company. Talkspace lets you send and receive unlimited messages with your dedicated therapist in the Talkspace platform 24/7. To match with a licensed therapist today, go to Talkspace.com or download the app. Make sure to use the code STOIC to get $100 off of your first month and show your support for the show.Streak is a fully embedded workflow and productivity software in Gmail that lets you manage all your work right in your inbox. Streak gives you tools for email tracking, mail merges, and snippets to save time and scale up your email efficiency. Sign up for Streak today at Streak.com/stoic and get 20% off your first year of their Pro Plan.LinkedIn Jobs is the best platform for finding the right candidate to join your business this fall. It’s the largest marketplace for job seekers in the world, and it has great search features so that you can find candidates with any hard or soft skills that you need. And now, you can post a job for free. Just visit linkedin.com/STOIC to post a job for free. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookFollow Lancer Brigade: Homepage, Facebook, Twitter, YouTubeSee 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 weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics. Something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview stoic philosophers, we explore at length how these stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend when you have a little bit more space when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal, and most importantly to prepare for what the week

ahead may bring. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another weekend episode, the Daily Still. We got a little table turn episode today. This is a conversation I had with Colonel Jonathan Chung. He's the second striker brigade commander. They're based out of Fort Lewis in Washington. And he's got this interesting podcast for the interview, sir, business leaders. It goes out to all the armed forces members

on the base and the leaders there. But we just, we had a great conversation about this idea of a lifetime. Dead time, which has been a big theme for us, talk about this thing I've been trying to remind myself of. There is no normal. Who knows when we're going to go back to normal? There is no normal, right?

It's about, for the stoke, it's about responding and being resilient. Where you are with what you've got. Colonel Chung was a great interviewer. We had a great conversation. I asked him some questions. He asked me some questions. I thought, hey, if this was relevant to our men

and women in uniform, it should be relevant to all of us out there whether we're first responders or in our first semester of college. How do we respond? How do we design the life we want? How do we find success? How do we navigate difficulties? That's all what we're trying to do today. And so this is a extended meditation on that. And I hope you like it. And thanks to Colonel Chung for having me on. Appreciate it.

Hey Ryan, I appreciate you taking the time. Join us to have a conversation with the team today. Yeah, of course, of course. I understand. Are you calling from Austin, Texas? Yeah, right right outside, right outside Austin near, near Bass Drop. You know, that's interesting. I read an article that said that you had, you'd moved out there, you know, live in the life of a stoic.

And my wife, actually, her family actually lived out there in Bastrop for a while. She's from Austin in the city, but then they moved out a little bit in the country, as you say. Very cool, yeah, yeah. It's, I don't know if it's the stoic life, but I certainly like it better than living in the city. I was kind of laughing to myself when it was an article that talked about I think you were out there with your son and

you know, the reporter mentioned something about, you know, you had donkeys and then like a dog grabbed a chicken. So I'm kind of like envisioning this, you know, Noah's Ark, kind of Ace Ventura thing that's going on, but pretty neat. are kind of ace Ventura thing that's going on, but pretty neat. Yeah, I don't know about that, but yeah, we've got some chickens and goats and donkeys. It's certainly not a bad place to be in the middle of a pandemic. Absolutely. Hey, so I was wondering if you could just share with the team, which you're currently working on right now. So I actually have a book coming out in September that's called Lives of the Stoics,

that's sort of a set of biographies of all the Stoic figures. So I'm kind of in the middle of getting that out in the world. And then my sort of philosophy has always been, as soon as you finish a book or a project start the next one. So I am about, I don't want to call it halfway, but I am deep in the middle of writing the next book. So I always try to balance sort of the exhilaration and the release of like putting something out with the sort of hard humbling work of like tackling the next big thing. That's pretty neat.

It sounds as you go through that process, I've watched a couple of your, you know, the daily stoic and you've got that routine down where you talk about the journaling and capturing the thoughts and then going back and reflecting. And does that help in the process when you're actually going through writing a book? Yeah, I think so. It's also, it's like, look, okay, if I'm just putting this book out or, you know when you're actually going through writing a book? Yeah, I think so. It's also it's like, look, okay, if I'm just putting this book out or, you know, you're just sitting there waiting for a promotion or you're, you know, you're just waiting to see if the deal is going to go

through whatever the thing you're anticipating, you're that sort of, you know, they say like, I don't hands of the devil's workshop. I tend to find like it's less than I'm gonna get into trouble and more like my mind is gonna cause me trouble. So I don't wanna be sitting here going, how's it gonna do? Do they like me? I just find that I'm happiest working on a project

because that's the best most constructive place to be putting my energy. So, you know, if I'm sitting here sort of ringing my hands, anxious, worried, is it gonna succeed? Is it not gonna succeed? Obviously, that's not making me happy and it's not really having any impact on the successor failure of that project.

But, you know, instead, today I woke up and I put a couple hours into the next thing, and that is going to have an impact. So I'm just always trying to put the energy towards where it's going to get traction as opposed to just sort of spin. That's great. I think that something that's parallel to us is there's only a limited amount of time in the day. So it's the dedicated hours we can to put toward our craft,

whether you're getting together, whether it's something you're honing as an individual in the skill set as a soldier or something you're doing as a squad. But there's a very fine amount of time. And as you talk about, really, it's the passion. So our passion and soldiering is one of those things we get a chance to do. It's that, you know, one to three hour time frame that you can really dedicate some time to get after that is really the gains that we're looking at and desires and the opportunities that we look at.

I think that's true and I would also say another analogous place is like, you know, you guys are waiting for orders, right? You're waiting for your next position or your next deployment. Your waiting is the plan going to take off today. It's going to take over tomorrow. You're waiting. You sent out your communication. You're waiting to get a reply back. Are you going to spend that time fuming, brooding, dreading, or are you gonna spend that time

productively trying to solve the problem, productively trying to solve a different problem, you know, or are you just gonna go for a run and, you know, burn some calories, right? Like any of those things is a more productive use of your time than the, you know, just sort of sitting back and waiting for things to happen to you.

Absolutely. I think that's a great segue before we actually start getting into the meat of the conversation. So for those that are listening, you know, I think when the message is in the underlying themes that you're going to hear as we're talking about today, you know, prioritization, really some key lessons on time management, focusing on the things that you truly can control. And I think for us, as you look at it, how can we help for those that are recently just joining the profession of arms?

How do we quickly integrate them and close this value gap? How do we then, as you know, I like to, you know, go back and really focus on the obstacle is the way, take advantage of the things, and see them as opportunities, vice obstacles, and then really, how do we grow as individuals and as an organization? And so, when we start this thing off, I was wondering, as we were doing some research,

I, and just to share with the team, I was wondering how, if we can get back in the time machine a little bit, how does Ryan Holiday, the guy that writes the promo, and one of the biggest ploys for Tucker Maxx, hope they serve beer and hell, start the journey for stoicism. And as you walk through that,

I was wondering if you could share really some of the lessons about having a mentor in the impact of Robert Green as you're going through that. Yeah, I mean, all those things are more related than it might sort of appear at first glance. When I was, you know, 18, 19 years old, I loved books. I don't think I fully verbalized yet that I wanted to be a writer, but I loved books. And so I just wanted to be close to the action.

And I knew if I could get close to the action, I'd find a lane for myself, or I'd find somewhere to contribute. And so knew if I could get close to the action, I'd find a lane for myself, or I'd find somewhere to contribute. And so, and I started writing for my college newspaper, and then through that, I started meeting writers, and Tucker was one of them. And I was his research assistant. I was his assistant. I did marketing for him, and through him, I met Robert Green, who's I think one of the great living writers of our time wrote the 48 laws of power. He wrote 33 strategies of war, which I think anyone in your profession should read.

But the point being, I just wanted to get around people who were doing or had done what I wanted to do. You know, there's a great quote, any fool can learn by experience. I prefer to learn by the experiences of others. You want to get what a mentor really allows you to do, something that they're pulling strings for you or opening doors for you, it's that they are allowing you to learn from their mistakes by instructing you of like, no, no, no, don't do that. That's a bad idea. Do this instead. And so that was just a

huge part of my career. So it was less like sort of an affinity for that lifestyle or this lifestyle or this kind of writing or that kind of writing and just more like this person has done it. I'm going to go suck as much knowledge out of them as possible and this person and this person and that was putting me on the path to be able to do my own stuff eventually. That's great. I'm hearing is when you have this passion and almost like this obsession, you're going to surround yourself with those that have demonstrated and they may have accolades, they may just have the experience that are willing to pass on the things that they've learned over the time. And that's very similar to what we go through.

We talk about the profession of arms, and as you come in, you really start off really as a member. And as you walk down this journey, and you've spent some time in there, and you realize it's as a career, you become a steward, and part of the things about a steward is you're recognizing talent, you know, as I

say, talent work ethic, you know, and really passion. Once they're aligned, you can start to see someone's potential. And that's pretty neat that, you know, Robert Green identified a lot of that stuff in you. As I know that you've accredited, and he's mentioned a lot of things to you as well. Yeah. And look, it's, there's other ways to find mentors too. It doesn't just, I mean, you do want to have an actual person you talk to, but this is

what reading also allows you to do. I know General Mattis has talked about this. He's like, look, people have been talking and writing about your profession for 5,000 years, right? It actually is the oldest profession. He's saying it's almost sacrilegious not to learn from that. There's amazing books about people who went to boot camp. There's amazing books about people who were prisoners of war. There's amazing books about people who went to boot camp. There's amazing books about people who were prisoners of war. There's amazing books about people who, you know,

the first female to do this in the military, the first black man to do this in the military, all the different experiences cut in little different slices you get from these memoirs and books. And so on the one hand, just to make your own journey easier, you wanna avail yourself of that knowledge. But then this is, I think, the really important part in your profession, and I think General Manis

is quote about it is incredible. You know, he's saying, you can't go fill body bags learning by trial and error. You know, he's saying, you have to learn from the people in front of you, because as you said, you become a steward, you become a part of the tradition and then other people are dependent on you. And so the idea that you're just going to win this as you move through your career is not just needlessly difficult but the costs of it are born by people other than you. They're going to be born by the men and women underneath you.

And then ultimately, the citizens that you protect as part of your profession. So I feel like I've certainly benefited from actual mentors, but I've benefited far more by all the books I've read because I have access to the greatest men and women from all of history, from every background and experience you could possibly imagine.

No, that's a great point. I think at Echoes, one of the things we try to share here is about, if you wanna move along the profession of arms, you've gotta be a student of the profession. So it's pouring yourself and just being that sponge. So there's that two portions of being that sponge. So there's that two portions of it. It's gathering all the science that you possibly can. And then

as you've mentioned, then we all go find our own rubber greens that have some experience and then we can actually operationalize and kind of learn whether it's vicariously or they give us the opportunity to actually be a practitioner. Yeah. And like Eisenhower famously, I think this is when he was stationed down near the Panama Canal, his mentor was Fox Connor, and Fox Connor was appalled that Eisenhower hadn't read Von Klauswitz and all these other books, and he like every day he was like, you're going to read this book and you're going to report to me tonight like you're going to read this book and you're going to report to me tonight and you're going to read this book and you're going to report to me tomorrow. And so I actually I think this is where the best mentorships are and I certainly learned

this from Tucker and from Robert. Really great mentors will craft a reading list for you. And so it's kind of the interplay of those two things, the knowledge and then the application and going, hey, yeah, I know you just read this, but here's some of my spin on it. Here's my experience. It's here that here's how that lines up. And so yeah, you got to be not just a student of the profession, but a lifelong student

in terms of life itself, I think. Absolutely. I was wondering if we could dial down, I heard one of the sound bites where you talked to Robert Green and he talked about a live time. You know, when you were talking about that time frame when you were actually at American apparel,

you were actually doing pretty well. You know, and you get into that point well in your career and they were gonna promote you and give you increased opportunities. I was wondering if you could share with the team that experience you were going through and what does that really mean when he was saying a live time? Yeah, and it was sort of a very formative moment for me and I remember when he was explaining it to me the analogy I took from it would be someone in your profession. So I've been an American apparel for several years. I couldn't quite leave yet for some financial reasons,

for some projects that were in the works and timing. So it was like, okay, I've got like eight to 12 months left at this job, let's say, before I can go do what I wanna do, which is be a writer. And Robert's point was, okay, that you could sit on your hands for the next 12 months because at the end of it, you don't want anything from that. So he's like, you sort of wait and collect your checks

or you could get everything possible out of this experience. And you sort of saying that he makes a distinction between a lifetime and dead time. And the lifetime is when you're active and you're learning and you're milking everything you can out of an experience and dead time is when you're just writing it off, you're just waiting. And I think that not only was that sort of formative for me

and I remember thinking, yeah, look, people get stationed in God knows where for, you know, interminable amounts of time, and they have to just put up with it, like this is a much cusier position than that. And so, you know, certainly I can, certainly I can eat this and figure out some way to make good out of it. But it's something I've thought about many times since,

this pandemic being a great example, you talk to these people and they're just, oh, I was waiting for things to go back to normal. And it's like, first off, I'm not sure that's gonna happen. But second, you're just writing off. Like, the people who are writing it off, because they thought it was only two weeks, well, here most of us are six months later, and nothing has changed.

You know, I would have hoped at some point you'd go, oh, that's a really, you know, bad attitude. And you have to say, here's what I'm gonna get out of it. And so I think what you do is, yeah, let's say you get, you know, you get stationed in, you know, Alaska or the North Pole or, you know, somewhere you don't want to be, you can't say, oh, well, now I just have to wait this out. You have to say, here's what I'm going to emerge from this posting, having, you know, developed in myself as a human being, as a leader.

You know, it could just be like, hey, I'm gonna leave this with, with, you know, a six pack or something. You know, like, I'm, or I'm gonna, you know, I'm gonna have left this having read, you know, you know, these 50 books. It could be anything, but the point is, what are you gonna get out of the experience as opposed to simply waiting for the experience to be over?

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That's a great point. I mean, and honestly, that's part of the reason we're able to shape them and have this conversation today. You know, as we were going through this here in the military, you know, we're used to doing a lot of things face to face. So if you came and you kind of saw things today in a military, any unit it was, it kind of looks pretty similar to how things were, you know, just as you mentioned, you know,

those that have studied and written about the profession, you'd see formations, you'd see, you know, counseling face to face, you would see, you know, soldiers doing a lot of things face to face. And when we recognized that we had to take a look at some of these mitigations, you know, and the conditions had changed, how can you still make a connection? How can you still convey purpose?

And one of the ways was we recognized in order to really, not just own our footprint, that footprint now included social media, different distributed communications, but really how do we dominate? How do we continue to message? How do we find and reach out with those that are still kind of going through

all for different ideas and messaging? And that's really the reason why we started the leadership experience. No, I love that. It's sort of what are you gonna use this as an opportunity to do? And often what you're able to do is things that you couldn't otherwise do because it wasn't feasible because it was too expensive,

because the risk was too high, because you were too busy, whatever it is. And so I think at the very least, you just go, okay, what is this an opportunity to do that perhaps we couldn't do under ordinary circumstances. And look, the idea of a lifetime or dead time, like if you're trapped at the airport for seven hours because your flight is delayed and you manage to get some reading done, obviously it would be preferable that your flight was not delayed, right? Like the fact that you've launched a podcast doesn't compensate for the fact that, you know, you're not able to interact with people face to face.

It doesn't redeem the fact that, you know, going on 200,000 Americans have lost their lives. These are tragic real circumstances, and we're not trying to minimize them. But what we are trying to do is say, okay, we accept that as an unfortunate reality, but how can we at least inch the ball forward a little bit? And how can we, what mean, you know, Vincdor Frankel talks about this in Mancesth for meaning, the idea of finding meaning in the suffering, finding good within the bad,

that's really all we can hope for as human beings. That goes back to the story that you talked about where the king would put the boulder in the middle of the road and just sit there and watch what would happen. I thought that was great if you wanted to share the rest of that. Yeah, so my book, The Ops School, is the way it's a book about stoke philosophy, but sort of ironically it begins with a story from Zen Buddhism, but is this sort of little, you know, a little story about how a king puts a, you know, a pouch of gold under a boulder, which he places in the middle of the road to town. And he watches the different reactions that people have. And some people curse the boulder, some people turn around and go home, some people just go around and ignore it.

And one man grabs a log and he manages to dislodge it. And what he finds underneath is the price. And so the moral of that story is that the things were avoiding the things that we're complaining about actually contain within them, often the opportunity to improve our condition, but we have to be willing to wrestle with them to take them on. And I think that that holds,'s certainly held true in my own life. It's not always, you know, the amount of gold isn't always worth the effort, but what's the alternative? That's true.

I think those who are listening would say that I've placed a lot of boulders in their past just to see if they would go find a lever. That's right. So no, I appreciate you sharing that. So, you know, for those that don't are not familiar with stoicism, I was wondering if you just give them an overview, and I think you really capture their principles. And the thing that I really enjoy Ryan and you're reading and the things that you're shared is, you know, you highlight the philosophy and the concepts, but you bring them in the stories

and you're able to convey them in some lessons. And really, I see them regardless of whether you're devout or not, it's almost a bridging strategy for personal and professional growth. So if you could kind of highlight, what is stoicism and then kind of how you brought the messaging to really communicate with people today? Yeah, well, thank you. I mean, stillisism is obviously an ancient philosophy. It dates back to Greece.

It sort of really comes of age and Rome. There were numerous sort of soldier stoics, which we can talk about if you like, but, but, but, but, so, stoic philosophy, my sort of summation is it, is that stoic believes we don't control the world around us, but we control how we respond. And so stoic, soicism is really a framework for that response. And as it happens, the four virtues of stoicism also happen to be the same cardinal virtues as in Christianity. It's courage, moderation, or self-control, justice, which is like fairness and honesty and serving the common good, and wisdom. So what Stoicism is saying, and if we look, we go back to that idea of the obstacle being the way, is that life is going to throw stuff at us constantly,

but it's always an opportunity to respond with one of those virtues. That's great. So, for a soldier that's going through anything, let's just say, personally, you know, challenges in a relationship, you know, thoughts about some self-harm, you know, difficulty with integration. What you're're saying as I'm hearing, all those things present some challenges which are seen as an obstacle, but we need to change that perception and look at it as an opportunity because that is the way that's being presented to us. Yeah, it's like, look, when things like when you go to the gym and you're working out, you expect it to be hard, right? That you're picking to the gym and you're working out, you expect

it to be hard, right, that you're picking up this thing and you know that it's heavy, but you understand that in picking up the heavy thing, you're getting stronger and better at picking up the heavy thing. And so maybe one way to think about stoicism is that, okay, when someone is insulting you, this is obviously making you want to react angrily. Well, actually, no, what the stoke would say is, this is a test of my ability to manage my temper, right? Or if you are struggling with something in your marriage, this is a challenge to my marriage.

How do we get better for this thing? And it's not to say that everything is improved. Sometimes it's setting up, hey, this marriage has to end. And now I have to learn how to be single, how to have better relationships in the future, right? Everything in that sense is a, has the ability to teach us to make us better, to we can be improved by it. So, you know, we talk about post-traumatic stress in athletics, they also talk about post-traumatic growth. What is the growth that comes from the trauma,

from the difficulty, from the strain. And if we focus on that, then we have the ability to be hopefully improved by the obstacles that we face in life. So one of the things I saw is when you spoke with the Cleveland Browns and you were talking about all these things and all these factors can occur, but the only thing you can control is the way that you're playing. And I was wondering, you know, for those that are listening as a soldier,

if you could kind of provide that same type of parallel that says, hey, you know, you can't control all these other things, but however you can control. Well, so I did speak to the Cleveland Browns last season. I don't know that there was very high expectations for the Browns at the beginning of the season. And then I spoke and the season did not go well. So I don't know what that says about my advice. But I did read an interview from Baker Mayfield a few days ago where he was talking about he was like, yeah, you know, last season, and he just sort of listed all the things. He's like,

you know, I struggled with this, this, this, and this, all the things that I talked about at the beginning of the season, which it seems he'd not been paying attention to. So, again, we can say these things and then, you know, whether people hear them is, I guess, different. But what I sort of do when I talk to sports teams and I can, you break this down for the military just as easily as you go, look, okay, you can show how you play, right? You can show how you do your job.

You don't control the weather that you're doing the job in, right? Like, you don't, you control how you play it in practice, you don't control your playing time, right? You control whether you run your route perfectly, you don't control whether the ball gets there, right? Think an army prepares for war, it doesn't decide whether it goes to war, and it doesn't decide who it goes to war with, right?

That's one of the interesting parts of your profession is that as powerful as you are and the weapons and the the the And so what the stoke is Epictetus who was a slave turned philosopher, you know, he talks about he he says the first task of the philosopher is to distinguish what's in our control and what's not in our control. And so really that exercise is just a way to go. Okay, here's all the things that are up to me. Here's all the things that are not up to me. And I'm going to focus the totality of my energy on things that are up to me. And if you can do that, I think not only will you be happier, but it's a better use of

your resources. Absolutely. I think that, you know, one of the things that you'd mention about stoic virtues and principles that I really appreciated was, you know, the highest level, just to be a virtuous person. Just do good things because you wanna be a better person. You wanna be better and you wanna contribute to increasing humanity in itself. And it's that whole piece I think that the highest good,

and you'd mentioned something I think, in Christianity, talk about if you go against the 10 commandments, then you, you know, you go to hell, but, you know, as a stoke would say, if you're doing those same things that they talk about within the 10 commandments, you're living in hell. And I was wondering if you get high like that. Well, look, I mean, one of the things I talk about when I talk to military groups is like, okay, why did you get into this? Why did you, it's certainly, you certainly did not join

this profession for the money, right? And you certainly didn't join this profession for the fame and you certainly didn't join, join this profession because you thought it would be easy, right? So you picked it because it was the harder thing and you picked it because you value something other than fame and money more, right? And so, so that's great.

Now you just have to make sure that day to day, you're making decisions in accordance with those values, right? Another person, I would advise everyone to read in this conversation. If you haven't checked out John Boyd's work, they're fascinating. There's a, I think I have it here. I don't see it, but John Boyd's, oh here it is. John Boyd, the fighter pilot who changed the art of war,

you know, he was famous for this, this to be, or, oh, what's that? Interesting. This to be or to do speech. And he was saying that, sort of, you have to decide in your life, why are you doing this, right? Are you, is this because you want to accomplish things

for your country, for yourself, for your for humanity? Or are you doing this because you want to be important and recognized and impressed with other people and knowing really early on about that distinction is really, really essential and and and it helps you judge your individual decisions along the way. I keep a bad glove. But if you ask me, I'm just getting started. And there's so much I still want to do. So I decided I want to be a podcast host. I'm proud to introduce you to the Baby Mrs. Kiki Palmer podcast. I'm putting my friends, family, and some of the dopest experts in the hot seat to ask them the questions that have been burning in my mind.

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Yeah, you know, that's that's one of the things I think that point kind of falls into the ego piece a little bit, right? And it also talks about defining as you're mentioning what is success because if you're joining this not for the money or the for the fame, what is it that you got to find? And it's interesting and what I would share, you know, a lot of times those that have been successful leaders that become, you know, you get promoted or you know, they end up taking command. What I tell them, because you know, the same message when you talk about ego is the enemy

and this whole downfall of pride and all the things that have been written about hubris and all those pieces, you know, what we say is, you know, the downfall of a leader was when he starts to believe what's written or said about them. You know, good or bad or don't believe your own press. But you know, what I would offer to them is I'd say, you know, the day you take command or the day you got your promotion, you know, there's your friends and

family are all there. Everything's great. What if the command or the promotion fairy showed up and told you right there and that moment that that was the last time that you were going to take command of anything or that was the last time that you were actually going to get promoted? So what would be the reason that you would still want to come in every day and still want to try to be better and not just for you and for the

recognition but to make the organization better. And the moment that you can identify that, that will be the purpose and the drive that keeps you on the path of selfless service versus self service. I sort of think about something like that when I write I go, okay, let's say I today is the last day that I put in on the project, like I die. Did I get one? Was it enjoyable for me to do? So it actually should be enjoyable as you're doing it.

You know what I mean? It can't be you hate it day in and day out for some vague payoff in the future that's frankly not up to you. You know what I mean? Like if you hate being in the military, but you think it will be really fun to be a general, well, you're gonna have to endure, you know, like 30 years of crap until you get your payoff, right?

Like you have to enjoy it, you know, day to day, to day. That's really, really important. So I think about that. And then I also think, you know, did I leave any loose ends? Like, so I'm trying to always, you know, Sennaka talks about balancing life's books each day. And what he means is just, like, coming to a close each day with the thing.

So if I died, someone could take my notes and publish, like, hey, this is Ryan's unfinished last book, let's say. But it wouldn't be like, here's Ryan's massive notes. Do you know what I mean? It wouldn't just be a giant pile of papers. I'm working diligently, orderly. and I think from a military standpoint, like that sort of structure and organization is key because something could happen to you and someone may need to take over. So I kind of think about it that way. Yeah,

I'm not working for some vague, distant payoff in the future, although obviously I do want to always be getting better, but I'm trying to assume every day that this is as far as I'm at the get. That's a, I really appreciate when they talk about it. It's almost one of those principles when you, they tell you, I can't remember the term where you talk about your thinking about mortality, but it's really in the sense of... Memento, momentum worry, which, but you really, it's about the

opportunity, are you making the impact or are you living life to exactly what you want to make the impact and to say it, did you be satisfied? No regrets. Yes. Yes. Definitely. And look, it's much easier for me to say because the risk in my profession is much lower than the risks of your profession. But I think you want to me, it's like when you say, when Mark's really says, do everything as if it is the last thing they're doing in their life. He's not saying the world is ending tomorrow. Bucket, don't care about anything. Like let's see what heroin feels like. You know what I mean? He's saying, he's saying like, do this. It's important, you know,

treat it seriously. That's how I take. What's ironic is that the momentum more exercise makes you treat everything seriously, but not too seriously because what does it matter in light of the fact that you're going to die? My other famous quote from Mark's Reel, he says, are you afraid of death because you won't be able to do this anymore? And what he means by this is responding to emails, waiting in traffic, filing your taxes. Like, you know what I mean? Like, his point is that like, none of this stuff really matters. Don't treat it so seriously. Just sort of do everything as if it matters,

but not so much that it makes you miserable. You know, when you were making those points, both within your writings and some of the things I've seen in the Daily Stoic, it reminded me of some of the things, even I've talked with Greg McEwan on essentialism. And we talk about the importance of when you're having a distinct end of the day, which goes back to the thing that we've mentioned about

time, being that resource, that I think you mentioned something to the fact if somebody've mentioned about time, being that resource that, I think you mentioned something to the fact of, if somebody had damaged or taken your property, you'd spend all this energy to try to get that back from them, but we give this resource away and people take it from us and we don't treat it the same way. And that's something that we can never reuse again.

Yeah, no, I think that's right. And certainly the more successful you get in any profession, the more and more impositions there are on your time. And you have to figure out what's important, what's not important professionally because there's a lot of stuff profession is important and then personally what's important, right?

The amount of people that are really good at their jobs at the cost of their family is unfortunately very high. And actually, again, to talk about Eisenhower, Eisenhower has this great matrix. It's called the Eisenhower Decision Matrix. And it's about, there's the trivial things and there's the urgent and the important. And most of the things that

we think are important are not urgent and most of the things that we think are urgent are not important and it's about sort of finding the balance, the tension between those things, you could spend your whole day reacting, reacting, reacting and that's when the enemy is going to sneak up on you and encircle you from the rear. Meanwhile, you could spend your whole time focusing on these big, big strategic issues and you're missing that termites are destroying the foundation of your command structures

or something, right? So it's a mix of those two things. That's right. One of the things that we've had, you know, leaders expressed to us very similar to that same paradigm, but almost kind of a mush should like. You know, what are the things that we must do?

You know, and in the same way, it's almost kind of breaking it down. If you came into an organization and it was just, you, from your perspective, it was so completely in disarray, where would you start? And so that's where you really gotta understand authorities and approvals and kind of this must or what are the things as you mentioned urgent

that we have to do. So, I'll offer to the team, it's like, hey, if you went down the road, like, hey, this is a statue, if we don't do the following things, like, we're breaking the law, right? And then you kind of work your way down between regulations, policies, and then SOPs, and it starts to kind of flush that out a little bit. And then leaders

then have to make that change, right? So they're making that determination as they're balancing both portion of it. You're not focusing too much because then that that's the experience portion that we're saying, Hey, there's a lot of stuff in this must-bucket, but there's still some stuff in this should, and there's still some of that stuff in that like. But understanding where to spend the amount of time, I think, is really the discussion that kind of goes back to some of these principles of stoicism. Yeah, Mark really says, you know, everything you're, everything you see and everything you hear, you should ask yourself, is this essential? And he said you should start by asking that

of your own actions. And so yeah, the flip side of this is, is from a leadership perspective, you see all that. Then you might, you're talking to someone who is not in a positional leadership, they got all these opinions about all the things that should be fixed around here. You know what I mean?

And then you look at them and their desk is a mess, and their desk is a mess, and their car is a mess, and the personal life is a mess. And so it's like, start at home, get your shit together, and then go outward from there, I think. get your shit together and then go outward from there, I think. That's right, you know, I was talking to John Gordon. He was the author of the Energy Bus.

Amazing, yeah, I love John. John also, John spoke the day before me at the Browns this season. So both of us laugh about how what this says about our life's work. So to speak. about how what this says about our life's work, so to speak. So, you know, and as we talk through his portion of it, one of the things was just so, I mean, it was so just dead on.

He mentioned, hey, if you're failing in your personal life, you're gonna fail in life. And it kind of, it goes along and it almost mirrors some of these principles. And one of the things I had mentioned as we talk through it, everybody's kind of looking for some paradigm, some concept, something that they can at least sink their teeth in as they gain some of this experience

on where they're balancing this prioritization of how to manage this time and what truly is essential. And a mentor once passed to me that says, how do you know what you're doing in this profession is gonna lead you to say that you were successful? And one of the things he mentioned was so easy to understand, but at the same time, you've gotta try to figure it out for yourself is you'll be able to tell

through the eyes of your shoulders, the hearts of your children and the smile of your wife. And so when you kinda think through that and what that means, and you kind of say, hey, this is the end state I want walking out of this. And here's the impact. I think it helps individuals frame in their mind, hey, what's the path I really need to take? What is essential and what's the way for it, what's truly important? No, I think I say something about this,

and you go as the enemy, but basically a lot of people think if they get their career on track and they succeed in it, it will create happiness at home, and that is not how that works. But like, perfecting the personal, perfecting the professional is almost unrelateding the personal, perfecting the professional is almost unrelated

to the personal, but getting the personal in order, you're having a better marriage, or you're getting out of a bad marriage, you have a good relationship with your kids, you're eating well, taking care of yourself, you're sleeping, you're doing all the things that go into being a well-rounded, well-taken care of person, that will have very tangible, immediate impact

on your ability to succeed as a professional. And so, yeah, definitely. And at the end of the day, like, what are you gonna be most proud of at the end of the day, what are you going to be most proud of at the end? What, like I was thinking about this, I do this email every day for daily dad, we send out an email about parents, about stories from history about being a better parent. And look, there's like what I'm saying is there's lots of ways to be successful. There's lots of ways to have impact. But like think about the impact of your grandparents, right?

Your grandparents had impact on your parents who had impact on you and you're going to be passing those things onto your children. So that's four generations. What is the chance that the work you're doing today at your job is going to have impact for generations from now? Do you know what I mean? It's exceedingly unlikely that anything I write will have impact for generations from now.

That's like hitting a grand slam as an author, like how timeless and well-selling your work has to be to hook that up. But there's a conversation I could have or something I could do at home right now that almost guaranteed would have impact on my kids, not just from their memory, but we also now understand this idea of epigenetics, which is that like the experiences and the things that happen to us in life literally shape the genes that we pass on. And so like, nowhere are you going to have more impact as a human being than at home with your family.

And weirdly, that is the thing we tend to prioritize last because those are the people who are most forgiving and understanding of us and that's somewhat tragic and something we've got to be very cognizant of. No, that's a great point. I think those that are listening, you know, one of the things that everybody I think kind of goes through and tries to struggle is there's this unicorn and concept of balance. And so as you mentioned, right? So those that are incredibly dedicated and are passionate and even obsessed with doing better and trying to get after things within their craft, they'll think, hey, if I get this on track,

but at some point it's kind of almost like summoning quicksand. You know, there's always gonna be something new, something new challenge that you're gonna move toward, dedicate more time. But the true portion about it is, how do you go back and the things that you'll never be able to have again? So it's a 15 minute conversation with your son that you may have to way through all these

different things, whether it's playing with some toys that you don't want to have some conversation, listen to some music, just to have that one 15 minute conversation where you know you've made an impact that that's something he's going to remember. And so, you know, we talk about, you know, this control portion about it. And so I think that's part of the thing that when, you know, I always offer to my son, you know, there's kind of like five things that he's got to be able to take a look at and plant for his day, otherwise he becomes kind of a victim of his own schedule, right? It's, you know, you got a plan where you're going to eat,

when you're going to sleep, you know, when you're going to do some type of physical activity and kind of prep and work, otherwise you start off being a victim of your own schedule. And just like you mentioned, one of the lessons of, you know, Stoic start early in the day. I think that, you know, this time naturally speeds up afternoon, you know, when you start playing catch up. So anything else I think you'd add on that, I think the team would appreciate that as well. Yeah, I mean, I gave after I talked to the Browns, I went and I talked to the coaching

staff of the Rams. And they had a, you know, a lot of just like you have behind you, so you can have like the organizational, I'd like sort of the core values or the commitments or whatever. And one of the ones that I've sort of stolen from them that I loved, it's is keep the main thing, the main thing. And that's just a great value. It's a great thing to think about. And it's something to apply strategically to your whole life, but also tactically day to day. And so what is the main thing today? What are you doing, right? And so like when I, like, for instance,

my calendar, because I'm much more autonomy than a person in the armed forces. I want like nothing in my calendar. When I see things in my calendar, that's time not spent on my main thing, which is writing. Do you know what I mean? Like we're talking, I agreed to do this, I'm not complaining, but I'm not writing because I'm doing this, right? So I could fill my whole day with these things.

And so like what's the main thing? And your point about the day speeding up is very true. So when I do schedule stuff, it's invariably in the afternoon because I want to have won the day already. And then I'm playing with kind of house money in the afternoon. So I'm never putting stuff off, right?

I'm never saying like, well, I was, I was gonna write this morning, but I wanted to see, you know, did the trailblazers win last night, and then maybe I'll watch a little more sports center, and then I'll respond to emails, then maybe I'll go out to breakfast, and then I had that eye schedule, that meeting for 11,

you know, so like all of a sudden, you know, it's like two or three o'clock before like the dust is clearing, and it's actually not clearing because now you've got other stuff you have to do. So, for me, I try to, I was, I had done the heavy lifting that I had to do from a writing perspective by like 10, 10, 15, 10, 30 this morning. And I, I've been working on other stuff since then. But the point is like I did the hard thing up front. And then the rest is extra. No, that's, I think that's, that's a, that's a great point and great advice for those

that are listening. And, and I did, I, Ryan, I thank you up front. I can write some pages, but I think what you would get is barely something that said subject plus predicate equals complete thought. But I'll, I'll send you a couple, a couple of emails so you can get this time back. No, the, I was wondering though, you know, now that we're talking through this thing, you do, you, you kind of almost in our business operationalize, you know, the philosophy itself, some key principles that I think you speak very well and very, very clear playing terms that guys can understand,

doesn't matter whether you're a practitioner in a certain things or you're still studying the concepts in itself. But I really like how you just talk about, here's some things you can do on a daily basis or throughout the week. You know, and I was wondering if you could share some of those things with the team. Yeah, I try to think about it in terms of practices. What are practices that are sort of historically proven that are going to get results?

So journaling is a big one for me, so I try to spend some time journaling in the morning. I try to have sort of time set aside for stillness, so which is sort of a difficult concept, this is a little paradoxical, but like, so the first thing I do in the morning is I wake up and then I don't touch my phone for the first one hour that I'm awake. And that means I do have to get up early

because like all people, I have to see what's going on. I have to, I do, there are stuff I have to react, but that means that I don't, that means I have to back up when I wake up so I can have this one uninterrupted hour. And so I get up, I don't go straight into the news or whatever, it's time for me to just reflect. And so since I haven't touched my phone since I went to bed,

that means I'm getting, you know, 10-ish hours of no phone, which to me is really important. And then I go for a walk. I take my two kids for a walk in the morning. And so we're outside, we're just connecting, we're experiencing nature. I often have all sorts of ideas from that experience. So then on top of the walk, I do some form of strenuous exercise every single day.

I try to have time for reading every single day as a practice. And then obviously as a writer, I'm very bullish on writing, but I think writing, like you write to figure out what you think. And so if I even back when I was an executive, I spent a lot of time sort of writing out whether it was letters or memos or, you know, I was trying to explain what I wanted to happen. So it could be, so the idea could be sort of distributed and disseminated through the organization. I like that point where you talk about journaling. And we've seen that, and you've mentioned Fox Connor, you know, Eisenhower, and a lot, you know, to truly understand what they were thinking and going through, you through, a lot of these key leaders

ended up journaling throughout that time frame. And so for me, I gotta confess, I mean, I use the notes on my iPhone is when I wake up, but I'm gonna have to turn off the notifications as we go through that. Because you're right, I feel like when I wake up a lot of times, which probably a lot of people do, there's so many things, you know,

your mind's kind of gone to rest, but then as soon as you wake, you're thinking through all these things, and you're trying to put some type of order, you're just jotting these thoughts down. But I do like that, the key point is, it's not journaling to figure things out, which I really like, is you have an opportunity at the end of the day to go back and reflect on it.

You know, it's interesting because a lot of times when I wake up, I'm writing things down that it's not even part of a problem set that's something hard. It may be even something that I wrote down that says, I need to make sure I send an email to this individual congratulating them about, you know, whatever it is. I need to make sure I, you know, call my dad and ask about how this followed up on. And so in my mind, you know, all these things, if you don't write them down, then there's no way

to kind of reflect, you know, almost that discussion that we had about how successful and are you actually actively, you know, pursuing that day? Yeah, it's just, there's all this stuff bouncing around in here and you want to get it out. So then you only have the important things going on in there. So yeah, for me, it's about kind of slowing things down, getting it out on the page, having a conversation with yourself. It's a great way to catch, you know,

that temper before you do, it does something damaging in your life or to someone else, you know, feelings of envy or unhappiness. It's just a place to work through those feelings. And look, there's a reason that most successful people through history have kept a journal. And so I also tend to look for things that have sort of been confirmed in the biographies of people that I admire. You know, but it's also interesting if the team's listening, just the order that you do it.

The moment you wake up, you give yourself the time, you're writing down to kind of figure out and kind of place what's going on in your head, how you want to, it's almost like how you want to attack the day and reflect on certain things that you're going through. Then you get after doing PT, which I want everybody to make sure that you said that. I didn't say that, you know. Well, so it, yes, the journaling thing is not just some item on the to-do list. It is a meditative sort of intention setting part of the day. My exercise tends to be flexible when I do it, just on what I have. But, you know, if I was single, I'd probably do it straight in the morning.

I don't. So, what I, the way I tend to do it now is the the I do the walk, but I don't consider the walk exercise. The walk is purely for the mental benefits. And there's a reason that mathematicians and composers and artists and and and and and leaders have been walking throughout history. It it helps calm the mind down. So I do the walk as the mental thing and then the exercise I And so I do the walk as the mental thing. And then the exercise, I tend to do more in the evening. But when you look at the routines of most really successful people,

like people who have less freedom over their schedule, like CEOs or presidents or heads of state or whatever, they tend to exercise in the morning. You look at the billionaires routine is always like, wake up at 4 a.m. workout, you know? And that's because at 4 a.m. no one is vying for their time, but at 4 p.m.

there's a lot of competing things going on. And it's disruptive in the middle of the day to do it. So yes, I do think starting the day with these things is really, really important. No, that's great. And I'm glad you differentiated walking versus doing PT. So I was going to have to clarify that for the team that was listening. So no, that's great because I agree with the same thing, unpacking this stuff afterwards and letting your mind get away from

the things that are the problems that you're going to have to tack later on. You know, the other thing that I appreciated when you speak about key lessons is it's almost this worst case scenario. So, you know, as we kinda, you know, almost come to the last portion of this conversation, I was wondering if we could just kinda talk and focus on the fact that, you know, a lot of times in our business,

when we say in the profession of arms, we have this repetitive responsibility of professional judgment and that's really to manage violence and risk. So how are you prepared in these pressure situations to do that? And I think one of the things that you talk about as a practice of stoicisms and good stoics is they think through almost the worst case scenario.

So they've already kind of prepared themselves. It's almost in the sense of preparing, hey, when you do have something that you may not go or the conditions are adjusting a little bit, how do you make sure that you're prepared, that you can continue to go, and for us, that's what I really saw is building that mental agility by kind of going through that in your mind. Yeah so this is something I'm writing about right now

actually yeah the Stokes practice what they call pre-metatoshu malorum, a pre-meditation of evils but but Senegal actually talks about this he's quoting quoting Fabius, the military historian, and he's saying the only inexcusable thing for a commander to say is I did not think that would happen, to have not thought about the contingency. And Napoleon says as well, Napoleon says, every moment the general should ask himself, what would I do if the enemy appeared on my left? What would I do if the enemy appeared on my left?

What would I do if the enemy appeared in my rear? Right? The idea being you have to know in advance what you would do in scenarios A, B, C, D, and E. Are there still such things as Black swans? Absolutely. And that does happen. But in preparing for all the things that are not black swans, you are preparing also for the black swan. And I think we are looking at, we are looking right now at a, at one of the most costly case studies of all time on what happens when you are not prepared, right?

Politically, culturally, medically, financially, all aspects of life from the person who didn't have enough savings in their savings account to be able to endure an economic downturn to the leadership in this country that disbanded a pandemic preparedness team, like we are dealing with the reality of what happens

when you tell yourself that because something is unlikely, you don't have to think about it. And it's great to be optimistic, and it's great to hope for the best, but you also have to be prepared for the worst. And what the Stoics say over and over again, is that it's better to be pleasantly surprised when something bad doesn't happen

than unpleasantly surprised when something bad does happen. And just for the team that's listening, you know, and I'll share with you, Ryan, as we were going through this with COVID initially, and was was really looking at, hey, what are the procedures and policies we need to implement to really create our safe bubble again and everybody's talking about, you know, our masks, no masks, do we need new face shields, what was going on. And as we were thinking through that, there was enough people that were working through

that problem set. What I was talking with the team is, we need to think through the next larger problem set that we're gonna end up facing, which is when a soldier in our barracks in small confined spaces becomes COVID positive. And then now we have a larger problem set that we have because it's now in confined spaces. We have to clean, we have to find out,

we can isolate all these individuals at once. And then the second one is what happens if it ends up spreading to our defect, where we have to quickly close it. How do we have to go back and continue to exercise all these essential services that we have? And so we went through this planning process in March. And I could tell that my team was kind of like, hey, sir, I think we're going to be good. The curves now starting to come down.

And really, part of that was is because those outside our military installation were also exercising similar procedures that we were. But then as it started to change and everybody started lifting, we started to see a little bit increase of the number of cases we had. And the scenario that we had done, the mental work for earlier in March, we just recently experienced some of those same things, but we were prepared as we went through that. No, and I was just reading an article in Texas, and I'm sure people listening have been posted from Texas. So, H-E-B, the grocery store chain has been stupendous.

Like, adding hours, they've had no runs on supplies, they've been great. And so, they were certain, I was reading this article about how they managed to do this. They're talking, they have like a disaster, like preparedness team, and a guy whose job it is to just do this or a person, a man or a woman. But anyways, they were saying, they were like, how did you, how have you survived this or whatever? And he said, well, we've wargamed for precisely this scenario.

And we've thought about, you know, he was like, we knew something was happening just because our supply lines overseas were, we were seeing the impact of this just from that. And so he was like, we've been reacting to this since like December or January. And the point being, if you've wargamed something, if you're prepared for it, it's never perfectly going to replicate the situation that you're in. But it is going to put you in a position where you don't have to waste as much time building a plan of action from scratch. And yeah, look, I would argue that of all the different, you know, branches of society of our system that have sort of crumbled under the pressure of COVID, there's a reason the military is like the one thing that people are pretty

universally pleased with at the moment. And I think that is because the preparation and the standards you guys hold yourselves to. No, I appreciate it, Ryan. And I would tell you, for the team that's listening, I think that, you know, what you've laid out in some some key practices for those that are relatively new and kind of figure out, how do I get integrated into this team? I think some of the things in terms of daily practices will help you figure out how to manage that time and quickly go through and really focus on the things that you mentioned, you know, control would only you can control. I think the same discussion that we had about looking hard, about obstacles as opportunities,

and then what we just had in terms of this recent portion of the discussion helps with building mental agility. I mean, you could take that same portion at an organizational level and say, am I wargaming the things to make sure I have enough finances this continues. What am I planning for, you know, my kids, if they don't go back to school?

And so you're prepared for that portion as well. And I think the biggest thing that I really took away is, you know, reading through your work and at the same time, listening to you discuss the daily stoic every day is, you really mirror and provide as we go back to this art and science and how to practice this. In the armeolithic, we talk about three Cs.

We talk about character, commitment, and competence. And I think what you kind of laid out is daily practices and really the messaging of what the philosophy is of stoicism is a way to get after those three Cs, which really in our business is the formula for building the currency of our profession, which is trust.

So Ryan, I appreciate you sitting down with us today, and we always leave the team with asking, what are your questions, but I'd like to leave the final word with you. Now thank you guys so much, and thank you for what you do for us. And I appreciate it. And if you want to know more about stoicism, I do this free email every day, Daily Stoic. What stoicism is so influential to me personally, I just sort of try to pay that forward. And if you're looking for something sort of part of that morning routine, that email is not a bad place to start,

you can get that at dailystoke.com slash email. That's awesome. Thank you, Ryan. Appreciate it. All right, talk soon. Hey, it's Ryan. If you want to take your study of stoicism to the next level, I want to invite you to join us over at Daily Stoke Life. We have daily conversations about the podcast episodes, about the daily email. We actually do a special weekend set of emails for everyone. You get all our daily stoic courses and challenges totally for free. That's hundreds of dollars of value every single year, including our new year, new you challenge, which we're going to launch in January.

You get a special cloth bound edition of the best of meditations that we've done. You get a bunch of cool stuff. It's an awesome community. I've loved being a part of it. I've loved getting to meet everyone who's trying to take their study of stoicism to the next level. Love to have you join us.

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