The Daily Stoic - You’re Not Dead Yet… | 9 Stoic Secrets For Self-Mastery (From Experts)

Episode Date: October 3, 2023

Marcus Aurelius was already quite old while writing Meditations. He was sick and surrounded by plague. Seneca was a marked man from the moment he left Nero’s service. But as aware as these men were of their ticking clocks, they were also quite aware that they were not dead yet. Seneca wrote many of his most beautiful letters in those final years.---And in today's Daily Stoic video excerpt, Ryan shares 9 Stoic Secrets from some of the great thinkers of the modern world: Alexander Ludwig, Tom Brady's Sports Psychologist Greg Harden, Joe Rogan, Robert Greene, Guy Raz, Steven Pressfield, Tony Gonzalez, Carli Lloyd, and Chris Bosh that will help you get the most out of your life and continue on the path to self-mastery.✉️ 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.

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Follow Terabli Famous wherever you get your podcasts. Bosch Legacy returns now streaming. Matt has been taken. Oh God. His daughter is in the hands of a madman. What are the police have been looking for me? But nothing can stop a father. We want to find her just as much as you do.

I doubt that very much. From doing what the law can't. And we have to do this the bad way. You have to. I don't. Bosch Legacy. Watch the new season now streaming exclusively on FreeV. Welcome to the Daily Stood 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. You're not dead yet. Marcus Aurelius was already quite old while writing meditations. He was sick and surrounded by the plague. Senaqa was a marked man from the moment he left Neuroservice. Yet as aware as these men were of their ticking clocks, they were also quite aware that they were not dead yet.

Senaqa wrote many of his most beautiful letters in those final years. Marcus really managed to bring meditations to the most perfect conclusion. He worked hard at his very important job, both managed to do good for their country, for their families, for themselves. Well, each of us can go at any moment, and some of us have been told the stressing news by doctors, which gave us even more clarity about exactly how little time we may have left.

This doesn't change the fact that we have this moment in front of us. In this moment, on this day, having woken up alive, there is so much that we can do. And as long as we are living, we can do our most important job, which markets to find not in a professional context, but as being and doing good. Someday you will be dead, but the good news is you are not dead yet.

So how will you spend this day, this life? That is a question you can answer. That is something in your control. The one thing that all great people have in common is self-discipline. No one becomes great at what they do at anything without a strong command of themselves. Seneca famously says the fact that no one is fit to rule who has not first mastered themselves. So in today's episode we want to talk about that. How do you cultivate the discipline, self-command, the ability to keep yourself in check to do the things you should do,

and to not do the things you shouldn't do? And over the years I've talked to people who are masters at so many different things. Great writers, politicians, military leaders, athletes, people have had to practice this in the real world. I'm Ryan Holliday, I'm the author. A number of books about philosophy. I've spoken to the NBA and the NFL, setting senators, special forces leaders. But in today's episode, we're gonna talk to some experts

about discipline and how this discipline helped them achieve their destiny and whatever it is that they do, and to talk about the power of self-control and figuring out what to do. I always tell people, they're like, I wanna be an actor and I wanna do this. It was like, the only reason I am where I am in my career

or that I have one is because I always made a promise to my young self. I said if I'm 80 years old or jobless, at least I will have made my 12 year old self proud. Sure. Because this is what I knew, I just had this knowing I had to do. I can't promise you that it will happen

when you want it to or how you want it to. But if you love it, yeah, with everything that you are and you do it over and over and over again, it will happen for you. If you study, if you train, if you love it, and the irony in it is that the love and the joy is in the process of doing it. Yes, that's the most important thing is once you actually fall in love with what you're doing, the outcome just happened. Because you do realize with what you're doing. The outcome just happened. Because you do realize the mental game.

Yes, the game. Yes. Tom Bray. It's easy to reference. Tom, because most people have seen his, Yeah. I try out video. And they've seen that he wasn't jumping higher,

lifting more or running faster than anyone. That draft photo of him in 2000, he just looks like basically a regular guy. Yes, but you couldn't measure this or this. Sure, that's what you can't measure. Sure, because his mental game is with superior to everyone else. Right.

We'd have to tell him to go home, because everybody else is begging him to watch found that and he's like sure He's living in the in the film room. Yeah, just trying to study and figure out how to approach his the game and But his ability to see what the average person can't see again The mental game is the gameult things are good for you, and they're good for your mind. That's what people don't understand that don't pursue them.

There's in America, unfortunately, there's this sort of intellectual leadism. There's this mindset that some very smart people have, because they're very good at certain intellectual pursuits, and they look down upon pursuits that are physical in nature because of this sort of prejudice. They have this idea and I think it's also like a fear of encountering something that you're

not good at or something that's going to humiliate you and something's going to make you feel bad. It's like they maybe came from gym class, maybe came from being forced to participate in sports when they were younger and they didn't enjoy it. So they have this thing in their head that there's no value there. That's when your mind has to tell your body who the fuck's in charge. But that's what it is. It's like you have to be able to endure. You have to be able to tell your body that this is what we do. And the more you do it, the easier it is, man. I made a video about it today when I was doing the co-plunge, because it's like it's so much

easier than it used to be, but it's still hard. But it's just easy because I'm accustomed to the grind of it, because I do it every day. So I just get in there, or almost every day. There's something to that that's so valuable that doesn't get emphasized enough in our modern day conversations. And it doesn't get emphasized in media, it doesn't get talked about. You have to search for that.

You have to search for this idea that struggle is difficult or like to title your book, the obstacle is the way. Like getting through things is how you you build a stronger foundation, it's how you develop characters, how the mind understands how to manage difficult situations. The proper idea to me is sort of a lot of what I meditate about and is in Buddhism, where you don't try to repress your emotions, because first of all, you can't. We are emotional animals, and if ever you have tried to repress your emotions, particularly in a state of meditation,

you see you have zero control over them, right? They're popping up, you know, it's with the way we're wired. So the proper I stance is, I'm not going to repress emotions, but I'm going to understand them. I'm going to see them as they occur with a degree understand them. I'm going to see them as they occur with a degree of distance. I'm going to see that I'm angry in this moment. I like to imagine it as if I'm six inches away from myself. I don't know why that metaphor come up. Only six inches, that doesn't seem that far. Well, it's out this side. It's like here. However, that's like a more

like a foot, I guess. Right? And I'm looking at what I'm thinking or feeling from that distance, almost from the outside. And I'm still feeling it, but I'm seeing it as if it's from, I'm just if I'm another person. And that's a strange concept. Yeah. But you can observe your own emotions while you're feeling them. And then you, they don't have power over you.

Then you can say, okay, I'm angry. Why am I angry? So number one, I recognize the emotion I'm angry. Why am I angry? So number one, I recognize the emotion number two. Why am I angry? Is it stem from something weeks ago, months ago, or earlier today? And then what do I do with my anger? Sometimes you want to use your anger, you want to channel your anger. So when you're in sports, if you don't have that kind of drive and that anger, when you're in a bet, you know, when you're down by 12 points, it's like an extra gear. Yeah. You can pull. Yeah. There's a little bit of anger and even I don't know on hatred or something. It just despises the enemy. You're

going to crush them, right? You use that emotion. But as Phil Jackson said, if that emotion controls you throughout 48 minutes of a game, you're useless, you drain yourself, you can't control it. You also make mistakes. Make mistakes. So you need to be focused, but you also need to be able to use those emotions. That's where I use that metaphor of the writer and the horse, which I've repeated many, many times. Maybe that's another medallion that we could. Yeah.

Can't manifest. No, no, that's a great idea. You reach a point where you're, you know, a point where you're being funneled into a bucket of all the best players. Everybody that I was playing with were the same me, just in a different state, in a different section of the country. So there's got to be some sort of separation of what's going to keep you there and what's going to allow you to keep staying at the top.

And I think it ultimately starts with passion. I mean that for me is a non-negotiable. If you don't have any passion and love for what you do, it's gonna be just treated as a job. It's gonna be treated as this monotonous thing that you just go through life. But I mean, I loved playing. That round ball was my first love, you know, and it was never about the money,

it was never about the fame, the glory, nothing. It was purely because of the beautiful beat. But when you step in between those lines, and I always stepped in between those lines, it was like everything else around me just paused, you know, it was just, it was like everything else around me just paused. It was just, it was like time stood still and I'm just playing this game. And yeah, it was, it was pretty amazing.

I always, I always had other things. You know, language, guitar and music came a little later. I had given up. I gave up on it in my mid-20s, early 20s. That's why I, you know, went back to it. But like, I always wanted to do some things to take my mind off of basketball. Sure.

It's a lot of flights, a lot of bus rides. So you need some hobbies. I didn't think of it this way, but I had a friend and told me your hobbies lead to greatness. And I always thought that fascinating and just that made me look back on things. And I did these things just to kind of get my mind

off of the game. Sure. Because, you know, I was all in the basketball. That is all I did, but I also had other interests. And one of the things that I found was, like so for instance, during the playoffs, I would cook the day before a game, I would cook dinner because you have to concentrate on the meal

or it's gonna suck. You know, so I'm looking at the time, I'm checking the meat, I'm making sure I don't burn, boil the water over, it's the thing that I have to focus on. Sure. You know, because if I don't, my brain is gonna start going

and then we're gonna start thinking about tomorrow and I'm gonna be back in that rabbit hole Right, sure you don't want to be there all the time and one of the things I found is that Once I start relaxing in my cooking or in me playing the guitar or In me studying for something in language. I see some weird connection To where I think about basketball, but it'd be like, oh, okay, I could put that to the side. It's like, it was this crazy thing of no judgment. Wow, I never thought of that before.

This is the move I'm gonna do tomorrow. I got it. Right. Yeah, sometimes when you're thinking about something else, create room for your brain, sort of subconsciously solve some problem that we talked about will for will. You know, if you're, I gotta solve this, I gotta solve this, I gotta solve this, I gotta

solve this. You're not gonna make any progress. Yeah. Yeah. And I think I'm bred something somewhere like I, I instead I played the violin. If you did. If you ran into the problem, you just played violin for days, weeks, hours, whatever it took. So I always thought, I thought that pretty fascinating. And that's kind of what I

started using my hobbies for. Because the grind will grind you down if you don't have anything to refresh. All the way down, you can stay in it. You know, I was working with this with a video game team in the Overwatch League. And it's these Korean kids, you know, living in LA, competing and they weren't doing too good. They're supposed to be the best team in the world and they weren't doing too good. And their thing is to be like, okay, 18 hours a day. Okay, video games playing video games.

Like, hey guys, you know what, sometimes you'll go to the park. Yeah. Sometimes you just stink. Yeah. I've been there plenty of times. Sometimes you just need to go in there and be like, yeah, get out of here. Go for a walk, go eat a delicious meal, go do something else, get out of here. You know, there is, you know, a lot of something to take from, from just taking time off there.

That is, you know, you do need time to repair your brain and your body to be able to compete at maximum level. When I wrote The Daily Stoke eight years ago, I had this crazy idea that I would just keep it going. The book was 366 meditations, but I write one more every single day, and I'd give it away for free as an email. I thought maybe a few people would sign up. Couldn't have even comprehended a future in which three quarters of a million people would

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