The Daily Stoic - This Is A Choice You’re Making | Ask Daily Stoic

Episode Date: February 13, 2025

We think if we just make enough money, we won't have to worry anymore. We think if we just become powerful enough, we'll be free from feeling pushed around. Of course, it never works out that way.🎙️ 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.

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And I've been doing it now, crazy me, at least 15 years I've been staying in Airbnbs, basically since it came out. I love Airbnb and you should check it out for your next trip. 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 Daily dailystoic.com. The worry part is a choice. We think if we just make enough money, someday we won't have to worry about it anymore. We think if we just get enough money, someday we won't have to worry about it anymore. We think if we just get big enough, strong enough, we won't have to worry about being pushed around. We think if we can just get through this or that rough patch, we can relax and not be so worried anymore. Of course, it never works out that way.

No one has ever gotten there and reported back on their worry-free life. Just as you must have noticed how this has gone with the progress you have made, you have more than you did today. How do you feel? Have all your problems disappeared? Does that mean that worry is just a part of life

that stress is ever present, no matter how successful or powerful we get? Well, no, unless you choose for it to be. In meditations, Mark Cerullius talks of his anxiety. He realizes that it's not coming from anything external, it's within him. It is a choice he is making. This is not to say that things cannot be made easier

by money or that your lack of money isn't a problem. It's that simply having and not having something is an external. Worry, doubt, anxiety, stress, indeed any emotion we experience in our lives is internal. We have influence over the latter, not the former. So let's try to solve the problem where it will actually make a difference. Let's stop lying to ourselves saying it will all be better in the future

because the present isn't the problem. None of the external things are. It's our emotions that are at the root of our discomfort. They are within us. They are our responsibility to work on. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Back in November, I went over to Europe

and then Canada to do a bunch of talks. You probably heard me talk about this already too much. I'm not gonna tell you about where to get tickets because, well, you're a couple of months late, but I spoke first in London, then in Rotterdam, and then Dublin was my last talk in Europe. We spent like a couple of days in London, like one day in Rotterdam, and then a bunch of days in Dublin, which is one of my favorite places, one of my favorite places to run, one of my favorite places to eat and hang out and study history. We took the kids with us, so they really enjoyed it.

They loved going to the jail because we'd just been in Australia and they were blown away that Ned Kelly's father was in that jail in Dublin because I'd shown him pictures of the armor and stuff. So they're kind of wrapping their head around that. We went to a castle they were pretty excited about. We go to this, whatever,

the big sort of government house castle that the British, I think it's Dublin Castle, we're walking into this building, right? And we go up the stairs and what do they have? A huge picture of Seneca. So the kids recognize that, that was fun. What does this have to do with today's episode? Well, I am bringing you some of the Q&A

from that talk in Dublin. It was, I think, the best attended talk of all of them I did. I loved being in Ireland. They were very good to me. Thanks to everyone who came out along the tour. Thank you for listening. And I hope you enjoy this little Q&A episode of The Daily Show podcast. Hi, Ryan. Thanks very much for your speech. I want to say that your book, Obstacles the Way, helped me finish my master's thesis.

Oh, congratulations. Thank you for that. I want to ask you about when you know something or someone is like annoying you or whatever, but you can't accept that they don't maybe agree with you, how to kind of have peace with that and not let it kind of take your own piece away. One of my favorite quotes from the Stoics, it's in Meditations, Mark Strillo says, Remember you always have the power to have no opinion. He says, things are not asking to be judged by you. Now imagine this is being said by a person

whose opinion was literally law. He had the life and death power over people. And here he is reminding himself to live and let live, that he doesn't have to let things bother him. He doesn't have to try to change everything. He can just let some things be. And now this sounds like not much of a power. You always have the power to have no opinion.

But how many people do we know that have no such power? Right? I mentioned Elon Musk earlier. Elon Musk is a incredibly powerful, incredibly wealthy person. But has he ever had an opinion he was able to keep to himself? Not that I know of. It's a hard thing to do to just shut up, you know, to just focus on your stuff.

That's what I try to do in my life as best as I can. Something I'm going through with my kids. Like I'll be like, oh wait, I don't need to have an opinion on whether this show is good or not. You like it. I like that expression. You don't have to yuck someone else's not. You like it. I like that expression,

you don't have to yuck someone else's yum. You like it, so it's good to you. It's not something I need to convince you of otherwise. Hi, Ryan. Hello. I have a question on how do you decide or what's the logic for choosing which battles to fight? I agree with what you're saying. You need to be courageous.

You need to stand up. Sometimes it might come, you might think it's not worth doing that. How do you gauge that? Yeah, I think it's a tough one. I wish there was some hard and fast rule or some formula. I think these are probably one of the areas you want to trust your gut. You don't just do everything that pops into your head, you're just going to be responding emotionally to stuff. But I think one of the things I try to think about as a tester, I'm thinking about doing something or not, this isn't just in matters of justice is, you know,

if I didn't do this, if I didn't say this, if I didn't take on this project, if I didn't do this task, would it get done by someone else? Or am I the best person to do this project? If I didn't do this task, would it get done by someone else? Or am I the best person to do this thing? Right? So as you're deciding what to get involved in, what to speak up about, etc., being the five thousandth or five millionth voice to be chiming in on something, maybe that's not the best use of your time and energy. That's not the stand you need to take. But what are the things that you are uniquely qualified or uniquely positioned or uniquely inspired to be involved with and that's probably what I would use to direct me towards what to get engaged with

and not get engaged with. Hey, Ryan, John here. So over the past 10, 12 years your output has been pretty prolific and very consistent. In structuring your time in a week, a month, a year, how do you structure your work on projects to maintain that consistency and where does your time off come in and all that? The main thing is to keep the main thing, the main thing as they say. So for me, that's writing. Writing is the main thing. There's other things I like.

There's other things that I find enjoyable or fun. There's other things that are lucrative, but the main thing for me is writing. So I always have this kind of weather vein that tells me how my decisions are going or my priorities are if I have time to write or not. Right? Because that's the driver of everything that I do.

And it's also what I wanted to do. And as I've said before, like the reward for succeeding as a writer should not be that you don't have time to write. And I think that's true for whatever it is you do. You love basketball, the rewards for having a successful career in that shouldn't be that you don't remember the last time you saw a basketball game in person or, and so what's your main thing and building around that

is I think really essential. So I just try to write almost every day and I find that if I am showing up and doing the work, publishable stuff comes out of the other side of that. It's not always publishable when I sit down to do it, but if I show up every day and do the work, the output tends to take care of itself. So again, do the verb or be the noun.

If you're doing the verb, it makes you the noun. If you are acting like the noun, assuming the identity of the noun, as he says in Fight Club, sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken. Welcome to Dublin. And great to see a fellow Iron Maiden fan. I love the shirt, yeah.

Oh, thank you. Thank you. I have a question about change. Okay. So whenever I go into companies, it's normally because we're going through a tough time and staff members are required to change. The problem is at least 80% of the companies I go into, staff don't want to change. Even if their jobs are in the line, the most difficult, painful thing in the world for them to do is to change their behavior. They'd rather keep doing the same thing over and over again. I know you can't change people. Stoicism is how you react to them. But how

do you influence or try to incorporate stoic thoughts and people who are just so stubborn and so set in their ways? Thank you. Yeah, we can't change people, but we can maybe motivate people to change themselves, right? And Mark Struis talks a lot about change in meditations. He says, life is like a river, it's flowing past us. You know, we never step in the same river twice. My favorite bit from him meditating on change is he says,

you know, everything in your life came from change. Even birth is change. There was non-being and now being, right? Says you're afraid of death as if that's not the final form of change. And so I think sometimes helping people understand that the way things are, the thing they're trying to keep

was never stable in the first place. Do you know about the ship of Theseus paradox? There's an ancient paradox about a Athenian ship that was responsible for a major historical victory. And so they preserved it. And it would get old with time and pieces of it would fall apart. And so they would replace it.

And so over the decades and then the centuries, every stick of it is replaced. Is it still the same ship or is it a new ship? And the idea is that everything and every one of us is that's a metaphor for us. We're always changing and evolving and growing. In fact, there is speaking of the War of Independence, there's actually the War of 1812,

but same common enemy, the British. The oldest ship in the American Navy, it's still considered an active duty ship, is the USS Constitution. And it still exists, it still floats. I have a piece of my son's obsessed with ships, and so I bought him from an antique dealer, a chunk of the hull that they took out in one of the repairs and sold to pay for the repair. So this ship has been, I think it was built in the 1790s, and it's still floating. Obviously, if it hadn't changed, if it hadn't evolved, if they hadn't

replaced the things piece by piece, it would have sunk by now. So change is a necessity. And it's like the Queen's motto was, if things are gonna stay the same, then things are gonna have to change. I think we gotta help people understand that this thing they're afraid of, not only is it an unstoppable force that they're powerless to actually prevent,

but it's a good thing. And they got where they are because at some point in their life, they were more comfortable with change. They were obviously somewhere else before they came to work at this company, you know. So without change, where are we going to be? That's how I think about it. Hey, it's Ryan.

Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. I just wanted to say we so appreciate it. We love serving you. It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple years we we so appreciate it. We love serving you. It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple years we've been doing it. It's an honor. Please spread the word, tell people about it. And this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say thank you. If you like The Daily Stoic and thanks for listening, you can listen early and ad free

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