May 30, 2025 • 52 mins
In this episode, Ryan Holiday explores navigating fear and hope and the everyday courage that shapes our lives. He unpacks how to confront our fears and how we need to do so, over and over. With great stories and insights, we are reminded that we don’t have to be fearless, we just have to begin.
Key Takeaways:
- The concept of courage and its significance in everyday life.
- The relationship between courage and fear, including how to confront fears.
- The importance of personal agency and making choices that shape our lives.
- The role of vulnerability in fostering connection and understanding.
- Historical and contemporary examples of courage and heroism.
- The four cardinal virtues: courage, temperance, justice, and wisdom.
- The idea that courage is not just for heroes but is present in daily decisions.
- The impact of sharing struggles and experiences on personal and collective healing.
- The notion that hope requires courage, especially in the face of adversity.
- The importance of taking action and making decisions to overcome analysis paralysis.
If you enjoyed this conversation with Ryan Holiday, check out these other episodes:
Why Community and Courage Matter More Than Ever with Laura McKowen
How to Overcome Cynicism and Embrace Hope with Jamil Zaki
For full show notes, click here!
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Really, what courage is is the idea that I can
change things, whether it's this tiny situation or it's some
globally complex situation.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
Welcome to the one you feed Throughout time. Great thinkers
have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have, quotes
like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think,
ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts
don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy,
(00:38):
or fear. We see what we don't have instead of
what we do. We think things that hold us back
and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking.
Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort
to make a life worth living. This podcast is about
how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction,
(00:58):
how they feed their good wolf.
Speaker 3 (01:02):
Every day we stand at a crossroads. One path is comfort,
the other is courage. But courage isn't just for heroes
on battlefields. It's in boardrooms, classrooms and kitchen tables. It's
the decision to speak up, to start over, to keep hoping.
My guest today is Ryan Holiday, author of Courage is Calling,
(01:25):
and one of the most influential voices in modern Stoicism.
We talk about fear, how to confront it, and how
to act bravely, not just once, but over and over,
from the Stoics to Steinbeck, from whistleblowers to warriors. Ryan
brings stories and insights that remind us you don't have
(01:45):
to be fearless, You just have to begin. I'm Eric
Zimmer and this is the one you feed. Hi, Ryan,
welcome to the show.
Speaker 1 (01:54):
Yeah, thanks for having me.
Speaker 3 (01:55):
It is a pleasure to have you on. We are
going to be discussing your latest book in a moment,
but let's start like we always do with the parable.
There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says,
in life, there are two wolves inside of us that
are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which
represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the
(02:15):
other's a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and
hatred and fear. And the grandson stops thinks about it
for a second. He looks up at his grandfather and
he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says,
the one you feed. So I'd like to start off
by asking you what that parable means to you in
your life and in the work that you do.
Speaker 1 (02:35):
Yeah, that's interesting. I talk about this in a couple
different of my books. There's a wonderful quote from Martin
Luther King where he says that there's a North and
a South in all of us, meaning, you know, sort
of a good and an evil, and that these sort
of forces are always at a kind of civil war
with each other. And I think this idea that we
have a higher self and a lower self. There's the
(02:57):
part of us that knows what's right and the part
of us that doesn't do what's right, you know, the
sort of part of us that is good habits and
the part of us that's bad habits. And the idea
that you're ever going to sort of perfectly be one
or the other is probably unlikely. But I do think
you give one more power than the other, which to
(03:17):
me is sort of what that parable is about, you know,
sort of day to day, which one has more control,
who's winning sort of more often than not. Is kind
of how I think about that. Pertains you know, to
the idea in the new book two of Courage. I
don't think courage is this thing that you sort of
magically perpetually are It's something that sort of day in
(03:40):
and day out, situation by situation, you either choose or
don't choose, And the fact that you've chosen it before
doesn't mean that you'll keep it forever. And the fact
that you've screwed up and fallen short in the past
also doesn't mean that you can't make a better choice now. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (04:00):
Books in general, I see a lot of you looking
at historical figures as ways of really seeing how other
people have to stay with the analogy fed their good
wolf to sort of remind us, because I think, you know,
it seems like there's two parts to this. One is
even orienting to what does that mean? What does it
(04:20):
mean to feed my good wolf? Or what does it
mean to live a good life or a life of virtue?
Then there's the actually doing it.
Speaker 1 (04:26):
Yeah, although I would also point out that I do
try to look also at examples of where the bad
wolf has won out again to further the analogy. I
try to do both inspiring stories and cautionary tales. Yeah,
the idea being we can sort of learn from the
experiences of others the costs and the benefits of those decisions.
(04:48):
And that they might stick with us when we are
faced with choices or temptations or difficult situations. I think
we tend to learn by story. We certainly remember stories,
and they sort of help us explain what we're going
through in the present moment. So I tend to look,
as you said, for stories that sort of remind us
either of what we're capable of, positive or negative, and
(05:11):
what the potential consequences of that could be either way. Yep.
Speaker 3 (05:15):
So we're going to get into your book in more detail.
It's called Courage is calling Fortune favors the brave. But
before we go deep into Courage, I'm going to ask
you to sort of set it up because this is
the first in a four part series of different virtues.
So say a little bit about what the different virtues
are and why did you choose them.
Speaker 1 (05:35):
So, in both ancient philosophy as well as in Christianity,
and we see some similar renderings of it in Eastern
philosophy as well, there's this idea of the four cardinal virtues.
Cardinal doesn't actually have a religious connotation. It comes from
the Latin word cardos, which means hinge. But the idea
that there's sort of four pivotal virtues that the good
(05:55):
life depends on, and those four virtues in Stoicism in
Christianity are courage, temperance, justice, and wisdom. So this book
is the first book in a series on those four virtues,
courage being I think, if not the most important virtue,
certainly the virtue that all the other virtues require almost
(06:18):
from the outset. Okay, I can give you a quick
definition of courage, or a quick definition of justice, or
a quick definition of wisdom or temperance, But what does
that actually look like in the real world, How does
one apply it, how have people applied it? And how
might we learn from them. That's sort of what I'm
trying to do in this book, as I do with
(06:39):
all the other books. They usually pick a theme, as
you said, and then survey illustrate it with stories that
are memorable and inspiring and sort of allow us to
get into the particulars of Okay, when you mean courage,
you mean not show fear. No, it's more complicated than that.
So we're trying to explore what courage looks like in reality.
Speaker 3 (06:55):
And I'm going to ask you to define courage in
a minute. But I want to start with you end
the book to a certain degree, which is with basically
the end of one of my favorite books of all time,
which is East of Eden by John Steinbeck, which I've
read every couple of years for I don't know, thirty
years now, and so I was wondering if you could just,
(07:17):
you know, share with us kind of how you end
the book around sort of the pivotal idea that ends
East of Eden.
Speaker 1 (07:26):
Yeah, so at the end of East of Eden. And
actually Steinbeck talks about this at length. He has this
wonderful book called a Journal of a Novel where he's
sort of writing to himself as he's working on the novel,
and you see him sort of struggling with these themes.
But he ends up talking to his editor about this.
But he has this sort of breakthrough that the commandments
(07:47):
are not thou shalt not, which sounds like you're not
allowed to do these things, and he says, actually the
rendering is closer to thou may not or thou should not, right,
meaning that we have a choice, and that the choice
is everything in the choice is as you said, if
(08:07):
you only had one wolf inside you and it was
the good wolf or the bad wolf, well, then you
wouldn't really have any responsibility or accountability for who you
were day to day. If you were a good person,
that would be great, but it wouldn't be really much
of a credit to you because you were simply born
that way. If you were a bad person, you really
(08:29):
couldn't be held accountable for that either, because it's not
your fault. It'd be like being short or tall. It's
not on you. It's not a reflection of you. And
so this idea that we have the individual choice, the
basis of free will, to choose to follow, the ideas,
to choose virtue, to choose which wolf we feed, is
in fact everything. I close the book with that story,
(08:52):
but I opened the book with a similar story as
no religious connotation, which is the so called choice of Hercules.
Hercules is said to come to a crossroads. At either
side of the crossroads, there are two goddesses. One goddess
is the goddess of virtue. One is the goddess of vice.
Advice says, look, you're gonna have everything you want. It's
gonna be fun, it's gonna be easy, it's gonna be wonderful.
(09:15):
You'll never have to care about anything again. And then
the Virtue, the goddess of virtue, says, I can't make
that promise. She says, it's gonna be hard, it's gonna
be sacrificed, there's gonna be difficulty, it's gonna challenge you.
But she says it will make you great. Won't be easy,
but the challenge will be everything. And so this choice
that Hercules makes is obviously said to be the sort
(09:38):
of founding of his mythological greatness. And so the idea
that we have this choice, that it's up to us,
to me is the essence of what we're talking about.
Speaker 3 (09:48):
Yeah, I couldn't agree more. So let's go into courage
talk a little bit about to start, how do you
define courage?
Speaker 1 (09:55):
Well, I struggled with this at the beginning because there's
said to be two types of courage, moral courage and
there's physical courage. And that it's like, do I want
to focus on physical courage or moral courage? What's more interesting?
And how do they pertain to each other? How are
they different? And then I really, as I thought about
it more and more, I realized that what do they
have in common? What are their similarities, what's their connection?
(10:18):
And I realized that at the core, all forms of
courage are about risk. It's basically, did you put your
ass on the line? Like, did you physically step up
and run into a burning building? Did you, you know,
follow orders under fire? That would be physical courage, of course,
But what is a whistleblower? What is a truth teller?
(10:41):
You know? What is an artist who pushes the boundaries
of what we accept? Well? Why do we admire that?
Why does that count as courage? They're not risking their lives,
of course, but they're risking their livelihood, they're risking their reputation,
they're risking being looked at straightly or criticize. So you know,
(11:02):
they're still putting their ass on the line. They might
not die, but they could die of some form of
social death. And so the idea at the core of
courage to me is the willingness to risk and to
put yourself out there.
Speaker 3 (11:16):
Yeah, you say that courage is the management of and
the triumph over fear. It's the decision, in a moment
of peril or day in and day out, to take
ownership to a certain agency over a situation, over yourself,
over the faith that someone else has resigned themselves to.
I just love that idea. And the other thing you say,
I think is so important around this is that inherent
(11:37):
in this is the belief that an individual can make
a difference.
Speaker 1 (11:40):
Yes, you know, we talk about this idea. It's sort
of now fallen out of fashion, the Great Man of
History theory. And I don't think it's fallen out of
fashion because it's sexist. It's the idea that, like an
individual can change the course of human history. There's first off,
a certain amount of courage just in that belief. But
it's easier to sort of look at the idea that
(12:01):
it's all hopeless, that it's all complicated, that it's all
too big for an individual to possibly affect. And so
I think, really what courage is is the idea that
I can change things, whether it's this tiny situation or
it's some globally complex situation. There's a great expression one. Again,
these are all little sexists, so I'm not the coiner
(12:23):
of the phrases. But there's another one that's like one
man with courage makes a majority, meaning that almost all
things start as a person who is alone, but it's
through their courages, through their commitments to the actions that
they take because of that courage that they are able
to make that thing a reality. They bring people to them,
(12:47):
where they bring people along with them. That's what courage
is about.
Speaker 3 (12:51):
The way you've structured the book is you start off
by really talking about what gets in the way of
courage for most of us, which is fear. So let's
take a step or two back, at least as far
as the order of the book, and talk about what
are some of the things that get in our way
as far as fear.
Speaker 1 (13:10):
Yeah, so fear gets in the way. But what is fear.
Fear is a bunch of specific fears, right, fear of
what other people will think, fear of the consequences, fear
of standing out, fear of looking stupid, right, fear of
any number of things. But I think the irony is
often it's not even those things we're afraid. We just
(13:31):
have this vague fear, right, this sort of undescribed, unspecified,
vague sense that it's not worth it, or it'll be hard,
or it'll be difficult. And so when we think of fear,
I think one of the first things we want to
do is just like, well, what am I actually afraid
of here? Right? You know, you're jumping off a high dive.
(13:53):
What are you afraid of? Well, you're probably afraid of dying, right, Well, like,
let's actually think about whether that's physical possible here. That
doesn't mean it's magically going to be easy, but you
can sort of logically get to a place where you know, Okay,
the fear I have is irrational, So if I push
past it, I'll be fine. Now, it's really just a
(14:15):
matter of do I have the willpower to push past it.
I think about this when I dropped out of college.
You know, I was really scared. It was like I
was nineteen years old. I had no life experience. I
had no sense of how the world actually worked. So
I was afraid, basically that if this didn't work out,
I would end up under a bridge somewhere, right, Like,
(14:36):
I was afraid that by leaving college, I was cutting
the only safety net that possibly existed between me and homelessness, right,
which was of course fundamentally irrational. And so it was
really helpful to have someone in my life. I had
a mentor who was like Ryan, I got sick for
a year in college. I remember he told me this.
(14:57):
He's like, I got sick for a year in college.
I had to take a year off and I was
in the hospital the entire time, and he was like,
do you know how often this has ever come up
in my life? Since that I was gone for a
year of college. It took five years instead of four years.
He's like, it's literally not once come up. He's like,
this happens all the time. People leave and they have
to come back. People leave and they never come back.
(15:18):
But he's like, it's not what you think it is.
It's not as irrevocable as your fears are telling you
that it is. And it was like, oh, okay, that
makes sense. So then I decided to do it, and
that was the other part. So I went and did it.
I remember I walked into the registrar's office and I
said something like, you know, I'm here to drop out
of college. And they were like, that's not even one
(15:39):
of the options. They're like, you can take a semester off,
but your credits are good for ten years. And so
this thing that I've been so afraid of, actually I
had a ten year like undo button that I could
press at anytime. And so it's really important that one
that we break things down and then the benefit of
(15:59):
breaking them down and proceeding, whether it's jumping off a
high diverge, dropping out of college is now the next
time there was one of those decisions in my life,
I was much more savvy and aware that it wasn't
as scary as I thought it would be, and that
there's almost always a way out.
Speaker 3 (16:20):
Yeah, that's so good. I was just working on recording
a shortcast thing for Blinkis this morning, and we were
talking about that exact point of like a get specific
about your fears, like really move out of the vagueness.
You know, like everybody will think I'm an idiot, and
is more like, well there'll be three people there, So
three people will think I'm an idiot, right, Like you know,
(16:41):
get specific.
Speaker 1 (16:42):
And how many of them are even paying attention and
give a shit? Right, And so you're you realize like
often you're like imposter syndrome. Right, that's a real fear
a lot of people have. Well what if they really
investigate and they find out that I'm not as good
as I think or whatever, and it's like they're not
thinking about you at all. They don't care, you know,
like they are consumed with their own problems, your obsession
(17:04):
with yourself is making you think this is a bigger
deal than it actually is.
Speaker 3 (17:08):
Totally, totally, yeah. And then the second part of that
that you said really is like, Okay, well if my
fear comes true, how will I respond. I love the
word it's not irrevocable, and I think that's so important
is to recognize, like, I mean, some decisions are irrevocable,
but the vast majority of them are not, and you
can change. I mean, when I left my full time
(17:29):
job to start doing this podcast and the coaching and
stuff full time, you know, I just had to spend
a little bit of time and think, well, if this
doesn't work, here's the thirteen different fallback plans I could have. Right,
the risk? Am I taking a risk?
Speaker 1 (17:42):
Sure?
Speaker 3 (17:42):
But like to your point, it's not like this either
works or I'm homeless. It's like, well, this either works
or I get another job. Like it's not the end
of the world.
Speaker 1 (17:51):
Yes, there's consequences, right, We're not saying like, don't be afraid,
there's zero consequences. There's consequences, but it's the vague, the
indescribableness of those consequences that makes them loom much larger
than they actually are. There's a story I tell in
the book about Ulysses as Grant this because your point about,
(18:11):
you know, sort of how many people are watching. He's
crossing the plains of Texas as a young soldier and
he hears these wolves and he thinks it's like hundreds
of wolves. He things they're about to be devoured by
this rabid pack of wolves to go to the idea
of this show. And the guy he's with is a
tad more experience and he says something like, you know, Grant,
how many wolves do you think there are? And Grant
(18:33):
doesn't want to sound like a like a woos and
so he says, I don't know twenty And he was like,
that was like half what I actually thought there were.
You know, he thought there were so many wolves. The
guy hears is he just sort of smiles. They finally
come upon the wolves and there's two of them. There's
two wolves. And what he realizes is and he says,
I never forgot this for the rest of my political
and military life. He said, there's always fewer of them
(18:56):
when they are counted, right, So you take your fears,
you take your risk, you think about the worst case scenario.
Then you actually go like, Okay, I'm going to inspect this.
I'm going to like really look at it. You know,
You're like, well, I don't want to say this, I
might piss people off. And your idea of people is
like a stadium, right or like yes, but there's actually
(19:19):
like fifteen of them, right. I think about this every
time I say something that's maybe a little political or
a little controversial, You're like, oh, people aren't gonna like this.
But like people, it turns out to be like seven
weirdos who sends you poorly you know, poorly written emails
that make you go like, how is this person reading
(19:40):
my stuff? Anyway? I'm not sure they're literate? Right, Like,
you realize that like the people that you were worried
about you actually don't care about and are far fewer
in number than you would have if you had had
to guess they're actually were totally.
Speaker 3 (19:56):
I mean, I work with a lot of people who
are trying to build their business step out online a
little bit, and they're just like, I'm just worried that
I'm going to get all these people hating on me.
I said, no, no, no, Your biggest worry in the
beginning is that nobody is going to pay any attention
to what you're doing. You don't have to worry about
the haters for a while, right. And then to your point,
in seven and a half years of doing this, the
(20:18):
number of people who've said anything to me that's really awful.
I mean, it's just so few.
Speaker 1 (20:24):
Yeah, and so what we often do is we make
these things bigger than they actually are, so then we
don't have to do them right. If you're like, well,
I don't want to piss people off, so I'm not
going to do it, or I don't want to be
laughed at, then we don't have to do it right.
It's like the excuse to not put yourself out there.
You're looking for someone to give you permission to not
do it.
Speaker 3 (20:43):
Yeah, there's something you said near the end of the
section on fear that I loved it. I'm just going
to read it because I think it speaks to a
different kind of fear. That's really important.
Speaker 1 (20:52):
Though.
Speaker 3 (20:53):
But you said, we're afraid to open up, we're scared
to share. We don't want anyone to know how we're
feeling inside, and so all of us feel more alone.
You know what pain is caused by the inability or
the unwillingness to sort of share our difficulties, our fear,
you know, the things that are going on inside us.
And I just loved that idea of you know, when
(21:14):
we don't do that, more of us feel alone.
Speaker 1 (21:17):
Yeah, because I'm specifically talking about stoicism, which you know,
is a philosophy that a lot of people associate with
having no emotions. That's sort of the big stereotype of stoicism.
In fact, that's like what the word stoic means in English,
like the sort of lowercase stoic means like emotionless, invulnerable robot.
(21:41):
And so I wanted to talk specifically about that that, like, hey,
courage is not just you know, charging into the fray
under fire. Courage is also saying, like you think about
the soldier who does do that, right, but then the
soldier who comes home and has trouble adjusting, or maybe
(22:03):
they're addicted to something, or maybe they're depressed, or maybe
they're even contemplating suicide. I wanted to talk about the
courage to say, hey, I'm struggling, I'm having a hard time.
I need help, because this is almost a scarier thing
for brave people to do right to put yourself out
there in that way. And so the idea of being vulnerable,
(22:26):
as Brene Brown talks about this much better than I do,
but the idea of being vulnerable is often the scariest
thing in the world for people.
Speaker 3 (22:59):
It's interesting this before, back when I had years and
years and years in sort of a corporate world, although
a lot of them were startups, but you know, it
was still sort of a business world.
Speaker 1 (23:09):
But the more that.
Speaker 3 (23:09):
I sort of shared who I was, I shared my
addiction history, I shared my depression issues, you know, the
things that happened in my life, not in a like
I'm talking about me all the time way, but just
was a little bit more open about that. It was
amazing over the years the number of people that would
come back to me and then say, oh, you know
this is going on because all of a sudden it
(23:31):
was safe or to use your word, they're not alone.
They recognize like, oh, okay, other people feel this way,
and it's okay to talk about it.
Speaker 1 (23:38):
Here we talked about this, right. So it's like, let's
say everyone's scared of doing something. Maybe it's a political stand,
it's standing up to a bully, you know, it's responding
to an emergency, one man with courage makes a majority. Right,
one person says no, we have to do something, and
then they go do it, and the other one says, yeah,
they're right, let's go do something. But this is also
true for mental health issues. This is all so true
(24:00):
for emotions. This is also true for doubts about something. Right,
So the person who says, hey, I'm having trouble with this,
like you think about what the Me Too movement actually was, right.
It starts as women on Facebook saying hey, something like
this happened to me too. Right, So put aside some
(24:23):
of the political implications of the movement, Put aside excesses
or problems or cases that you agree with or disagree
with the idea of women saying hey, I was afraid
to talk about this, but now that other people are
open to talking about it, I'm going to say me too.
That's what the power of courage is really about. And again,
(24:45):
this is such important moral courage. First of uf, there's
an element of physical courage that we probably shouldn't under
state as well. But this is the decision to talk
about a thing. That's why weren't they talking about it
before it was uncomfortable. They thought they would be judged
for it, they thought there might be professional consequences for it,
they thought they might get a reputation because of it. Right,
(25:06):
So the decision to put your ass on the line
and say screw all of that, it's important for me
to say this. It makes a difference for me to
say this. I've been inspired by the other people who
said it, and I am going to say something that
is courage and it helps not just yourself but other people.
Speaker 3 (25:25):
Yeah, that's a beautiful example of it. So let's now
move into the courage section of the book. And the
book is set up in that fear section the courage section,
and there's little essays under them. Yeah, you know, lots
of different ones that tell stories from history and make points.
So I thought I'd just grab a couple of them
(25:45):
out of there and let you talk about them, and
then maybe you could pick one or two that you
most want to talk about. But one of them that
I liked was just start somewhere, do something.
Speaker 1 (25:56):
Yeah, you know, I'm actually going through this right now.
I'm working on this other bookuggling a little bit. It
was going well and then got distracted and anyways, trying
to remember that doesn't have to be perfect, particularly the
first draft. I have to be willing for parts of
it not to be good. I just have to start.
If I sit around and I wait for it to
(26:17):
be easy, it'll never happen. If I wait for the
perfect opening or opportunity, it's never going to happen. If
I want what I'm doing now to be as good
as what I've done before, what I did even earlier
on this project, again, I'm going to be sort of
stimied or stuck. So I just have to start. And
so today I was like, you know what, what's the
(26:37):
littlest thing that I could work on. I was like,
you know what, I've got all this sort of loose
research that I haven't found a place for. I'm just
going to start organizing that and hopefully that will sort
of knock something loose, which it did. Yesterday was sort
of a mediocre day. Today was kind of a mediocre day.
But tomorrow, I now suddenly, because I did this work,
(26:59):
have pretty clear marching orders for what I need to
work on tomorrow. So just start somewhere. You don't have
to magically do some huge, heroic, impressive thing. You just
have to make a little bit of progress.
Speaker 3 (27:12):
I don't want to divert the conversation too far from
the topic of your book, but I've got to ask
a question about how do you organize all your research,
because you are really good at pulling lots of different
pieces together, and I am always fascinated by the authors
that do that really well how they organize it.
Speaker 1 (27:34):
So for me, I'm always reading these are books behind me,
and as I'm reading, I'm like, Okay, for instance, I'm
writing a chapter on Churchill and is somewhat reckless financial habits.
That's what I was thinking about. So this is a
book I read called No More Champagne about Churchill and
his finances. And then these are all the pages that
i've market yep, that I thought were interesting, and then
(27:54):
I usually record them on note cards. And then the
note cards are usually the build blocks of the book,
so I have a big box all the difference. As
you said, the book's three parts, then there's chapters in
each part. Those note cards get slotted in in their
respective parts, and those are the building blocks for each
specific chapter in each book.
Speaker 3 (28:15):
Makes total sense. So you're doing it sort of paper based,
old fashioned way.
Speaker 1 (28:20):
Yes, definitely. And it's not a perfect system. There's like
a thing I know I wrote down and it has
a guy's name on it, a baseball player that I
want to write about, and I can't find it, and
I don't know how I'm possibly going to find it.
So it's not a perfect system. But for the most part,
it gives me everything that I.
Speaker 3 (28:37):
Need makes sense. Okay, thank you for that. I just
was fascinated to know. So back on to courage. A
couple of these we've already hit. We've talked about how
courage is contagious, you know, how one person being courageous
spread So that was one I was going to hit.
We kind of talked a little bit about preparation makes
you brave. So let's move on to be the decider.
Speaker 1 (28:58):
Okay. The thing that's garious is making a decision. Right,
as long as you don't decide, it can be anything,
it can be everything. You won't be held accountable. Right.
The decision is when we pull the trigger, and that
that holds us back. So I was just, you know,
just really talking about the power and the courage required
(29:21):
to make decisions, because if you don't decide, sure, things
will stay sort of in one spot. But by definition,
you're also not going to be making progress. It's easy
to endlessly debate things, it's easy to endlessly research and
consider them. It's easy to ask for unlimited amounts of advice.
(29:44):
But at some point you got to pull the trigger.
You got to go. And that's that chapter's about.
Speaker 3 (29:50):
Yeah, you quote an expression in there that I think
is great, which is whatever you're not changing, you're choosing.
It's corollarya is, you know, not making a decision is
a of a decision unto itself. But I actually like
this phrase better what you're not changing your choosing, which
is really good. And then I can't remember what was
in the book or something else you wrote. I think
you led me to it, but it was a William
(30:12):
James quote. There is no more miserable human being than
the one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.
Speaker 2 (30:21):
So true.
Speaker 3 (30:21):
Having been there, I know how miserable that is.
Speaker 1 (30:24):
Yeah, And to me, that's the importance and the power
of routine. That's the importance and power of sort of
setting your ground rules. And for those who don't do that,
they face every day as an endless stream of unlimited decisions.
Speaker 3 (30:41):
Totally I mean with coaching clients. One of the first
things we'll work on is we have got to decide
ahead of time, yes, what we're doing, because if you don't,
as you just said, you will spend a lot of
your precious energy trying to figure out, well, when am
I going to do it? What should I do? When
am I going to do it, so that when it
comes to time to do it, you already have sucked
(31:02):
out half your resources are more and thus it's really
hard to do when you know exactly what you're doing.
When then you could take all that energy and sort
of channel it, like do it totally.
Speaker 1 (31:12):
Yes, if you've set the rules for yourself. And this
is kind of where the virtues come in to play. Also,
if you're like, hey, I'm a person who defaults towards courage,
then when a scary situation comes up, you're like, this
is what I do, This is who I am. If
you're like, I don't really know what I believe, I
don't really know what I stand for, I don't really
know what's important to me, then you're also winging it.
(31:34):
And that's when you go, ah, but this will cost
me money, Ah, but this could be hard, right, ah,
but this seems fun, right, and so setting those sort
of rules for yourself help you in those stressful, difficult situations.
Speaker 3 (31:48):
A lot of your work is about values, you know,
what are the values that we have? Do you have
any particular ways that you like of sort of determining
personal values and getting clearer on what they are. There's
a lot of different systems out there, there's a lot
of ways to do it. But I'm just kind of curious,
as somebody who's pretty firmly ensconced in thinking about values,
(32:10):
if you have any thoughts on you know, for people
who are like, well, I'm not really sure what my
values are.
Speaker 1 (32:15):
I mean, what I love about Stoicism in particular, and
I brought up earlier that sort of Stoicism and Christianity
are aligned on these four virtues. What I like about
the Stoic case for those virtues is there's no sort
of metaphysical, supernatural explanation for them. I'm not faulting anyone
who chooses it, but if you don't believe that the
(32:35):
idea is divine, it's like, well, sort of why should
I do it? Right? So Christianity always has this sort
of benefit of like, well, this is what God says, right,
and Stoicism, I think is making the argument not, hey,
if you live in opposition to the four virtues, you
will go to hell. I think the Stoics are arguing,
your life will be hell. Right, your life will suck.
(32:57):
You might be rich, you might be powerful, might be
but that will bring you very little joy, very little happiness,
very little meaning, and in fact probably bring you the
opposite of those things. Right. And so that's really what
I love about Stoicism. It's making sort of a logical,
self interested case for virtue and value.
Speaker 3 (33:16):
Now, are these four virtues that you talked about, Courage, temperance, justice,
and wisdom? Are those considered sort of the four core ones?
You know? Is that sort of throughout Stoicism or certain
Stoics or I'm just kind of curious how ensconced those
four are, and then how many branches off of those
four perhaps there are?
Speaker 1 (33:35):
Those are the core fundamental values of Stoicism, And I
think you would argue that every other thing that the
Stokes talk about or believe could be ascribed to one
of those virtues. So someone goes, well, what about love?
Is that a virtue? And It's like, yes, it is,
but love I think fits under justice, how you treat people,
your connections to other people, so on and so forth.
(33:58):
So I think those four virtue who are all encompassing
as far as values go. And it's also important to
remember that the four virtues don't work in isolation from
each other. So courage in pursuit of injustice. To the stoics,
it is not impressive. In fact, it's a vice, not
(34:19):
a virtue. And wisdom is the virtue that helps us
discover when and where the other virtues apply. Right, So
these virtues can be configured in an unlimited amount of
combinations that can give you clarity or guidance in each
and every situation.
Speaker 3 (34:58):
Before we dive back into the conversation, let me ask
you something. What's one thing that has been holding you
back lately? You know that it's there, You've tried to
push past it, but somehow it keeps getting in the way.
You're not alone in this, and I've identified six major
saboteurs of self control, things like autopilot behavior, self doubt,
(35:20):
emotional escapism that quietly derail our best intentions. But here's
the good news. You can outsmart them. And I've put
together a free guide to help you spot these hidden
obstacles and give you simple, actionable strategies that you can
use to regain control. Download the free guide now at
oneufeed dot net slash ebook and take the first step
(35:43):
towards getting back on track. A question that I've seen
posed a couple times that I thought was an interesting question,
and I've got kind of my thoughts on it, but
I'm curious what yours were, is that from a surface level,
Buddhism and Stoicism seem to have a lot in common.
There's a lot of overlap there. I'm curious if you
have a sense of where you think there might be differences.
Speaker 1 (36:06):
Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, I think what
I particularly love about Stoicism is its engagement in the world,
where I tend to find with Buddhism, and both in
the Buddhist texts, there is kind of a disengagement from
the world. To me, the image of the Buddhist is
the monk, and the image to me of the Stoic
is like the emperor or the general, or the person
(36:30):
in the midst of the busy world. Like Stoicism is
founded in the Athenian Agora, the busiest marketplace in Athens.
That's not where I associate. I mean, there are Buddhist
Samurais and Confucius, for instance, as a political advisor. So
in the Eastern tradition there's certainly some level of engagement.
(36:51):
But I do think I see stoicis a much more
a philosophy of the world of the self as opposed
to so much of the attachment that we sometimes see
in the Eastern texts.
Speaker 3 (37:03):
Yeah, that makes sense, I would agree, And I think
a lot of what's happening in Western Buddhism is I
think there's a lot of correction oriented around that idea,
where actually I think that's not what is necessarily in
a lot of the Buddhist core teachings. But you're right,
there is an idea of withdrawing from the world. But
there certainly is also a lot of talk about compassion
(37:26):
and action. And I think that's one of the things
that Western Buddhism is doing right, I think, is correcting
for some of that and saying, look, yeah, these things
are great to develop this wisdom in this capacity for
reflection and all that, but to what end, you know,
not a metaphysical idea that like oh, well, if I
(37:46):
awaken all being simultaneously awakened like no like, is the
wisdom that I'm developing, the compassion I'm developing, is it
showing up in the world in a useful way?
Speaker 1 (37:56):
Yeah, Seneca was talking about the Epicureans the Buddhist, but
I think it's a similar point. You know. He says,
the difference between the Stoics and the Epicureans is that
the Epicurean says, I will not be involved in public
life unless it's unavoidable, and then the Stoics says, I
will be involved in public life unless it is impossible. Right,
(38:20):
And I think that's in distinction. The still defaults too,
I'm a philosopher, plus I am a insert profession, important
public role, et cetera. And I sort of tend to
see the Buddhist as the well, I'm I'm a philosopher,
and yes, occasionally I have to do X y and
(38:41):
Z yep.
Speaker 3 (38:41):
So let's move back to the book, and I want
to hit on the idea. The last part of the
book is around heroicism and talk about the difference between, say,
heroicism and courage.
Speaker 1 (38:58):
So obviously fear holds us back, courage is therefore rare,
but there is something beyond courage. One of the examples
I've come to explain this is like Michael Jordan walking
away from professional basketball at the height of his greatness
took immense courage. Would have been scary, it was real
cost to it. Lots of people told him this a
(39:20):
bad idea. He had to go be bad at baseball
in front of millions of people. He had to go
from being the greatest to like a minor league baseball player. Right,
that took incredible courage. Now is that heroic? Well probably not.
I mean, it doesn't really help anyone. It doesn't like
make the world a better place. Same with Michael Jordan
(39:42):
on that sort of flu game comes back from the flu.
It's courageous, takes the immense amount of endurance. You know,
It's not like solving world hunger or something, right. I
contrast that with Maya Moore, who I think two almost
three seasons ago now walks away from, you know, an
equally dominant career in the WNBA to work full time
(40:03):
at freeing a man wrongly convicted who is sentenced to
life in prison. So the courage to walk away for
oneself takes courage, the decision to walk away for something
greater than oneself is heroic. And so what we decide
to commit to, what our courage is in service of,
(40:25):
is the sort of next and ultimate sort of level
to think about and consider.
Speaker 3 (40:31):
Yeah, you say courage is not an independent good heroes
have a reason, and you also say the difference between
raw courage and heroic lies and the who who is
it for? It's a beautiful idea. So what are some
of your favorite things you'd like to share around heroicism.
I've got a few here, but I'm going to let
you lead for a second.
Speaker 1 (40:50):
Well, I open that part of the book with the
story of the three hundred Spartans at Thermopyla, and you know,
obviously it's made for some great movies, but it's all
so I just think one of the most indelible examples
of selflessness and sacrifice in the history of Western civilization,
these three hundred Spartans. There was more because they were
(41:11):
supported by some auxiliary troops, but basically, like a few
thousand Greek soldiers went out and fought a Persian army
that may have numbered as many as one million, and
they did it obviously knowing they would lose. I mean,
nobody marches out against those kind of odds convinced like, oh,
we're really going to win this thing, right, So why
(41:31):
did they go? Because they knew that this sort of
shaky Greek alliance needed time to come together. There were
people who thought the Persian threat was overstated, they thought
it didn't matter. They thought, like, you know, we were
better off handling this individually. And these three hundred Spartans
go out and make the ultimate sacrifice to bind these
(41:56):
nations together, to make a statement, to show that it's
possible for the Greeks to fight and do real damage,
but that a unified Greece is the only viable option.
And you know, you just read about these three hundred guys.
Every single one of them had children. In fact, that
(42:16):
was the point. The three hundred Spartans were chosen specifically
because they had children, because they believed that they wouldn't
let those children down, and that they were also protecting
the younger soldiers who hadn't had time to start families yet.
So it's just this, you know, magnificent story of human greatness.
I feel of in this brief moment, they become more
(42:40):
than just three hundred people. They become legends, you know,
they become transcendent. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (42:46):
In one of the sections called Going Beyond the Call,
you talk about the Spartans again and you say, the
opposite of fear, the true virtue contrasted with that vice
was not fearlessness. The opposite of fear is love. Love
for one another, love for ideas, love for your country,
love for the vulnerable in the weak, love for the
next generation, love for all. And you're saying, like, that's
(43:08):
what was really underlying what they did was love.
Speaker 1 (43:12):
It obviously wasn't for their benefit that they were going
out to fight this battle, because they weren't coming home,
and they knew that it was a selfless gift for
other people. I think about as America withdrew from Afghanistan.
You think of these twelve servicemen and women who walked
out for days on end into these crowds to load
(43:34):
people up onto airplanes, knowing that, you know, something could
go wrong at any moment, and tragically it did, and
twelve of them lost their lives. But they also in
the process where integral participants in one of the greatest
humanitarian rescue efforts in human history, and they are not
the recipients of the benefits of that risk. So you know,
(43:59):
if I just I to write a book that's transgressive,
there's a danger to that. But if I succeed, I
reap the rewards of that right financially, reputationally, etc. When
you look at sort of truly heroic people, what makes
it so impressive is that there was no real hope
(44:21):
for them, at least of the benefits of that sacrifice.
Speaker 3 (44:26):
You tell a story in the section about the audacity
of hope about John Lewis. Do you want to share
that one?
Speaker 1 (44:33):
That's another one. I mean, you think about what John
Lewis goes through in his life. I think he's arrested
fifty times, he's beaten more than fifty times. It's nearly
killed several occasions. If there was ever a person who
had reasonable justification for giving up on human beings, giving
(44:54):
up on white people, just giving up on people in general,
it was John Lewis and yet who sort of continually
was there with hope and forgiveness and optimism and commitment
to change, belief that change was possible. You think about,
in a weird way, the courage that it takes to
remain hopeful when people are showing you time and time
(45:17):
again that they're probably not worthy of that kind of belief.
To be a black American in nineteen fifty or nineteen
sixty and to believe that America was decent and good
and would eventually inevitably make progress in these areas, I mean,
(45:41):
there was not a lot of evidence for that, right,
I mean there's that expression when people show you who
they are, believe them, like we were showing over and
over and over again, like sort of who we were.
And so to have a belief, to have hope, to
have the belief in yourself that you could actually affect
change and make that real, I mean, that's just one
(46:02):
of the most magnificent things I could possibly imagine.
Speaker 3 (46:06):
Yeah, you say, just about one of the craziest, bravest
things you can do in this damned world of ours
is to keep hoping because there are so many reasons
not to. That is so true. It seems like such
a on one hand, crazy thing to do, but so
critically important.
Speaker 1 (46:22):
Yeah, I mean, we're not talking about sort of vague hope, Oh,
this will take care of itself, right, This isn't like, oh,
I don't need to do anything it'll work out. That's
not how it goes. But it's the courage to believe
that one has the ability to make a difference, to
push the ball forward in some way. And I think
also that on a long enough timeline, progress can be made.
Speaker 3 (46:42):
Yeah. I think it's that holding those two ideas at
the same time, right, Like, Yeah, things are really messed up,
there's all kinds of problems, and it can get better.
It's really seen both those. If you only see one
of those, you either end up hopeless or you end
up naively optimistic. But when you hold both of them,
that's a constructive and practical realism.
Speaker 1 (47:04):
Yeah. There's a James Baldwin quote that I love. I'm
pretty sure it's in the book. He says, not everything
that's faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed
unless it is faced. Right, So sticking your head in
the sand, pretending everything's fine, being afraid to look at
it or deal with it, obviously, that keeps things the
way that they are. That's not to say that just
(47:26):
because you're brave enough to say I'm going to try
to do this, that the bill will pass, that the
company will succeed, that the person will you be willing
to hear what you're saying, and you know, go to
rehab or whatever. But if you're not willing to try,
it's definitely not going to happen.
Speaker 3 (47:45):
Yeah, I think that's very spot on. Let's end with
you just sharing a little bit about your bookstore. You
opened a bookstore right as the pandemic opened, and I'd
be curious to hear a little bit about that story.
But i'd be also cure is to hear how has
it been going, say, since you've sort of talked about
that in a couple different places, I'm kind of curious
(48:07):
the latest update. But for people who don't have the
first update, why don't you give us that part?
Speaker 1 (48:11):
Well, it's actually worse than you said, because I was
I had just started the process, I had just paid
for the location for which I was hoping to open
a bookstore at the beginning of the pandemic. So then,
you know, looking at things in the cold light of
March twenty twenty and April twenty twenty and May twenty twenty,
(48:32):
as it literally looked like the world was falling apart,
and it wasn't even possible to be open as a bookstore. Right,
my wife and I had to sort of sit there
and go, are we sure we want to do this?
Do we just light our life savings on fire? You know?
But we stuck with it. We took our time, we
really thought about what we wanted to do, why we
wanted to do it, why we thought it was important,
(48:52):
and we pushed through. It opened in earlier this year,
and actually, so far it's doing great. I mean, you
never know with these things, but I I think now, like,
what if I had, you know, thrown in the towel
in March, what if I'd cut my losses might have
been cheaper in some ways. But when I watch people
walk through the bookstore, as I did before I came
up here to record this, it's like, Oh, this is
(49:13):
what's on the other side of those decision points when
you go do I want to do the easy thing?
Do I want to do the hard thing? Do I
want to push through? Do I want to quit? I
don't think that I could have thought that what it
is now and how it's doing was possible, And I
only found out that it was possible by pushing through,
by trying. As they say, all growth is a leap
in the dark. You have to take that leap, no
(49:35):
guarantee you to work. It might blow up in your face,
or it could surprise you and be even better than
you thought.
Speaker 3 (49:42):
Yep, so right now it's going well?
Speaker 1 (49:43):
Then yes, fingers crossed, but yeah it's going great. And
it was cool to like launch, you know, my new
books through my own bookstore.
Speaker 3 (49:50):
I was going to say, did you do you throw
yourself a book launch party at your own bookstore?
Speaker 1 (49:55):
No, no parties because of the pandemic. But you know,
instead of saying, hey, go buy this book from Amazon,
which of course I also want people to do, I said,
you know, buy this book from my bookstore, or just like, hey,
we can put my book in the window as a
new release. You know, Like how cool is that? So
there's just been a whole other element to it that's
(50:16):
been really fun.
Speaker 3 (50:17):
Before we wrap up, I want you to think about this.
Have you ever ended the day feeling like your choices
didn't quite match the person you wanted to be. Maybe
it was autopilot mode or self doubt that made it
harder to stick to your goals. And that's exactly why
I created The Six Saboteurs of Self Control. It's a
(50:38):
free guide to help you recognize the hidden patterns that
hold you back, and give you simple, effective strategies to
break through them. If you're ready to take back control
and start making lasting changes, download your copy now at
oneufeed dot net slash ebook. Let's make those shifts happen
starting today. One you feed dot nets e book. As
(51:02):
someone who has paid attention to the work you've done
over a few years, I know how deeply you love books.
You're reading lists. I always love to get and see,
and so I'm happy you've got a bookstore that's really wonderful.
Speaker 1 (51:14):
Thank you. Yeah, it's called the Painted Porch. It's in
this little town called Bastrup, Texas, right outside Austin. And
the other thing I think about it just for other people.
I'm not saying you should start a bookstore. But if
you become successful, if you have achieved whatever you've set
out to achieve, if that's not allowing you to then
go do things you've always wanted to do, sort of,
(51:36):
what's the point, you know? And so I think the
cool part about the bookstores. I love books. I love bookstores.
And if I can't do this now, what sort of
is the point of the other things? Right? And so
that's sort of something that's kind of empowered me along
the way.
Speaker 3 (51:51):
Yeah, well, Ryan, thank you so much for coming on
the show. I hope the book does great. I hope
the bookstore does well, and I hope to someday visit it.
I need to get down to Austin to visit my
brother who lives there, so I'll come by.
Speaker 1 (52:03):
Please do that would be awesome. Thanks so much, appreciate it.
Speaker 3 (52:06):
Thank you so much for listening to the show. If
you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking, I'd
love for you to share it with a friend. Sharing
from one person to another is the lifeblood of what
we do. We don't have a big budget, and I'm
certainly not a celebrity, but we have something even better,
and that's you. Just hit the share button on your
(52:27):
podcast app or send a quick text with the episode
link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means
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at a time. Thank you for being part of the
one You Feed community.
Really, what courage is is the idea that I can
change things, whether it's this tiny situation or it's some
globally complex situation.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
Welcome to the one you feed Throughout time. Great thinkers
have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have, quotes
like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think,
ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts
don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy,
(00:38):
or fear. We see what we don't have instead of
what we do. We think things that hold us back
and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking.
Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort
to make a life worth living. This podcast is about
how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction,
(00:58):
how they feed their good wolf.
Speaker 3 (01:02):
Every day we stand at a crossroads. One path is comfort,
the other is courage. But courage isn't just for heroes
on battlefields. It's in boardrooms, classrooms and kitchen tables. It's
the decision to speak up, to start over, to keep hoping.
My guest today is Ryan Holiday, author of Courage is Calling,
(01:25):
and one of the most influential voices in modern Stoicism.
We talk about fear, how to confront it, and how
to act bravely, not just once, but over and over,
from the Stoics to Steinbeck, from whistleblowers to warriors. Ryan
brings stories and insights that remind us you don't have
(01:45):
to be fearless, You just have to begin. I'm Eric
Zimmer and this is the one you feed. Hi, Ryan,
welcome to the show.
Speaker 1 (01:54):
Yeah, thanks for having me.
Speaker 3 (01:55):
It is a pleasure to have you on. We are
going to be discussing your latest book in a moment,
but let's start like we always do with the parable.
There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says,
in life, there are two wolves inside of us that
are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which
represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the
(02:15):
other's a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and
hatred and fear. And the grandson stops thinks about it
for a second. He looks up at his grandfather and
he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says,
the one you feed. So I'd like to start off
by asking you what that parable means to you in
your life and in the work that you do.
Speaker 1 (02:35):
Yeah, that's interesting. I talk about this in a couple
different of my books. There's a wonderful quote from Martin
Luther King where he says that there's a North and
a South in all of us, meaning, you know, sort
of a good and an evil, and that these sort
of forces are always at a kind of civil war
with each other. And I think this idea that we
have a higher self and a lower self. There's the
(02:57):
part of us that knows what's right and the part
of us that doesn't do what's right, you know, the
sort of part of us that is good habits and
the part of us that's bad habits. And the idea
that you're ever going to sort of perfectly be one
or the other is probably unlikely. But I do think
you give one more power than the other, which to
(03:17):
me is sort of what that parable is about, you know,
sort of day to day, which one has more control,
who's winning sort of more often than not. Is kind
of how I think about that. Pertains you know, to
the idea in the new book two of Courage. I
don't think courage is this thing that you sort of
magically perpetually are It's something that sort of day in
(03:40):
and day out, situation by situation, you either choose or
don't choose, And the fact that you've chosen it before
doesn't mean that you'll keep it forever. And the fact
that you've screwed up and fallen short in the past
also doesn't mean that you can't make a better choice now. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (04:00):
Books in general, I see a lot of you looking
at historical figures as ways of really seeing how other
people have to stay with the analogy fed their good
wolf to sort of remind us, because I think, you know,
it seems like there's two parts to this. One is
even orienting to what does that mean? What does it
(04:20):
mean to feed my good wolf? Or what does it
mean to live a good life or a life of virtue?
Then there's the actually doing it.
Speaker 1 (04:26):
Yeah, although I would also point out that I do
try to look also at examples of where the bad
wolf has won out again to further the analogy. I
try to do both inspiring stories and cautionary tales. Yeah,
the idea being we can sort of learn from the
experiences of others the costs and the benefits of those decisions.
(04:48):
And that they might stick with us when we are
faced with choices or temptations or difficult situations. I think
we tend to learn by story. We certainly remember stories,
and they sort of help us explain what we're going
through in the present moment. So I tend to look,
as you said, for stories that sort of remind us
either of what we're capable of, positive or negative, and
(05:11):
what the potential consequences of that could be either way. Yep.
Speaker 3 (05:15):
So we're going to get into your book in more detail.
It's called Courage is calling Fortune favors the brave. But
before we go deep into Courage, I'm going to ask
you to sort of set it up because this is
the first in a four part series of different virtues.
So say a little bit about what the different virtues
are and why did you choose them.
Speaker 1 (05:35):
So, in both ancient philosophy as well as in Christianity,
and we see some similar renderings of it in Eastern
philosophy as well, there's this idea of the four cardinal virtues.
Cardinal doesn't actually have a religious connotation. It comes from
the Latin word cardos, which means hinge. But the idea
that there's sort of four pivotal virtues that the good
(05:55):
life depends on, and those four virtues in Stoicism in
Christianity are courage, temperance, justice, and wisdom. So this book
is the first book in a series on those four virtues,
courage being I think, if not the most important virtue,
certainly the virtue that all the other virtues require almost
(06:18):
from the outset. Okay, I can give you a quick
definition of courage, or a quick definition of justice, or
a quick definition of wisdom or temperance, But what does
that actually look like in the real world, How does
one apply it, how have people applied it? And how
might we learn from them. That's sort of what I'm
trying to do in this book, as I do with
(06:39):
all the other books. They usually pick a theme, as
you said, and then survey illustrate it with stories that
are memorable and inspiring and sort of allow us to
get into the particulars of Okay, when you mean courage,
you mean not show fear. No, it's more complicated than that.
So we're trying to explore what courage looks like in reality.
Speaker 3 (06:55):
And I'm going to ask you to define courage in
a minute. But I want to start with you end
the book to a certain degree, which is with basically
the end of one of my favorite books of all time,
which is East of Eden by John Steinbeck, which I've
read every couple of years for I don't know, thirty
years now, and so I was wondering if you could just,
(07:17):
you know, share with us kind of how you end
the book around sort of the pivotal idea that ends
East of Eden.
Speaker 1 (07:26):
Yeah, so at the end of East of Eden. And
actually Steinbeck talks about this at length. He has this
wonderful book called a Journal of a Novel where he's
sort of writing to himself as he's working on the novel,
and you see him sort of struggling with these themes.
But he ends up talking to his editor about this.
But he has this sort of breakthrough that the commandments
(07:47):
are not thou shalt not, which sounds like you're not
allowed to do these things, and he says, actually the
rendering is closer to thou may not or thou should not, right,
meaning that we have a choice, and that the choice
is everything in the choice is as you said, if
(08:07):
you only had one wolf inside you and it was
the good wolf or the bad wolf, well, then you
wouldn't really have any responsibility or accountability for who you
were day to day. If you were a good person,
that would be great, but it wouldn't be really much
of a credit to you because you were simply born
that way. If you were a bad person, you really
(08:29):
couldn't be held accountable for that either, because it's not
your fault. It'd be like being short or tall. It's
not on you. It's not a reflection of you. And
so this idea that we have the individual choice, the
basis of free will, to choose to follow, the ideas,
to choose virtue, to choose which wolf we feed, is
in fact everything. I close the book with that story,
(08:52):
but I opened the book with a similar story as
no religious connotation, which is the so called choice of Hercules.
Hercules is said to come to a crossroads. At either
side of the crossroads, there are two goddesses. One goddess
is the goddess of virtue. One is the goddess of vice.
Advice says, look, you're gonna have everything you want. It's
gonna be fun, it's gonna be easy, it's gonna be wonderful.
(09:15):
You'll never have to care about anything again. And then
the Virtue, the goddess of virtue, says, I can't make
that promise. She says, it's gonna be hard, it's gonna
be sacrificed, there's gonna be difficulty, it's gonna challenge you.
But she says it will make you great. Won't be easy,
but the challenge will be everything. And so this choice
that Hercules makes is obviously said to be the sort
(09:38):
of founding of his mythological greatness. And so the idea
that we have this choice, that it's up to us,
to me is the essence of what we're talking about.
Speaker 3 (09:48):
Yeah, I couldn't agree more. So let's go into courage
talk a little bit about to start, how do you
define courage?
Speaker 1 (09:55):
Well, I struggled with this at the beginning because there's
said to be two types of courage, moral courage and
there's physical courage. And that it's like, do I want
to focus on physical courage or moral courage? What's more interesting?
And how do they pertain to each other? How are
they different? And then I really, as I thought about
it more and more, I realized that what do they
have in common? What are their similarities, what's their connection?
(10:18):
And I realized that at the core, all forms of
courage are about risk. It's basically, did you put your
ass on the line? Like, did you physically step up
and run into a burning building? Did you, you know,
follow orders under fire? That would be physical courage, of course,
But what is a whistleblower? What is a truth teller?
(10:41):
You know? What is an artist who pushes the boundaries
of what we accept? Well? Why do we admire that?
Why does that count as courage? They're not risking their lives,
of course, but they're risking their livelihood, they're risking their reputation,
they're risking being looked at straightly or criticize. So you know,
(11:02):
they're still putting their ass on the line. They might
not die, but they could die of some form of
social death. And so the idea at the core of
courage to me is the willingness to risk and to
put yourself out there.
Speaker 3 (11:16):
Yeah, you say that courage is the management of and
the triumph over fear. It's the decision, in a moment
of peril or day in and day out, to take
ownership to a certain agency over a situation, over yourself,
over the faith that someone else has resigned themselves to.
I just love that idea. And the other thing you say,
I think is so important around this is that inherent
(11:37):
in this is the belief that an individual can make
a difference.
Speaker 1 (11:40):
Yes, you know, we talk about this idea. It's sort
of now fallen out of fashion, the Great Man of
History theory. And I don't think it's fallen out of
fashion because it's sexist. It's the idea that, like an
individual can change the course of human history. There's first off,
a certain amount of courage just in that belief. But
it's easier to sort of look at the idea that
(12:01):
it's all hopeless, that it's all complicated, that it's all
too big for an individual to possibly affect. And so
I think, really what courage is is the idea that
I can change things, whether it's this tiny situation or
it's some globally complex situation. There's a great expression one. Again,
these are all little sexists, so I'm not the coiner
(12:23):
of the phrases. But there's another one that's like one
man with courage makes a majority, meaning that almost all
things start as a person who is alone, but it's
through their courages, through their commitments to the actions that
they take because of that courage that they are able
to make that thing a reality. They bring people to them,
(12:47):
where they bring people along with them. That's what courage
is about.
Speaker 3 (12:51):
The way you've structured the book is you start off
by really talking about what gets in the way of
courage for most of us, which is fear. So let's
take a step or two back, at least as far
as the order of the book, and talk about what
are some of the things that get in our way
as far as fear.
Speaker 1 (13:10):
Yeah, so fear gets in the way. But what is fear.
Fear is a bunch of specific fears, right, fear of
what other people will think, fear of the consequences, fear
of standing out, fear of looking stupid, right, fear of
any number of things. But I think the irony is
often it's not even those things we're afraid. We just
(13:31):
have this vague fear, right, this sort of undescribed, unspecified,
vague sense that it's not worth it, or it'll be hard,
or it'll be difficult. And so when we think of fear,
I think one of the first things we want to
do is just like, well, what am I actually afraid
of here? Right? You know, you're jumping off a high dive.
(13:53):
What are you afraid of? Well, you're probably afraid of dying, right, Well, like,
let's actually think about whether that's physical possible here. That
doesn't mean it's magically going to be easy, but you
can sort of logically get to a place where you know, Okay,
the fear I have is irrational, So if I push
past it, I'll be fine. Now, it's really just a
(14:15):
matter of do I have the willpower to push past it.
I think about this when I dropped out of college.
You know, I was really scared. It was like I
was nineteen years old. I had no life experience. I
had no sense of how the world actually worked. So
I was afraid, basically that if this didn't work out,
I would end up under a bridge somewhere, right, Like,
(14:36):
I was afraid that by leaving college, I was cutting
the only safety net that possibly existed between me and homelessness, right,
which was of course fundamentally irrational. And so it was
really helpful to have someone in my life. I had
a mentor who was like Ryan, I got sick for
a year in college. I remember he told me this.
(14:57):
He's like, I got sick for a year in college.
I had to take a year off and I was
in the hospital the entire time, and he was like,
do you know how often this has ever come up
in my life? Since that I was gone for a
year of college. It took five years instead of four years.
He's like, it's literally not once come up. He's like,
this happens all the time. People leave and they have
to come back. People leave and they never come back.
(15:18):
But he's like, it's not what you think it is.
It's not as irrevocable as your fears are telling you
that it is. And it was like, oh, okay, that
makes sense. So then I decided to do it, and
that was the other part. So I went and did it.
I remember I walked into the registrar's office and I
said something like, you know, I'm here to drop out
of college. And they were like, that's not even one
(15:39):
of the options. They're like, you can take a semester off,
but your credits are good for ten years. And so
this thing that I've been so afraid of, actually I
had a ten year like undo button that I could
press at anytime. And so it's really important that one
that we break things down and then the benefit of
(15:59):
breaking them down and proceeding, whether it's jumping off a
high diverge, dropping out of college is now the next
time there was one of those decisions in my life,
I was much more savvy and aware that it wasn't
as scary as I thought it would be, and that
there's almost always a way out.
Speaker 3 (16:20):
Yeah, that's so good. I was just working on recording
a shortcast thing for Blinkis this morning, and we were
talking about that exact point of like a get specific
about your fears, like really move out of the vagueness.
You know, like everybody will think I'm an idiot, and
is more like, well there'll be three people there, So
three people will think I'm an idiot, right, Like you know,
(16:41):
get specific.
Speaker 1 (16:42):
And how many of them are even paying attention and
give a shit? Right, And so you're you realize like
often you're like imposter syndrome. Right, that's a real fear
a lot of people have. Well what if they really
investigate and they find out that I'm not as good
as I think or whatever, and it's like they're not
thinking about you at all. They don't care, you know,
like they are consumed with their own problems, your obsession
(17:04):
with yourself is making you think this is a bigger
deal than it actually is.
Speaker 3 (17:08):
Totally, totally, yeah. And then the second part of that
that you said really is like, Okay, well if my
fear comes true, how will I respond. I love the
word it's not irrevocable, and I think that's so important
is to recognize, like, I mean, some decisions are irrevocable,
but the vast majority of them are not, and you
can change. I mean, when I left my full time
(17:29):
job to start doing this podcast and the coaching and
stuff full time, you know, I just had to spend
a little bit of time and think, well, if this
doesn't work, here's the thirteen different fallback plans I could have. Right,
the risk? Am I taking a risk?
Speaker 1 (17:42):
Sure?
Speaker 3 (17:42):
But like to your point, it's not like this either
works or I'm homeless. It's like, well, this either works
or I get another job. Like it's not the end
of the world.
Speaker 1 (17:51):
Yes, there's consequences, right, We're not saying like, don't be afraid,
there's zero consequences. There's consequences, but it's the vague, the
indescribableness of those consequences that makes them loom much larger
than they actually are. There's a story I tell in
the book about Ulysses as Grant this because your point about,
(18:11):
you know, sort of how many people are watching. He's
crossing the plains of Texas as a young soldier and
he hears these wolves and he thinks it's like hundreds
of wolves. He things they're about to be devoured by
this rabid pack of wolves to go to the idea
of this show. And the guy he's with is a
tad more experience and he says something like, you know, Grant,
how many wolves do you think there are? And Grant
(18:33):
doesn't want to sound like a like a woos and
so he says, I don't know twenty And he was like,
that was like half what I actually thought there were.
You know, he thought there were so many wolves. The
guy hears is he just sort of smiles. They finally
come upon the wolves and there's two of them. There's
two wolves. And what he realizes is and he says,
I never forgot this for the rest of my political
and military life. He said, there's always fewer of them
(18:56):
when they are counted, right, So you take your fears,
you take your risk, you think about the worst case scenario.
Then you actually go like, Okay, I'm going to inspect this.
I'm going to like really look at it. You know,
You're like, well, I don't want to say this, I
might piss people off. And your idea of people is
like a stadium, right or like yes, but there's actually
(19:19):
like fifteen of them, right. I think about this every
time I say something that's maybe a little political or
a little controversial, You're like, oh, people aren't gonna like this.
But like people, it turns out to be like seven
weirdos who sends you poorly you know, poorly written emails
that make you go like, how is this person reading
(19:40):
my stuff? Anyway? I'm not sure they're literate? Right, Like,
you realize that like the people that you were worried
about you actually don't care about and are far fewer
in number than you would have if you had had
to guess they're actually were totally.
Speaker 3 (19:56):
I mean, I work with a lot of people who
are trying to build their business step out online a
little bit, and they're just like, I'm just worried that
I'm going to get all these people hating on me.
I said, no, no, no, Your biggest worry in the
beginning is that nobody is going to pay any attention
to what you're doing. You don't have to worry about
the haters for a while, right. And then to your point,
in seven and a half years of doing this, the
(20:18):
number of people who've said anything to me that's really awful.
I mean, it's just so few.
Speaker 1 (20:24):
Yeah, and so what we often do is we make
these things bigger than they actually are, so then we
don't have to do them right. If you're like, well,
I don't want to piss people off, so I'm not
going to do it, or I don't want to be
laughed at, then we don't have to do it right.
It's like the excuse to not put yourself out there.
You're looking for someone to give you permission to not
do it.
Speaker 3 (20:43):
Yeah, there's something you said near the end of the
section on fear that I loved it. I'm just going
to read it because I think it speaks to a
different kind of fear. That's really important.
Speaker 1 (20:52):
Though.
Speaker 3 (20:53):
But you said, we're afraid to open up, we're scared
to share. We don't want anyone to know how we're
feeling inside, and so all of us feel more alone.
You know what pain is caused by the inability or
the unwillingness to sort of share our difficulties, our fear,
you know, the things that are going on inside us.
And I just loved that idea of you know, when
(21:14):
we don't do that, more of us feel alone.
Speaker 1 (21:17):
Yeah, because I'm specifically talking about stoicism, which you know,
is a philosophy that a lot of people associate with
having no emotions. That's sort of the big stereotype of stoicism.
In fact, that's like what the word stoic means in English,
like the sort of lowercase stoic means like emotionless, invulnerable robot.
(21:41):
And so I wanted to talk specifically about that that, like, hey,
courage is not just you know, charging into the fray
under fire. Courage is also saying, like you think about
the soldier who does do that, right, but then the
soldier who comes home and has trouble adjusting, or maybe
(22:03):
they're addicted to something, or maybe they're depressed, or maybe
they're even contemplating suicide. I wanted to talk about the
courage to say, hey, I'm struggling, I'm having a hard time.
I need help, because this is almost a scarier thing
for brave people to do right to put yourself out
there in that way. And so the idea of being vulnerable,
(22:26):
as Brene Brown talks about this much better than I do,
but the idea of being vulnerable is often the scariest
thing in the world for people.
Speaker 3 (22:59):
It's interesting this before, back when I had years and
years and years in sort of a corporate world, although
a lot of them were startups, but you know, it
was still sort of a business world.
Speaker 1 (23:09):
But the more that.
Speaker 3 (23:09):
I sort of shared who I was, I shared my
addiction history, I shared my depression issues, you know, the
things that happened in my life, not in a like
I'm talking about me all the time way, but just
was a little bit more open about that. It was
amazing over the years the number of people that would
come back to me and then say, oh, you know
this is going on because all of a sudden it
(23:31):
was safe or to use your word, they're not alone.
They recognize like, oh, okay, other people feel this way,
and it's okay to talk about it.
Speaker 1 (23:38):
Here we talked about this, right. So it's like, let's
say everyone's scared of doing something. Maybe it's a political stand,
it's standing up to a bully, you know, it's responding
to an emergency, one man with courage makes a majority. Right,
one person says no, we have to do something, and
then they go do it, and the other one says, yeah,
they're right, let's go do something. But this is also
true for mental health issues. This is all so true
(24:00):
for emotions. This is also true for doubts about something. Right,
So the person who says, hey, I'm having trouble with this,
like you think about what the Me Too movement actually was, right.
It starts as women on Facebook saying hey, something like
this happened to me too. Right, So put aside some
(24:23):
of the political implications of the movement, Put aside excesses
or problems or cases that you agree with or disagree
with the idea of women saying hey, I was afraid
to talk about this, but now that other people are
open to talking about it, I'm going to say me too.
That's what the power of courage is really about. And again,
(24:45):
this is such important moral courage. First of uf, there's
an element of physical courage that we probably shouldn't under
state as well. But this is the decision to talk
about a thing. That's why weren't they talking about it
before it was uncomfortable. They thought they would be judged
for it, they thought there might be professional consequences for it,
they thought they might get a reputation because of it. Right,
(25:06):
So the decision to put your ass on the line
and say screw all of that, it's important for me
to say this. It makes a difference for me to
say this. I've been inspired by the other people who
said it, and I am going to say something that
is courage and it helps not just yourself but other people.
Speaker 3 (25:25):
Yeah, that's a beautiful example of it. So let's now
move into the courage section of the book. And the
book is set up in that fear section the courage section,
and there's little essays under them. Yeah, you know, lots
of different ones that tell stories from history and make points.
So I thought I'd just grab a couple of them
(25:45):
out of there and let you talk about them, and
then maybe you could pick one or two that you
most want to talk about. But one of them that
I liked was just start somewhere, do something.
Speaker 1 (25:56):
Yeah, you know, I'm actually going through this right now.
I'm working on this other bookuggling a little bit. It
was going well and then got distracted and anyways, trying
to remember that doesn't have to be perfect, particularly the
first draft. I have to be willing for parts of
it not to be good. I just have to start.
If I sit around and I wait for it to
(26:17):
be easy, it'll never happen. If I wait for the
perfect opening or opportunity, it's never going to happen. If
I want what I'm doing now to be as good
as what I've done before, what I did even earlier
on this project, again, I'm going to be sort of
stimied or stuck. So I just have to start. And
so today I was like, you know what, what's the
(26:37):
littlest thing that I could work on. I was like,
you know what, I've got all this sort of loose
research that I haven't found a place for. I'm just
going to start organizing that and hopefully that will sort
of knock something loose, which it did. Yesterday was sort
of a mediocre day. Today was kind of a mediocre day.
But tomorrow, I now suddenly, because I did this work,
(26:59):
have pretty clear marching orders for what I need to
work on tomorrow. So just start somewhere. You don't have
to magically do some huge, heroic, impressive thing. You just
have to make a little bit of progress.
Speaker 3 (27:12):
I don't want to divert the conversation too far from
the topic of your book, but I've got to ask
a question about how do you organize all your research,
because you are really good at pulling lots of different
pieces together, and I am always fascinated by the authors
that do that really well how they organize it.
Speaker 1 (27:34):
So for me, I'm always reading these are books behind me,
and as I'm reading, I'm like, Okay, for instance, I'm
writing a chapter on Churchill and is somewhat reckless financial habits.
That's what I was thinking about. So this is a
book I read called No More Champagne about Churchill and
his finances. And then these are all the pages that
i've market yep, that I thought were interesting, and then
(27:54):
I usually record them on note cards. And then the
note cards are usually the build blocks of the book,
so I have a big box all the difference. As
you said, the book's three parts, then there's chapters in
each part. Those note cards get slotted in in their
respective parts, and those are the building blocks for each
specific chapter in each book.
Speaker 3 (28:15):
Makes total sense. So you're doing it sort of paper based,
old fashioned way.
Speaker 1 (28:20):
Yes, definitely. And it's not a perfect system. There's like
a thing I know I wrote down and it has
a guy's name on it, a baseball player that I
want to write about, and I can't find it, and
I don't know how I'm possibly going to find it.
So it's not a perfect system. But for the most part,
it gives me everything that I.
Speaker 3 (28:37):
Need makes sense. Okay, thank you for that. I just
was fascinated to know. So back on to courage. A
couple of these we've already hit. We've talked about how
courage is contagious, you know, how one person being courageous
spread So that was one I was going to hit.
We kind of talked a little bit about preparation makes
you brave. So let's move on to be the decider.
Speaker 1 (28:58):
Okay. The thing that's garious is making a decision. Right,
as long as you don't decide, it can be anything,
it can be everything. You won't be held accountable. Right.
The decision is when we pull the trigger, and that
that holds us back. So I was just, you know,
just really talking about the power and the courage required
(29:21):
to make decisions, because if you don't decide, sure, things
will stay sort of in one spot. But by definition,
you're also not going to be making progress. It's easy
to endlessly debate things, it's easy to endlessly research and
consider them. It's easy to ask for unlimited amounts of advice.
(29:44):
But at some point you got to pull the trigger.
You got to go. And that's that chapter's about.
Speaker 3 (29:50):
Yeah, you quote an expression in there that I think
is great, which is whatever you're not changing, you're choosing.
It's corollarya is, you know, not making a decision is
a of a decision unto itself. But I actually like
this phrase better what you're not changing your choosing, which
is really good. And then I can't remember what was
in the book or something else you wrote. I think
you led me to it, but it was a William
(30:12):
James quote. There is no more miserable human being than
the one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.
Speaker 2 (30:21):
So true.
Speaker 3 (30:21):
Having been there, I know how miserable that is.
Speaker 1 (30:24):
Yeah, And to me, that's the importance and the power
of routine. That's the importance and power of sort of
setting your ground rules. And for those who don't do that,
they face every day as an endless stream of unlimited decisions.
Speaker 3 (30:41):
Totally I mean with coaching clients. One of the first
things we'll work on is we have got to decide
ahead of time, yes, what we're doing, because if you don't,
as you just said, you will spend a lot of
your precious energy trying to figure out, well, when am
I going to do it? What should I do? When
am I going to do it, so that when it
comes to time to do it, you already have sucked
(31:02):
out half your resources are more and thus it's really
hard to do when you know exactly what you're doing.
When then you could take all that energy and sort
of channel it, like do it totally.
Speaker 1 (31:12):
Yes, if you've set the rules for yourself. And this
is kind of where the virtues come in to play. Also,
if you're like, hey, I'm a person who defaults towards courage,
then when a scary situation comes up, you're like, this
is what I do, This is who I am. If
you're like, I don't really know what I believe, I
don't really know what I stand for, I don't really
know what's important to me, then you're also winging it.
(31:34):
And that's when you go, ah, but this will cost
me money, Ah, but this could be hard, right, ah,
but this seems fun, right, and so setting those sort
of rules for yourself help you in those stressful, difficult situations.
Speaker 3 (31:48):
A lot of your work is about values, you know,
what are the values that we have? Do you have
any particular ways that you like of sort of determining
personal values and getting clearer on what they are. There's
a lot of different systems out there, there's a lot
of ways to do it. But I'm just kind of curious,
as somebody who's pretty firmly ensconced in thinking about values,
(32:10):
if you have any thoughts on you know, for people
who are like, well, I'm not really sure what my
values are.
Speaker 1 (32:15):
I mean, what I love about Stoicism in particular, and
I brought up earlier that sort of Stoicism and Christianity
are aligned on these four virtues. What I like about
the Stoic case for those virtues is there's no sort
of metaphysical, supernatural explanation for them. I'm not faulting anyone
who chooses it, but if you don't believe that the
(32:35):
idea is divine, it's like, well, sort of why should
I do it? Right? So Christianity always has this sort
of benefit of like, well, this is what God says, right,
and Stoicism, I think is making the argument not, hey,
if you live in opposition to the four virtues, you
will go to hell. I think the Stoics are arguing,
your life will be hell. Right, your life will suck.
(32:57):
You might be rich, you might be powerful, might be
but that will bring you very little joy, very little happiness,
very little meaning, and in fact probably bring you the
opposite of those things. Right. And so that's really what
I love about Stoicism. It's making sort of a logical,
self interested case for virtue and value.
Speaker 3 (33:16):
Now, are these four virtues that you talked about, Courage, temperance, justice,
and wisdom? Are those considered sort of the four core ones?
You know? Is that sort of throughout Stoicism or certain
Stoics or I'm just kind of curious how ensconced those
four are, and then how many branches off of those
four perhaps there are?
Speaker 1 (33:35):
Those are the core fundamental values of Stoicism, And I
think you would argue that every other thing that the
Stokes talk about or believe could be ascribed to one
of those virtues. So someone goes, well, what about love?
Is that a virtue? And It's like, yes, it is,
but love I think fits under justice, how you treat people,
your connections to other people, so on and so forth.
(33:58):
So I think those four virtue who are all encompassing
as far as values go. And it's also important to
remember that the four virtues don't work in isolation from
each other. So courage in pursuit of injustice. To the stoics,
it is not impressive. In fact, it's a vice, not
(34:19):
a virtue. And wisdom is the virtue that helps us
discover when and where the other virtues apply. Right, So
these virtues can be configured in an unlimited amount of
combinations that can give you clarity or guidance in each
and every situation.
Speaker 3 (34:58):
Before we dive back into the conversation, let me ask
you something. What's one thing that has been holding you
back lately? You know that it's there, You've tried to
push past it, but somehow it keeps getting in the way.
You're not alone in this, and I've identified six major
saboteurs of self control, things like autopilot behavior, self doubt,
(35:20):
emotional escapism that quietly derail our best intentions. But here's
the good news. You can outsmart them. And I've put
together a free guide to help you spot these hidden
obstacles and give you simple, actionable strategies that you can
use to regain control. Download the free guide now at
oneufeed dot net slash ebook and take the first step
(35:43):
towards getting back on track. A question that I've seen
posed a couple times that I thought was an interesting question,
and I've got kind of my thoughts on it, but
I'm curious what yours were, is that from a surface level,
Buddhism and Stoicism seem to have a lot in common.
There's a lot of overlap there. I'm curious if you
have a sense of where you think there might be differences.
Speaker 1 (36:06):
Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, I think what
I particularly love about Stoicism is its engagement in the world,
where I tend to find with Buddhism, and both in
the Buddhist texts, there is kind of a disengagement from
the world. To me, the image of the Buddhist is
the monk, and the image to me of the Stoic
is like the emperor or the general, or the person
(36:30):
in the midst of the busy world. Like Stoicism is
founded in the Athenian Agora, the busiest marketplace in Athens.
That's not where I associate. I mean, there are Buddhist
Samurais and Confucius, for instance, as a political advisor. So
in the Eastern tradition there's certainly some level of engagement.
(36:51):
But I do think I see stoicis a much more
a philosophy of the world of the self as opposed
to so much of the attachment that we sometimes see
in the Eastern texts.
Speaker 3 (37:03):
Yeah, that makes sense, I would agree, And I think
a lot of what's happening in Western Buddhism is I
think there's a lot of correction oriented around that idea,
where actually I think that's not what is necessarily in
a lot of the Buddhist core teachings. But you're right,
there is an idea of withdrawing from the world. But
there certainly is also a lot of talk about compassion
(37:26):
and action. And I think that's one of the things
that Western Buddhism is doing right, I think, is correcting
for some of that and saying, look, yeah, these things
are great to develop this wisdom in this capacity for
reflection and all that, but to what end, you know,
not a metaphysical idea that like oh, well, if I
(37:46):
awaken all being simultaneously awakened like no like, is the
wisdom that I'm developing, the compassion I'm developing, is it
showing up in the world in a useful way?
Speaker 1 (37:56):
Yeah, Seneca was talking about the Epicureans the Buddhist, but
I think it's a similar point. You know. He says,
the difference between the Stoics and the Epicureans is that
the Epicurean says, I will not be involved in public
life unless it's unavoidable, and then the Stoics says, I
will be involved in public life unless it is impossible. Right,
(38:20):
And I think that's in distinction. The still defaults too,
I'm a philosopher, plus I am a insert profession, important
public role, et cetera. And I sort of tend to
see the Buddhist as the well, I'm I'm a philosopher,
and yes, occasionally I have to do X y and
(38:41):
Z yep.
Speaker 3 (38:41):
So let's move back to the book, and I want
to hit on the idea. The last part of the
book is around heroicism and talk about the difference between, say,
heroicism and courage.
Speaker 1 (38:58):
So obviously fear holds us back, courage is therefore rare,
but there is something beyond courage. One of the examples
I've come to explain this is like Michael Jordan walking
away from professional basketball at the height of his greatness
took immense courage. Would have been scary, it was real
cost to it. Lots of people told him this a
(39:20):
bad idea. He had to go be bad at baseball
in front of millions of people. He had to go
from being the greatest to like a minor league baseball player. Right,
that took incredible courage. Now is that heroic? Well probably not.
I mean, it doesn't really help anyone. It doesn't like
make the world a better place. Same with Michael Jordan
(39:42):
on that sort of flu game comes back from the flu.
It's courageous, takes the immense amount of endurance. You know,
It's not like solving world hunger or something, right. I
contrast that with Maya Moore, who I think two almost
three seasons ago now walks away from, you know, an
equally dominant career in the WNBA to work full time
(40:03):
at freeing a man wrongly convicted who is sentenced to
life in prison. So the courage to walk away for
oneself takes courage, the decision to walk away for something
greater than oneself is heroic. And so what we decide
to commit to, what our courage is in service of,
(40:25):
is the sort of next and ultimate sort of level
to think about and consider.
Speaker 3 (40:31):
Yeah, you say courage is not an independent good heroes
have a reason, and you also say the difference between
raw courage and heroic lies and the who who is
it for? It's a beautiful idea. So what are some
of your favorite things you'd like to share around heroicism.
I've got a few here, but I'm going to let
you lead for a second.
Speaker 1 (40:50):
Well, I open that part of the book with the
story of the three hundred Spartans at Thermopyla, and you know,
obviously it's made for some great movies, but it's all
so I just think one of the most indelible examples
of selflessness and sacrifice in the history of Western civilization,
these three hundred Spartans. There was more because they were
(41:11):
supported by some auxiliary troops, but basically, like a few
thousand Greek soldiers went out and fought a Persian army
that may have numbered as many as one million, and
they did it obviously knowing they would lose. I mean,
nobody marches out against those kind of odds convinced like, oh,
we're really going to win this thing, right, So why
(41:31):
did they go? Because they knew that this sort of
shaky Greek alliance needed time to come together. There were
people who thought the Persian threat was overstated, they thought
it didn't matter. They thought, like, you know, we were
better off handling this individually. And these three hundred Spartans
go out and make the ultimate sacrifice to bind these
(41:56):
nations together, to make a statement, to show that it's
possible for the Greeks to fight and do real damage,
but that a unified Greece is the only viable option.
And you know, you just read about these three hundred guys.
Every single one of them had children. In fact, that
(42:16):
was the point. The three hundred Spartans were chosen specifically
because they had children, because they believed that they wouldn't
let those children down, and that they were also protecting
the younger soldiers who hadn't had time to start families yet.
So it's just this, you know, magnificent story of human greatness.
I feel of in this brief moment, they become more
(42:40):
than just three hundred people. They become legends, you know,
they become transcendent. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (42:46):
In one of the sections called Going Beyond the Call,
you talk about the Spartans again and you say, the
opposite of fear, the true virtue contrasted with that vice
was not fearlessness. The opposite of fear is love. Love
for one another, love for ideas, love for your country,
love for the vulnerable in the weak, love for the
next generation, love for all. And you're saying, like, that's
(43:08):
what was really underlying what they did was love.
Speaker 1 (43:12):
It obviously wasn't for their benefit that they were going
out to fight this battle, because they weren't coming home,
and they knew that it was a selfless gift for
other people. I think about as America withdrew from Afghanistan.
You think of these twelve servicemen and women who walked
out for days on end into these crowds to load
(43:34):
people up onto airplanes, knowing that, you know, something could
go wrong at any moment, and tragically it did, and
twelve of them lost their lives. But they also in
the process where integral participants in one of the greatest
humanitarian rescue efforts in human history, and they are not
the recipients of the benefits of that risk. So you know,
(43:59):
if I just I to write a book that's transgressive,
there's a danger to that. But if I succeed, I
reap the rewards of that right financially, reputationally, etc. When
you look at sort of truly heroic people, what makes
it so impressive is that there was no real hope
(44:21):
for them, at least of the benefits of that sacrifice.
Speaker 3 (44:26):
You tell a story in the section about the audacity
of hope about John Lewis. Do you want to share
that one?
Speaker 1 (44:33):
That's another one. I mean, you think about what John
Lewis goes through in his life. I think he's arrested
fifty times, he's beaten more than fifty times. It's nearly
killed several occasions. If there was ever a person who
had reasonable justification for giving up on human beings, giving
(44:54):
up on white people, just giving up on people in general,
it was John Lewis and yet who sort of continually
was there with hope and forgiveness and optimism and commitment
to change, belief that change was possible. You think about,
in a weird way, the courage that it takes to
remain hopeful when people are showing you time and time
(45:17):
again that they're probably not worthy of that kind of belief.
To be a black American in nineteen fifty or nineteen
sixty and to believe that America was decent and good
and would eventually inevitably make progress in these areas, I mean,
(45:41):
there was not a lot of evidence for that, right,
I mean there's that expression when people show you who
they are, believe them, like we were showing over and
over and over again, like sort of who we were.
And so to have a belief, to have hope, to
have the belief in yourself that you could actually affect
change and make that real, I mean, that's just one
(46:02):
of the most magnificent things I could possibly imagine.
Speaker 3 (46:06):
Yeah, you say, just about one of the craziest, bravest
things you can do in this damned world of ours
is to keep hoping because there are so many reasons
not to. That is so true. It seems like such
a on one hand, crazy thing to do, but so
critically important.
Speaker 1 (46:22):
Yeah, I mean, we're not talking about sort of vague hope, Oh,
this will take care of itself, right, This isn't like, oh,
I don't need to do anything it'll work out. That's
not how it goes. But it's the courage to believe
that one has the ability to make a difference, to
push the ball forward in some way. And I think
also that on a long enough timeline, progress can be made.
Speaker 3 (46:42):
Yeah. I think it's that holding those two ideas at
the same time, right, Like, Yeah, things are really messed up,
there's all kinds of problems, and it can get better.
It's really seen both those. If you only see one
of those, you either end up hopeless or you end
up naively optimistic. But when you hold both of them,
that's a constructive and practical realism.
Speaker 1 (47:04):
Yeah. There's a James Baldwin quote that I love. I'm
pretty sure it's in the book. He says, not everything
that's faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed
unless it is faced. Right, So sticking your head in
the sand, pretending everything's fine, being afraid to look at
it or deal with it, obviously, that keeps things the
way that they are. That's not to say that just
(47:26):
because you're brave enough to say I'm going to try
to do this, that the bill will pass, that the
company will succeed, that the person will you be willing
to hear what you're saying, and you know, go to
rehab or whatever. But if you're not willing to try,
it's definitely not going to happen.
Speaker 3 (47:45):
Yeah, I think that's very spot on. Let's end with
you just sharing a little bit about your bookstore. You
opened a bookstore right as the pandemic opened, and I'd
be curious to hear a little bit about that story.
But i'd be also cure is to hear how has
it been going, say, since you've sort of talked about
that in a couple different places, I'm kind of curious
(48:07):
the latest update. But for people who don't have the
first update, why don't you give us that part?
Speaker 1 (48:11):
Well, it's actually worse than you said, because I was
I had just started the process, I had just paid
for the location for which I was hoping to open
a bookstore at the beginning of the pandemic. So then,
you know, looking at things in the cold light of
March twenty twenty and April twenty twenty and May twenty twenty,
(48:32):
as it literally looked like the world was falling apart,
and it wasn't even possible to be open as a bookstore. Right,
my wife and I had to sort of sit there
and go, are we sure we want to do this?
Do we just light our life savings on fire? You know?
But we stuck with it. We took our time, we
really thought about what we wanted to do, why we
wanted to do it, why we thought it was important,
(48:52):
and we pushed through. It opened in earlier this year,
and actually, so far it's doing great. I mean, you
never know with these things, but I I think now, like,
what if I had, you know, thrown in the towel
in March, what if I'd cut my losses might have
been cheaper in some ways. But when I watch people
walk through the bookstore, as I did before I came
up here to record this, it's like, Oh, this is
(49:13):
what's on the other side of those decision points when
you go do I want to do the easy thing?
Do I want to do the hard thing? Do I
want to push through? Do I want to quit? I
don't think that I could have thought that what it
is now and how it's doing was possible, And I
only found out that it was possible by pushing through,
by trying. As they say, all growth is a leap
in the dark. You have to take that leap, no
(49:35):
guarantee you to work. It might blow up in your face,
or it could surprise you and be even better than
you thought.
Speaker 3 (49:42):
Yep, so right now it's going well?
Speaker 1 (49:43):
Then yes, fingers crossed, but yeah it's going great. And
it was cool to like launch, you know, my new
books through my own bookstore.
Speaker 3 (49:50):
I was going to say, did you do you throw
yourself a book launch party at your own bookstore?
Speaker 1 (49:55):
No, no parties because of the pandemic. But you know,
instead of saying, hey, go buy this book from Amazon,
which of course I also want people to do, I said,
you know, buy this book from my bookstore, or just like, hey,
we can put my book in the window as a
new release. You know, Like how cool is that? So
there's just been a whole other element to it that's
(50:16):
been really fun.
Speaker 3 (50:17):
Before we wrap up, I want you to think about this.
Have you ever ended the day feeling like your choices
didn't quite match the person you wanted to be. Maybe
it was autopilot mode or self doubt that made it
harder to stick to your goals. And that's exactly why
I created The Six Saboteurs of Self Control. It's a
(50:38):
free guide to help you recognize the hidden patterns that
hold you back, and give you simple, effective strategies to
break through them. If you're ready to take back control
and start making lasting changes, download your copy now at
oneufeed dot net slash ebook. Let's make those shifts happen
starting today. One you feed dot nets e book. As
(51:02):
someone who has paid attention to the work you've done
over a few years, I know how deeply you love books.
You're reading lists. I always love to get and see,
and so I'm happy you've got a bookstore that's really wonderful.
Speaker 1 (51:14):
Thank you. Yeah, it's called the Painted Porch. It's in
this little town called Bastrup, Texas, right outside Austin. And
the other thing I think about it just for other people.
I'm not saying you should start a bookstore. But if
you become successful, if you have achieved whatever you've set
out to achieve, if that's not allowing you to then
go do things you've always wanted to do, sort of,
(51:36):
what's the point, you know? And so I think the
cool part about the bookstores. I love books. I love bookstores.
And if I can't do this now, what sort of
is the point of the other things? Right? And so
that's sort of something that's kind of empowered me along
the way.
Speaker 3 (51:51):
Yeah, well, Ryan, thank you so much for coming on
the show. I hope the book does great. I hope
the bookstore does well, and I hope to someday visit it.
I need to get down to Austin to visit my
brother who lives there, so I'll come by.
Speaker 1 (52:03):
Please do that would be awesome. Thanks so much, appreciate it.
Speaker 3 (52:06):
Thank you so much for listening to the show. If
you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking, I'd
love for you to share it with a friend. Sharing
from one person to another is the lifeblood of what
we do. We don't have a big budget, and I'm
certainly not a celebrity, but we have something even better,
and that's you. Just hit the share button on your
(52:27):
podcast app or send a quick text with the episode
link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means
the world, and together we can spread wisdom one episode
at a time. Thank you for being part of the
one You Feed community.
Host
Eric Zimmer
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