The Daily Stoic - Why You Must Build A Deep Bookshelf | The Best Advice Ryan Holiday Ever Got

Episode Date: August 16, 2022

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Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic Podcast early and add free on Amazon Music. Download the app today. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. On Tuesdays, we take a closer look at these stoic ideas, how we can apply them in our actual lives. Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wundery's podcast business wars. And in our new season, Walmart must fight off target, the new discounter that's both savvy and fashion forward.

Listen to business wars on Amazon music or wherever you get your podcasts. Why you must build a deep bookshelf. We know that if we can lift the weight easily, we're not getting stronger. We know that if we eat the same few foods over and over again, we won't get the vitamins and nutrients we need. We know that if we shelter a person, especially early on in life from different bacteria or viruses, they'll never develop the necessary immunities and may well find themselves stricken with many allergies. Should the mind be any different than the body?

The author and entrepreneur, Luke Burgess and recent Daily Stoic podcast guests has written often about the tendency to read books we enjoy by writers we agree with. Most people, as we've talked about recently, look for mirrors. Their bookshelves are full of books that reflect back what they know and believe. That's what I call a thin shelf, Burgess writes. What we want to build is a deep shelf, as you continue. Republicans should be reading books by Democrats and Democrats should be reading books by Republicans. Atheists or agnostics should read books that challenge them. Christians should read doccans, telebians, should dabble and pinker. Cross over into the enemy's camp, Senika wrote, deliberately read and immerse yourself into the thinking and the strategies of those who disagree with.

Not as a deserter, Senika writes, but as a scout. And he would have liked Epictetus's line that you can't learn that, which you think you already know, even if epictetus were an epicarion. So read and study like a scout. Go into the enemy's camp. Build a deep bookshelf. Challenge yourself. Vary your diet. Expose yourself to new and foreign influences.

That's how you get stronger. That's how you get stronger. Why do we study philosophy? Because these people a long time ago figured out stuff about life that we can benefit from. Senuka said that those who study philosophy annex all the ages of the past into their own. And they said only an in grade would fail to avail themselves of this. Bismarck famously said, fools learned by experience I prefer to learn by the experiences of others. And I think that's what we're doing when we read Marcus Reales, when we read Senaika, when

we read Epic Titus, is there people who experienced a lot of things, who made mistakes, who were understresses, and what they took out of this is stuff we want to avail ourselves to, stokes were learners. That's what you can't avoid when you read their writings. In fact, Marcus begins meditations by cataloging all the things that he learned from other people in his life, big or small. Some people he names, some, he doesn't, some people get whole pages or paragraphs and some people get a sentence or two. Well, that's what I wanted to focus on in today's episode. I'm going to give you some of the best advice

I've ever received, lessons, ideas, things that I took from the experiences of others, or that others took from their own experiences and distilled into wisdom to me, which I am gratefully paying forward by passing along to you. Enjoy this. And you might have noticed we adapt a lot of these episodes from the Daily Stoic YouTube channel, which you can check out at dailystoic.com slash YouTube. Over 600,000 people subscribe to us there and we'd love to have you join us. And as I've been telling you, discipline is destiny.

My new book is now available for pre-order and you can grab that at dailystoic.com slash pre-order. You can get signed copies for me, a bunch of awesome bonuses, and that's all my hard one lessons and advice on discipline plus learning from the experiences of others. I hope you check that out. Discipline is destiny.

It's out at the end of September, but if you pre-order it now, you get this awesome stuff at dailystowach.com slash pre-order. I remember I was in my 11th grade English class, I was a teacher named Miss Carves. Someone in the class was like stealing an idea I had. We talked about it in a small group, and then they'd raised their hand and answered a question with the thing that I had said.

And I remember I complained, they said, they're stealing my ideas. And then my teacher looked at me, she had no tolerance for what I was complaining about. And she said, they're stealing my ideas. And then my teacher looked at me and she said, no tolerance for what I was complaining about. And she said, Ryan, that's your job. And what she meant was that as a smart person, my job was to come up with ideas.

And the whole point of a successful idea is that it does get adopted, that people use it, that people take it up as their own. What was so true about that advice, what hit me about it, is that that is our job. Our job is to come up with things to make a contribution, to want credit for that, or attention for that, is to miss the point.

Mark, really says this is like asking for the third thing. You do something good, you say something good, you discover something, that is the reward in and of itself, the contribution to the common good. That's the whole point. It's wanting recognition for it, wanting to be understood for it, wanting to be admired for it, and missing the point. Your job is to put things out in the world. Your job is to do good things. Everything else is extra. Everything else is the third thing. When I worked in Hollywood, I was this intern and I was sitting in this

meeting and all the important people were talking and talking. They were talking about something that I vaguely knew about or I was connected to. I forget what it was, but I remember I interjected. I said something. I was like, oh yeah that's like this. I spoke up and said something and they all sort of looked at me and then moved on. And afterwards one of my mentors, the guy that I was working for, he said, come in my office, I wanna talk to you about something. And he's like, when you spoke up in that meeting, he said, why did you say that?

And I was like, what do I mean? Was I wrong? And he's like, no, you're totally right. And you're totally welcome to talk. But he said, did you felt that needed to be said, or did you just wanna have something to say? Right? And he was totally right. I just felt like everyone was talking

and I felt like I needed to get in there. I was injecting myself. He said, you should just sit there and watch and listen and learn you don't need to say something. Which of course is also a law in the 48 laws of power always say less than necessary. But it's also a rule that Kato lived by. Kato said, I only speak when I'm certain

that what I'm about to say is not better left unsaid. And then Zeno said two years in one mouth, right, that we should listen a lot more than we talk. And so I think about that always, is what I'm about to say, does it actually need to be said, why am I saying, what's my motivation for saying? Is this actually an important or meaningful contribution? Am I just feeling insecure? Am I just feeling uncertain? And my nervousness, my insecurity insecurity is driving me to say something that's actually not to my or anyone's benefit.

I've never actually met Senuka, of course, but the thing that hit me the most out of all of Senuka's writing is when he says that it's wrong to think of death as something in the future that will remove and towards. Said, no, death is happening now. It's happening every minute. He says, we're dying every day

because the time that passes belongs to death we can never get it back. So all the helpful advice I've gotten in my life it's been little things here or there but this fundamentally changed how I perceive time how I perceive my day. I realized that how I spend today it's a purchase for which there is no refund policy that you can't undo. So how you spend your time is literally how you spend your life. And it's your most precious resource. So the idea that, that death isn't this thing that we fear, that's over there, that we have no connection with, no grasp of, is to totally miss the point.

No death is everywhere, it's all around us. It is the passage of time. And you have to live your life with that in mind. You have to take advantage of it, protect your time and live your life accordingly. It's perfectly possible to learn good lessons from bad people, to take value from, from at least flawed people. And I worked for several years under Doug Charney, the founder of American Apparel, who was a genius in many ways and a fundamentally positive force in fashion in a lot of ways until he wasn't. Until those demons overwhelmed and destroyed all that good. But I remember early on we were

talking about something. He described something, some criticism he was getting or something that happened and he described it as a tax. He said that's a tax you have to pay in life. He described it as a tax. He said that's a tax you have to pay in life. He described it as a success tax, like a cost of doing business. That because of what the company was doing, because of where things were, just something we're gonna have to pay.

And Seneca says that he says, I pay the taxes of life gladly. He doesn't mean or just mean from the government. It's like, look, are annoying people attacks on being outside of your house, of course? Are delays attacks on travel? Yes. Are sudden rainstorms attacks on a tropical paradise? Yes.

There are taxes on everything. The tax of having this YouTube channel is negative comments or haters. There's a tax on everything. And if you want the thing, if you want the income, you have to pay the tax. And it's funny, sometimes we'll post this on social and people about it. I don't wanna pay my taxes, taxes are theft.

Which is the whole point, right? They're arguing against the fundamental reality of life, right? Nothing's certain, but death in taxes. There are going to be taxes in life, whatever you do. If you become a famous person, they'll make up rumors about you. If you do charitable work, people will question your intentions or your motivations. If you have kids, you will lose sleep, right?

There's a tax on everything in life. So when Doug was saying there's a success tax, it just, it reminded me. It costs what it costs. You gotta pay these things. There's no use crying about it. There's no use whining about it. And to try to find complicated illegal ways to avoid it

as some people do about their actual taxes is again, to miss the point that you have to pay the taxes of life gladly, as Seneca said, and then move on. Three things I learned from Tim Ferris. Number one, and I learned this very early from him, he said, look at what an hour of your time is worth, and then try to pay people to do anything that's less than that amount, right? And this is so hard because if you come from a sort of a middle class background, you're used to doing stuff for yourself. It feels reckless to pay for people's. But time is your

only non-renewable resource, and so to spend it doing things that you're not the best at is a complete waste of time. The second thing, and this was really life-changing for me, he said, think of everything as an experiment. So as you go through life, if you're thinking about dropping out of college, don't think about it as a irrevocable life decision, think about it as an experiment

where you take a year off. If you think about quitting your job, it's the same thing. If you think about any change in your lifestyle, move into a new city, see it as an experiment. And the third thing is, Tim was not the first person to start a blog, was not the first person to get a Twitter account, who's not the first person

to be an angel investor. He was not the first person to start a podcast. You don't have to be first, you just have to do the thing really well, you have to do it better than most people, and an eventually quality will find its audience. Three things I learned from RoboCream. One, mastery requires a long apprenticeship, either under a great master or painful trial and error,

but to be great at something, it takes a very long time, and the education phase of it is the longest period. Number two, he told me once when I was thinking of leaving my job in American apparel, that life can be defined by a lifetime or dead time. Are you learning and getting better or are you killing time? Would they always be learning and getting better?

Always focus on how we can use the moment in front of us. The third and the most important lesson is even if you want to be a good person, even if you want to be nice and friendly and generous, it doesn't change the fact that you have to understand the laws of power. You have to understand how people are acting in the world and the forces that make them do what they do. 3 things I learned from the great George Ravelling, Hall of Fame basketball coach, civil rights activist, always be reading. He told me that his grandmother told them that the slave

masters used to keep money in books because they thought the slaves would never read them. Point being there's there's money in books, there's freedom in books, and there's a reason powerful people don't want you to read. Number two, he has a great question he says, are you going to be a positive difference maker today? That's his question. Are you going to be a positive difference maker today? That's a question I think about all the time and I got that from him. The third one is you can learn from anyone. George traveling one said, I was his mentor in an interview, which of course is preposterous,

but I'll take the point, which is that you can learn from anyone including people who are younger than you, you can learn from anyone, even if they live very different lives than you. Even if you disagree with them about 99% of stuff, you can learn from anyone, anyone can be your mentor, and I learned that from George Revealing.

Three lessons from Marcus Aurelis. Number one, it's not what happens. It's how we respond to what happens. He says the impediment to action allows us an opportunity to move forward to try a different action. Number two, he says ask yourself at every moment, is this essential? Do I really need to do this?

And he says, when you do less, you get the double benefit of doing less better. The third thing for Mark's to realize, this would be the exercise of memento more. He said, you could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think. He says, let every action, every decision, every thought be that of a dying person.

When you think about life that way, it gives you urgency, it gives you clarity, and it lets you see what actually matters. If you want to learn more about stoic philosophy, totally for free, you can sign up for a daily stoic email. It's one free email every morning, the best of stoic wisdom, dailystoke.com slash email. early and ad-free on Amazon music, download the Amazon music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts. Is this thing all? Check one, two, one, two. There y'all! I'm Kiki Palmer.

I'm an actress, a singer, an entrepreneur, and a Virgo, just the name of you. Now I've held so many occupations over the years that my fans lovingly nicknamed me Kiki Keepa Bag Palmer. And trust me, I keep a bag love. 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. What will former child stars be if they weren't actors? What happened to sitcoms? It's only fans, only bad. I want to know. So I asked my mom about it. These are the questions that keep me up at night.

But I'm taking these questions out of my head and I'm bringing them to you. Because on Baby This Is Kiki Palmer, no topic is off limits. Follow Baby This Is Kiki Palmer, whatever you get your podcast. Hey, prime members. You can listen early and app-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today.