#541 - Ryan Holiday - Stoicism's Lessons For A Disciplined Life

Hello everybody, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Ryan Holiday. He's a podcaster, marketer, and an author. Discipline is one of the world's hot topics because it's become apparent that in order to achieve anything, you must be able to temper your desires and direct your efforts. The Stoics believed this 2,000 years ago. And between then and now, there's been a plethora of historical examples which can teach us how to build and sustain discipline.

Expect to learn why sanity is your most precious resource, why discipline without an end goal is pointless, how to stay disciplined when success arrives, why Martin Luther King let a Nazi punch him in the face, without lambasting yourself for falling short what eisenhower's smoking habit can teach us about self-control why 75 hard might not build discipline long term and much more I actually got to do this in person with Ryan, which was nice because...

I've lived in Austin for seven months and still we haven't found time to see each other yet, even though we've been in touch for many years. He's great. I really, really appreciate Ryan's historical view, the number of examples he's got from the last few... centuries and millennia of people fighting with discipline. He's great. You're really going to enjoy this one. ... ... ... ... ... ...

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Modern Wisdom. That's drinkag1.com slash modernwisdom. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Ryan Holiday. Brian Holliday, welcome to the show. Yeah, good to see you in person. Finally, man. Yeah, we did it remote. Correct, yeah. Once from Austin. Right. Remote. Yes, yes, yes. Could have shouted it out the window, but yeah, finally. I forgot, yeah, you were here. You just come here.

Yeah. Interesting. You've got this quote that I referenced a couple of weeks ago. Be quiet, work hard, and stay healthy. It's not ambition or skill that is going to set you apart, but sanity. What's that? Well, I find as a former like sort of young person going places that when I am hiring someone or I'm looking for someone like that I want to like mentor or help or whatever.

It's not like how talented you are or what your background is, but it's like the first test is like, is this person fucking nuts or not? You know what I mean? Like, does this person have their shit together or not? And so I think. we often think a lot about like getting better at what we do like the craft of the thing which is really important but then when you look at like why did this person make it and this person not make it it's usually

You know, very, some stark divergence where they started making bad decisions. They, you know, started being very egotistical.

they had this shot and they blew it you know it's not it's not like in sports where you're like this guy's just faster than that person it's some other thing that usually sort of prevents a person from reaching everything they're capable of reaching is there an element in there as well about playing a long game yeah for sure for sure definitely i mean one of the hard parts about having

potential and ambition is that it burns very hot and bright. And if you want to be established, you want to do it for a long time, you have to figure out how... yeah to play a long game to not blow yourself up to not it's like how do you care about it very deeply but not sweat it so much that it's like a liability needs to be sustainable man yeah yeah i

I play with this all the time and a lot of the guys that I see that have flash in the plan successes on the internet are very similar. Yeah, well, look, and we live in an environment where algorithmically you can just... be given a huge gift you can just sort of blow up right and so that really has nothing to do with whether you deserve it or not but then once you have it the question is can you maintain it can you do the work necessary can you not fuck it up

And I think when I talk to groups, I usually start with some version of the biggest enemy in this room is not... like what the other people are doing it's not the economy it's not like gatekeepers like the person who determines like how this is going to go is you really like for the most part most failures are

self-inflicted or most big mistakes are self-inflicted and they often come like right after some form of success that's kind of the most dangerous point that's a we overreach that's when we go it goes to our head that's when we You know, it's like it's in that moment of success or triumph or whatever that like you need the most discipline. But there is the highest justification for. slacking on said discipline, right? Yes.

That's where it happens. There's a quote from Charlie Munger that says, it is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid instead of trying to be very intelligent.

Yeah, that's right. Yeah, it's like, can I not blow this up? Like, I remember, so like, I dropped out of college when I was 19 or 20. I sort of had all these cool opportunities very early, like things that... especially with what was happening because i i sort of left right in the financial crisis so all my friends are struggling sort of watched as you know people my age have taken longer than you would expect to get where they want to go

And then so I was very cognizant of the concept of like a regression to the mean. Right. And so just because you break out early, just because you have this thing, you know, statistically. you're going to end up like everyone else. So you have to be really cognizant of if that's what tends going to, if that's what would happen sort of naturally.

you better make sure you don't accelerate that process. Like there's even less room for self-inflicted or, you know, unnecessary errors. So I was like really in my 20s, I was thinking a lot about like... You've gotten these opportunities. You have this stuff. The number one thing is don't fuck it up. How do you avoid being too risk averse when that happens?

Yeah, I don't know. I mean, that is the tension. Like, you still want to take big swings. But it wasn't like I was risk averse in the sense of, like, I don't want to, like, I've got this capital and I have to protect it. It was more like... How do you not alienate the wrong people? How do you not, you know, take your foot off the gas at the wrong time? Like it was more like. Ego, complacency, entitlement, you know, like those kinds of, you know, like feeling like.

you're anointed feeling like you're special. Like as soon as you start thinking like the rules don't apply, like I've made it, I'm good. Like that's when, you know, you're probably getting into dangerous territory. Yes.

It seems to me that ever since James Clear's book, Atomic Habits, this has been something everyone's thinking about, right? That your outcomes are a lagging measure of your inputs. Like where you're at is just a lagging measure of the things that you've gone toward that. And it seems like discipline is... Pretty much exactly the same. And that's where I'm going to guess the line between your future destiny is dictated by your current discipline.

Well, I was thinking about that actually just recently. Like all the work that I, when I'm working on a book, so Discipline Just Came Out, I'm working on the next one. Like all the material in those books are the result of research. writing, thinking, organizing that I did a year ago, five years ago, 10 years ago, right? And so all the work that you'll do in the future is in a sense, the...

dependent on the work that you're doing now and how long you continue to do it. And so, like, when I sit down, I was sitting down and writing today, the material that's available is... like you said, a lagging indicator of work that I did at some unknown previous date. And so it can be really easy to be like consumed with what the task is in front of you.

But if you're not simultaneously also setting up the future stuff, you're going to wake up one day and you're not going to have what you need. And I think the better you are, the more momentum you have, the easier it is to coast. for a long enough time that you don't even know. The foundation is being eroded from underneath you. Yeah, it's a bank account that you pay into every single day. Yeah, it's very interesting to think about that.

Going back to what we said at the very beginning about people being able to blow up overnight, I did a reality TV show called Love Island in the UK a little while ago, and that basically plucks people out of obscurity and gives them... two million followers and a million pound contract with a fast fashion company and they're the hottest thing in the world in the uk pretty much every single person knows who they are

And I have been worried for quite a while about what that teaches young people about the route towards success. Not that you're supposed to do something that's very difficult at a high quality consistently for a long period of time, despite what the market says to you. It's that you're supposed to be in the right place at the right time. Yeah, I mean, one of the amazing things about the internet is that it's this platform. It's so much more democratic.

more people get their shots but then then you get that shot and you still have to like have the stuff right like you can you can get like you can have one thing go viral you can have one thing but like can you consistently or repeatedly do it do you actually have like once you have the audience Do you have the stuff? And I'll see this.

Two, someone will be really good on one platform. They'll have a podcast that does well or a YouTube channel that does well or a social media account. And then what happens is the entertainment business is like, well... We want you to do this. We want you to do this. And so I often interact with those people when they're coming to do a book and you go, oh, like you're really just a feature or a function of the medium you're in. You don't actually have like.

there's no there there as the expression goes like you don't have like a core thing that can then be translated into the other mediums if you have that you're you're you're golden like you can You can succeed in all the different platforms in all the different ways. If you have some unique point of view or a voice or a thing that you, a message that you're delivering, it doesn't matter if you start on this platform or that platform. You should be able to, with some...

skill and hard work be able to translate in all these different ways and be able to succeed in a sort of multidisciplinary format the problem is if you're really just like right place right time then it comes time to do this thing

Like the audience just feels that there's nothing there. Something that I found very interesting thinking about discipline was the relationship between... directionality or an outcome that discipline is being filtered through it feels like you need something to direct your discipline toward without the direction discipline is pretty hard to deploy because

What are you being disciplined in service of? What does discipline even look like? You know, as an ex-club promoter for a long time, what was disciplined to me going out until four in the morning may be somebody else's idea of complete destruction. That's true. Yeah. What is the outcome? Where are you trying to get? What's it all being directed towards? That's sort of the ultimate question. Practice without some aim is not really practice at all. It's just activity.

So yeah, you have to figure out what it is that you're trying to do. Like for me, it was, you know, okay, I don't want to write. That's what I want to do. So then it became clearer, like, you know, what are the composite tasks?

that go into being in a position to do that. Just like, if you're like, hey, I want to run for office, you know, okay, maybe military service would be helpful. You have to graduate from these schools. You have to cultivate this network. You have to have this. There's a resume that you need. to have that job right and you got to know what that is that's not to say that everyone has to do it the same way but you got to know the sort of the the

collection or the portfolio of assets or tools or skills that you're where you want to end up. But the Stoics have this line, they go like, if you don't know what port you're sailing towards, no wind is favorable. You have to know where you want to go. And this is really true, like, even for successful people. Like, if you don't know where your stopping point is, what you want your life to look like, now all of a sudden...

You're in this wonderful, fortunate position where people are like, hey, you want to do this? Do you want to do this? They're offering you this. Do you want to take this amount of money to do this or more money to do this? If you don't know what's important to you, what kind of work you want to do, what you want your life to look like, you end up defaulting to one of two things. What pays most or what are other people doing?

those are not the worst proxies in the world like it's better than no proxy but you can end up very far from what you actually want and you'll only know that when you get there so you have to have a very clear sense of where you're trying to go. Or these things, these opportunities are really chances to get super off track. With that in mind, is it easier to be disciplined before success arrives?

Well, I mean, look, it's easier to say like singularly focus or let's say it's easier to say no to stuff when you're not getting offered a lot. Right. It's easy to be principled when the.

you know there's not a lot in the way of consequences right so all these things are easier to a certain degree uh when you're dealing with sort of less volume or like lower stakes um i mean one of the hard parts about being disciplined early is that you're doing this thing and the payoff may be eating all of the very very far lagging indicator you know so i think it's

The truth is it's always difficult to be disciplined, right? It's always difficult. And it's something you have to figure out how to do and enjoy for its own sake. Because a lot of times... there's not only not rewards for it, but there can be the opposite of rewards for it, right? Like there can be punishments for it. If you're like, this is what I want to do. This is the track that I'm on. This is what's important to me.

And you look around and everyone's not doing those things and it seems like they're having a better time. It seems like they're getting ahead for it, right? You have to, if the only reason you're disciplined is that you think. what comes on the other side of it will be worth it not only is that going to be hard when you're not immediately getting it but then you find like oh i was super disciplined until i hit the best seller list i was super disciplined because i won a gold medal i was super

then you get that thing. And even that thing itself isn't the reward that you thought it was. So if you hated the process of it, but you told yourself it'll all be worth it when, you know, there's a... disappointment there and the accomplishment is tinged with the kind of sadness. Was there anyone that you researched for the book that had that happen that reached lofty heights and then their discipline fell away?

I mean, I think being disciplined once you're in the promised land, it's an extremely difficult thing. I don't know. I mean, when I look at super disciplined people. uh i i again i'm not just making the case like okay you got to sacrifice it then you get this and then you don't have to do it anymore it's more a kind of uh it's it it has to get to a kind of an intrinsic thing i remember i was uh i was talking to lance armstrong once and he said like i raced for the money but i practiced for me

some version of that, that like his point was like, he likes riding the bike. What they pay him for was the competition. Right. And like, and like people have obviously different opinions about Lance Armstrong, but he's a person who clearly loved doing the thing and you have to get. to a point where you love doing the thing that's why you do it and like in writing for instance there's writing and there's publishing and those are not the same thing um

Like publishing is when it goes out into the world and that's interacting with the publisher and there's contracts and there's deadlines and there's press and there's good stuff, but there's also a lot that's not up to you. But like the... the day-to-dayness of it is you. Does that make sense? Yes, and seeing the...

stuff that you maybe aren't super, super enamored with as part of the price that you pay, the same as getting up on time, the same as hitting your word count. Douglas Murray says that once the book is published, that's when the real work begins. That's how he...

it's just i've said it's like a second marathon and some people are not willing to run that marathon um but like i remember i heard this interview with a comedian once and he was saying that like someone asked him like are you still gonna do comedy like once you've hit it big her you know and his point was that like yeah of course because if i don't it means that like i was doing this for the wrong reasons right that like

he was a comedian as a means to an end to do another thing like acting or producing or you know having a sitcom or whatever it is like i like doing the thing that i do and what you'll tend to find This is why discipline is so important. As you get successful out of something, all of a sudden you're a Pro Bowl quarterback or you're a CEO of a company or you write a book.

Well, now you have all these opportunities to do not that thing, right? Like people want to pay you to do other stuff, endorsements. They want to pay you to come speak here. They want you to consult on this or invest in this. And so if you don't. love that thing you're going to end up doing all those other things or worse if you do love that thing but you don't have the discipline to be like this is what i'm here for this is like what why i did this

The reward for your discipline and your success is that you don't have the time or bandwidth to do that thing anymore. Yes. And you only have a limited window to do that thing. right and so one of the things i try i try to go like well could other people like writing is the thing that only i can do like only i can write the things that i have to say so i have to figure out a life and a system and a practice where

I'm filtering what I'm saying yes and no to, but I'm also like building systems or structures. So like I'm not spending a lot of time.

doing things that are prevent and then i don't have time to do the hard thing which is like sit down at the blank page that outsourcing of tasks that other people can do is an important one One of the challenges, at least I'm seeing now, especially because Naval and his concept around leverage and all of that personal accountability stuff, I think people are quite quick to outsource stuff that they probably shouldn't be.

I'm seeing a lot of, so for instance, in the podcasting world would be a good example. The podcaster is the only person that understands the direction that they want to take the show in, but tons of shows that are smaller than the size of this one. Have guest bookers that look after all of the guests that come on. Sure.

They have researchers that read the book and tell them the questions that they should ask. They have a thumbnail and a titling guide that comes in and demonstrates how it's visually going to look on YouTube and on Apple Podcasts and stuff. And you go, well, like... What are you? Now, I have a friend who did a 330-date comedy tour over many years, basically doing the same act. And he said that after the first 50 to 70 shows...

He was no longer a comedian. He was an actor. And the point being that he was no longer actually doing the art of comedy. He was just a mouthpiece for what had happened before. And he had to take a big chunk of time off because he'd lost his love. Yeah, yeah. You have to maintain the authenticity of the craft or the thing. And yeah, you do outsource and you find leverage points, but it's usually about the trivial things that don't matter to free you up to spend.

the most time on the things that do matter so when you're saying no to stuff it has to be clear that that is part of a process of saying yes a thousand percent yes to like the things that really do matter. So yeah, when I outsource, if I have an assistant or someone mows my lawn or I'm sort of taking tasks off, that's not so I can just dick around, right? That's so I really do have the time.

to like sweat the details of the stuff that i make right um i tell the story in the book there's this exchange um coretta scott king martin luther king's wife is is called by the actor harry belafonte uh and you know she's i think martin luther king had just gotten arrested or was you know sort of away doing this march or something and as they're talking on the phone

he can tell like she keeps having to put the phone down she gets interrupted kids are need something she's take food out of the oven she's like just busy while they're on the phone and and belafonte goes like i it's a personal question but i have to ask like do you have any staff? Are you totally by yourself right now? And she goes, yes, yes, of course. And he says, why don't you have any help? And she goes, well, you know, my husband's a minister.

she thinks the optics are bad you know we don't know if we can afford it it it's just sort of a combination of this block that they had and and belafonte goes like that's ridiculous and it ends now he's like i'm I will pay for you to have staff. And he realizes that like, he's like, they're doing, they're running this massive organization. They're the head of this movement that has the potential to change the world.

Martin Luther King can't be worried about whether there's milk in the fridge or not. And his wife can't be, you know, worried, you know, about this or that. Like there has to, you have to have the ability to. to delegate and build like a system or a structure around you. And I think that can be really hard for people, especially if you came to what you did from a very sort of scrappy, like...

passionate thing where you loved doing it, one, but two, like you didn't think anyone could do it as well as you. And it takes a certain amount of discipline to find out, to separate the essential from the inessential. to delegate or eliminate the inessential.

And then that leaves you with the essential. In meditations, Marcus realized, so you can imagine, he's the emperor of Rome. He's having to think about this exact thing. And he says, you know, the question you have to ask yourself in every moment is, is this essential? And he said, because most of what we do and say is not essential. And he says, the thing is when you...

When you eliminate the inessential, you get the double benefit of doing the essential better. And so this isn't, you know, this sort of hoity-toity like first world problem. It's a critical dilemma. critical juncture point as you get better at what you do how do you find the way to professionalize and systematize and scale the stuff so

You can spend more time on the things that matter and less time on the things that don't matter. Or you can bring in other people who are better than you at certain things that allow you to take what you do to another level. It's such a common...

dynamic that i see especially coming from the northeast of england right spit and sort of salt of the earth people who are that person that you said scrappy they've come up from the bottom up they've done all of the things themselves they were hr and marketing and finance and accounts and all that everything yeah and they get to the stage where you go look man like you are now

bouncing off the rev limiter in first gear the only way that you're going to be able to do this is to relinquish some of this control and it's a combination of fear of perfectionism of a lot of things that come about and it is a particular type of discipline I think the Puritan work ethic, this is something that I would love to have drilled into myself 10 years ago. So we ran a Saturday club night in Newcastle, the city I went to Union.

And I did 204 Saturdays in a row without missing a single one. The only first one that I did miss was because I had a... a chest infection and I was completely dead. I literally couldn't go. I was going on holidays that would leave on a Sunday and get back on a Thursday for four years because I didn't want to be away for this particular thing. I was absolutely adamant that if I left...

the Saturday, something would go wrong. But the stuff that I was doing during the day, setting the club up, was getting a piece of rope with a... gaffer tape and throwing it over the top of a particular bracket at a very specific place because that's where the inflatable went that looked right in the middle and if it went a little bit to the left it was off and it went a little bit to the right and then the way the smoke machine was set up and everything and me and my business partner did this

directors of this company that was doing thousands and thousands of people every single Saturday night, and it was us that was spending three hours each Saturday between 11 and 2 going in and doing this. Like, why? Well, it's because we were terrified that if somebody else did it, that would be the...

gateway drug, the pebble at the top of the avalanche that would cause everything to fall to pieces. Look, and there's a form, ironically, of kind of... fear or resistance in this sort of obsession or you know sort of drive to be on top of everything i remember um when i was at american apparel i looked down from my office one day and the ceo and owner of the company was in the parking lot like directing traffic

Like there'd been some problem and there's a traffic jam and he sees it and he runs downstairs and he's like directing traffic, like thousands of cars. It's like a shift change. He's directing traffic. And so there's some, you know, version of leadership stories where this is. like hands-on the leader gets down in the trenches with the soldiers and like does what needs to be done and there there is truth to that like a leader has to be willing to do anything

But a leader also can't do everything. And the truth is, there were a lot of hard decisions that the company desperately needed to make, like strategic decisions.

sort of cultural decisions that weren't down in the car park that weren't down there that he was as i stepped back from it can clearly see was running from those things you know there's the immediate reward the immediacy the tangibleness of like i'm gonna go solve this problem when he should have been in his office doing something that if someone walked by might not have looked like work right he could have been sitting there like this just thinking but if he doesn't do that

No one does that, right? Like you have to think about your role in an organization, in a project, in a field. You have to go like... If not me, then who? Right. And like there's a lot of decisions, especially as you get higher up, that only the owner, only the creative, only the main person can make. And thinking long term, you know. setting principles, setting goals, those are the things that only you can do. Other people can do a lot of these main pieces, but if it's...

If you're not doing that thing, it's not happening. And you have to figure out what that is. And that's what that question, is this essential? Is this essential? Am I the only one that can do it? What happens if I don't do it? And that's got to sort of determine your day-to-day priority list or your to-do list.

So that would be somebody, not with excess discipline, but with discipline that is heavily focused, perhaps in a suboptimal direction or perhaps behind them almost. It's focused on tasks that they should have let go of a little while ago. Yes. What about... someone on the other side of that? What about somebody that achieves the accolades and gets to that stage and then everything falls away? I think you had, was it?

Robert Moses was somebody that was like that, and you could compare him with like a George Washington, who was the guy that was in charge in 1944 when America was in the war. George Marshall? George Marshall, yeah, him. That would be a big difference, right? You have someone that's basically in charge of, what was it you said, about 70 million human lives? Oh, Eisenhower. Yeah, Eisenhower is basically this sort of brief moment after the Second World War.

most powerful man in the world. He leads this enormous army. You know, he's the head of the nuclear arsenal. You know, he is... a conqueror of conquerors, the head of the most powerful nation in the world for this sort of brief moment. And he has this line that I think a lot about. He says, you know, freedom is better defined as the opportunity for self-discipline.

And so, you know, we think of discipline as this thing you need to achieve a kind of success, right? And you do. You have to be disciplined on the way up. But also, like, people make you. disciplined on the way up because you have fewer options. There is no other way, right? You have to be disciplined about your money because you don't have any.

Right. You have to be disciplined about your work ethic, et cetera, because like you're in this competition with all these people and sort of a forcing function. But then you get there, you get to the top.

And now the rules that previously bound you or the things you needed to prove, that's not there. And so if you're not self-driven, if you're not... you know enforcing that discipline on yourself it all falls apart right and i think deep down the reason a lot of people are ambitious and want to be successful is they they have they want to be

the president or they want to be the CEO or they want to start their own company. What they think is that the end of that rainbow is an exemption from all the rules that they don't like. And in fact, it's those people have to be stricter on themselves. The Stoics would say no one is fit to rule who is not first master of themselves. And so the idea is that discipline is not this.

thing that is enforced on you like when you're in school you can't go to the bathroom at this time you got to be here at this you know as you work your way up a lot of those things not only not only fall away But actually life says, well, what time do you want to be here? Right? Like, what do you want from us? What do you need from us? Right? Suddenly people are accommodating to you.

And so, or, you know, they're building you up, they're telling you how great you are. If you don't have this sort of strong internal compass, this strong sense of what you're okay with, what you're not okay with, what you need to do, what you shouldn't do, then... the success is going to be deeply unmooring, right? And deeply disconcerting and liable not to last because...

it's like you ran past all the barriers and now you're just there. And so, yeah, discipline has to be this kind of internal thing that you cultivate that stays with you.

whether the circumstances are really good or really bad. Do you not think that this is where Commodus would have probably played a stark contrast to his father's role? Yeah, I mean, what's so interesting about Antoninus, Marcus Aurelius... and then marx really says son commodus you have sort of a great emperor a greater emperor and you have one of the worst emperors and why is that um

I don't, I mean, there's so much we don't know, right? We don't know what their relationship was like. We don't know what happened. It could be that Marcus Aurelius was the greatest father in the world and his son was a psychopath, right? We know there's just a tragedy. The whole thing is tinged in tragedy in the sense that Marcus Aurelius had 12 or 13 children and every one of his sons dies.

Commodus is the only one. We have some sense that Marcus, for instance, the first thing Marcus Aurelius does with absolute power in this incredible moment in human history, he's named emperor. And he anoints his brother, his stepbrother, co-emperor. The first thing he does with his powers, he shares it, right? Which is a nod to the old Roman system, which had two consuls, like had two presidents who would serve like.

co-presidents who would serve these one-year terms. Then Rome becomes an empire and this changes. But Marcus says, thinks that there needs to be this kind of check on power. And so he and his brother serve as co-equals. We get the sense that he was setting up some system where two of his sons or his son and his co-emperor's stepbrother's son would rule together. Okay. So do you think that maybe Marcus was trying to future-proof?

any one tyrant from being in too much control because you would always have this other person and by doing it at the moment that he was given power it It was the highest cost that he could pay. Yes. Like one of the most beautiful passages in Meditations. Again, you have the private journal of the emperor of Rome. And he's saying,

Be careful not to be Caesarified. You can easily be dyed purple, he says. The Roman emperor wears a purple cloak. And he's saying you can't be dyed purple. You can't be stained or changed by this position. right we we have lord acton's rule of like absolute power corrupts absolutely he was saying like he he was consciously talking to himself about

trying to prevent that from happening. And I think obviously the decision at the very beginning to share power is like, you know, a very big sort of step. preemptively trying to prevent that from happening. And we believe that his succession plan for his son was to set up some sort of system or tradition where that happened again. The other quirk is...

Marcus is the only emperor, five emperors in a row, to have a male heir. So Marcus's father is not Antoninus. Antoninus is his adopted father, just as... Antoninus' adopted father is Hadrian and Hadrian's adopted father is Trajan. There's this process. So Marcus isn't able to do that.

right he's not able to choose an era because he has a male son uh but we get the sense that he wanted to have two maybe one his son one of his brother's son or two of his sons rule together um but you know the best laid plans They all die. And so Commodus is the only one left. And we don't know what Marcus thinks of Commodus. We can imagine every father is...

blind to a certain degree to the flaws of their children and trapped by, you know, the insaneness of this system. But certainly something goes wrong. And it's a tragedy of, in some ways, an indictment of Marcus, right? Like if you're the most disciplined, you know, decent human being, but.

somehow you're not able to pass that along to your family. I mean, what does it say? It raises a lot of questions, for sure. That is interesting, the fact that you have this emperor, philosopher, god-king thing going on.

incredibly giving, very benevolent, very caring, you know, was equality, like ideas that were literally millennia before their time. And yet one of the few roles that... every father has that they need to fulfill somehow happened but then everybody is so idiosyncratic and unique and individual you don't know i mean we all know about the rebellious rich kid that happens to be a dick

Yeah. Smashes up the father's car and has parties in the house when the parents are away and all that stuff. And I suppose the open loop here that may never, is most likely to never be closed unless we discover some more hidden something somewhere.

is interesting for speculation it's like is this a blip in what would have been otherwise a pure white snow surface of Marcus Aurelius's rule or is it just you know the exception that proves the rule which is the reason we don't have this system is that it

almost never produces good results, right? Like there's 30 or 40 Roman emperors and there's five that they consider the five good emperors, right? Does that finish, that finishes with Marcus? Marcus is the last, Marcus is considered the last of the five good emperors. There's five. emperors in Rome. There's a few other good ones, but the point is...

I mean, even with the passing of Queen Elizabeth, like how many other good ones have there been? There's not that many. There's been thousands of kings and queens in these various kingdoms over thousands of years. And there's probably, what, two dozen that were like they did a good job. They proved – what Matthew Arnold, one of the sort of biographers of Marcus Aurelius in the 1800s writes, he goes, Marcus Aurelius is given every privilege and power.

and advantage in life. And the remarkable thing is he proves himself worthy of it, right? And how rare that is, not just in royal families, but... like anyone with any kinds of privilege, right? How many people who are incredibly athletically gifted also you're like, and they're a great person too, right? Or people who are wealthy and you're like, and they're also so hardworking and just a great parent, right?

The reality is, and this is why I think discipline is such a virtue and justice too and wisdom and all. It's really hard. It's really fucking hard. And it's harder in some ways. when you can get away with not doing those things. And that, I think, is what sort of privilege and power often enables. There's not the forcing function of having to earn it, right?

Congress doesn't have to run for election. He just gets it. And because it doesn't have to get it, it doesn't do a very good job of it. That's the interesting element about... The life cycle that discipline has, especially as you progress as a human, that in the beginning, it's about working hard. It's about leaning in.

As you start to develop more and more, it's actually perhaps a little bit more about leaning away. It's about restricting the options that you have. It's about leaning in a little bit less. And that what got you here won't get you there mentality has never been seen more for me than... watching that kind of transition at least begin to happen in my life as well. I'm like, look, I have more things that I need to say no to than things to say yes to. And that was a...

pathological yeser. So I'm like, okay, well, what do I do now? I can't people please anymore. If I take my eye off the ball on the main thing, the main thing is the podcast. That needs to happen. I need to prepare. I need to choose guests that I'm interested in. I need to make sure that I am on my game as much as possible. That's the...

the single ordinating function. Two examples, actually, that I keep on using, and I don't know whether you came across them. So apparently when he was at Amazon, Jeff Bezos filtered every decision. through one heuristic, and it was, does this make the customer experience better? And apparently, Elon Musk has got the same, and it's, does this get us closer to Mars? And I don't know if it's true, but... It certainly doesn't look like he's following said rubric.

That's up for debate. My point being, even if it isn't, the idea, you can see how much more simple everybody's life would become if you had a single ordinating principle. It's like, does this make the people of Rome... their existence better. Everything from do I have wine tonight to what time do I get up tomorrow to who do I have meetings with. And this is where the multiplicity of options that people have in the modern world creates a difficulty for discipline.

I think, because the amount of distractions that are there. Well, that's the idea. If you don't know what port you're sailing towards, no wind is favorable. How do you judge whether you should do X or Y, whether you should do it now or later, right? you should say yes or no how much you should charge how long it should take you don't know any of the things unless you know where you're trying to go like for me i i don't have like a question where i'm like hey

is this helping me become the most of this or the most of that? I kind of think about it because the reality is we have... multiple things right so if if marcus realizes i gotta be the is this good for rome well you know what about your son for my son right yeah so i think about it in terms of like i want to be very good at my professional life i want to be a great writer

I want to be a great husband and I want to be a great father. And those three things are related but also in tension with each other. But the nice part about the tension is it prevents you from going too far in one direction. And I think it... It sort of forces a kind of discipline. There's things I could do that would make me more successful as a writer, but would come at the cost of my marriage. Or there's things like...

that my wife and I could do that would make our marriage better, but then, you know, we're personally happier, but we're gone all the time or whatever, right? Like, you have to think about how these things matter to each other or balance with each other. My friend Austin Kleon sent to me once, he said, actually, right when I moved to Austin, he said, work, family, scene, pick two. So the point was, you can be good at your work, you can have a family.

but like partying being cool experience like the fun experiences the perks of the job you know you gotta say no to that conversely you can be great at your job and party it up but like you're probably not going to find that person or you're kids are going to be like, where's dad, right? So you can't have all those things. And when you know, okay, well, the important things to me are work and family, or the important things are...

family, and having a good time. Okay, well, you're going to leave some potential, whatever your magnum opus is, it's not going to happen, right? And so knowing that, okay, here's what I want, and then here's what I'm willing to trade or give up to get that thing, that clarity is super, super important. What was that word? Akrazia?

Yeah, the idea that there's sort of a higher self and a lower self. For the ancients, there was this sort of perennial battle between the higher self and the lower self. you know, discipline to me is the deciding factor, right? To mediate them. Which wins, right? You know, what side are you is going to win out here?

And, you know, it takes a sort of a strength of will that the story that goes to the... beginnings of stoicism uh is the it's called the choice of hercules hercules is walking through the hills of greece and he comes to this crossroads and basically there's two goddesses One is the goddess of vice and the other is the goddess of virtue. You know, basically one is the lower self and the higher self, the easy way and the hard way.

And he has to choose, you know, he has to choose. Do you get, you know, do you get everything you want? It's easy. Are you willing to work for it? Are you willing to sacrifice, you know, virtue or vice? That choice of Hercules was at the essence of... you know stoicism are you are you choosing the disciplined way or the ill-disciplined way uh you know and that choice we face that choice not just like

This one big pivotal moment in our lives where you choose between, am I going to go for it or not go for it? But like you said, you also choose it every day. Am I going to eat this or that? Am I going to get up at this time or this time? Am I going to... Push through.

When it's hard or am I going to wait for it to be easy? Like that choice happens over and over and over again. And the Stoics would say that, you know, if you want to be beautiful, if you want to be great, you have to make beautiful or great choices. It comes down to.

Over and over again, we have this choice of Hercules. And do we make it often enough? I don't know if you have to make it always, but more often than not, you have to make that right, beautiful, great choice. And that... is what determines whether you will be those things do you think there's a risk of attaching a sense of self-worth to your ability to be disciplined it seems to me that a lot of the

Friends that I have who are superbly disciplined spend more time lambasting themselves for missing out by 1% to 5% on the perfect game for each day.

Because the meditation was good and they did it, but maybe they thought about work for a minute of their 15-minute meditation. Do you know what I mean? It makes you fragile. Well, the paradox of having high standards is that it makes you... more likely to reach great heights, but also almost constitutionally unable to enjoy or appreciate or even recognize that that's where you are, right?

The person who goes, oh, that was the greatest game in the world, I crushed it, is not going to see all the things they could have done better, right? The person who goes, oh, but I messed up this, this, this, and this. that person is going to tend to be the one that's improving and growing. And that's good, but it's also not a recipe for happiness, for contentment, for sustainability.

Seneca is writing this letter to his friend Lucilius and they're talking about stoicism this idea that you know you try to get better every day. hold yourself to these high standards. You know, and at this point, he's probably in his 60s or 70s. He's been doing this a long time. And he goes, how do I know, he's sort of rhetorically, but maybe Lucille said, asked him, like, how do you know you're doing it right?

And he goes, how do I know that I'm doing it right, that I'm getting better? And he says, each day I become a better friend to myself. That's how I know I'm making progress. And I think what he means is that... So discipline or stoicism is not this constant whipping of oneself, this constant feeling of falling short of not being good enough, being like, you piece of shit, I hate you. Like, look, I could have done all these things better.

But it's a sense of like, you did your best, good job. I love you. I respect you. There's still room to grow, but there's nothing you have to feel guilty or terrible about. And I think... it's if you want to do this well you want to do it sustainably uh you have to understand that discipline is not a form of self-flagellation it should not be hurtful

you should love it like in meditations marcus really says love the discipline you know and let it support you and i think he means that discipline in both senses he means the philosophical discipline but he also means like the practice of it And I think that love and support are too like operative, but also underrated words there, right? Like if you feel bad about yourself.

and that's what you think discipline is, I think you're getting it wrong. It's a motivating factor though, right? That's why people do it. They need to have both carrot and stick. And for the most part, a lot of the people I think that are seduced by heavy discipline, they're... stick people a good example of this so andy frisella who reached out

a couple of months ago, he did that 75 hard thing. He was the guy that made 75 hard. Have you heard of this? No. Okay. So it's a challenge for 75 days in a row and you have to do two 45 minute workouts. read 10 pages of a nonfiction book, meditate, drink a gallon of water, do something else, and don't break your diet. Something like that. It's like a list of things. Kind of basic, but pretty intense.

And if you miss any one thing on any one day of the 75, you go back to the start and you start again. And from the outside, I loved the idea. I haven't done it, but. I love the idea of something that created a framework for people to build discipline around. However, I haven't got a single friend that's done 75 hard and not snapped afterward.

and not gone to a period of a decrease in discipline, even if you smeared it across 150 days, their discipline overall is lower. One of the guys didn't train. for half a year after he did it. One of the guys didn't meditate. Another one of the dudes couldn't bear to go into work and do a bunch of other stuff because they just myopically nailed themselves to this goal and sustainable.

perseverance commitment over time like these are the sort of words i think that being introduced into a more holistic view of discipline would be interesting magic words for me are more often than not like more often than not are you doing what you're supposed to be doing are you uh holding yourself to high standards are you taking the

you know, the hard choice over the easy choice, putting in the extra, more often than not, are you doing it, right? If you try to hold yourself to this perfect or impossible standard, Not only are you liable to sort of not do it and then feel terrible afterwards, but I think it can so often come at the expense of other things that are important or you become so...

terribly out of balance that it's almost an excuse right you're like so you do some challenge for 30 days or 75 days or whatever it's like They don't throw you a parade at the end, you know? I mean, look, I appreciate the idea of challenging yourself, pushing ourselves, and to a certain degree, all discipline is arbitrary. but like i'm not trying to just win made-up competitions or check arbitrary you know things off the list i i want to

I want to do this consistently over a long period of time. So I run. And so one of the things that happens when people find out you're running, they go, oh, are you running a marathon? Are you training to do an Ironman? I'm not trying to win at my hobbies, you know? To me, the doing the thing is the reason I'm doing it. It's good for me for a variety of reasons.

But it could very easily become an unhealthy, unproductive thing that comes at the expense of the other things that are important to me. So I think sometimes people can get caught up with seeing it again as this kind of a means to an end.

when it should be a sort of an integrated practice into your life. I think that this becomes very prevalent when you grow up a little bit, that my ability to view broader time horizons... has only really kicked in in the last couple, I'm 34, it's only kicked in in the last few years.

that you presume the thing you're doing now is going to be the way that life's going to be forever. And the training plan that you do now, even if there's a 10%, 20% risk of injury over the next six months, doesn't matter because you want to be jacked to go away on summer holiday or whatever. And then after a while, you realize, no, my goal is in 20 or 30 years to be significantly more capable than I am now. What is the route between me now and me there?

fear and the degree of neuroticism around it being it's not fast enough it doesn't happen quick enough that dissolves quite nicely I was talking to the Olympian, Kate Courtney. She's this amazing mountain bike racer. And she was telling me, you know, like her coach would give her a workout. She was like, you know, ride 20 miles.

she'd ride 25 miles or, you know, do it in two hours and she'd do it in 90 minutes. And I think a lot of successful driven people understand that impulse. Like you're like, I want to win everything, right? Even practice. And he said to her once, and when I signed her copy of Discipline's Destiny, I wrote this in it because I think about it all the time. He said, do you want to be fast now or do you want to be fast later?

The purpose of training, the purpose of practice is to peak in the race, in the moment that it matters. Life is a little bit different than the Olympics. There is no sort of one moment. But if you have this idea that... you know your big moment is in the future that it's a marathon and not a sprint the idea of sort of forcing it now peaking early is actually something you should be quite worried about so you have to be disciplined about your discipline you have to curb that impulse to do

In some ways, the easier thing now, which is like, I want to go all out. I want to push everything into the center of the table. I want to go now. But now might not be the moment. And the ability to step back, to restrain yourself, to focus on sustainability and endurance and all that, you know, it's... may well be the harder thing. And so it's like, do you want to be great now or do you want to be ready when like a truly great opportunity is there?

Do you want to do your best work at 22 or the only work at 22? Or do you still want to be doing this when you're 82? Because you love it, because you'll have more experiences and wisdom and all that stuff now. And those are the kind of questions. that I think people at a really elite level are thinking about. What was that comparison between Lou Gehrig's career and Babe Ruth's career and how their trajectories went? Well, I mean, clearly...

Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth are two of the greatest baseball players of all time. Both achieve incredible athletic feats. But when you look at Babe Ruth, you're sort of like... how like how did you even like he doesn't look like an athlete and so in some ways he's very impressive that he could hit all these home runs but you you definitely get the sense and and the more i think you study uh you know sort of elite performance star history sometimes you're just amazed

and saddened at the greatness of someone because you're like, how did you do it? And what could you have been capable of if you weren't your own worst enemy? So both Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth's careers are cut short, right? Lou Gehrig from Lou Gehrig's disease or ALS. And then Babe Ruth, I mean, this wasn't a guy who took care of himself. He burned through millions of dollars. He treated his body like a garbage can. You know, he sort of has this precipitous decline at the end. And, you know.

he was not tom brady right like in peak athletic conditioning at the end of his career he was a obese you know uh drunk old man right and i think that's so tragic to me right and to me the idea is like if you respect the craft if you really love the thing you're doing you owe it to that craft take the responsibilities of it seriously, right? And I think I wanted to show that contrast because we so often just assume, oh, this person accomplished all these things, therefore it's good.

But what else could they have done had they had more discipline? And I think one of the small consolations of someone like Lou Gehrig is you go, He left it all in New Jersey. Like there was nothing that he could have done in his career that he didn't do. The only thing that the only tragedy was that. for reasons that were not his fault he didn't get to do it as long as he could have done it right but the games that he played he showed up for and he played them

And I think about that, you know, every day when I wrap up, I'm like, did I leave it all there? Or did I phone it in today? You know, did I... make excuses today? Did I not bring my best self to this thing? And again, more often than not, you want the good answer to that question. I like the idea of the more often than not because it means that an individual repetition that is suboptimal. Today, I just didn't quite work. It seems like it would give you a little bit more detachment from it.

And I think that that's very important. Yeah, you, Mark's realized in meditation, he goes, you got to pick yourself up when you fall, but also celebrate that you're a human being, that none of us are perfect, that we're going to mess up, we're going to screw up.

But if you have this sort of baseline that you know what you're capable of, you know what you should do, you know that you're not always going to be able to do it, but you know... what to come back to to me is more important than having these impossible perfect standards that are almost in their own way paralyzing or impossible or discouraging and and so i think cultivating a kind of like a rhythm that there's like this thing and sometimes you

sometimes you fall off the rhythm but you know how to come back to it that to me is a a more sustainable conscious kinder way to be committed to something i think that Again, that's something that you learn through experience. I was perennially locked into a...

work so hard that I can't take it anymore, burn out, spend three days in bed, work so hard. That was me. That was the cycle of how I worked pretty much for most of my 20s. One of the advantages of doing that was that... now i know some of the warning signs when i start to get close to that yeah and i can just yeah and i can just about fly underneath that a little and go okay how long can i hold this for and i'll back off a little bit more but it's less of this yeah

Apart from the fact that it's less efficient because three days of doing nothing is a lot worse than a couple of days of doing 50% of something. But it's just... suffering, the difference in terms of suffering is pretty drastic. And I think another interesting example, so you're talking there about two different types of athletes, one of whom left everything on the table, another one who didn't and took a ton away.

Michael Jordan seems to be someone that was almost tyrannical in the way that he went about his game and left it all on the table, but did it in a way that sacrificed everything else, pretty much everything else. Do you think that it's possible for people to get extreme results in life whilst still having that balance? It seems like you're trying to...

to do that, and that was the two out of three example. To me, that's the challenge. It's almost easier to be great than it is to be good. And I don't mean to contrast good and great in that sense. I mean that like... Like to say, I don't care about anything but succeeding in this thing is almost taking yourself off the hook to a certain degree. There's a writer when she said, like, I don't want to have kids. I don't want to get married. I want to be an art monster.

right and i get that right i think anyone who's like loves what they do there's a certain like i want to be the center of everything i only want this thing to matter But that's almost the easier path, right? To be like, well, why is this person an asshole? And they're like, well, they're great. I think sometimes people think that they're... innate talent or their success or their commitment to a path or a goal is like an exemption from the rules of human behavior, right?

I don't have to care about other people. I don't have to keep my word. You know, there's a story about this writer. I'm forgetting her name. She was at this party. She had a young daughter. And she's a poet. And she's at this... party and jack kerouac is there and she you know it's one of those famous parties and she's there and and uh she gets up to leave she goes you know i i um

I promised the babysitter I'd be home by 10. She has a young daughter, I have to leave. And Jack Kerouac, a different model of a kind of writer, says, if you don't forget about that babysitter, you'll never be a great writer. And she gets up and she leaves anyway. And she says later, I knew in that moment that if I didn't keep that promise to the babysitter, I wouldn't be a great writer. And her point was that like.

Having some talent, some calling doesn't exempt you from keeping your word. And then in fact, if you tell the babysitter you're going to be home at 10. And then you blow that off. You're also the kind of person that says, I'm going to be at my desk writing by nine. And you break that promise also, right? And so actually, I think cultivating a practice or a set of standards.

that are more than just like how good are you professionally, makes you a more well-rounded and better professional. And the people that I really admire are people who have gotten to the commanding heights of their profession.

but are still good neighbors and citizens and activists and fathers or daughters or wives. There's something to me hollow and kind of a cop-out about... being great at one thing at the expense of all the other things when especially at the end of your life you don't get to take that thing with you you know um you don't get to take it with you so What does it matter that you made more money or you wrote one extra book? You're going to sit back and go, I really fucked it up.

That's why it's so important to start with the end in mind, I think. Why am I doing this? What are the ordinating principles that I have that I'm working toward? Because, yeah, you could spend a very, very long time climbing up a ladder to find out that it's up against the wrong wall. yeah i mean and how many people they're on the metal stand you know they're accepting the nobel prize or you know they they get to that number they told themselves like i want to make it and then

What was the thing about beyond mountains, there's more mountains? Yeah, it's a Haitian proverb, beyond mountains, there are more mountains. But I think it's more like you think that this thing is going to fix it. It's going to make me feel good. It's going to make my parents proud of me. It's going to make me part of the club. We think that these external things are going to address this internal.

lacking or need or emptiness that we have. And I've done a lot. I've read a lot. I've talked to a lot of people. I've yet to find someone that got it. It's a mirage. It's a phantom. You get there and it moves. In one sense, that's a tragedy. In the other sense, it's a great gift, right? The first time you do that thing and you get it, the thing you've been working for, and then it isn't what you thought it would be.

If in that moment you can accept the gift you've been given, which is a decoupling from external success and internal contentment, happiness, enoughness. If you can make that break in that moment. You're free and empowered forever because now you can still do the things you're good at. You can still want them, but you are no longer at the whims of this lie or this delusion. Yes. But what most people do in that moment.

is tell themselves a second lie, which is, oh, I have to prove I can win an NBA championship on my own. I have to show that this wasn't a fluke. oh, it's not $10 million. Actually, it's $100 million, right? Or it's not number two that's enough. It's got to be number one. If that's what you do, I think you have... You have made a bargain or told yourself a lie that is now almost impossible for you to get free of. I think that people need to see that for themselves. Yes.

i've been told this lesson a million times yeah and i each time that something good happens that feels like a success it helps me to prove that same rule to myself a little bit more. Robert writes Why Buddhism is True in that he talks about life is suffering, said by the Buddha, and the word...

Dukkha, D-U-K-K-H-A, contested by some scholars as not meaning suffering, but unsatisfactoriness. Life is unsatisfactoriness. And given that Robert is an evolutionary psychologist now writing about Buddhism. that aligns those two perfectly. Like humans are not built to be happy. We're built to be effective.

And effectiveness is everything being just a bit more shit than you thought it was going to be. Well, from an evolutionary perspective, there's very little value in the finish line existing, right? There's a lot of evolutionary value to move it a little bit further. It's like the horizon. You never actually get there. But in chasing it, you go further and further and further. And so understanding why it exists.

should help you break free of the power that it has over you. And I mean, look, I've liked to think that the work that I've done since coming to this conclusion... is still very good, right? It's just, and in fact, I would argue it's better. Like when I think of, like, there's no question, craving or anger, wanting to prove something. This is powerful fuel. But at the same time, it's really volatile fuel. And I'm not sure it actually puts you in the headspace needed to do like your best work.

I would think that the work that I've done from a place more of fullness and contentment and balance, I think it's better. Like, not only is it better for me, but I think the actual product is better. But I think people are really afraid. They're afraid of what it will cause. They're afraid of, like, if I put this down, if I'm motivated by something different. If I no longer need to do X, Y, or Z, I won't do it anymore.

and so they don't so they find you know that anger gets them here and then they're like well i need to find something new to be angry about or you know i shoved it in these people's faces and it wasn't as satisfactory as i thought so i'm gonna shove it in more people's faces, right? And that is, again, from an evolutionary perspective, from an output perspective, it works. But I'm not actually sure it's best. But it's also...

what are you optimizing for again? If it's a miserable experience and if you sacrifice the thing that you want to achieve the thing which is supposed to get the thing that you want, if you sacrifice happiness in order to become successful so that you can finally be happy. It's that story of the fisherman again. Why not just be happy? Why not just give yourself a little bit more of a break? You talk to people and you're like, well, why do you want to do X? And they're like, then I can do Y.

why is so much more accessible to them now? And why do you think they're mutually exclusive? I'm not sure that they are. You mentioned Queen Elizabeth earlier on. What did you learn about her? Well, I think she's this remarkable person. I mean, you look at someone, you don't want to talk about sustainability. You have this job for 70 years. And, you know, as I was saying, the idea of Marcus is given these privileges, this immense power.

platform etc and he proves himself worthy of it and you look at the outpouring of support for this woman when she died even from people who have sort of an ideological disagreement with the monarchy. To me, that's very high praise when people who disagree with what you do still find the way that you did it to be admirable and impressive.

She was a remarkable picture of restraint and dignity and poise, tradition, but also flexibility and innovation. And I just, you know, discipline is not just how far can you run, you know. How hard can you work? It's also, you know, are you in control of yourself? Like you want to talk about someone who was in command of themselves. This is a woman who over 70 years never lets the mask slip, never has the outburst, never has the, you know, dropping for 70 years. She's like on point for it.

thing that she didn't choose for a thing that only because of a quirk of history even was in a position to take. Tell people that story in case they're not familiar. So her uncle was the king of England. He abdicates in this sort of fit of passion as he's in love with this terrible woman, basically. And suddenly Queen Elizabeth's father becomes king. You know, he would have been expected to rule for 20, 30, 40 years. Instead sort of dies, I think, after like 20, 25 years.

Father dies unexpectedly young of lung cancer. And then in her, what, late 20s, early 30s is, I think, yeah, early 20s is suddenly the queen of this enormous empire. And what is her job? You know, her job is better defined by all the things she's not allowed to do as opposed to the things that she can do. It's this symbolic role.

And, you know, I wanted to illustrate the idea of discipline. Again, it's not just, but it's also when you feel like and not doing it, right? The restraint and poise, the ability to. to want to do something, to very understandably want to do something, and then to not do it because it's not the right thing to do. Becoming queenly. That is...

a kind of discipline and grace that I think we need to see more of. You know, you think about, you're like, why is this person tweeting this? Why are they saying this? Why are they doing this? And you're like, well, they can, you know, not. Because it's the right thing to do, not because it's important, not because it's going to accomplish X, Y, and Z, but this kind of lack of self-control, I think. She is an inspiring picture of what self-control can look like.

Not self-control in the masculine sense, which is what I think we so often tend to stereotype it as. How would it be feminine? Well, I just mean like she's... She's not, this isn't a physical thing. This is a spiritual and emotional and a mental thing. Yeah, as you're getting news headlines written about you that are claiming you think a thing or did a thing or were part of a thing, and you don't have the compulsion to.

write a response to when it like she's a she was a little old lady you know and that it she's not this big hulking thing she's a little old lady and yet you know, was more restrained and disciplined than these ambitious prime ministers, male or female, right? Like she had a sort of a different path to power. And in a world where everyone says everything that they think and is constantly fighting for their recognition, for their chance in the spotlight.

I think she's a really powerful example or was a really powerful example that the opposite of those things is often more impressive or a better path. Didn't Martin Luther King get... punched by a Nazi or something. And it was, that's kind of a similar situation. Yeah. Yeah. Again, we tend to think of discipline as strength, force. There's a moment in Martin Luther King's career he's obviously committed.

proponent of nonviolence. And it's one thing to be like, strategically, we are marching from here to there. The police are going to attack us. We just need to keep going. You know, he's on stage and a Nazi walks on stage and just...

starts punching him in the face in front of everyone that he knows. And what people said they found, so he's attacked. So first, you know, he's hit. And then... natural human thing when you're hit would be to protect yourself which he does instinctively hits himself and people said the shocking sound like the auditorium goes dead silent you could just hear you know flesh on flesh and

Then there's this moment. So he's being tested at the highest level. I am a practitioner of nonviolence. That doesn't mean I don't just not engage in violence. But like what do you do when you are violently attacked? And in this split second, as he protects himself, he catches himself. And they said he drops his hands. And it was like this, you know, it's...

This is more than self-discipline. This is some higher, almost saint-like place that he's managed to reach where, you know, again, he's not just protecting himself, not actively defending himself. but he has, for philosophical and spiritual reasons, said the discipline is to actually allow yourself to be attacked in this moment, which he does. And, you know, it was this shocking moment that sort of...

Fundamentally, it teaches the power of nonviolence and his commitment to the message more than any other thing he could have possibly done. And then, you know, obviously the man is swarmed and the first words out of Martin Luther King's mouth are like, don't hurt him, don't hurt him. And again, it's easy to say these things, but then what do you do in that moment of being tested? To me, that's more impressive than, you know, any Olympic gold medalist or, you know, feat of athletic strength.

He's able to conquer his like almost innately human need to protect yourself. He's able to stop that in the moment. That to me is, you know, discipline at some sort of transcendent heroic level. What about perseverance? What did you learn about people who coped when things got really difficult? It seems to me that discipline, even in the modern world, no matter how hard it is that you're working toward a thing and how difficult the pursuit is, it's still...

Quite a bourgeois sort of luxurious position to be in. I know that you recently got a cold tub. We've got one in the house as well. Let's not get that wrong. We are LARPing at discomfort. Sure. We're electing to go into discomfort because the world has become so nerfed and so comfortable around us that we need to buy pieces of kit that we can get into that force us to feel cold. What about...

Where do you stand? Where can people find that's firm for them to stand when they're doing the discipline and the world just continues to punch them in the face? Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss. the difficulties of life, right? I think it's good to have practices, physical practices that push us.

But like life is fucking hard and it breaks your heart. There's Murphy's Law, right? What can go wrong will. There's also another law that says like it always takes longer than you expect even when you take this law into account, right? It's hard. People go, I want to start a podcast.

how long it took you before you even started to see rewards or it pay off i mean even just now you're probably early in it right it takes longer than you think it's fucking hard and it breaks your heart you know um is that is it Certainly preferable to like starving to get to death on some, you know, desert plain, of course. Right. It's better than it's better, you know, here in this moment than anywhere in history, probably anywhere in the world.

of course. But like, if you don't have a sort of a fortune, the Stokes call it an inner citadel, kind of a fortress that you can retreat into, that you can rely on. I said, I don't think you're going to make it. Maybe, maybe algorithmically you get lucky and it always goes your way maybe, but to count on that or to let alone expect that, you know, I think is to, is to set yourself up to be crushed.

by what is inevitably a heartbreaking difficult you know soul testing process paul graham talks about After the rush of the excitement of an idea, you call it like the tech crunch bump, right? You get your first bit of attention. Then you enter the trough of despair, right?

And the trough of despair is fucking real. Like every book I start, it starts off exciting. It's fun. Here's what I'm going to do. And then right into the trough of despair. And you might not come out of that for months. Like, and by the time you're out of it.

you don't even it catches oh i'm on the downhill side of this like i'm you don't even realize that you're out of it until you're so far out of it that that you're almost surprised by it so you have to have this ability to endure to show up fucking every day even though it's hard even though it doesn't feel like you're making progress even though not doing it would be way easier

You have to cultivate that strength. And it doesn't matter if it's, you know, you're trying to become a massage therapist or you're writing, you know, some like, you know, the great American novel. Like, it's fucking hard. Or you're starting some movement. You know, you're trying to build this movement.

off the ground from nothing to change the world. Like, it's going to take a long time. Things are going to constantly go wrong. It's going to be way harder than you think. And it might not test you in the sense, in the way that... like starving tests you but it's gonna challenge you in every conceivable way and you have to have you have to have what it takes to get through and you have to have a really strong why too or you're not gonna get through it

One of the other elements that gets laid on top is I think shame and guilt around it not being as bad as it could be. You know, the fact that a lot of the people that do deal with discomfort, it's them. choosing to go after a pursuit that they care about you're choosing to write these books no one is holding a gun to your head other than your own existential conscience that you have to go and write these books so okay well what does that mean how do I ameliorate the fact that

I'm choosing to do a thing. I'm electing to do it, but it's causing me suffering. But I also, the suffering... From that, I derive meaning. And it's sort of all this big mess, I think. You know, it's weird. Like, as I wrote this book. several years ago called the obstacles away. And so people will go like, well, what was the biggest obstacle in your life? And I think people think it's like some contest or this measuring thing or, or they think that.

The only obstacles that count are like, well, I lost my leg in an accident when I was seven or, you know, I was born, you know, and barely survived this genocidal attack. Like, obviously, all those things are profound obstacles and we can learn so much from. Viktor Frankl in Man's Search for Meaning. There are these people who have been through the absolute, like, crucible of the human experience. And they have something profoundly deep and powerful to teach us.

But I think we're often quick to dismiss the adversity of our lives, you know, and we somehow think also that it's this thing that happens once. And in fact, we all wake up every single day in a world that we don't control, that's utterly indifferent to us, our happiness, our, you know, fulfillment. And the challenge is like, do you have what it takes to keep going through that?

to not despair, to not become cynical, to keep believing, to keep trying, to keep pushing, to keep using the experiences that you have to get. better. To me, that's the marathon of it. That's the gauntlet of it. And I'm just... Of course, we should poke fun at the fact that we live these Nerf lives and we should acknowledge readily the incredible privileges that we have compared to other people, compared to people who lived a long time ago. But if...

If you think that it's easy because we're privileged or because you're not running from somebody trying to kill you, you're... I think being naive and anyone who's done anything hard can tell you like you have many moments, these sort of dark nights of the soul moment. And if you don't have something to draw on.

you're not going to get through that. Well, what's a firm place for people to stand then? You know, you're doing something, you're working hard, and it's just difficulty after difficulty. The discipline is being tested. Where do they go in those moments? Yeah. I mean, for the Stokes, that's what the inner citadel was. This sort of, the principles, the ideas, the...

the practices that you've gone that where you go, hey, I've been through tough shit before, right? Like I've been through stuff like this before. I mean, just to think. If you just think about, first off, the unlikeliness of you and I even being here, we're already extremely lucky. But you think about like you were born this tiny defenseless thing with no discernible skills or knowledge.

and you're not fucking dead like you you you you survived against incredible odds and incredible adversity to even like you learned how to walk you know you got through school this like crazy insane you know thing you worked your way up from like nothing like in that sense like

It's an incredible journey. Just as like someone who, you know, went from poverty to wealth, they'd be like, I got from here to there. Like we all have the ability to look back and be like, look at where I was not that long ago, right? And you should have. some sense of what you're capable of. Marcus Rios in meditations, he goes like, what is sort of worried or anxious about some.

future thing and he goes well what will i meet that with and he says the same tools that i've met today with like that you you have been through stuff and especially coming out of the pandemic like people should go like you just lived through A historical event of, you know, epic proportions in the way that you would hear from grandparents who lived through the depression or the war, you know, traveled across oceans on some boat to go to some new like.

Those historical moments are on par with the historical moment that we just lived through, that we are continuing to live through. And you're still here. And I'm not implying the people who are not here somehow, not here as a result of their own. But what I'm saying is like. You have been in the arena and you have been knocked around and you made it. And you should be able to look back at the things that you've done and have a certain pride and confidence in your ability.

to get through real shit. And that should give you some firm ground to stand on. As you contemplate what tomorrow might bring, you know, like you'll meet tomorrow with what you met yesterday with and what you've met all the challenges of your life with. And I mean, I do think there's value in.

seeking out difficulties and challenges and pushing yourself so you have even more confidence. But the fact that you're here, that you've been through all the things you've been through, that's not nothing. Yes. I love that. The idea of the inner citadel is you're...

talking away, I've got this idea of a huge grand hall, maybe influenced by the fact I'm watching a lot of Game of Thrones at the moment. A huge grand hall and above the fireplace are all of the heads of the different enemies, but they're all you. It's all you at different stages. It was you when you doubted your ability to do this. It's you when you felt weak and you decided you were going to do it anyway. It's you when you chose the path that was virtuous as opposed to the one that was hedonic.

I have a friend who I saw at the start of this week, and his band has a lyric that says, I can't drown my demons, they've learned how to swim. And he'd suffered with depression, same as me, throughout his 20s. And that's one of the things that was one of the most...

empowering, enlightening reflections I had from dealing with depression for a chunk of time was the world is going to have to do really, really well to be able to torture me more than my own mind already did. Like I have already become... the prison keeper of... Every single little bit that I knew was exactly the like pharmaceutical grade insult that I wanted that was pinpoint accurate to make me feel as bad as possible. And each different time that you get past that.

another head goes up on the wall, another head goes up on the wall. That's another situation that I've managed to get myself through. When I was adamant that it was going to be destruction and embarrassment and all the rest of it, and everybody that's listening is listening. And that's the benefit also of discipline and having high standards, which is like you know that what you subject yourself to on a regular basis, the standards you hold.

are higher than the other things so you're not intimidated by like what are other people gonna think how's it gonna do because you have worked to such a degree that that's all that is almost like settling that's like the low end of what you're expecting yes and you know this difference i think between kind of an inner scorecard and an outer scorecard the outer scorecard is almost the easier one like what do other people think do people like me you know

Obviously, it's not under control, but there's a softness to that because it may well be less than you're actually capable of. Yes. Yes. What about Eisenhower's smoking habit? What did you learn from that? Well, we're talking about this guy who says, you know, freedom is the opportunity for self-discipline. He's the most powerful man in the world, and he's in his 50s or 60s, and he has these heart problems, and the doctor goes,

dude it's the smoking man you've been smoking you know five packs a day or whatever for 30 years and he gives himself an order and he quits right he just quits cold turkey after a lifetime of a habit which is extremely difficult to do And I think the Stoics were very suspicious of anything that was in control of us. So Seneca says, you know, show me somebody who isn't a slave, you know, a slave to a mistress or to fame or to money or to what other people think. And, you know, he wanted to.

He wanted to break any of those habits, right? Ruling over the self is the greatest empire. Are you in charge of the cigarettes? Are you in charge of the phone? Are you in charge or the need to win one more or make more? Can't pass up the deal. I can't be out of the thrill. You know, are you in charge or is the need in charge? When the need was in charge, that was something you needed to look very, very hard at. If you need any substance in order to perform, then it stopped conferring a benefit.

That's the reason why I did A Thousand Days Sober, even though I wasn't drinking that much. I was like, look, I am going to be the person that gets to call the shots. I'm going to go out on nights out. And I'm going to work out what it's like to go on a night out sober as a club promoter, as a fucking club promoter for like 15 years. And then I did 500 Days Without Caffeine. And I think that caffeine stares people in the face. I think that...

Most people don't have varying levels of tiredness. They simply have varying levels of caffeine concentration in their blood. People don't say, I'm tired. They say, I need a coffee. You've supplanted the problem for the solution. the way that you describe it. And what happens is by doing that, I'm using chemicals as a proxy for everything else here, but you paper over the cracks that are causing that to come through.

Have you ever stopped to think about why you're so fucking tired at two o'clock in the afternoon? Right. Is it maybe that you're not actually getting enough sleep? Is it that you're going to bed at different times? Is it that your sleep environment? You're doing the wrong things. Exactly. Yeah, of course. Yeah, you've got to look at the sort of root cause. Yeah. Anytime you can't not do a thing, you probably need to stop doing that thing. And this is true for work, too.

Right? Like, if you're like, I just can't be out of it. Like, I can't stop. Workaholism. You know, there's the addictions or the compulsions that are not socially acceptable. You know, heroin. And then there's the ones that are not just socially acceptable, but often socially rewarded. And those are the most insidious ones.

You know, people will applaud you for and they'll celebrate and then they'll laugh at you or question you or make you feel like you're the crazy one for not doing it. Why don't you want to go out with us? Well, I don't enjoy doing that.

And then you feel like a weirdo for having your sort of own thing that you don't want to do. And yeah, it requires discipline. I'm not interested. The same for you with the books. I mean, I imagine that you're writing close to the limit in terms of what you could write. If someone had a gun to your head, you would be able to crack out another however many percent per day. So there is some that's being left in the tank.

There is a little bit that's being left in the tank with regards to that. So, well, why don't you want more success? That would be more accolade. That would be more applause. The publishers would be fucking delighted, I'm sure. Well, the question when they try to see someone, an addict, or does someone have a problem, it's what are the costs of this thing to you? Are there negative repercussions in your life?

from this thing right and so if it's coming at the expense of x y and z so yeah sure i could do more i could do more faster but it would it would start to deteriorate the quality of the other things that are important to me or it might shrink the time horizon that i the the longevity that i would like to have and so yeah you have to ask yourself and is is

Am I trying to do it now or trying to do it later? Well, what's actually important to me? What about the cautionary tales from people like Napoleon and King George IV? Because I have... No background about either of these people. Well, I tell the story in the book about Napoleon. He writes this essay as a young man about the perils of ambition. You know, he says, what is Alexander doing?

trying to make it to the ends of the earth. You know, he can't, he's conquering this and this and this. And he goes like, what a fool, you know? So the irony that, you know, he would then be that conqueror, it's almost too perfect. But it's what happens, right? None of those people start off thinking that's where I'm going to end up. It's a process that once you begin, it's hard to stop. And yet, like once that governor comes off, it's almost...

inevitable, right? And ambition is a thing. We're talking about socially acceptable addictions. Ambition is a thing that very few people question or criticize up until It stops working, right? Everyone's clapping you on the back, telling you it's a great idea, right up until you overreach and lose all of it. And then they go, you're a fool. What were you thinking? How could you do it?

And so you have to have that sense. Other people, consequences of your life, all these things, they're going to be the lagging indicators. You've already passed the point of no return. So you have to have... this sort of internal governor, this internal compass, this internal sense of your limitations that prevents you from becoming another cliche.

And what about King George? Well, King George, I was sort of contrasting him to, do you want the life where you say, I don't eat this, this is how hard I have to work out, this is, you know. The strenuous life seems like the hard life, right? Compared to, I mean, eat what I want, I do what I want. But who's happier, right? The person who's in good shape or the person who's not in good shape?

The thing about exercise and diet is that it's hard now, but the rewards or the place it gets you is pleasant. The thing about the Oreos or the milkshake or, you know, whatever it is, is it feels good on the way down, but the consequences are, you know, they linger. Was that King George? 1800s. Was he East India Trading Company time? He's not like the American King George. I think he's after that King George. Too many Georges. This is Queen Victoria's father.

I believe. Okay, so this might be about the right time. I'm watching Taboo at the moment. So it's a five-year-old series. Or her uncle, I forget. Tom Hardy in it. Yeah. Right. And it's all about the East India Trading Company and Tom Hardy comes back and he's been in Africa and he's learned voodoo magic and loads of other stuff. And it's got, I would be very surprised if it's not, but it's got this sort of big.

bloated, like super fat king and he's gout and sort of bad complexion and all this sort of stuff. And yeah, I mean, you look at that and Tom Hardy's this guy who is continually sort of underfoot. He keeps on making the right. decisions whenever he can and you do you are contrasted between there's another guy that's kind of an echo in between both of them and the guy that has the life that you would want to lead is probably tom hardy is the guy that's actually doing the right things

I sent you, I think I mentioned to you the last time that we spoke about The Forgotten Highlander, Alistair Urquhart. How did you get on with that? It was fascinating. It was fascinating. Yeah, when we talk about people who've been through real adversity, right? There's those people. There's levels to this guy. Yeah, yeah, of course. There is some level where you're like...

how is that even humanly possible? How did you not break under these circumstances? And it should remind you, I think, I mean, one of the things I take from that is that like, We're capable of more than we could possibly conceive of. So when you're having that dark night of the soul, you're in the trough of despair, you can definitely make it through this. You definitely have what it takes.

to do this like we you come from an unbroken line of those ancestors right like every one of us comes from an unbroken line of people who endured terrible things who made it through famines and wars and adversity and challenges that we can't even begin to conceive of. We should feel, we should remind ourselves that we're their descendants. We are the heirs to that tradition.

To go back to the idea about Marx, are you going to prove yourself worthy of it or are you going to be a disappointment? To me, that's a question to ask yourself in some challenging moment. Ryan Holiday, ladies and gentlemen, if people want to check out the stuff that you're doing at the moment, where's best to go? Dailystoic.com. I do one email every day.

about Stoic philosophy. And if you like podcasts, obviously do. I do a podcast version of it totally for free every day at the Daily Stoic Podcast. Brian, I appreciate you. Thanks for having me.