The Daily Stoic - Tim Ferriss on Making Better Decisions and Solving Problems (Pt 1)

Episode Date: January 20, 2024

On this episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast, Ryan talks with author and early-stage technology investor/advisor Tim Ferriss on the essence of Stoicism, fear setting, and exaggerating the downside of things. How stoicism helped Tim manage the catastrophe of success and criticism and his podcast Tim Ferriss Show, which is the first business/interview podcast to exceed 100 million downloads. It has now exceeded 900 million downloads.Tim Ferriss has been listed as one of Fast Company’s “Most Innovative Business People” and one of Fortune’s “40 under 40." He is also the author of five #1 New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestsellers, including The 4-Hour Workweek and Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers.IG and YT: @TimFerrissX: @TFerriss✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoke Podcast. It's pretty unreal to me, 15 years ago, I was in this town, Austin, Texas. I was just a, I guess a college sophomore, trying to make my way as a research assistant, aspiring writer person.

And I was here at South by Southwest, one of the first events conferences I ever been to in my life, and I met this guy. And he was an entrepreneur, he was thinking about doing a book. He was presenting later that day or the next day, and he invited us to come and I went, I saw him get up there and give an incredible presentation. I just thought, this dude is going to be huge. And he did go on to be huge. One of the best selling authors of the last 15 years. One of the great investors of that period also. And a guy who's been my friend throughout all of that, a mentor, advisor, teacher,

and just all around great dude. I'm talking about Tim Ferriss, who I have known or has known me since I was, like I said, in college. So this is really cool for me. I had Tim on the podcast back during the pandemic. We chatted remotely and I wanted to have him out to the studio when he was in town

and he came out to the bookstore, which I'll tell you about in the next episode. I'm gonna split this up into two. I'll tell you about Tim's relationship with the bookstore a little bit because I think it's pretty cool and we talk about it in the episode. But Tim say multi-time, five-time,

number one New York Times bestselling author for our work week, tools of Titans, for our chef, for our body. Just a great, great writer. His books have changed me so much. It's funny, his bio calls him the Oprah of audio. But I think I may have coined that phrase in a piece that I wrote about him many years ago.

I think I was the fourth guest on the Daily Stoke podcast because Tim published the obstacles the way as an audiobook. I'll tell you more about that in the other intro too. I just wanna get into this intro. He's, if you haven't listened to Tim Ferriss podcast, absolutely should. Amazing interviews over the years.

Some of my favorite authors. I really liked his episode with Michael Lewis many years ago. That's a favorite. He was one of the first people to have Arnold Schwarzenegger on. I'm really excited they came out. I think we had an awesome conversation.

We follow him on social at Tim Ferriss and at T Ferriss. Here's my interview with the one and only Tim Ferriss. I remember very specifically, I rented an Airbnb in Santa Barbara. I was driving from San Francisco to Los Angeles. I just sold my first book and I've been working on it and I just needed a break. I needed to get away and I needed to have some quiet time to write. And that was one of the first Airbnb's I ever started with.

And then when the book came out and did well, I bought my first house. I would rent that house out during South by Southwest and F1 and other events in Austin. Maybe you've been in a similar place. You've stayed in an Airbnb and you thought to yourself, this actually seems pretty doable. Maybe my place could be an Airbnb. You could rent a spare bedroom,

you could rent your whole place when you're away. Maybe you're planning a ski getaway this winter or you're planning on going somewhere warmer. While you're away, you could Airbnb your home and make some extra money towards the trip. Whether you use the extra money to cover some bills or for something a little more fun, your home could be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.ca slash host.

You know all this is your fault, right? Because so, so I had this crazy idea, Samantha and I had this crazy idea to do this bookstore thing. And you know what you have? You have a crazy idea. Most people are like, oh yeah, that sounds great. You should blow up your life to become a yoga teacher or whatever, you know?

Like it sounds amazing. And so I was like, I felt like everyone was telling me what I wanted to hear. And so I was like, you know what? I'm gonna call Tim. Tim will tell me if this is a terrible idea or not, because you always do. And also I felt like what you really want in those situations,

you want disconfirmation, not confirmation. So I was like, Tim will tell me not to do this. And then I probably won't do it because I felt like you of all people would was like, Tim will tell me not to do this. And then I probably won't do it because I felt like you of all people would be like, I take your philosophy to largely, not largely, but a big part of it is like, how do you understand the life you want? How do you avoid unnecessary entanglements,

obligations, overhead, the things that sound fun on paper, but actually turn out you just bought yourself a prison cell, you know? So I was like, I'm gonna ask him and he's gonna tell me probably not to do it. And for a bunch of smart reasons. Anyways, I call you and you're like,

I think it sounds like a great idea. And you're like, but only if you think about it like this. And what you said is, don't see yourself as opening a bookstore forever. See yourself as doing a two year experiment running a bookstore. Obviously that would sort of change how you would do some of the stuff,

but your point was think about it as an experiment and you said, you'll only know if you wanna run a bookstore. How you said, how else will you find out if you really wanna run a bookstore than by opening a bookstore? And so you gave me permission to do it in a way that I could actually trust and that I didn't feel like you were, you know.

Fluffing your passion. Yeah, exactly. That's exactly what it is. It's the new in my new podcast, by the way. And then we're, I think this is the three year mark, but at the two year mark, it was like, hey, we actually do really enjoy doing it. We can settle into it a little bit more now.

And it's, I think just the idea of seeing, doing crazy thing as an experiment or as an iterative process, as opposed to this is permanently my identity, you know, I can never go back, and then being either intimidated by it and not doing it or being locked into it forever if it's not working. Totally.

And if I remember correctly, and I could be manufacturing this, but I get a lot of these calls as you might imagine. And there are people I call with my own situations where I'm like, am I stupid? Tell me actually I'm gonna force you, what are the five ways if you had to steal men that this is a terrible decision?

Yes. I just take that side of the debate table. But I believe that also when we chatted I said, all right, let's look at the fixed costs. Like what are the actual investment sort of capital outlays we're talking about? And if it doesn't work, can you hit undo? Like what are the costs?

Like what's the carrying cost? Sure. And I'm making this up, right? These are not real numbers. but if we land at, well worst case scenario, I think I'll be 50 to 75K in the red after all is said and done, if I hit undo and have to sell everything after three years. I'm like, okay, well, would you pay $20,000 a year

to no once and for all if this is something you enjoy doing. And then you're like, oh, okay. That's actually from a life tuition perspective, something you can wrap your head around. And then you can think about opportunity cost or the cost of taking advantage of an experiment like this. You think that life tuition experiments,

that's how you think about it. Because I remember when you decided to be an angel investor, you looked at the cost of going to business school and you said, okay, it's $200,000. Why don't I just spend $200,000 investing in companies? And I'll end up at the same place, which is I'll know how to invest in things. And with one, I'll have a degree and a piece of paper.

And the other, I might have valuable stakes in a bunch of companies. Or if it fails in both cases, I'll have just $200,000 that I let on fire, but I'll have learned something either way. Yeah, I'll have learned something. I look at it and this is not unique to me. This is something that Mark Andreessen has talked about.

This is something, although he, every once in a while just deletes everything he's ever written, so I'm not sure what the current status of that is. And Scott Adams has certainly spoken and written about this. He has an entire book, I think, dedicated to, effectively, I can't recall the title, but How to Win Even If You Lose,

How to Fail Bigly, perhaps. And the general heuristic is choosing projects based on the skills you will develop and the relationships you will develop, whether those are new or preexisting, such that even if you don't get the outcome, public or private, that would be the objective marker of success.

Let's say in the case of investing, making more than you put in, in the case of a bookstore, maybe you could say, all right, if you're trying to compare 100 bookstores you would look at, annual sales and this and that and revenue per employee, blah, blah, blah. Outside of that though,

what are some of the more abstract or less common line items that you could think about? Those could be skills, those could be also skills that transfer relationships that transfer to other areas. So if I look at my collaborations that I've done in various projects like For Our Chef, which was from an objective perspective, we look at the best seller lists,

a failure compared to my other books. Yes. But it led directly to the podcast. Yeah. And for that reason, it has been my most profitable book by far. If we look at that as an antecedent to the podcast. Right.

By far. Yeah. And you can't, or at least you shouldn't, I shouldn't evaluate the podcast in isolation because the prerequisite was the set of experiences and the launch which relied heavily on this new thing, relatively speaking, called podcasts. Yes.

So that's everything about it. And it takes a lot of also unnecessary stress or pressure out of the situation. Well, it's funny though, because now the advice was very helpful and it feels like it worked out. But for the first year, it seemed like the worst idea in the entire world because we were talking in maybe January of 2020.

And so it got serious about it. Like we started the construction the first week of March, 2020. So for the first year, it wasn't even a bookstore. It was just an enormous albatross around my neck and empty building filled with books. It was a series of bills that I was paying, but there was no, nothing coming back to the other direction.

But I remember I wrote this little note card to myself sort of speaking of stoicism, I said, this is a test, we'll make you a better person or a worse person, right? And so the idea was, yeah, maybe this turns out to be an experiment that goes poorly from a business perspective, but how did I grow as a result of it?

What did I learn, right? Did I learn to not do crazy things? Did I learn actually to do crazy, that I can do crazy things, that I can absorb failures, you know, like. Reframe crazy things. Totally. By looking at them from a different perspective. Yeah, right.

You know, what do you take from it so you can win either way? Right, and the perspective shifting is really important. I mean, this is also looking at this bust right behind you. Of Marikus, yes. Yeah, reframing and thinking about labels very carefully, thinking about expectations very carefully, which tie into language is super important.

So in the case of say, angel investing, almost anything you would ever read or hear about angel investing states something that is at face value very obvious and that is high risk, super high risk. Even if you're successful, 80% of them, the investments will go to zero, yada, yada, yada. But the way that I folded the angel investing into a meta level plan to develop relationships

and learn skills was not risky at all. You were gonna get that, whether the company was hugely successful or hugely unsuccessful. In fact, you may get those things more on an investment that didn't work than one that did work. Totally. And that certainly ended up being the case, which is not to say they're called experiments not guarantees for a reason. Yes. There are plenty that don't turn out the way that I would like them to turn out,

but as long as I hold it lightly as an experiment and not Tim Ferriss' final exam for his self-worth, then you can roll with the punches and it's not always easy. Well, like when a scientist has an hypothesis and then they do an experiment and then the hypothesis turns out to be wrong, they're not like angry and they're like, you're such an idiot. Why did you think that? The whole point of the hypothesis was that it might be wrong. And the point of the experiment

was to find out if it was right or wrong, not whether you're a genius or an idiot. Yes. And there are human elements in science science of course, and people have confirmation bias, and there's a positive publication bias, and there are all these things, and plenty of politics. You know, Henry Kissinger, RIP, right, said he left academics because he couldn't take the politics at one point. So there was all of that, but the good, really good scientists, including, man, a lot of people have passed in the last year, Roland Griffiths, who I knew really well out of Hopkins,

would say, that's a hypothesis worth disproving. I mean, that's the wording that you would sometimes hear. Right, I like that. So looking for disconfirming evidence. Yeah, right. To counterbalance the very human inclination to look for what you want to see. Well, you mentioned Mark Andreeson,

sometimes he tweets like, huge, if true, you know, like he'll take something and be like, that's interesting if it's true. And the idea of like that, so that's another way of saying that's a hypothesis worth disproving or proving one way or the other. Yeah, totally, I agree.

Yeah, it's your point though about like, okay, so you're gonna do this thing, how do you mitigate or minimize risk? Or just how do you define what those risks are? To me, that's the essence of socialism. It's also what you've called fear setting. Because sometimes like you think, okay, I wanna do this thing.

And then you're like, it could work, it could not work. It's high risk, it's a high risk thing potentially. But actually it might be high risk of success or failure, but what is the actual downside? And sometimes something could be high risk, but the downside could be very low, right? So like oftentimes in our head, we exaggerate the downsides of things, right?

Like I remember when I dropped out of college, obviously, upsides high, if it worked out, the downside I thought was I could end up living under a bridge somewhere, but actually the downside was, and I discovered this when I went to fill out the paperwork to drop out. You ended up owning a bookstore. No, the downside was like, she was like, yeah, just come back.

Like you're just pausing your, like, so in my head, I was making up that I was making this irrevocable life altering decision. And that's certainly what my parents thought. And that's certainly probably what most people think. But in fact, it was like a piece of administrative paperwork. And I found it, I found the other day, it was 60 dollars. I have the receipt, it was $60 to effectively pause,

you know, my enrollment at college, of which I had 10 years to re-enroll. And so what fear setting is, and I think with the stoic, this is the so-called, it's a discipline of perception, it's this practice of going, yeah, I'm intimidated by, I'm scared of it, I don't want to fail. But if I actually did fail, what's going to happen?

And I think you very regularly find not much of anything that's going to happen. It's not as bad as you think it is. And in a lot of cases, it's reversible. In the case of the $60 prepayment for the optionality and not to belabor the point, but the language you use matters a lot, right? So if you think about some of the commonly used language,

right, this is the decision, like there's a fork in the road and you have to choose a fork, implies that going backwards is gonna be very difficult. Whereas a lot of these things, at least the way that I try to view them, and I don't do it perfectly, is more like walking into a closet and choosing which sweater you wanna put on.

Yes. You don't like it? Mm-hmm. Put it back on the rack. Right. Go back to the one you were wearing before. I mean, in a lot of cases, it's a much more appropriate way to view things

and that is like a pause or it's just really a temporary experiment that you can zig and zag with. Yeah, the language you're right is very important and it can cut both directions. So yeah, we say I'm dropping out of college versus I'm taking a semester off or yeah, we say I'm quitting my job

or one of the phrase you have in the four hour work week. A mini retirement. Like one feels empowering and the other feels dangerous or irresponsible. And so the language is like, so when I called you and I said, hey, I'm thinking about doing this bookstore. And you said, oh, that's a cool experiment.

That was just a totally different phrase for what I was considering doing. All of the language I was using felt so permanent, so life-altering, so enormous. And what you did with your, you shrunk it down to this small decision. Like you're saying, if someone's going in their closet

and they're picking out clothes, that's an ordinary metaphor versus shoot for the moon. Like everything big, everything big or you think it's small. And sometimes you wanna think big, sometimes you wanna think small, but just that the way you're looking at it, the words you're using determines like how large it's gonna loom over you.

And also I recently reread, and it's a little schlocky because it was written a long time ago, but I still find it helpful. There's a book by Dale Carnegie who a was written a long time ago, but I still find it helpful. There's a book by Dale Carnegie who a lot of people know for how to win friends and influence people, I believe it was. And he has a lesser known book that has still sold millions of copies called

How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, which includes a lot of stoic-ish tenets. And it's a very fun read because there are many, many different case studies and historical references. A lot of them are out of date. When he talks about neuroscience, don't pay a lot of attention. However, the general principles and examples are really helpful and he talks a lot about incomplete information and improving your visibility into a given situation by adding more information and that it is somewhat pointless

if you can easily add that information to worry about it beforehand. And the reason I bring that up is that in a case like opening a bookstore, right? Open a bookstore is this big kind of macro abstracted decision. In reality, it's a whole lot of different decisions. Little ones. Little ones, such as looking into the actual costs, looking at what's available, looking

at the current, let's just call it, borrowing rates, et cetera. And so you could say, yes, I'm going to pursue this experiment, but only the next X steps. Like I'm not committing to three years, but I am committing to gathering more information so I can determine if I wanna take the sort of 10 steps after those preliminary steps. So I'll do that a lot as well where it's like,

okay, do I wanna write a next book? Well, how would I decide what types of many decisions could I make? What types of information could I gather? That would help me to have a higher degree of conviction around whether I wanna do it or not. Okay, let's take a week and do that first. Look at the landscape, talk to agent or agents, talk to authors, look at ABCD&E, I mean of

course look at subject matter and so on. And then you have much better footing for considering if you want to keep pushing forward. But breaking these big, heavy-sounding macro decisions into smaller steps. Also, I think highlights the fact that it's not, you're not firing a gun, right? If you get to see and then you want it to stop and not continue to de-e-e very often have the ability to do that. Yeah, it's, I remember when I was talking to you

about starting a podcast, you gave me advice similarly. You were like, don't do a podcast, do six episodes of a podcast, right? And if you think about it, it's like, don't open a restaurant, open a pop-up, right? So of course there are, there's a reason that the economic incentives and life

wants you to make big permanent commitments. It's usually cheaper. Like, you know what I mean? Like to go, they wanna lock you in for a long period of time. They want you to be more invested. And you have to understand that what you're purchasing is a certain amount of optionality by not fully committing.

And so going, hey, I'm gonna do six episodes that can feel harder in some ways, but it's easier in that it allows you to just do the thing, not overthink it, get started on it. And then hopefully the feedback either gives you momentum in one direction or the other about what you should or shouldn't do. What it also does is it gives you graceful exit.

So when people ask me about podcasts, this is true for a lot of things. I'm like limited time only. That is the key. Phrasing or at least concept that you put forth so that you don't succumb to the very kind of chimpanzee politics, inclinations that we all have.

I'm gonna be embarrassed. It's gonna look like a failure. I can't stop because of the following types of perceptions. But if you just say upfront, I'm doing a single season of a podcast, six episodes, 10 episodes. If it goes well and you extend it, everybody's happy, versus saying, I'm going to have a podcast

implying indefinite and then stopping after six or 10 episodes, psychologically, it's much more difficult for the person in the driver's seat, in this case you or me, to make that exit. And so to preserve the flexibility, I do that all the time and the optionality is important. Now infinite optionality is a problem. Yeah, man. Then you have decision fatigue and so on. But I was given a book at one point. I can't even remember the title. I can't remember anything about the book other than it was related to financial management and the line I remembered from it. Because there was a section that talked about how

people who have some degree of financial success spent like 10 to 20 years accumulating and then they realized, fuck, this is a mess. I have so much clutter, so many obligations, so many ongoing headaches that now I'm gonna divest myself. And then they spend the next like 10 to 20 years trying to divest themselves with these things.

And in that context, which applies in a lot of circumstances, even if you're not wealthy per se by the top 1% kind of standards, rich enough to rent. Yeah. And I was like, huh, I was like rich enough to rent and... That means try it before you buy it. Try it before you buy it, which means you might try it indefinitely, try it without buying

it in the sense that I love mountains and rivers. I spent a lot of time in the mountains all over the place. And the advice that I received from a lot of friends who know me super well was, oh, you should buy a place. And the fact of the matter was that the handful of places I looked at, I felt very confident we're going to do well in the real estate market. I could be wrong, I could be right. So far I've been right.

And I don't actually don't think the logic is that hard to follow. But when I looked at the cost, I'm like, okay, where have I underestimated costs? Energetic as well. Energetic, time cost, not just financial costs in the past because I do own some real estate. It's like, all right, well, you think about the closing cost

and the monthly cost. It's very, this sounds stupid, but it's sometimes easy to forget like, oh, wait a second, HOA dues, oh, wait a second, property taxes, oh, wait a second. A sink broke and the downstairs flooded and now you have to replace it, yeah. Right, it goes on and on.

And if you have an exterior, it just gets, I mean, look, I'm talking to the guy with Nigerian dwarf coats and a lot of property, so you get it. And when I looked at these locations, I very quickly realized I could rent the most absurd, opulent place for a few months a year, well beyond anything I would ever buy. I could do that probably for a decade.

And I would not approach my first and second year costs of buying something. Now, the sort of homeowner equity argument has some rationale to it, but there are trade-offs. It's not all upside. And so for me to reduce psychic drag, I'm like, okay, first of all, you don't need to be an investor in all categories, a good financial investor. And in fact, you can make money doing other

things. You have to make money in everything you do. I would take it a step further, which is sometimes it makes sense to quote unquote lose money in a very consciously aware way in certain categories so that it frees up your mental and psychic bandwidth to make money in a category that's more aligned with your zone of genius. Like real estate is not my zone of genius. You're talking to the guy whose first house he bought adjustable rate mortgage in 2007. Oops, got my face ripped off immediately.

And I have made a lot of mistakes and say like public markets. Once you get fancy, fancy gets broken. Like as soon as you try to get clever, at least in my case, I get swiftly kicked in the balls by the universe. This has happened over and over again. So I've realized not only do I not need to make money

in certain categories, but to, there can be, I can make nominal sacrifices financially in some areas that free up a bunch of energy and resources that I can allocate somewhere where it matters a lot more. I'm Afwa Hirsh. And I'm Peter Fragerpen. And in our new podcast, Legacy, we explore the lives of some of the biggest characters

in history. This season, we delve into the life of Pablo Picasso. The ultimate giant of modern art, biggest characters in history. This season we delve into the life of Pablo Picasso. The ultimate giant of modern art, everyone has heard of or seen a Picasso work, or the Picasso brand on something. But a man with a complicated, difficult, personal side too that makes us look at his art in a different way. He was a genius and he was very problematic.

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Our latest season is all about the catwalk queen Naomi Campbell. The years Naomi had to fight to be treated fairly in an industry that was overwhelmingly white. That drive saw her break down barriers and reached the pinnacle of high fashion, but it also got her into some dangerous situations when it spilled over into an anger she couldn't control. In our new season, Naomi Campbell's model behaviour, we tell the story of how a young girl from South London became a trailblazing black icon, but had some very public falls

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Hundreds of thousands of Canadians with disabilities are ready and eager to work. Help create an inclusive workplace that benefits everyone. Find the tools and resources to help you hire persons with disabilities at canada.ca slash right here. A message from the government of Canada. So you said something to me one time in regards to that. You said something like, what do you do with your money? Right? And I was like, what do you mean? You're like, do you like buy speedboats or like, you know,

what do you do? Like what are your like expensive hobbies? Right? And I was like, I don't really have any. And then you're like, what do you mean? You're like, do you like buy speedboats? Or like, you know, what do you, you're like, what are your like expensive hobbies? Right? And I was like, I don't really have any. And then you're like, okay, so make your career and business decisions accordingly. Right? That might have been related to the bookstore. No, no, this is well before.

I remember I was in, I was walking around in New York city. I just started my, I think my first company. Your point was, your point was, if you don't need lots of money, don't optimize your life around earning lots of money, right? I guess what you're saying is like, if you don't need it, why are you trading, this is a very silly idea,

why are you trading your most precious resource, which is your life, or in my case, my creative energy, why are you trading that to get a thing that you don't necessarily need? Right, you weren't saying like money is not important. You were just saying, if money is not your number one priority, make sure that you're not doing things

for which the statement is, money is my most important priority. Yeah, right, look at your calendar. Yeah. Don't tell me what's important. Like, it's a little your calendar. I'll tell you what's important to you. Well, I think what I like about this is, okay, so often times when people think about

stoicism, they think about it as a philosophy that is resilient. It's about dealing with adversity. It's about dealing with difficulty. And it's true. I mean, Epictetus is a slave, right? Mark Serbius lives in a plague. The Stoics lived hard lives, but it's also a philosophy for success. I don't mean it's a philosophy that will make you successful. The idea is the Stoics are saying that, that everything is an opportunity to practice the Stoic virtues. And by that they meant you get your arm cut off,

you know, a pandemic happens, you get thrown in prison on unjust charges. These are opportunities to practice Stoicism. But it's also a chance to practice stosism when you find yourself the emperor. It's a chance to practice stosism if the company that you invested in becomes worth billions of dollars, right? Or if you become successful as an author or whatever you do. Like I think less explored because it's slightly less relatable. Most people are dealing with hard things. Philosophy is also, stoicism is also a philosophy designed to help you

with abundance or success in life. Would you agree? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. How has stoicism helped you at, I mean, you've done very well. You've done lots of interesting things. You've been at the top of the author game,

the podcast game, you've been a great investor. How do you think of stoicism in that sense as something that helps you deal with what we would call champagne problems or too much of a good bit? You know, like stoicism is also there. You can see the YouTube thumbnail now. Tim Ferriss on champagne problems.

There are a few things that immediately come to mind. So the first is I do a lot of things that I know are perceived by many people to be high risk, that I don't consider high risk at all because I've run through exercises and journaling and so on that lean very heavily on stoic practices and have come to the definitive conclusion that this is not holistically high risk in the long game. Like the real world MBA where I traded Stanford Business School for the- Crucible of Angel Investing.

That's right, the in theory Tim Ferriss fund of Angel Investing that I deployed over two years. the theory Tim Ferriss fund of angel investing that I deployed over two years. And yes, there was a risk, even the expectation, it wasn't even just a risk. I expected that like tuition, that money would vanish. And I was like, okay, let's assume the money vanishes. How can I approach the angel investing in such a way

that my skills and relationships developed over that period of time far exceed what I am expecting to lose. Yeah. And so I pulled the trigger. Now the timing was also incredibly lucky in retrospect. At the time it wasn't obvious, but in retrospect, it was very lucky, but there was also some deliberation

around it in the sense that, and I think this is compatible with, it might not be verbatim, reflective of Stoic writings, but thinking about competition very carefully. In other words, so this is very, Seneca's not the only who has written about this, but in terms of competing with your peers and wanting to- And keeping up with the Joneses. Keeping up with the Joneses, oh, you wanna wear a purple tunic, do you?

Hmm, let's talk about that. You think you're a success, that person has more than you, so you're not. Right, right, you feel like you need to go to the banquets and you need to do this and you need to do that. When I find an area that is crowded or competitive, I look at that as an opportunity to find something that is very un-crowded.

So that has also helped me. For instance, I'm coming up on the 10th year of the podcast and podcasting has become incredibly competitive. And there was a long time when I felt like I was category of one. And if I'm being honest with myself, that's no longer the case. There's some very, very good interviewers out there, yourself among them. And the production quality has gone parabolic. It is going to be harder to build a business

and to fight for successfully, fight for attention in this particular format. And I love doing my podcast, I'm gonna continue doing it. However, because I would pay to have these conversations anyway, by and large. I'm taking a moment, Sarah, wait a second. When I did angel investing from say 2008 to 2015, it got crowded.

I felt like it went from single deck blackjack where you can kind of count the cards to like five deck and then the table stakes got a lot higher because the terms got weird. There's a lot of money coming in from places like China and sovereign wealth funds. And I was like, oh man, this is gonna get very, now the risk is real for me financially. So I stopped for a while. And I've done that over and over again.

I stopped the books for a while. And in this particular case, I'm like, all right, I may not find an answer, but it would be a mistake not to look for an answer. Like what's neglected? And that's not necessarily something new. For instance, I think text is neglected. I think writing is neglected.

Yes. And text isn't dead. It's just not surfaced by the algorithms. It's just not favored at the moment. But... It's the most perennial of the medium. It's the most perennial and it's the hardest so if I'm looking at Differentiation and competitive advantage you have this too right you can write writing is hard. Yeah writing is very very hard at least for me and For that reason I'm like all right. Well, maybe it's just the return to basics in that sense. Maybe it's

fitting something old into a new vehicle, et cetera, et cetera. Let's come up with a lot of bad ideas to see if there's maybe one or two good ideas we can test. So, to come back to your question though, I think that that is a way of avoiding comparison with others that can lead directly to outperformance if we're talking about success in financial terms. But it's also very compatible with success on your own terms. I think Kevin Kelly's a great example of this. He's really forged his own life. There are other people for sure, but he's very good at questioning basic assumptions

that are common. They're so common that it's taken to be fact, but in most instances, you can kind of negotiate reality around a lot of these assumptions. I was thinking of other sort of success problems that socialism helps with, like, haters is probably one or people who don't like you or negative attention on top of.

Yeah, I mean, the more, especially if you're, if you're a version of success or what you're pursuing is going to make you more public, you are going to have to deal with all sorts of things that at least at current you have not faced this magnitude of negative attention. And I've seen people buckle under that if they don't have the toolkit. And the toolkit doesn't have to be sophisticated, by the way. Like rule number one, don't go looking for it.

Sure. It's kind of like, all right, if you're gonna like do shuffle sprints on top of like broken floorboards, you're gonna stub your toe all the time. And then I mean, I'll admire you if you have the best stubbed toe fix, but maybe you just shouldn't run across

the floorboards barefoot, which is what a lot of folks do and they're kind of hunting for comments, but being human, ending up fixating on the one or two people who are awful. I remember one time you said something like, okay, so let's say how many people know who you are, right? Like the first part of your career as a creative person,

really, even anything that relies on the public is you want lots of people to find out who you are. Your first problem is a lack of awareness, and then you get the awareness. Now, a certain percentage of those people are find out who you are. Your first problem is a lack of awareness and then you get the awareness. Now a certain percentage of those people are not gonna like you or they're gonna have had a bad experience or you're gonna have a turn or something.

Or they're gonna be nuts. Yeah, right. So like, you know, Daily Stoke has let's say 3 million Instagram followers. So let's say 10% of those people are just not fans. That's hundreds of thousands of people who just plain don't, who know who you are but don't like you.

Whereas in normal life, you know, if 10% of the people you meet don't like you, those people could fit in a small SUV. You know what I mean? Like it's not that many people. And also like 20 years ago, they're not enabled with the ability to publicly. They can't reach all the other people.

Yeah, right. And so, so it's, I think that's a very key. So Mark Sreeliz has to come to terms with the fact that he's the emperor of Rome. Some people don't even like that there's an emperor. Some people don't like him for good reasons. Some people don't like him for bad reasons. But the point is you're not going to please everyone.

And in fact, part of the job is just putting up with the fact that a bunch of people hate you. And having to come to terms with the fact that one, it's outside your control. You can't make everyone like you. And two, if you try to make those people who don't like you like you, or you spend your time obsessing about them,

what you're doing is making yourself miserable and not servicing or serving the people and things that do like you that you are good at. That's totally, I was wondering, I don't know if you know this, this is a pretty sort of arcane fact to ask for, but do you have any idea what the greater, not the Roman Empire, but the greater Rome area,

let's just call it, just like you would have the greater Austin area, or Rome Central, do you have any idea what the population was around Marcus Aurelius' day? So the the Empire I know because I looked it up for something is like 50 million people So let's say Rome is 10% of that right there's still millions of people, right? I don't know where I was going with that is like more people may dislike you yes, and me Individually, yeah, then hated Marcus Aureurelius at his peak as the last of the great emperors of Rome. Yeah, totally. Which is kind of hilarious to think about.

We're to think that there's probably more Stoics now than have ever existed before in history. There may be more people who know about Stoicism but don't like me specifically than have ever been interested in socialism ever, right? Like, you know, the numbers get really big, really fast, because that's what technology allows for, when you live in a world of eight billion people. Technology allows you to reach lots and lots of people, and it's not healthy or realistic for humans

to be subjected to that, but we are subjected to it, right? Like, so you think success is gonna be amazing, and it is in a lot of ways, but it's subjecting you to a fundamentally unnatural, really difficult thing, which is like, you have to wake up and deal with the weight of the fact that like lots of people like hate you,

like they hate you. And if you don't have the sort of fortitude and the confidence to just sit with that and to not let it eat at you or make you swerve off what you think you're supposed to be doing, like you're gonna get eaten alive. Yeah, you'll get eaten alive.

You'll eat yourself alive. You'll eat yourself alive. And I think, You yourself live and I think Deutosticism and reflecting on applications of stoic like thinking right because I'm not a Stoic fundamentalist, right? I'm not like this is yeah, this is the scripture. This is the end. I'll be all it's like Extend that it's right exactly. So like let's extend, let's expand. All right. What other ways could this type of thinking apply? And I think that extends to 80, 20 principle,

Richard Koch type stuff. I think it extends to, it's really about the number of people who get it, not the number of people who don't get it. Kevin Kelly, 1000 True Fans type of thinking, Blue Ocean versus Red Ocean, Blue Ocean strategy kind of stuff. These are all highly, highly compatible

and I would go further to say there are a lot of people who, at this point they've probably heard the word stoic, at least in the modern sense, yeah, lowercase, but they're not familiar with the canon of stoicism, yet if you look at anyone who has thrived in what most people consider high stress environments, they're gonna walk the walk. I think that there's such a selection bias, there's a survival bias towards anyone

who indirectly or directly has put into practice these principles on a regular basis that if you look at, and this is just the other hypotheticals, I haven't asked these people, like anyone from a Bob Iger to a hedge fund manager to an exceptionally good athlete who has had longevity, if you were to sit them down and walk them through Marcus Aurelius and so on for the first time, they'd be like, oh yeah, oh yeah, yeah,

yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that's how I live my life. Yes. Yeah, you have to, because look, the chief task in life, as so I should say, is like finding what's in your control and what's not in your control. Now, this is gonna shift depending on who you are and where you are in the world, right?

Like Epictetus, this is understanding of what was in his control and where you are in the world, right? Like Epictetus is understanding what was in his control and what's not in control. It's gonna be fundamentally different than Marcus Rius, they're living a generation apart. One's a slave, one's the most powerful man in the world. One has slightly more things that are in his control than the other. But so fundamentally they're limited by gravity, right?

They're limited by the weather, they're limited by gravity, right? They're limited by the weather, they're limited by mortality. You know, they're limited by the fact that most people don't care what they have to say or think, you know, like the unpredictable nature of human beings. Like, so yeah, it changes a little bit, but more things remain outside your control than in your control.

And that fundamentally dealing with stress, high performance, success, whatever you're dealing with is coming down to this really basic, almost so basic, it doesn't feel like it could be ancient philosophy, but is like, hey, what part of this can I influence? And what part of this do I have to accept and just deal with and find a way to adapt and get comfortable with? And I think stoicism, as I think about it, you're much more familiar, of course. You

are very much familiar with the canon and the figures and thinking and the latest sort of modern examples. But from my perspective, stoicism is good for survival and self-preservation for the same reason it's good for success. However you might define that, but let's just say being an outlier in some type of performance, it is because stoicism helps you to conserve and best deploy your limited resources. So, for instance, if you are, and humans are humans, right, so you're going to slip, you're going to make mistakes, at least certainly I do. So a lot of this is work in progress, but if you are easily offended,

you're a poor resource allocator. Yeah. If you look at the most successful CEOs of all time in a book, interestingly enough, called The Outliers is one example. Like one of the key characteristics is they're very good capital allocators. But what that comes down to

is limited resource allocators. So time, energy, attention, capital in this case. I think that the tenets of stoicism help UTB, a better resource allocator, coming back to what you said, by pausing a lot to say or think about what is in your control and what is out of your control. If it's out of your control, trying to allocate as few calories,

as few minutes, as few dollars to that as humanly possible. Yeah. And sometimes it's tricky. Sometimes it's hard. Sometimes there are gray areas. And so you have to make your best fast decision with the information that you have. But I think that the tools are the same.

The tools are the same. The tools are the same. And there are plenty of things I've folded into my own life that are, I think, highly compatible with stoicism that you might not find in the pages of some of the classics. But it's a mistake to think about stoicism as a joyless toolkit for preventing pain and ensuring survival. There's a lot more to it.

It's a more flexible toolkit. Yeah, my wife's been saying that like the key skill in life, we were thinking about this with young kids, like she says the key skill in life is the ability to deal with frustration, right? Or that basically at the end of the day, it comes down to can you regulate your emotions? And so whether you're dealing with a catastrophe

or what Tennessee Williams calls the catastrophe of success, right? Which is its own catastrophe. Like it basically comes down to emotional regulation. Can you regulate extreme elation? Can you regulate extreme despair? And can you figure out how not to be overwhelmed by the situation you're in, but figure out, okay, what am I gonna do about it?

What am I being asked to do here? What's the best thing to do here? What's gonna get me in more trouble? What's gonna give you, you know, you're trying to figure out how do you integrate, address, respond, not be corrupted by, you know, whatever the moment that you're in. And that's the same at, at either end of the extremes.

And you can really extend the scope of regulation, at least I do, to think about a lot of different factors and also a compatible and I think complimentary word, which is repair. So I have a very hyper vigilant system from we don't have to spend time on it, but had some awful things happen to me as a kid. And my sympathetic nervous system

goes into overdrive very easily. And I have tried a million and one tools for preventing this from happening. But the reality is that there are many instances in any given week. This week is actually a very good example. Actually texted a friend, can I curse on this podcast? Where I was like, he knows what's going on. And I was like, so I put in quotation marks.

I was like, surprise, bitch, it's time for your surprise semester exam from the universe. And I was like, okay, you doing all this meditation, reading all this Stoicism. Let's see what you got. And this week was one of those weeks. And there have been times when I'm like, my God, like my resting heart rate is at like 120. And then it's about repair.

And the tools are the same. The tools are very similar, right? Thinking about like sitting down, doing a little serenity prayer. And also thinking about the worst case scenario, testing assumptions, and the repair is incredibly important. And also thinking about not just what thoughts

are you going to have, what questions are you going to ask, what exercises are you going to do in your head that will help in these moments, whether it's preventative or repair, but also thinking about the conditions that lend themselves to dysregulation. Too much caffeine, too little sleep, alcohol before bed. And a lot of the times, like you don't need to sit down, you're having a really rough day and you're like, wow, I need to figure out my life, fuck, what am I gonna do when I grow up?

I'm lost and it's like, no, you have low blood sugar and you didn't sleep, you need some macadamia nuts and a cold shower and a nap. Happening now at Mademy Homes, the Now falls across decades, even centuries. But it also changes. Judgments are revised, some are redeemed, others are torn down. From Wondery and Goal Hanger Podcasts, I'm Afua Hirsh. I'm Peter Frankapan.

And this is Legacy. Exploring the lives of the biggest characters in history and asking whether they have the reputation as they deserve. Follow Legacy Now wherever you get your podcasts. And don't you think repair, one, taking care of yourself so self-care, working through it, but this is something I definitely think the Stoics didn't talk about enough and so I don't think the Stoics are flawless or perfect in any way.

But it's also repair to the person you yelled at because you got upset. 100%. Or the person you were frustrated with because you were anxious or, you know, any, or the person you neglected because you were consumed by this thing, right? Like stoicism isn't never freaking out,

never going into a downward spiral, never being overwhelmed by your emotions. It's hopefully catching yourself before you've done something terrible as a result of those things. And hopefully as you get better, ratcheting sooner and sooner how fast you can do it. But it's what you do after you've done it, right?

After you have the awareness to go, okay, I didn't live up to my standards here. I did something I shouldn't have done. I understand and empathize with the consequences that had on you and I'm sorry. Right? Like the stoicism isn't just being this invulnerable, disconnected, you know, yeah, autonomous being,

but you exist in society and you exist in relationships and that the repair isn't just to yourself, but to those people too. Other practices that, I mean, I do sometimes, I'll be honest, skip some of the very esoteric, cosmological, teal-yological. You don't care about the stoic physics? Not so much, generally.

So I skip a lot of that, but there are a few things that I feel like I've indirectly taken from that that are very much along the lines of some of the chapters in 4000 Weeks by Oliver Berkman, which I think is a great book. I really enjoyed this book. And there is a chapter, I think it's called

Cosmic Insignificance Therapy, but really zooming out and looking at your goals, problems, hangups, neuroses in a broader and broader context of the world and history and the universe. And this sounds very hand-wavy, but it ends up being very, very therapeutic. And I've had a number of people who I have interviewed who have arrived on their deaths in hospice care, memory champions, military leaders, astronauts who all do have done some version of this. And the reason I bring that up is that it's another way to take the magnifying glass off of some of your issues.

Right, like reflect on the problems, like this week, five years ago, what were you worried about? Can't remember? Yeah, exactly. Right, right, right. Well, I was just thinking about this because so two different times in meditation,

is Mark Zirilis talks about taking the view from above. He calls it Plato's view. And so I was thinking about that. I was like, well, how tall could you get in Rome? So Marcus really has this column. They erect this column as a monument to his victories. And it's like a hundred something meters tall. So like if Marcus could get to the top of this column,

which we don't know if he did or not, that's like 300 feet. And I think the tallest mountain in Rome at that, and not at that time of all time, is like 15,000 feet or something like that. And he never climbed that. But the point is, in Marcus's time, that's as high as you could physically get, right? And now you can get that on a Southwest flight

for 99 dollars, double that, right? You can get at 30,000 feet and look down and you see enormous, you know, plots of land, states. You know, you all of a sudden you see it and you see how small it is. And astronauts call this the overview effect. Like you think about humans did not see the earth. A human being did not see the earth from not on earth

until like 1972, like the blue marble photo and how what a paradigm perspective shifting piece of information that was, right? Like America's the most powerful country on earth at that time, we have nuclear weapons and all that stuff. And then you see us as just one of the green continents on a little marble that's mostly ocean. And all of a sudden it shrinks way down to significant. And you think about all the people who had all these problems in each individual pixel on that photo, and it shrunk down to that exact cosmic significance.

And the astronauts that have been there, they're like, all you feel two things. You feel total insignificance, and you also feel complete and total interconnectedness, because all the borders and boundaries and distinctions that separate us as human beings go away when you get that big also. I really recommend people at least read this chapter.

You should read the whole book, 4,000 weeks. It's a great book. The Cosmic Insignificance Therapy. If you search that in my name, I liked that chapter so much that I reached out to Oliver and got an excerpt. So that chapter is available on my blog and people can read it.

So I really do suggest that. Another thing came to mind, you can tell me if this is somewhere in the Stoic writings. And this has come up a lot for me over the years and has come up very recently also, which is the belief that, and I'm borrowing here, this is definitely attributed to somebody else, but never let a good crisis go to waste.

Yes. And really deeply believing, and this could be self deception, but it's enabling self deception. It's very beneficial self deception in a sense that if you're really experiencing a seismic shift of a problem or something that is a very non-trivial problem to look at that problem and to really sit down

and ideally write out how the problem is based on your assumptions that you have about how things should work or how you should do things. And I think it's Dan Sullivan who I've never had any direct interactions with but he runs something called, I think it's the strategic coach and he talks about how the problem isn't the problem,

it's how you view the problem that is the problem. And I've been trying to- It's not things that upset us, it's our opinion about things that still excited. Yeah, exactly. And to figure out like why is this a problem? Is it because your five friends handle this problem in this way and they have established this as a priority

because it is a problem for them, is it something you should be doing in the first place? Is there a way to remove this entire category of problem by stopping something, by hiring someone, by firing someone, et cetera? And I'm doing a lot of that right now. It's a good time for us to have this conversation because it's a good reminder for me on a lot of levels

and I'm having to pull out all the tools in the toolkit. I gave a talk to a live nation last week and so I was like trying to think like, what's like a music story I could tell? And so I told the story of Taylor Swift. So like in 2019, Taylor Swift's masters are sold from her first five albums. They're actually bought by Scooter Braun.

She's very upset by this. Scooter Braun reads the Daily Stoic. So I make no judgment. He's cool with me, but her masters are sold, right? And she decides that this is a problem. She's very upset by it, right? And can't argue with the fact that she doesn't like it, right? Like you can say this is just a part

of how the music business works and that he didn't do anything wrong, but she didn't like it, right? Like you can say this is just a part of how the music business works and that he didn't do anything wrong, but she didn't like it, right? To her, it represented this kind of betrayal and she was really pissed off that now somebody else controls the master's to her music. So she, at the funny enough, she sees this tweet, Kelly Clarkson tweets about it,

like two musicians helping each other, I guess. And she goes, why don't you just rerecord all your masters and put out new art, right? Which seems like a crazy idea, like two musicians helping each other, I guess, and she goes, why don't you just rerecord all your masters and put out new art, right? Which seems like a crazy idea, like why would anyone do that? But that's what she did. She spent the whole pandemic rerecording every song plus a bunch of bonus songs

and shooting new art for her first five albums, right? So when people think like Taylor Swift is now unequivocally the biggest artist in the world, maybe the biggest person in the world. Also raises so many questions for me about how you can even legally do that also. Well, I know copyright is the expression. Yes.

But I- There's a two tier, there's two kinds of intellectual property in music, which is interesting, which I don't fully understand either. But the point is, when people see like the Aries tour, like, which is not just the most successful concert tour in history, it's earned more than the first, the second and third two tours have combined. Like even the movie about the tour has made over a hundred million dollars, right? So it's the biggest thing

in the history of music, probably the history of the entertainment business, of a singular artist doing a singular thing. It's actually a result. You wanna talk about the obstacles the way. It's a result of this seemingly terrible thing happening to her. So the thing happens to her, her masters are sold, but how she responds to it, what she, her decision not to waste it and to use it to channel that energy into some productive end

is what creates what's possible now, right? Because it seems like she's always been this big and she has always been big, but the process of re-releasing five consecutive albums plus two that she recorded, two or three that she recorded just of all new music during the pandemic makes her like this powerhouse in music because she's, it's like every day there's a new song.

Every month there's something new from her. So she's just been the recipient of just endless amounts of media attention. She's been rediscovered by a whole generation of people. And then it sets up going on this tour where she says, I'm gonna play music from every era of my life. And so I think it's such an interesting example. Like when we say never let a crisis go to waste, crisis isn't, you know, your whole family

is murdered in front of you, right? Crisis is also just like something that you didn't want to happen, happens to you. And then you are defined by what you do in response to that. And it can be a spring board for things that not only you didn't think were possible, but like nobody thought were possible. Artists typically re-record their music and it's just this like kind of technical legal thing that manifests itself in the fan experience in basically no noticeable way.

But the way she did it and the way she set it up set about this transformational transcendent series in no noticeable way. But the way she did it and the way she set it up, set about this transformational transcendent series of events that have made her what she is. And that all comes from this thing that if you had asked her in that moment, do you want this to happen to you? She would have said, not on my fucking life.

You know, I'd rather die than that happened. And that's what we have the ability to do. And so I think when we think of stoicism as this philosophy of resilience and creativity and it's, she's a very privileged person when this happens to her. She's already extremely successful. It's not just for you at your lowest moment,

but you can transform things that happen you into that if you want. Yeah, I mean, on a much smaller want. Yeah, I mean on a much smaller scale. I mean, what wouldn't be on a smaller scale? Four hour chef, right? That was a book that completely burned me out. I mean, I burned myself out. It was probably a three year, very complex book, very, very detailed, very involved. My first four color book,

I decided it would be a great idea if I did like 40% of the photography myself, even though I'm not a photographer, great idea. Also just you wanted to learn a thing you didn't know how to do. That was like also just the content of the book itself, like the ideas was not easy. Yeah, this was an incredibly difficult book.

I'm very proud of how it was executed, but crammed something that should have been three or four years into a year, year and a half, and just flamed out. And at the time, again, I would have said I absolutely would never have wanted this outcome. But when you have an experience like that, or when Taylor has an experience like that,

I can't speak for her, but I imagine, what an experience like that does is it allows you, it gives you permission to take time to step back and to pause and to look at things with fresh eyes in a way that you often disallow yourself from doing. If you are chugging along, keeping the trains running on time, following your daily, weekly routine,

whatever that might be. And it doesn't always work out. But in my case, without that window, also without that extreme fatigue, I would not have, I do not think I would have possibly experimented with the podcast. I was just writing about this kind of pine tree and I'm forgetting what it's called exactly,

but I have one of the pine cones in my office as a reminder, but basically, so it's like any other pine tree drops a pine cone, pine cone has the seeds in it, right? That's how the new trees come. But these pine cones, like, you know, if you ever see a pine cone that hasn't like done that yet, it's still like the green, it only unlocks when it is subjected to temperatures

that weather alone cannot reach. So it's only forest fires that allow it to do what it does. So the thing that is the worst thing in the world for the tree, which is a fire, which burns down the forest, is also what allows a new stand of trees to come in its place, right? And so like it's funny, I was looking at the tree,

I was like, this doesn't look burned. Like how did it, how did she get it to open? I bought it on Etsy. Well, she puts them in a tray and then she puts it in the oven. Like she gets them, she puts them in the oven. But the point is it only does what it does when subjected to extreme, you might even say,

unnatural amounts of stress or adversity. And there is something, to me, that's the essence of what Stoke philosophy is. Like Marcus Aurelius is a student of philosophy, then he becomes emperor. And then basically everything that can go wrong goes wrong for the next 20 consecutive years. There's the Antonine plague, there's floods,

there's a coup attempt, there's war. He buries multiple children. It's like everything that can go wrong goes wrong, but that's when he becomes Marcus Reales. He would have been of his predecessor, Antoninus, his model in all things. Basically, nobody knows his name and nobody thinks about him at all

because he got 20 years of peace and prosperity. Like everything that could go right goes right for him and he's basically forgettable. Everything goes wrong for Marcus and he becomes the person that you read about in the pages of meditations, right? And so it's this idea, I think, that you want things to go the way

you think you want them to go. And then it's only when they don't go that way that you figure out what you're really capable of and you do the things that really you're only capable of in those moments. It makes me think, I haven't thought about this in a long time, but I was either Ann Murico, who's a very well-known investor, tech investor, or Mike Maples.

Also they work together, investor. I think it was one of the two, but apologies if I'm mis-tributing guys, which is something along the lines of sometimes you need life to save you from what you think you want. Yeah. And that has been, I think, a real key for me. Are those mints or nicotine? You want a caffeine mint? Oh, caffeine mint?

No, I'm good. No, I was sponsored by the way. I'm just gonna do it. Yeah, you think you want it to go a certain way. And of course it doesn't. I was just reading this story about Hemingway. So Hemingway is this aspiring novelist. He's living with his wife in France.

He's in Switzerland and he's meeting with this famous journalist and his wife, he telegrams her to come meet him. He wants to introduce her to her, but she basically, she takes, she's like, oh, he wants me to bring all his work to show off to this guy. So she gets everything he's ever written in his life.

She gathers it all up, puts it in a briefcase, gets on a train, heads towards the train station, she's in a train station in like Lyons or something. And she gets off to get like a coffee, she comes back to the train car, the briefcase is gone. Oh, God. Was it stolen, did she lose it? Did she said it? We don't know, but it's gone.

Everything he has ever written disappears. And Hemingway was of course devastated and it feels like his whole life is ruined. I don't know how a marriage would possibly recover from this. It does not, right? But he writes this letter a few weeks later to Ezra Pound and he goes, I know what you're gonna tell me. He's like, you're gonna tell me good start over.

But he's like, I'm not there yet, you know? And I love that too, because it's easy to be flipping about this. Like Taylor Swift did not the next day after her master's cell go, I'm gonna rerecord all my albums and it's gonna transform me into the stratosphere, right? Like, it's okay to feel sorry for yourself for a while.

It's okay to fucking be pissed too. And I don't think there's, I don't, you look, you think about all the things Mark Spreelis goes through. There's gotta be days he does not get out of bed, right? He must have been devastated and pissed off. But it's after you accept it and then you get to work on it

that you can turn it into that thing. And what happens is basically like a forest fire, all the underbrush for Hemingway is cleared out and he has to start over and he invents his new sort of writing style as a result of basically in his mid-20s losing everything, right? And we, so it's in retrospect, we know this is what happens. Like we look at any phase in your life

where the worst thing that could happen to you happen to you. Now you have integrated it in and you see how it helped you get where you're going. Yeah, by the way with the podcast, like it wasn't obvious on day one, wasn't even obvious on the anniversary of year one, probably not even year two. Yeah, right? It was it was not clear and I also want to

state for the record Not all crises turned into these Willy Wonka golden tickets, right? A lot of them are just things that you need to weather But I've tried to cultivate the habit of at least looking for the possibility that there is an angle from which I can see something that I would miss if I were just singing the Woe is Me song. Well, it's like sometimes the disaster or the crisis presents an opportunity to advance professionally

or from a profit perspective. Like sometimes, hey, this thing closes this door and it opens this crazy window that you never would have gone through. And that turns out to be the best thing that happens to you. I think it's important when we say the obstacle's away. Obviously I wrote a book on this, but I'm not saying that everything is that, right?

Because how does a cancer diagnosis become that? Or the death of your father become that? Or a pandemic where millions of people die. Like shit happens, that's just fucking terrible, right? That's life. And it's important that we're not dismissive of the profound pain and anguish that's a result of that. The Stokes would still say the opportunity,

and I don't think they would use the word opportunity because it feels, again, insensitive, but they would say, that still demands of you, certain character traits, it's still an opportunity for what they would call erite or excellence. Like you still have to be a person inside that and you have to weather it, endure it,

be of service to your fellow human beings. You know what I mean? So it's not always like a chance to just like make more money or build your brand. Like it's not always great for your career, but it can always be, that's why I wrote during the pandemic, I wrote that note, I didn't say like,

this is the chance for you to like make a killing in real estate. Or like, this is a chance for you to really take a lock on the independent bookstore market. Like I was looking out over this bookstore that was looking like it was gonna be the biggest failure of my life and go, it can make me a better person or a worse one, right?

Like it can also cost me my marriage. It could also cost me my creative energy. I could make it worse if I wanted to. I could also be improved by it, right? I could become more aware of my capacities, I could learn from the mistakes, my relationship could get better, my connection to human beings could get better.

I could realize, hey, in the big scheme of things, none of this shit matters. You know, there's so many things you could take from it to emerge as a better person, almost all of which are not related to money or success in really any way. Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show.

We appreciate it and I'll see you next episode Hey Prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic early and add free on Amazon music Download the Amazon music app today or you can listen early and add free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts. Hello, I'm Dan Harris, host of the 10% Happier Podcast, where every week I talk to meditation gurus, top scientists, even the odd celebrity about how to do life better. These are wide-ranging conversations. We explore topics such as productivity, anxiety, enlightenment, psychedelics, relationships, and every episode is loaded with practical tools

you can put into your life right now. To start this year off right, we've asked some of the smartest people we know about their non-negotiables, the practices and principles they cannot live without. We're talking about big names like Bill Hader, Esther Perel, Glennon Doyle, John Cabot-Zinn, and the legendary Buddhist nun, Pamma Chodron.

These conversations were fascinating and, like I say, extremely practical. Kick off your new year with Non-Negotiables, a special six-episode series from the 10% Happier Podcast, the smartest people we know, the advice you cannot live without. Listen to 10% Happier on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts.