Ryan Holiday ON: The Importance of Being Disciplined With Our Ambition & How to Get Comfortable with Change

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
If success is this lagging indicator of commitment, Now, how
can you be sure that you are paying your dues?
Best selling author on the Post the number one health
and well iness.

Speaker 2 (00:10):
Podcast On Purpose with Jay Shetty.

Speaker 3 (00:14):
Hey everyone, welcome back to On Purpose, the number one
health podcast in the world. Thanks to each and every
one of you that come back every week to become happier, healthier,
and more healed. Today, I'm talking to a guest who
I've had the pleasure of interviewing. I think I think
this is the fourth or fifth time that I'm getting
to sit down with him, probably the person I've interviewed
the most in my entire interviewing career, and it's because

(00:37):
he keeps putting out incredible work and incredible books that
I hope you're going to read. I'm talking about Ryan Holiday,
who's one of the world's best selling living philosophers. Ryan's books,
like his new One Discipline Is Destiny, which is available
right now number one New York Times best sellers multiple
some of my favorite ones, The Obstacle is the Way,

(00:57):
Ego is the Enemy, the Daily Stoic, and they've been
translated into over forty languages and sold multi millions of copies.
I'm so excited to talk to Ryan today about this
new book, The Power of Self Control. I know it's
been out for a bit, but this is a topic
I'm fascinated by. If you don't already have this book,
go and grab it. If you have on, go and

(01:17):
grab one for a friend. Ryan, thank you for being
back on the show. Yeah, it's always great, man, it's great.
I remember when I first met you. It was such
an inspiration for me because seeing you uncover stoicism for
the modern world definitely was parallel to how I felt
about what I wanted to do for Vedic knowledge and

(01:37):
Vadic wisdom. And it's been exceptional to watch end and
I love that. I hope there's more.

Speaker 2 (01:42):
I don't know. This is the end of the series, right.

Speaker 1 (01:45):
This is two and a four book.

Speaker 3 (01:46):
Okay, good, good, okay, okay, yeah, you keep finding a
way of doing that. I need to figure that out.
But no, it's great we're talking about this, and I
love that you chose what I think today is considered
as such an unsexy topic and I don't if you
see it that way.

Speaker 1 (02:03):
Discipline, I mean, I do, I mean, especially because the ancience,
the word they used for discipline was temperance, which sounds
even less like discipline, at least like that there's like
a kind of a coolness to it. But temperance feels
like the opposite of fun. Right. It feels like you're
telling me what I can't do, all the things I

(02:23):
have to avoid or all the things I have to
stop short one. And people don't like that, even though
when you actually think about the people who do whatever
they want all the time. Yes, actually some of the
most unhappy, miserable people in the entire world.

Speaker 3 (02:40):
Yeah, And it's funny you say that now because I
started thinking back to Vde acknowledging the word is tapa tapa,
and and it means austerity. That's the closest translation. And
the idea that discipline is often compared to austerity, right.

Speaker 2 (02:56):
And austerity.

Speaker 1 (02:57):
The purpose of that is not deprivation of austerity, is
to be not corrupted, to be sustainable, right, to avoid
what is superfluous or unnecessary. And it's not even about
a thing, it's not even about avoiding pleasure altogether. Like
in the agent world, the big in the Western asient world,

(03:19):
the big dispute is between the Epicureans and the Stoicism
and the Stoics. And you think Epicureans are the lovers
of pleasures and the Stoics are the haters of pleasure,
But even the Epicureans believed that any pleasure taken too
far becomes a source of pain or suffering. So it's
what we're really talking about. Then it comes down to
this idea of temperance or balance. What is the right amount?

(03:43):
Some things, the right amount is zero, but for most things,
the right amount is some sort of moderate or midpoint.
And you have to have wisdom and self control toude
not only figure out what that is, but then to
stop at that line.

Speaker 2 (03:56):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (03:57):
Yeah, And that's the hard part because I feel like
society has gone in the direction of becoming addicted to pleasure, yes, well,
pleasure seeking. Where from the Stoics perspective, why did we
even ever go down that road? Like why did we
leave wisdom and self control or did we never have
it at toll and we've always been trying to balance it.

Speaker 1 (04:17):
Yeah, I mean, I guess that's the big question, is
like why do we take something that we like too far? Right?
So the Epicureans would say like, look, drinking is great,
but if you have a hangover the next day, was
it actually so great? And so you know, if you
push or the pleasure too far, it becomes not pleasurable.

(04:38):
But in the moment that feels very far away, right,
like in the moment you want the thing now. Obviously
sex is this thing for people. It's like the thing
you're attracted to in this moment. You're not thinking about
the shame or the regret or the consequences or the
pain or the loss or the greed. You're not thinking
of all those things. You're just thinking of right now.
So I think a big part of this this where

(04:58):
the wisdom comes into the ability to step back. So
what am I going to think about this after I
get it? What am I going to think about this later?
And realizing that your mind is very good at tricking here.
Just as your mind often tells you like stop, you're
too tired, you can't go any further. You actually have
a lot less left in the tank, your mind also

(05:18):
tells you you need this thing, you won't regret it.
It's a you know whatever, And it's really good at
putting those blinders on. And so part of I think
any meditative practice, any philosophical practice, any journaling practice, is
being able to argue with yourself a little bit, to
step back and have that conversation about, well, is what

(05:39):
I think about this true? Is the story I'm telling
myself about this true? I think nowhere is this more
important than for like ambitious people who have told themselves,
I will be happy when I accomplish X. Right. Like
all the things we need to be most disciplined about,
ambition is one of them because it tells you this live.
After I become in your time as a seller, after

(06:00):
I make a million dollars, after I get a gold medal,
then I'll be good. My parents will be proud of me,
I'll be happy. Then I can relax. And you have
to have the perspective the wisdom to go has that
ever been true ever in my life before? Has that
ever been true in history? And then go, oh, okay, no,
I can't tell myself that lie. That doesn't mean you

(06:21):
don't work really hard to do stuff, but you're not
doing it under the false pretenses that it's going to
be conditional to your happiness.

Speaker 3 (06:30):
Yeah, but there's a part of us that and I
love what you're saying, but there's a part of us
that always believes that we are the exception, that we
will know how to spend money better, that will know
how to have love in our life better, like we
won't be the one who fumbles off the ende of
a cliff, Like we're smart, don't all our friends, even
if we don't say that we're wiser than the people

(06:50):
who came before us.

Speaker 2 (06:51):
And that's and that's ego is the enemy.

Speaker 3 (06:53):
But of course, like that, that idea, I think is
what misleads us so much.

Speaker 1 (06:56):
Yes, yeah, it's it's like, Okay, you're on the metal standing,
just won the gold medal, and you're not feeling happy
for yourself. You're thinking, well, I could have done a faster.
You're thinking, oh, I gotta do it again. Right even
in that moment, you're not able to think I'm doing
it to myself right now, what I will be doing
to myself in the future. And that's this sort of

(07:17):
insidious thing. And you can understand why from an evolutionary perspective,
it drives the species forward. You can also see the
immense personal cost that it inflicts on us because it
never allows us to be present or content or happy
with what we have in that moment, and so I
think again, people think discipline is the I always push

(07:39):
myself to do better, do more, discipline can also be
curbing that very impulse, right, Like ordinary people, when we're
talking about discipline, what we're talking about is getting off
your butt, working out, resisting eating candy and eating nutritious food.
Instead it's you know, managing your screen time. But I

(08:01):
think for a lot of more disciplined people, or for
people who have tasted the rewards of discipline, you have
to learn how to be disciplined about discipline, which is
maybe the highest level of the whole thing.

Speaker 2 (08:16):
Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 3 (08:17):
Now we're I guess now we've started talking about discipline
as a tool to achieve daily or weekly, monthly, yearly tasks,
But you're actually saying that we need to go back
a bit, like how would you unpack that for how
you're defining discipline there?

Speaker 1 (08:33):
Well, it's like what's the number one cause of injury
for athletes? It's overtraining, right, So like, yeah, you're ordinary person,
it's like you're not training enough, you're not working hard enough. Yeah,
But then at an more elite level, at a more
accomplished level. Actually, the trouble is, hey, the racism for
six weeks, Like you do you want to peak now,

(08:53):
or do you want to peak at the right moment
right or this is just a practice session you don't
have to go out, or you know it's a long season,
or you prepared for that, and so you know, discipline
has to be balanced with sustainability, with rest, relaxation, recuperation, recovery,

(09:13):
all these other things. And that requires kind of a
spiritual discipline, not just hey, I can run an hour
without getting tired, but like, can I stop myself from
doing that? That's not what I should be doing in
this moment.

Speaker 3 (09:27):
Yeah, And what I like about that is that I
feel there's different phases and stages, Like in the first
two years of my career, where we would have met
in New York and we went on a walk once
as well, I think, and we were walking around the
city and I remember talking about a few of these themes.
But it was at that time in my life I
was working probably eighteen hour days, sure, because I had
to in order to kind of break through that first level.

(09:50):
I was still disciplined in the sense that I would
make time to eat to some degree, and meditate, and
I would make some time to do a few things
of rest. But generally I was working seven days a week,
eighteen hours a day, and I'm very grateful.

Speaker 2 (10:01):
I did that. I don't look back and go, oh,
I wasted two years. It was brilliant.

Speaker 3 (10:04):
But then in the last couple of years, I've taken
my evenings back and so I don't work after six pm.

Speaker 2 (10:10):
It's just a rule.

Speaker 3 (10:11):
I don't want to work. I don't want to be
on the phone. And I was talking to a friend
and it's exactly what you said. He was saying to me.
He was just like, well, don't you get less done?
And I was like, no, I get more done. Sure,
because I know how much I have to get done.
I'm far more attentive and focused. And then I'm not
working at nine pm when I can rest and recuperate,
and now the next day I'm better for it. And
so I hear that idea that that is also a discipline,

(10:34):
or they could be seen as you're being lazy in
the evening.

Speaker 1 (10:36):
And I think it's the question is it easy for
you to do that? Yes? Or no? Right, it's hard.
It's actually harder for you. I imagine to say I'm
stopping at six than it is to say I'm going
to work all night till I fall asleep at my desk, right, Like.

Speaker 2 (10:50):
Yeah, I could do that.

Speaker 3 (10:51):
Yeah, if my wife's not around, I can work every
weekend and evening.

Speaker 1 (10:54):
And also it's realizing that you have multiple things that
you're trying to do simultaneously. So yeah, sure, working, continuing
to work eighteen hour days may help you continue to
advance in your career. But if one of the also
the other things you're trying to work on, is to
stay married or to have a happy marriage, or you
have children, or you have your health or whatever you

(11:15):
were telling me before we recorded it. You like you
got in at three am last night. Let's say you're
a person who always wakes up very early, Like I'm
a person who wakes up early. Yes, But then I
also have to understand that sleep is a discipline. And
so if some changes outside my control mean that I
didn't go to bed to a certain time, the fact
that I wake up at five, that's bad idea, and
it actually requires it. You wouldn't think that sleep discipline

(11:38):
would be a thing, but in the military they talk
about that sleep discipline. You got to get your hours
because you make bad decisions when you are not rested,
and other people bear the consequences of those decisions. And
so deciding hey, I'm going to skip this thing that
feels comfortable to me to do that feels natural for
me to do that, I feel like I'm letting some

(11:58):
part of myself down by not doing I actually have
to be the bigger, more self controlled person and say
in this moment, I'm not going to do that right.
And I think at the end of the day, self
discipline is the ability to have an emotion and instinct
of feeling to do a thing and then to catch
yourself and go, is that actually the right thing to do?

Speaker 2 (12:20):
Yes? Or no?

Speaker 1 (12:20):
And sometimes it is. Sometimes it's hey, it's cold outside
and it's five am and it's still dark, and I
don't want to get up, but I have to get
up because I've made these commitments I'm behind blah blah blah.
And other times it is to stay in bed right
just like you know, sometimes you feel that surge of

(12:41):
temper coming on and you have to go, no, that's
not a good like it's always the ability to step back,
put the emotion, the instinct the opinion to the test.
And I think you learn this in meditation. I think
you learn this for soicism in the journaling of going like,
here's the thing, and I can choose it or not.
I can choose to identified or not. It is not me.

(13:02):
The Stokes have this word assent right, not like ascent
up a mountain, but as s e nt.

Speaker 2 (13:08):
Do you assent to the.

Speaker 1 (13:09):
Feeling or not? Do you agree to it, rubber stamp it,
approve it, go along with it or not?

Speaker 2 (13:14):
Do you subscribe?

Speaker 1 (13:15):
Yeah, that's what discipline is is about what do you
assent to and what you not assent to?

Speaker 3 (13:21):
Yeah, I wonder I want to go with a tangent.
I want to come back to that because I actually
really like that point. But a few words ago, there
was something that you sparked for me. Sometimes I feel
like with work it's doable. Sometimes with even our partner,
with friends, it's possible to say no.

Speaker 2 (13:36):
To be disciplined.

Speaker 3 (13:37):
I find like, and I want to ask you this
from your perspective, what about a sense of dad guilt?
Like we talk a lot about mum guilt, and you know,
if it was speaking to mom, i'd ask about mum
guilt in this scenario, but from a dad guilt point
of view, like you're a dad, I you know, and
I see you wanting to be a good dad and
you're very involved to do kids. But at the same time,
you're a writer and you're in a bookstore and you're

(13:58):
doing activists like this.

Speaker 2 (14:00):
There so many things that you do.

Speaker 3 (14:01):
Do you ever feel like that's like the hardest place
where discipline because it's like even if a dad comes
home at three am and the kid once in at
four am, Like does the dad stay out there?

Speaker 2 (14:10):
What does the dad do? How does he work?

Speaker 1 (14:12):
Well? It's so insidious. What we do is we go like,
I'm doing this for my family, right, and it's like
are you or are you doing it for you? Are
you doing it for the money? How can you be
doing it for your family if you don't see those
people as a result of what you're doing. Someone told
me many years ago, they said love is spelled time,

(14:32):
and I think about that all the time. I mean,
obviously I always have things that take me away more
than I would like them to be. I suppose I
could do nothing, but that would also leave me unfulfilled.
That would not be me setting the example. I want
to set for my kids. But at the end of
the day, realizing that everything I say yes to also
means saying no to someone or something else, And in

(14:56):
some ways I try to use that dad go a
little constructively. I try to go, Okay, this person's asking
me to do this thing, and this person's offering me
money to do this thing, or this is some cool
opportunity they want me to go Hella skiing and British
Columbia or something, and I go, I don't want to
say no to this cool opportunity. I don't want to
miss this memory. I don't want to hurt this person's feelings.

(15:17):
And I go, But I am hurting a person's feelings.
I am saying no to a memory, like I am
taking something away from someone, and that person is a
five year old and they're going to feel it far
more deeply. Someone else will take my spot on that
plane to British Columbia. No one will spend that time
with my kids. And so I try to use that

(15:38):
guilt constructively in the sense that I'm reminding myself always
that's saying yes to one thing means saying no to
something else, and that conversely, saying no means saying yes, right,
and then I always as much as I can. I
want to be saying yes to the things that actually
matter to me, and I want to be putting my

(15:59):
money my mouth is. It's like if someone looked at
your calendar, you say you put your family first, You
say family is important, blah blah blah. But then if
I looked at your calendar, what would it show, right,
if there was a custody hearing, or you know, if
you were being investigated, if you're being audited, what would
the receipts show? Do you actually value them? Do you

(16:21):
put them first? And like it should be pretty pretty
obvious whether that's true or not.

Speaker 3 (16:28):
Yeah. No, I have an exercise in Think like a
monk where asks people to do their time audit for
the week, and it's literally that where it's like, and
it's against your values because someone's values may be different.
But the idea that your bank statement and your schedule
show your values more than what you say yes, right,
The words that come out of our mouth are not

(16:48):
actually our values. There are aspirations. Those are the values
you wish you had, but the values that actually go
what do you spend your money on? And what do
you spend your time on? Like that's far more what
your real values are.

Speaker 2 (17:00):
Yeah, I think about that.

Speaker 1 (17:01):
I saw this interview with Jimmy Carter many years ago,
and he has this sort of crisis of faith and
he goes like, if I was put on trial for
being a Christian, would I be convicted? Right? So it's
not what you say, not what you think, not what
you wish, but like what are the action show? And
I think about that with Mark Srelis, who I write
a lot about the Stoic Emperor, like he never identifies

(17:24):
explicitly as a Stoic, and one of his translators says,
you know, he never even says the word stoicism like
in his writings, but he's considered this philosopher emperor. And
he probably still would have been even if his writings
had never survived.

Speaker 2 (17:40):
Because the deeds are there.

Speaker 1 (17:42):
There's a Latin expression acta non verbal like deeds not words.
And so you have to always think, not what do
I write about, what do I think about? What do
I want to be true? But what are the action show?
And no one is perfect, and I think anyone auditing
themselves is going to be there's going to be some disappointments,
but you want, like the big statements of priority to

(18:04):
be there and to go back to the idea of
guilt when you're looking at it, you shouldn't like whip
yourself and feel but you should be like, Okay, this
is not the painting the picture that I want to paint,
and that you're lucky enough in that moment to catch
it now, not when you're eighty, you know, not on
your deathbed. You're you're you've caught it now. And so
what changes are you going to make? Yeah, to get

(18:27):
closer between the ideal and the reality.

Speaker 2 (18:30):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 3 (18:32):
And something that's interesting that's coming out from me here
is that pretty much everything we do every day can
be defined by thinking, feeling, and doing. But I think
we're living at a time where we're stuck in the
feeling generation. So we do things because we want to
feel a certain way, but then when we feel things,
we don't know what to do with it. So I'll
give an example of what I mean by that. If

(18:53):
you if we feel guilt, most of us don't know
how to shift from that feeling into thinking and doing
something different in order to not feel that guilt again. Yes,
and if we want to feel happy, we just try
and feel happy, not realizing that you have to change
your thoughts and what you do in order to feel
happiness or whatever it may be. What I'm trying to

(19:15):
get at there is like that to me sounds like
a discipline too. But we've gone so into feeling because
I think for so long thinking and doing what the
only things talked about, and we didn't feel enough.

Speaker 1 (19:26):
I think realizing that almost all the things you want
in life are accidental byproducts of habits, processes, systems, routines. Right,
So Victor Frankel famously said that happiness can't be pursued,
it must ensue. It's the result of getting those big
things right, and then you just feel this kind of
feeling of happiness as a byproduct. You don't as you said,

(19:48):
you don't go today, I must feel happy, right, It's
the result of having meaning and purpose and taking the
right actions. And so people sometimes look at the books
that I've written and then like what, like, how did
you publish so many books? And it's like publishing is
not what I think about. I think about writing. I
wake up every day and write, and the accidental by

(20:10):
product of that is the publishing right, and so good habits,
good routines, Like you want a happier home life, It's like,
are you spending more time there?

Speaker 2 (20:19):
You know?

Speaker 1 (20:20):
How are you setting up systems or processes that the
result is that outcome? Right? You control what you put
in that the outcome happens or it doesn't happen. And
I think so often we just you're right, We just
want the feeling, and so we try to cheat it
or steal it, or we feel guilty that we don't
have it, when really you could start small right now

(20:41):
and just get yourself closer to it.

Speaker 3 (20:44):
What do you think is the best discipline you've built
like over time? Like is it writing? Obviously that would
be the obvious one. But is there another one that
you think underpins that success. Is there a discipline you've
worked on the longest.

Speaker 2 (20:56):
Well.

Speaker 1 (20:56):
I think writing is such a sedentary sort of intellectual
cerebral thing that I try to balance it out with
like a physical practice. So I try to do something
hard every single day, running, swimming, biking, I do a
walk once a day, Like I do something hard every day,
and part of what that is is transferable back to

(21:19):
the practice, right, because again, it comes down to the
you don't want to do it. It's hard, it's not going
the way you want it, but you've cultivated the muscle
of being able to push through that. Like, there's lots
of claims about the health benefits of cold plunges, and
they may or may not exist. That's not why I
do it, right. The muscle for me is the cranking
of the knob of the looking at the cold punge

(21:40):
at my house and going it is going to be
unpleasant to get in there, but I have the ability
to force myself to do that. That's the muscle that
you want to cultivate. And I think, you know people
want to be the person on the other side of that,
but they don't realize that the way you do it
is by just starting it. Just starting it.

Speaker 3 (22:01):
Yeah, it's so true. I can relate to so much
of that in my own life. And when you're saying that,
it's I feel like today most of what I do,
I'd say I spend a lot. I'd spend like seventy
five percent of my life outside of my comfort zone.
I am constantly doing things that demand more from me
than I believe I'm skilled and able to accomplish, yeah,

(22:22):
and in a healthy way, in a good sense, because
I feel challenged, and I feel that challenge forces me
to grow my skills, which then meet a new challenge,
and then that keeps growing. But then I find myself
in my personal life often resorting to comfort because I
need to kind of cushion the amount of like su
pressure and stress. And so it's like this for me,
I'm at that place in my life where I'm like, Okay,

(22:44):
I'm pushing so much and in my personal life to
be super like you know, cushion.

Speaker 1 (22:48):
To some degree, it is interesting, right, we will take
and Seneca points us out on one of his letters,
like we'll push ourselves. It will take risks to succeed financially,
to succeed in business, to succeed in our careers, to
butchers our reputations, But then we don't want to do
it in the other places where most of us would

(23:09):
admit it actually matters. Right, my favorite passages and meditations
Mark Sutis is like a better wrestler, but not a
better forgiver of faults, a better friend and type places
he's pointing out how we'll go like, yeah, I'm trying
to like You'll talk to someone that have this well
laid out plan for how they're trying to increase their
back squad or their mild time, or how they're trying

(23:32):
to to they've got they've they've got these aggressive goals
for their stock pricer or you know how many copies
they want to sell this thing, or they have. We
have really clear financial and professional goals, and then in
our personal life we just wing it. And I'm not
saying that I.

Speaker 2 (23:49):
Didn't Yeah, I didn't mean that, but I know you mean, yeah, yeah,
I love that point.

Speaker 1 (23:52):
And I think the point is like you have to
be challenging yourself in your personal life, also getting vulnerable,
you know, getting outside your comfort zone, having the conversations
that you like. I think it's because our professional stuff
is so much more quantifiable, and then there's other people
are looking at it, whereas the other stuff is private,
and so we we just we hold ourselves to different standards.

(24:15):
And you think about what that costs us in terms
of a place you get to in your marriage in
ten years that had you thought more consciously about or
put one tenth of the focus on, maybe you could
have got there in one year and then had nine
years of enjoying it.

Speaker 2 (24:31):
Yeah, no, that I fully agree with.

Speaker 3 (24:33):
Then maybe I didn't clarify when I said comfort, I
mean more apart from my sleep sked, I have so
many routines that already set up that I try and
make my personal life more comfortable because in my individual
life of my own self care because I find I'm
pushing myself in so many areas. But I love where
you took it to because I think that's the critical one, right.

(24:55):
It's like what you're kind of leaning towards is most
people will become people they don't want to be in
order to achieve something, and that external pursuit often does that.
By the end of building a billion dollar company or
whatever it may be, you end up going, well, I
don't even like the person I am anymore, or I've

(25:16):
lost the person who I thought I was. Whereas the
pursuit of doing it inwardly with your family, with your friendships,
the openness that's required, chances are you'll become the person
you want to be. Like chances are you'll become someone
that you're proud of being. And I think that's such
I want to dive into that. That is such a
powerful way of looking at it, and you're saying it's
because it's the quantifiability, which I think there's truth in.

(25:39):
I also think it's the it's harder. It's harder because,
like you're saying, there's no external reward, there's no number
that proves you did it, and it's fluctuating way more
because people's emotions, like anyone in your family and friendship,
you can't control it. Could you can control or master
an algorithm or the stock market is some degree, but

(26:02):
with a person, you can't do any of that because
you can't set something up and then be like you're
going to stay this way.

Speaker 1 (26:09):
Well, it's like you get so used to the control
and the power that you have from the mastery of
your professional domain. Right like, when I sit down to write,
I'm in control. I'm comfortable. This is a place that
I have carved out for myself. When I am arguing
with my wife or I am dealing with three year

(26:31):
old who's having a meltdown, I'm not in control and
I'm humbled by it and I'm struggling with it, and
I don't feel like I've got it because I have
so much less. I've literally never done that before. I'll
and I'll have such a short window where I'll ever
have to do it right. It's not it's not like, oh,
I've been in this place in a book twelve times, right,

(26:53):
Like I've only had one five year old ye, and
so you know, it's just so much more challenging.

Speaker 2 (26:59):
It's just a.

Speaker 1 (27:00):
Much more multi dimensional, you know, and of one like
difficult thing, and so it's going to demand more of you.
And I think I think it's like, look, optimizing your
professional life or maximizing your professional life very unlikely to
improve your personal life. But if you have optimized and

(27:22):
maximized and improved your personal life, got in your house
and order, you're going to be better at what you do.
What are you going to care less in some degrees
about things that used to bother you so much? And
so which one are you going to focus on? Right?
Because you can get you can be a titan in
your industry and then be a total amateur at home, right,
And I think go where it's easy.

Speaker 3 (27:45):
And that's and that's the thing I think discipline often
gets applied to the titan in the industry, not the
amateur at home. Yeah, And that's how we think about discipline.
We think about discipline is what can I achieve through this?

Speaker 2 (27:58):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (27:59):
In an external sense. Yeah, and at least today that's
the language, and you.

Speaker 1 (28:03):
Can get away with so much more if you're really talented.
You know, you can be a jerk. Right, you can
demand a lot of people because you're paying these people, right, Like,
I'm not saying you should, I'm just saying that there's
accommodations that are made for you and sort of insidiously,
the more successful you are, the more needed you are,
the more accommodations you are. But there's none of that

(28:24):
in the other area, and so you have to there's
some humility required, Right, You're meeting equals on an equal
playing field, and the discipline to say like, yeah, I'm
I'm going to wrestle with that, I'm going to try
to get better. I'm not going to allow myself to
do these following bad habits. That takes a certain amount

(28:45):
of self control and focus and discipline.

Speaker 2 (28:48):
Yeah, I guess.

Speaker 3 (28:48):
I guess one of the biggest challenges with discipline is
that we're trying to destroy a habit that we hate.
Like there's this idea that it just has to break
and go. Right, if you have a habit that you
don't like about yourself, whatever that may be, it's like
you just or released. I've found when I'm coaching clients
and working with people is that they have this like

(29:10):
bitter feeling towards this thing that they have and they
want it to go at all costs. But that almost
makes you hold on to it harder, like that makes
you grip onto it sure and wrestle with it more.
And I remember when when I lived in India, a
lot of the time, the analogy that was given or
the metaphor that was given to meditate on because we'd
see all the time was like snake skin. And the

(29:31):
idea was that when snakes shed their skin, they just
slither out. They don't it doesn't like they don't want
day just go well and they don't even have Yeah, yeah,
they're not like the whole where it's like like snakes
just slither out and then their skin gets left behind
and then it you know, they'll grow more. And so
the idea that it's it's such a natural, organic process
of if you just slither, if you just move forward,

(29:53):
you naturally shed.

Speaker 1 (29:55):
Yeah, that's the beauty of process, right, You don't sit
down anymore. I have to do this right now? What
do I have to do today? What are the small steps?
And you get great by minor improvements compounded on top
of each other day and day out, showing up day
and day out. And that's the same. Hey, we were

(30:17):
fighting like crazy six months ago and now things are awesome.
Why is that they made a change and you made
a change, and you made a response in a change
in response to their change, and it compounded and now
you're here. That work can fall away at any moment.
You have to rebuild it. But I think you know,
the Buddhists talk about willful will like almost the more
intentional you are about it. That's the irony too, is

(30:37):
we're talking about how you know, being intentional in your
professional life often pays off. Being intentional having clear expectations, wants,
desires in your personal life is harder because it depends
on other people, people who are not like you, people
who did not sign up for that. And I think
one of the things you learn having kids and then

(30:58):
also being married is like a scent in that same
sense of like acquiescing to things, adjusting to things like
I'm a routine person. Kids don't care about your routine.
They fall asleep when they fell asleep, and you have
to adjust like you're no longer the center of the universe. Yeah,

(31:18):
and that is such an important thing that you have
to figure out and adjust and accommodate towards you're the
master of the universe here, but that you leave that
behind when you walk through the front door.

Speaker 2 (31:29):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (31:29):
Absolutely. I was talking to a Maah from Yes Theory.
I don't know if you know the guys that Yes Theory. Yeah,
they're awesome and we've had them on the show before.
But I was talking to Ama the other day and
they just released their project Iceman, I think their documentary
first time, like the Future documentary. But he was talking
about this and he was saying that when they built
Yes Theory, the goal was like, how can we say

(31:51):
yes to things we would usually say no to? RTE
Like that was the obvious point and now he's learned
that it's equally important to say no. But the part
that really hit me when he was explaining in it,
I think we both vibe with the idea. He was
saying that, and it's something you said earlier. He said,
have to start saying yes to the things I find hardest.

(32:11):
And so he was saying that today, no matter how
many marathons he's done, no matter how many crazy expeditions
they've gone on, no matter how many countries they survive
with no money, he said, the hardest thing for him
to do is sit with his thoughts for fifteen minutes. Yeah,
he was like, that's the hardest thing. He goes, I
don't look forward to doing that.

Speaker 2 (32:27):
He said.

Speaker 3 (32:28):
If someone told me to train for something, he goes,
I look forward to that. But if someone told me
to sit down with my thoughts for fifteen minutes, because
I don't look forward to it. So that's what I'm doing.
And he was saying, that's why he's trying to build that.
And he was like, that's his new definition of seeking discomfort,
because he said when people come to h and say, do
you want to build like a million dollar company? A
billion dollar He's like, I can get excited about that,
But he goes, I don't get excited about it. Is

(32:49):
that a good sense of people finding what discipline is
for them?

Speaker 2 (32:53):
Or how do you see that?

Speaker 1 (32:54):
And I think restraint is the hardest thing, right, Please,
Pascal the fifteen hundreds said all of humanity's problems stem
from our inability to sit quietly in a room alone.
It was hard five hundred years ago, it's harder now
when you have a cell phone in your pocket, when
you could get on a flight and travel anywhere you

(33:14):
want in the world, and there's a limited distractions, opportunities,
things to get excited about. Like it's hard to hold
the mind still, to be physically still, or maybe not
to be physically still, but had the mind still while
the body is in motion. This requires like so much discipline,
so much self control, so much self awareness. Right even

(33:36):
to understand that it's hard for you, that it's something
that you are naturally averse to or avoid is a
step in that journey to getting better at it.

Speaker 2 (33:46):
Because a lot of.

Speaker 1 (33:46):
People are just doing, doing, and doing, and they're not
even aware they're running away from something. They're not even
aware that it makes them uncomfortable to be still. So
I think we have to understand it's this journey, and
hopefully as you go you get more more and more comfortable,
because at the end of the day, that's the one
constant in life. Wherever you go, there you are, there

(34:07):
you are. As expression goes like you're there, and if
you can't get comfortable with that, can't get in touch
with that, you can't see what's there. I think you're
gonna wake up one day and realize I did all
of this stuff to get away from something that's been
inside me the whole time. And that's very, very sad.

Speaker 3 (34:27):
That is That's yeah, that's well, that's that's the inconvenient
truth of it, right, Like that's the hard part that
you chased pleasure for so long that you completely missed
what was it, what was already there? But I think,
is it that we don't what is your take from
studying it?

Speaker 1 (34:46):
Like?

Speaker 3 (34:46):
Is it that we don't know the benefits enough? Is
it that we don't like processes enough? It is is
it that we're just addicted and there isn't a because
I look at and I do think looking at very
daily habit changes is the easiest way to build the
muscle to go.

Speaker 2 (35:02):
I can do this.

Speaker 3 (35:02):
So I always give the example of when I met
my wife, I was addicted to sugar like I genuinely was,
and I didn't even know it. I had a sprite
and a chocolate bar every day without thinking about it.
It's how I got through college. It was life. When
I was a monk, I didn't have either of those things,
but that was more of a suppression and there was
lots of other interesting things to do or I didn't

(35:24):
need that kind of energy.

Speaker 2 (35:25):
When I came back, I.

Speaker 1 (35:26):
Liked the convict was sober in prison. Yeah, you don't
have access exactly. I didn't have access to it, and
I didn't. I definitely built a discipline where I didn't
feel like I needed it. But then when I came
back to the real world, all I wanted was chocolate
and sugar. And so when I met my wife, it's like,
you know, we've been married for six years now together
for ten, and she like, at first she would just
educate me, like she would just tell me because she's

(35:49):
a dietician in nutrition is this is her job. She's
laying out all the dangers of sugar. Then she's like
taking it out of the like home, like it's not
around anymore, it's not accessible. And then almost like it's
taken six years, and I would say, now I'm at
a place where the habit has really transformed. It's like
a six year journey, and obviously it probably happened like
halfway through. I'd say like probably it happened three years

(36:09):
ago where I really started cutting out sugar.

Speaker 3 (36:11):
But he needed a coach. My wife was the coach.
It needed a obedient or submissive student. I trust my
wife on this area. It wasn't like I was. I
didn't have an ego about it. She knows more than
me about the body. And then on top of that,
it needed a focus in the sense that in my health,
we kind of did it one at a time without

(36:33):
even trying, where it's like we took out sugar first,
we started working out next, like she kind of did
that even unconsciously. It just took so much, and I
go and I know, obviously with the stoics we talk
about mentoring and coaching and there's always this cross learning.
But I feel like now we're all trying to do
it on our own.

Speaker 1 (36:48):
We are, and we're also expecting that it just happened.
That it's just like epiphany. If knowing what to do
was enough, everyone would be in great shape. No one
would have any of these illnesses or problems that we have.
It's so much more complicated than that, and I think
I do try to remind people that it's a journey
that you're on your whole life. There's passages and meditations

(37:11):
where MARKSURREALI is is going. You're an old man and
you're still losing your temper. You're still worried about what
other people think. He's like, you're still afraid of death
and it's almost here. And realizing that if the wisest
people in the world struggled their whole life with this thing,
the idea that you, who were lucky enough to hear

(37:32):
about it in your twenties or thirties or forties, that
you're just gonna get it. It's naive and it's also
unfair to yourself. The question is are you getting better
at it as you go? Right? Seneca says, how do
I know I'm making progress? And my philosophy says I've
begun to become a better friend to myself. So discipline

(37:55):
is not just squeezing blood from the stone. It's not
just whipping yourself. It's hiring a coach. It's you know,
setting reachable goals as you go. It's it's stepping back
and giving yourself credit and saying how far we've come? Man, Like,
we're doing great?

Speaker 2 (38:12):
Right.

Speaker 1 (38:13):
It's not it's not just this sort of like in
your face, like how are you not there yetness? Right,
It's it's a journey and you're not supposed to really
ever get there. That it's like the horizon, it's always
a little bit further away. And so you know, I
think when we hear discipline, I think we think of

(38:34):
like the marine drill sergeant, Yeah, this is kind of transformative.
You didn't have discipline and now you do. We should
also think about like having a discipline it is a
thing you do your whole life, and realizing that that's
how we should measure this progress.

Speaker 3 (38:51):
I think though, that that's what we're banging a head against,
is that the mind has been so far removed from
the idea that things take time, that patience is required,
that one step at a time, Like we hear those
things all the time, but there's literally nothing we do
in our lives that requires us to move one step

(39:13):
at a time anymore. Like it just doesn't work. And
we know these examples, like whether you're ordering food to
your house, or whether you're getting this delivered, or whether
you jump.

Speaker 2 (39:21):
Into an uber or lift.

Speaker 3 (39:22):
We know that, but I found it really interesting recently,
Like I just went through a double hernia surgery, and
it's not life threatening, and it's meant to be routine,
but it's far worse than the docors make it out
to be. And the journey back to feeling like I
can operate normally. It's been two months now and I'd
say I'm seventy five percent there. I would say that

(39:43):
the first four weeks were like learning how to walk again.
And I have never ever moved that slow in life
in a good way, as in that every movement of
the body or the mind had to be slow because
if I moved far, I could potentially relapse. So I couldn't.

Speaker 2 (40:03):
I can't.

Speaker 3 (40:03):
I still can't think anything above like fifteen pounds of
not allowed. I couldn't for that first month, like walk
for the first week, and then I had to shimmy
for the rest of it, and I had to, like
when I sat down on a chair, I had to
be so mindful. I was like, wow, I thought I
was mindful, And having this surgery has made me the
most mindful person ever. I've never eaten that slow, because

(40:25):
the digestion was harder and there was pain in this area,
and so it was the first time in a long
time I felt that present, and I consider myself to
be a present person.

Speaker 1 (40:35):
I think that the root of it is this illusion
we had that we're in control, right, that we're deciding
how things go, and then we have an injury or
a problem or something that disrupts it, and we are
rudely but also kindly reminded how little control we have.
I remember I was I moved across the country. I
was writing my first book. The two days before I

(40:55):
was supposed to start riding my bike New Orleans, I
get stuck in the street car tracks, like over the handlebars.
I break my left elbow and I'm left handed, and
so like all of the way that I was thinking
about writing this book goes out the window. For like
six weeks, I couldn't get like the adrenaline or the
endorphins that I needed just to function as a person.
I had to go on these like long walks. So

(41:16):
you know, I get the news and it's like, okay,
I'm not going to be able to work or think
for like six weeks. This is a total dead loss
for me. But then I started taking these walks, like hour,
two hour, three hour walks just around and what do
you know, I start writing the book in my head
on these walks. If I had gotten things the way

(41:37):
I wanted them to go, it would have been far
less advantageous to me than me having to respond to
the way they did end up going. So at the
core of stoicism is this idea that we don't control
what happens, we control how we respond to what happens.
It seems like it's this curse, this human frail to
your weakness, that like, we're not in can but our

(42:01):
superpower is our ability to respond to that, to find
good in it, to be made better for it. And
you go through this thing and you realize, oh, this
is an opportunity to practice all of the things that
I ordinarily take for granted I assume I have. There's
this one Japanese zen master, actually the zen master from

(42:24):
Zen in the art of Archery, and he's at the
end of his life. He's dying and he goes to
urinate in the snow and it's red. He's like bleeding.
He's dying, and the students are alarmed. He goes this too,
is practice all of these things that we experienced that
we didn't want or we thought they should go a
different way they're actually the opportunity to practice the way

(42:45):
where the logo says the Stokes would call it in
the way it's actually meant to do, if we choose
to be present, recognize it, and take that opportunity instead
of fighting it or resenting it or wishing over otherwise.

Speaker 3 (43:00):
Even I love that point that you made, that that
even that was practice. Yeah, that is beautiful like that,
that's magical, like that idea that even in that worst scenario,
at the end of all of it, it was still practice.
And if we could only wrap our hand around that,
because I think we still think of practice and performing
practice and arrival practice in the end, we still see

(43:20):
it as separate and there is nothing that separate. Like
that tree outside that's huge is still growing and being nourished.
It's just you don't see it anymore. And I almost
sometimes what I do with clients is I'll give everyone
a seed and I'll ask them to plant it and
take care of it.

Speaker 2 (43:37):
And that's like an.

Speaker 3 (43:38):
Old way of just learning growth, because it's so painful
to be watering something every day and not seeing it grow,
only to realize it is growing. Or I remember something
they gave us in the monastery was like they.

Speaker 2 (43:51):
Gave us this rope.

Speaker 3 (43:52):
There was like this really old rope and it was
already tied and we were asked to untie it. And
it's like most of us spent the whole of the
first day we got it trying to untie it and failing. Yeah,
only by like day twenty one to realize all we
have to do is pull it a little bit every
day and hopefully it would unravel because it was so tight,

(44:13):
and so even if you sat there all day, you
would just you'd go mental and you wouldn't achieve anything else.

Speaker 1 (44:18):
Right, Yeah, it's the wilful will.

Speaker 3 (44:21):
Right.

Speaker 1 (44:21):
It's like wanting it a certain way, needing it a
certain way, trying to force it as opposed to stepping
back and letting it be what it is. It's like
the way our mind works. Whatever is happening now you
will look back on sometime in the future as formative
to who you become.

Speaker 2 (44:39):
Right, and yet in.

Speaker 1 (44:40):
This moment, all we're doing is trying to make it
something other than it is. Right, Like, we will look
back on COVID and see the good in it, the
lessons that came from it, the reminders that gave us
the weird experiences we had, the connections, all of that.
We'll look at that, but in that moment, all we're
thinking about is when this will be over. Whose fault
it is? You know what it's cost us, right, Freud says,

(45:04):
in retrospect, the struggle will strike you as most beautiful,
but it seems it's such a it's such a shame,
so unnecessary to deprive yourself of understanding the beauty of it. Now.
Certainly perspective adds to it, allows you to see it differently.
But what if you could just not feel guilty, worried, anxious, resentful,

(45:27):
like you know in the future this will be a story, right,
you'll have learned, But you could give yourself the gift
of at least some of that now by accepting it
and just seeing it as what it is in front
of you, that it's practiced.

Speaker 2 (45:43):
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 (45:44):
And the challenge, I guess is that because we've not
had an experience, maybe an early childhood or our teens,
where we saw that where it was like we went
through a difficulty, we built discipline and we got over it,
or we learned from as you're saying, I find that
a lot of people have experienced difficulty, but then they
were given comfort or shelter, or the difficulty was somehow

(46:08):
removed or left, so you never got the opportunity to
build the discipline muscle, if that makes sense. My wife
will love to talk about like for her, she went
through a difficulty, like her parents would come and save
the day. Yeah, right, someone would swoop in and solve
the issue. Her sister would do her homework for her.
And so as that happened more and more and more,
it created this behavior of someone will save the day

(46:30):
that I don't need to build a discipline around this.

Speaker 1 (46:33):
Obviously saving is coming from good place. The other thing
we do is we tell it's so bad that that
happened to you. I'm so sorry you're this victim. Right,
Like the first year of COVID, they would describe for
kids that this was like a lost year. And I
just remember.

Speaker 2 (46:47):
Thinking, like how that language.

Speaker 1 (46:50):
Patronizing but also self fulfilling. That was for kids. Like
when I would talk to my grandparents or all people
that lived through the Depression or the Second World War,
which were by the way, a lot longer than COVID,
they weren't like, oh it was a lost time. It
was a transformative, formative experience that in retrospect made them

(47:12):
who they were. That maybe even if you'd ask them
if they would have wanted things to be different, they
would have said no. And we have the power to
transform whatever we're going through into that thing. So yeah,
by rescuing someone, you're depriving them of that thing. But
also by telling them that there's no there's nothing in
this thing that it's indisputably inarguably bad, is to deprive

(47:35):
them of the agency, the perspective, the gift that they
have in front of them, if they choose to see
it that way. And we should emerge from this period
the very least, as you said, like if you haven't
been through stuff like this before, you just lived through
an event of historic proportions, Like you just lived through
event that your kids and your grandchildren future generations will

(47:58):
marvel at, and you emerge unscathed, maybe even improved in
some ways, Like you, you should emerge from this with
a real sense of what you're capable of enduring and
surviving and adjusting towards. And that should give you a
lot of confidence as you wake up and you experience
things that are so microscopic compared to that thing, right,

(48:21):
and you should feel armed with a certain set of
weapons or tools that maybe you didn't have before, Like
you've been knocked around and you didn't get knocked down.
That's that's powerful.

Speaker 3 (48:35):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, And in my own little way, it's
like while I was going through my surgery, it was
exactly that. It's like I can either sit here and
think this is the worst, because it did feel like
the worst for someone who's active, always on planes and
always traveling, always working, to be completely off and it
wasn't even RESTful because it was painful, Like it wasn't
RESTful time. Everyone's like, we didn't work for a month,

(48:56):
it must have been amazing. I was like, well, no,
I was in pain.

Speaker 1 (48:58):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (48:59):
But the idea that my mind at the time was like,
this is the worst. I hate this, and when's it
going to be over right, which is the same as COVID,
which is the same as anything like those are the
three thoughts that go through I had pretty much, whether
it's surgery covered or anything else that's going on. And
having to reframe those thoughts in the moment made it

(49:20):
become a really beautiful process at the time, and now
a sense of gratitude for it having moved on. But
that's what I'm hearing from you, is like you will reflect, well,
hopefully you'll reflect afterwards, but there is a bit of
reconfiguration that has to happen at the time.

Speaker 1 (49:36):
Yeah, there's a story about Phil Jackson when he's the
coach of the Lakers. He gets this back surgery. He's
super bad back surgery, and he can't stand on the sideline.
He has to sit in a chair, and the way
they had him sit it's like a row back. And
so suddenly all the things that he's comfortable with as
a coach are not possible. He's not able to pace
the sidelines, get up in people's faces, intervene, direct people,

(50:00):
just to sit back is to watch. It's like the
antithesis of his coaching style. And yet he's a sort
of a Zen buddhiska stage guy. He realizes that this
is practice that he realizes that now the team's having
to come to him. Now the team's having to solve
some of the problems. He's having to explore a different
way of communicating. He's having to communicate verbally better than physically.

(50:24):
It's a way to change adjust he's forced to do
it differently and thus learns some things he wants to
continue doing differently. Now realizes he was taking for granted
certain things that are actually super important. Right, and so
you can always take from this like it's this forced
lifestyle experiment. Just see it as that, right, Like COVID

(50:46):
the biggest forced lifestyle experiment in human history. Things that
people said were impossible had to become possible, remote work,
you know, e commerce, all these things, And then you
want to throw that away by saying I can't wait
for things to go back to normal. Right, It's like
normal is what caused this, Right, Normal was you before
you learned the things that you learned in that intervening time.

(51:09):
And for COVID, for Phil Jackson's back surgery, insert whatever
disruptive event you're undergoing in your life. Yeah, you don't
want things to go back to how they were. You
want them to go to a new place where you
have the old perspective and the new perspective fused into
something new. When Marx realis is the impediment to action
advance is actually stands in the way becomes a way.

(51:31):
The Zen expression is the obstacles the path same East
West coming to the same idea. It's like, this thing
has opportunities inside it to make you better, should you
choose to accept them?

Speaker 3 (51:42):
Yeah, and that's what I like. It's not the simplistic
idea of and I'm aways trying to address this. It's
not the simplistic idea of look for the positive in
the negative, right, Like, that's not what we're saying here.
This isn't the idea of like, oh, there's a beautiful
side to this. That's not the point. Let's get into
that a bit, because I feel like people kind of
simplify and go, oh no, that just yeah, we'll just

(52:03):
look for the silver lining, which is not what we're saying.

Speaker 1 (52:05):
Would you know? The Stockdale paradox. So James Stockdale, he
studies Stoic philosophy and then he shot down over Vietnam
and he's taken prisoner. It's been seven years horribly tortured
in this Vietnamese prison camp. Afterwards, he's speaking to Jim
Collins wrote who writes good to Great, and he formulates
what becomes known as the Stockdale paradox. Jim con says,

(52:27):
who has the worst trouble in the prison camp and
Stockdale says, Oh, that's easy. The optimists, right, the people
who thought I'm going to be out by Christmas, I'm
going to be out by the spring. This isn't going
to be hard. When Stockdale's parachuting into this camp, he says,
I am leaving the world of technology and entering the
world of Epictetus. He says, it's going to be seven
years at least, But he said, he said, the first

(52:48):
step is I had to unflinchingly accept the reality of
my situation, which is that I might not get out,
which is that I'm probably going to be tortured, which
is that I'm not in control, which is that there
is so much unknown pain and suffering ahead. I have
to accept that this is not gonna be fun. This
is not gonna be easy, he says. But simultaneously, I

(53:10):
said to myself, if I get out, I want to
have transformed this into something that in retrospect I would
not have traded away. That's the paradox of what we're
talking about. Stuff happens. Life gets in the way. You
lose someone, your company goes bankrupt, the market shifts, you know,
a natural disaster. Your life can get flipped upside down

(53:33):
at a moment's notice. You have to unflinchingly accept the
reality of that situation, the unfairness, the unexpectedness of it,
your blamelessness or your blame worthiness for it, and then
simultaneously go, Okay, I'm not saying this is wonderful, that
I'm glad it happened, but I can make choices now

(53:54):
that derive positive benefits from this that make me better
for having gone through this. And I was at the
beginning of the pandemic, in the middle of opening this bookstore.
I'd sunk my life savings into opening this bookstore that
by the time it was ready, it was impossible to open.
It was looking like this enormous failure mistake, you know,

(54:18):
like albatross around my neck. And I wrote this note
card to myself, and I have a picture because I
I wrote it to myself. I was thinking about every
day and I took the picture in front of the bookstore,
and I just wrote to myself, I said, twenty twenty
is a test will make you a better person or
a worse one. Right, I have no idea whether the
bookstore will work. I have no idea where things are going,

(54:39):
I have no idea what life is going to look
like what I control inside that is to I emerge
from it a better person, right, more community minded, a
better spouse, a better thinker, a better writer, more patient,
more self aware. Those are the things I control within it.
And so when we say the obstacle is the way,
we're not like, oh it's great, this terrible thing happened

(55:00):
to me, but you're saying what I took from this
terrible thing, or maybe you're trying to strip the labels altogether,
but you're saying what I took from this was positive
I made from it. That's the paradox.

Speaker 2 (55:12):
Yeah, yeah, that's a great breakdown.

Speaker 3 (55:13):
I'm so glad you went into that, because, yeah, I've
heard the example in the same way of when there
were soldiers who said we'll be home by Christmas, their
hope were shattered because they weren't home by Christmas. And
whereas the people who said, we'll figure out a way
to get home, and if we get home, we'll see
our family, and that person was more likely to be
able to deal with the fact that it didn't happen

(55:35):
by this time. And I think I think that's become
Our obsession with controlling time is partly where that comes
from where it's like, we want this done by this time,
and then whether it's positive or difficult, when it doesn't happen,
we're completely demoralized, right Like, it's almost like it's all
over just because it didn't have happened by an arbitrary date.

Speaker 1 (55:57):
We're setting yourself up for disappointing or frustration or resentment
or despair by attaching to an outcome that's not yours.
If you get lucky, sure you'll feel wonderful. But if
you work for years on a book and success or
failure of it was did it win awards? Did it
sell lots of copies? Did your parents read it? You know,

(56:21):
those are things that are not in your control. But
if it was, I understand that's better than when I started.
I am more confident than I was when I started.
You know, Like I said something I got on the
page what I thought only in my head at the beginning,
right Like, when you move the outcome or the goal

(56:44):
to something that's up to you, you'll always win. And
I think that's what wise people do. It's not that
they're not ambitious. They are ambitious, but their ambition is
things that are up to them and So when Marcus
is saying better wrestler as a part to better philosopher,
better friend, whatever, he's shifting from like this external, societal

(57:06):
driven thing to this internal thing that he controls that.

Speaker 2 (57:11):
He gets to judge the success.

Speaker 1 (57:13):
Or failure on. And it's not so quantifiable either, It's
something deeper, more human, more connected. And so as you
shift that, not only do I actually think you do
better work, but you are increasing your chances of feeling
good about yourself at the end of that.

Speaker 2 (57:32):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (57:32):
And I think the challenge Ryan, though, is that today
we want both right. We want the feeling of I
did something that was true to me and it resonated
with a lot of people or whatever that means, right,
And I feel like that's where everyone kind of gets stuck,
because it's like, you know, especially when people watch people
do what they love and it gets received, well, it's like, oh,

(57:54):
well I want to do that too. Where do you
think people go wrong in that journey? Because like what
the mistakes we make on that path? Because I feel
like that's pretty much where people are headed.

Speaker 1 (58:06):
Well, yeah, I mean I think we're sometimes not honest
with You're like, I'm just I want this album to
be true to who I want to be my artistic expression.
Blah blah blah. That's why you made all these sort
of individualistic decisions. But deep down you have this sort
of secret lie, which is that you're actually judging yourself
on where it lands on the billboard.

Speaker 2 (58:26):
Yes.

Speaker 1 (58:26):
Right, so that's the worst of both, right, because you're
not going, well, what do I need to do to
be commercially successful, and I'm consistently judging myself on whether
it was commercially successful or not, you set yourself up
for maximum disappointment. But if you can say, look here,
my goal is to do my absolute best. My goal
here is to get to the truth of what I'm saying,

(58:47):
to express what's true inside here. And that's what I'm
going to focus on. And I'm not going to waste
any time on these other things. I actually do think
I'm sure you found this that that does make better work,
It makes truer work, makes more authentic work, more relatable work.
It actually does make a better product, but only if
you are fully and honestly and deeply committed to doing it.

(59:11):
It can't be like I'm making the charitable donation. I'm
doing it anonymously. But I still hope everyone sees how
wonderful I am. You know what I mean. It's you
can't have your cake and eat it too.

Speaker 3 (59:25):
Yes, exactly. And I think it goes back to what
you were saying a few moments ago, where it's like
you have to accept the reality, which includes your own intention.
Like I know that I like creating things that are
true to me but are commercially successful. That is important
to me, is a value of mine. And I'm okay
with that, yeah, because I don't want to lie about
those things to myself at all.

Speaker 2 (59:46):
Because I enjoy.

Speaker 3 (59:48):
The idea of creating thoughts and ideas that can affect
lots of people like that. That is something that gives
me a sense of feeling that I've understood an idea
and been able to communicate it well enough. I guess
what I'm saying is that it comes back to what
you were saying at the beginning, that I don't set
out to write a commercially successful book or launch something

(01:00:08):
commercially like that isn't what you set out to do.
Set out to understand, articulate, communicate with myself and write
an incredible book. And then that leads to that but
at some part of that process you have to think
about the sharing of it.

Speaker 1 (01:00:22):
Yeah, of course. And I've learned a lot from you
in this regard, like you're not helping yourself or your
ideas by rejecting what makes them accessible or shareable or
turning your nose up at this tool or that tool.
Like look like, when I want to learn about an idea,
I want to read long form books about it. That's

(01:00:43):
the medium that I'm comfortable in. I don't think TikTok,
but millions of people do think TikTok or Instagram. And
to turn your nose up or close your heart off
to those people because they're not like you. It's not
just snobbish, but if you actually care about the ideas,
it's selfish.

Speaker 2 (01:01:01):
And so I don't think.

Speaker 1 (01:01:03):
They're mutually exclusive. But I also think if you're on
those platforms and you're letting the algorithm decide what you
do and don't do, you are sacrificing the whole reason
you became a creator in the first place.

Speaker 3 (01:01:16):
Correct, Absolutely, And I think that's the balance, right. It's
like there's people who just completely sell out for the algorithm,
and then there's the selfish creator or the snobbish creator
on the other end, who thinks they're too cool. Like
it's kind of like this badge of honor where it's like, oh,
I don't need to do that, like I don't care
about and I'm like, that defeats the whole point, because

(01:01:37):
I'm hoping this book was a compassionate expression of service, hopefully,
and maybe it wasn't. Maybe it just was a selfish,
arrogant move of professing your ideas. And that's like the
best thing about it. And so you have sellouts on
one and you have selfish on the other end. And
to me, like service is kind of in the middle
where it's like service means I understand people's needs and
interests and concerns and where they are, but I always

(01:01:59):
have to than what's most beneficial?

Speaker 1 (01:02:02):
What's if you meet people where they are and like
there's almost agreed to it. It's like, well, I wrote
in a book, if you want to hear it, you
can buy it, right. Well, what if they're not ready
for that, What if they're too busy for that? What
if they already did buy it, but they just need
a reminder of it, right, And so there's different just
in the way that like, look, I also read in English,
that's the only language that I speak. But I don't

(01:02:24):
turn up my nose that all these different translations. I go, oh, yeah,
there's a process. These ideas get translated in those languages
and they reach people who otherwise wouldn't have consumed it.
And understanding that different people have different native languages. Some
people like audiobooks, some people like podcasts, some people like
this social network or that social network, and that by

(01:02:44):
thinking that you know one is superior to the other,
in fact, you should be translating or working all these
different areas long form, short form, audio, video, text, what
you should be everywhere that's possible. And understanding that the
win is that the ideas are reaching people and helping

(01:03:04):
them in their life. If some of those things translate
to sales or followers, great, But like I always think about,
like again, what is success at the end of the day,
Like if you think sold zero copies, but it changed
the world, you'd be like that was that that was
a win? So why don't you just do the stuff
that changes the world and trust again, trust the process

(01:03:27):
that you'll probably be able to make a living.

Speaker 3 (01:03:29):
Absolutely, and most things that do change the world or
have an impact started non commercially right, like in that
sense of especially creational ideas. I mean, maybe not businesses,
but the ideas. Like when I started creating content, even
the first few interviews I did with you, like, I
didn't I mean that Na's that that whole NASA. I
never got paid for that whole series. I was interviewing
authors every week because I was fascinated by the idea

(01:03:52):
that I get to sit down with people that I
find interesting.

Speaker 1 (01:03:55):
You're also putting in your hours, y'are getting good at
this again?

Speaker 3 (01:03:58):
Yeah, yeah, exactly, and you getting good at it, You're
enjoying it. You get to meet awesome people. And even
even when we did the show a HFF post, it
was like I was leading the show of what kind
of show we wanted it to be. It wasn't like
it was already set up. And so yeah, I look
back and I think like all stuff that had an
impact and grew was always from that deep intention, pure
intention of I want to create something that will hopefully

(01:04:21):
help people have these conversations. And that was what it
was for me. I felt when I started creating content,
there weren't there were so many people who had deep
thoughtful conversations offline, but there was no spaces online really
to have those, or there wasn't a piece of content
you'd send to your friend and be like did you
see this? Like have we talked about this? And I
wanted to create an excuse for people to have more meaningful,

(01:04:44):
thoughtful conversations based on ideas.

Speaker 1 (01:04:46):
I mean, look, I think at the end of the day,
it's like, you create a lot of value and if
you can capture a small percentage of it, you're good, right,
Like I think about Craigslist, Like the vast majority of
stuff on Craigslist has been free since the very beginning it.
Craigslist still makes up million dollars a year in revenue.
Like when you create a lot of value, I create
so much content, and like the only part that is

(01:05:09):
not free are the books, right, And the books fund
that work, and then that work also funds the books.
It's you're creating kind of a flywheel of stuff. I
was thinking about one of my books that hasn't sold
as well as the.

Speaker 2 (01:05:21):
Other books, which one is it.

Speaker 1 (01:05:23):
Lives of the Stoics is different than my other books.
But I personally used and then also have reused stuff
that I learned while writing that book almost every single day.
So like the monetization, you know, to use that word,
the value creation, there was a personal one. And the
book is done extremely well by like any standard, but

(01:05:46):
like the primary beneficiary was me. Yes, And again, if
whatever you're doing, you can say, look, the primary beneficiary
of this is me having gone through it, changing, developing, learning,
And then the byproduct is that I paid my rent
or that like you know, this happened that then you've

(01:06:06):
won and all the stuff that's out of your control
is the extra. Yes, that's where you want to be.

Speaker 3 (01:06:12):
Yeah, yeah, I can agree more. And that requires just
so much. I think that requires refining of the intention.
It requires having a sense of belief and confidence. I
think for me it was the other and for you too,
from your journey that we've talked about before, Like I
spent ten years doing this without any followers or without

(01:06:32):
any commercial edit to it anyway, because it was all
offline and it was speaking to rooms of five to
ten people if they showed up, and so it was
like for so long I was doing it without any
care of how far it went because.

Speaker 2 (01:06:44):
It was just so powerful, It was so beautiful to live.

Speaker 3 (01:06:47):
In that world of even if I had one meaningful
conversation with someone after an event that would make my day,
like I'd talk about it for weeks.

Speaker 1 (01:06:54):
Let me ask you this. I've been thinking about it lately. Yeah,
the work that you're doing now or that I'm doing now,
is the result of work you did a long time ago.
It's a lagging indicator of sacrifice and commitment and study
and practice from however long ago. Sometimes what keeps me
up at night and as I go, but ten years

(01:07:15):
from now, fifteen years from now, am I putting in
the work doing this stuff now that will pay off then?
And how do you know? How do you know if
success is this lagging indicator, or growth is this lagging
indicator of commitment? Now? How can you be sure that
you are paying your dues?

Speaker 3 (01:07:32):
Yes, I'm so glad you said that, because I literally
just I've been talking to my team about a few
things that we're doing. I've literally asked us to find
three new coaches, Like I've literally gone. I've always learned
through one to one coaching on mentorship, like that's my
favorite apart from books, that is my favorite way of learning,
and especially when it comes to self transformation. So I
love ideas through books, but when it comes to me

(01:07:53):
actually changing, I'm better when I'm working with one person
and getting mentorship of coaching.

Speaker 1 (01:07:58):
So you're thinking about who are you who are your
teachers to get you to the next level level you
might not even know exists.

Speaker 3 (01:08:04):
Yet, correct, And so I'm trying to identify those people
right now. So when I was a teen, I was
reading Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Steve Jobs right like,
well Steve was a bit later actually, but Matin, Luther King,
Malcolm X, like, That's who I was reading at sixteen
years old. They were hugely formative in my ideology in
so many ways. And then in my twenties, obviously I
lived with the monks, so that was hugely that and

(01:08:27):
then when a public speaking school when I was eleven
years old. So that has that has lasted far too long.
It needs to be refined again. And so yeah, I
completely agree with you. I look at all the skills
I have today and I go where do they need
to be refined? And then I look at, well, what
are the things I'm missing out on? Because I'm not
exposing myself now, I do think that I do find
having the podcast very fortunate because I do get to

(01:08:49):
sit down with a lot of people that I seek
mentorship from in an informal sense, and then I could
be like, oh, I'm really going to do a deep
down on that person's book, or like Gable Matte was
just yeah, he's amazing, like you know, and people have
known about him for a long long time. This was
the first time I interviewed him. But I'm like now
doing a backwards reading of all of his books.

Speaker 2 (01:09:08):
Sure, and so I love that, you know.

Speaker 1 (01:09:10):
Yeah, it's like what rabbit holes are you falling down?
What sort of new It's like a great athlete. It's
like on am My addings my game this off season totally,
and like how do you not get complacent and coast
because you could be coasting for a long time. Yeah,
not real if your lost skills, your skills or your
speed is slowly decreasing before it and then it's it's

(01:09:33):
too late.

Speaker 3 (01:09:33):
Yeah that's such a good point. And I think the
thing that hit me there with what you just said
is just it's also, what skills do I need that
I'm not trying to see the results now? Yes, Like
what is something I'm happy to let kind of simmer
and build and just organically grow, rather than like I'm
going to learn this skill because next week we're going
to launch this thing. Like that's not what I'm talking about.

Speaker 1 (01:09:52):
Well, all the things you were talking about that made
you who you were, those were never means tune in
because the end was inconceivable, right, none of it didn't
even exist. But somehow it was the perfect like training
montage for who you became. And how do you make
sure the montage is continuing as opposed to this once
in a formative thing. And then you know, every once

(01:10:13):
in a while, do a talk and like it's the
person before me. You're like, oh, you've been doing this
a long time the exact same way, and you stopped.
You stopped, and you don't you don't want that.

Speaker 3 (01:10:23):
Yeah, exactly. And I think partly that's also me allowing myself,
at least for me, and I'm only talking about myself,
but I think this is helpful for people. I think
you have to allow yourself to become different things and
giving yourself permission to follow that bliss, as Joseph Tumble
would say, because right, for example, when I wrote think

(01:10:44):
like a Monk, that was the kind of end and
beginning of a new journey in my life, Like I
was kind of encapsulating what I've learned of the last
fifteen years, and then it was like, well, now I'm
in a new space, like I'm a married man, now
I'm I'm a business person, I'm so many more things.
And so it was almost like me saying, Okay, well,

(01:11:04):
I'm going to put this rapper on this right now.
And now my next book's all about love. And there's
loads of people going Jay, like, why are you writing
about love?

Speaker 1 (01:11:11):
Why?

Speaker 3 (01:11:11):
And I was like, because I'm fascinated by love, and
I'm okay with answering that question of why love. I
don't want to continue to write books. I mean, by
the way, the Love Book is full of wisdom I
learned during my time as a monk, of course it is.
But the point is that I don't want to be
defined by that, and I don't want to limit myself
to any human experience because then now I'm basically saying

(01:11:32):
I have to be this, and that's what performers do.
I have to play this character for the rest of
my life, and then you get type cast in your
own life and you don't let yourself, and I'm like,
maybe my next book will definitely not be about love.
I know that for a fact. My next book's not
about love. But I'm okay with that. Like I like
the idea of I'm letting myself go in the direction
of whatever I want to become, because why would I

(01:11:55):
limit it?

Speaker 2 (01:11:55):
Now?

Speaker 1 (01:11:56):
Well, we talked about like you know, cranking the shower handle.
That that's a muscle. My first book was about marketing. Yeah,
I could have sold my next book about marketing, my
next book about market I could be still doing that.
I could still be speaking about that first book. And
when I went to my publisher and I was like,
you know, I want to write about this obscure school
of ancient philosophy, they were like what you know? They
were like, how's half sound? You know, they give me

(01:12:17):
half what I got for my first book. But that's
that muscle. I was like, I don't care. This is
what I want to do. And so when you cultivate
the ability to do that hard thing, the challenging thing,
the different thing, the investing in, like being bad at
something to get good at something, to think about tiger woods,
He's changed his swing three or four times, from the
ground up. That's the real muscle that prevents you from

(01:12:40):
sort of ossifying or declining. It's the ability to go like,
just because I'm here doesn't mean I'm going to stay here.
I want to try and do something radically new or
different that I hope will work commercially, but I know
personally I will emerge bet right, Like, let's say that

(01:13:01):
the book doesn't work. Sure it will. Let's say it
doesn't work, but you're like, hey, my marriage is better
as having done it. It's a win from top to bottom, right,
And then you know, you take that with you as
you go.

Speaker 3 (01:13:13):
For me writing it, I wrote a completely different book
than the one I thought I was going to write.
And I wrote it three times. And the first time
it was too raw and probably too like, it was
probably too tough to read. And the second time it
was too shallow, like it was totally like not what
I would want to do. And then the third time
we got the balance right. Yeah, it's funny what you
said about earlier, like the discipline of trying to get

(01:13:35):
out of doing things wrong, but the discipline of ambition.
Once you've had one success in anything, most people grip
onto it because now you've had a taste of it,
and now you're scared that if you don't be that person.

Speaker 2 (01:13:49):
You will lose it.

Speaker 3 (01:13:51):
And I just wouldn't want to live that way because
then you are just acting and not being.

Speaker 1 (01:13:58):
It's like what you think that having the success proving
yourself should make you more courageous, less risk averse, because
now you've done it, But in fact the opposite is true. Right,
This is where courage and discipline are related. It's the opposite.
Now you have something to lose. Now you don't want
to change go in a different direction because the expectation

(01:14:21):
is set with the first one. So you imagine how
scary it is Tiger Woods. You're like, you're the best
swing in golf, and you're like, but I think it
could be better, but I'm going to have to go
have a bad swing for months to get to the
other side of that. And so the ability to say
I decide whether I'm successful or not not the external results.
And that's why I'm willing to go down this detour

(01:14:44):
or try things differently, do this. That is that sort
of key. Skill and courage and discipline have to be related.
They compliment each other. And yeah, like it was come
from my first book came out, it debuted on the
bestseller list. It was controvert. But if who I would
be today, if I continue down that road, would be
a caricature of that first person, because I would have
been been a copy of a copy of a copy

(01:15:04):
of a copy. Instead, I went towards something that was
interesting to me, which opened up another thing that was
interested in and that, like, I wouldn't be who I
am had I done this safe thing. And so all
they say, all growth is a leap in the dark, right,
you have to continually take that leap. And one of
the things I hope you learn when you do that is,

(01:15:25):
first off, it's not as scary as you thought. But
then sometimes like it doesn't work and you go, oh,
but I feel great about it. And then it decouples
external recognition from the internal process and then you go, yeah,
I just do what I want. I do where it
takes me, and a lot of times it works out.
Sometimes it doesn't. But it's called being a creator for

(01:15:48):
a reason. You're making something. You're the leader, you're not
a follower.

Speaker 2 (01:15:53):
Well, I said, Ryn, this has been so much fun.

Speaker 1 (01:15:55):
The best thing.

Speaker 2 (01:15:56):
I mean, we were talking for ages.

Speaker 3 (01:15:57):
I had no idea where the time went, but it's
been such a joy, just always like just getting into
with you. And I hope that everyone who's been listening,
I hope you go and grab a copy of Discipline
is Destiny, The Power of Self Control by Ryan Holiday,
and of course any of the other books that we've
recommended before on the show. If you love this episode,
you can go back and listen to a ton of

(01:16:18):
other episodes with Ryan. And again, I hope today's episode
I tried not to do for everyone who's listening, and
you know I've been trying this more recently. I tried
not to do a systematic conversation of breaking down how
to build discipline and which you know, I've been avoiding
that kind of hack kind of conversation recently, which I
think you've been really resonating with because I think sometimes

(01:16:42):
the penny that needs to drop isn't the how too.
It's kind of like the churning of the idea in
your own self of coming closer to what it truly
means for you and making sense of it. So that's
been my attempt at least, and I hope that's coming through.
I hope you enjoyed this, please do give me feedback
on Twitter, Instagram, tag Ryan and I both with your
greatest insights the nuggets of wisdom, and we'll see you

(01:17:05):
on another episode of On Purpose.

Speaker 2 (01:17:07):
Thank you everyone.

Speaker 3 (01:17:07):
If you love this episode, you'll enjoy my interview with
doctor Daniel Ahman on how to change your life by
changing your brain.

Speaker 1 (01:17:15):
Everything in moderation, which is the gateway thought to hell.
It's the gateway.

Speaker 2 (01:17:21):
Thought to cheating.

Speaker 1 (01:17:22):
As soon as you hear someone say everything in moderation,
they're going to do something bad for their brain.

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Jay Shetty

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Ryan Holiday ON: The Importance of Being Disciplined With Our Ambition & How to Get Comfortable with Change