Robert Greene on the Power of Daily Practice

my philosophy has always been you have to make ideas your own can't just be these dead words that you kind of digest that have no relevance to your daily experience you have to take them they have to come to life within you within your own experience so this is the new book the daily laws i see it as kind of a greatest hits album uh a best of robert greene because to me like i feel like it's a question people ask me a lot they they'll hear me or someone else talk about you and then they'll go what robert greenbook should i start with and it's kind of a tricky thing because if you go 48 laws of power maybe they get turned off because it's dark if you went with seduction maybe they're that's not what they're in it to me it's it's actually a question i get with the stoics too like who should you start with it feels really hard but this is to me perfect because it's basically the best of all your stuff in the most digestible way like i was talking to a football player actually he plays at alabama and he was he had heard that the laws of human nature was really good and i thought that's probably to me that's like advanced class robert greene maybe not where i would start if i was 19 years old yeah it depends it depends on your background and if you've read a lot of books on psychology and if you can stomach going through a nearly 600 page book but it's you know i have a lot of people who you wouldn't think would be reading the laws of human nature but who read it slowly and bit by bit and particularly if you're in a situation where you're dealing with a lot of difficult people but the way i look at the book is a little bit differently in that i sort of see like it embodying kind of two main lessons that i've derived in life the first one yeah the first one was um you know unlike you i did not have any success in my life until i was essentially 38 years old and prior to that i had a lot of very painful experiences as i kind of wandered my way through the work world and i was sort of entered the work world out of college with all of these silly illusions about people about success about who i was and slowly they all got knocked down one by one it was very painful very emotional and it caused me a lot of drama and probably set me back several years although in the end it gave me all the material for the 48 loss of power and what i sort of learned from all of that that crap that occurred to me was that really what i needed to to forge was kind of this realistic outlook on life where i get rid of all the all the things that you learned in university all the bad ideas that you got from your parents all the bad ideas you get from your peers and you're able to look at the world relatively objectively and i mean relatively and it doesn't mean that life becomes this kind of boring gray world of just it actually becomes more exciting and fulfilling and so i learned that the hard way that kind of realistic attitude which i was forged through a lot of battles was really really what allowed me to write the 48 laws of power then the second thing was the power of daily practice of habits now i've been meditating for about 11 exactly 11 years now every single day don't miss a single day if i miss one day i make sure the next day i do two times and the habit of doing it every day is just very fulfilling it becomes something i look forward to and it's really helped have a profound effect upon me but habits of work and discipline where every day you attack something is where our the power of our brain operates maximally so this is a book that every day is going to make you meditate on something and it's going to infuse you with that realistic outlook that i think kind of actually literally saved my life no i think i think that's right because and what i found with the daily stoke is you read it once and you're getting the sort of greatest hits survey course of the works and thinking of robert greene and there is a lot of value in that and that's more than the 26 or whatever the book costs but it's it's really on read number two and three right or 50 depending on how young you are when you buy the book that's where the value of the daily practice is like i imagine your meditation is relatively the same as it was 10 years ago 15 years ago and the power is the groove you get into doing the same thing over and over again and i think is you so you mentioned that the laws of human nature is 600 pages so there's a percentage of the population that could read a 600 page book but how many people are going to take the time to read a 600 page book two or three times and the books that have really influenced me have been books that i've interacted with over the course of my life right right yeah i think there's something really special about the daily practice this is what like for instance daily or nightly bible study is for certain people it's again the words are the same but you're different and what you just went through or are going to go through that day is different this is that heraclitus idea that we never step in the same river twice i think there's something really cool about revisiting the same ideas over and over again well um the thing is i my philosophy has always been you have to make ideas your own you have to take what somebody teaches and you have to put it into your own experience it can't just be these dead words yes that you kind of digest that have no relevance to your daily experience you have to take them they have to come to life within you within your own experience so you read a passage and that's not maybe what i'm really going through right now but you kind of maybe recall some experiences in the past that might be relevant and then the second day you come about something that is maybe a little bit closer and then as you go through it more and more and more the kind of soaks in and you see more and more access points to your daily experience and then it can kind of become something that you internalize yeah i talk about sort of using the confirmation bias like against itself or using the confirmation bias to your advantage so like i'll hear from people and be like how did you know on today's entry the daily stoke that this is exactly what i needed well the truth is i didn't right i wrote it five years ago and you might be in australia and someone in america might be reading different entries on the same day so it's really that we bring to the text exactly what we need it's why fortune cookies and horoscopes seem to have power is that we see in them what we already knew but couldn't articulate to ourselves and there's sort of a delphic quality there where like it's just vague like your passages are just short enough just general enough that whatever you're going through it could feel like that was exactly the advice that you needed that morning well i had the experience very weird experience with the 48 laws of power when it first came out i would go it's my very first book tour and i would go to i was in washington and i went to the um what was it called voice of america yeah and this woman comes running up to me in the hallway saying god that book didn't you just describe exactly what i'm going through everything is just so perfect you must have you must know washington really well the same thing happened to someone who's in the um in the what's the charitable world what do you call that the non-profit yeah the non-profit world they did the same thing then athletes will say it so yeah you kind of project and you your own emotions your own experiences of the moment into what you're reading that's totally viable and i think that's also what happens when it's why buddhism and stoicism and christianity often feel very aligned even though they didn't particularly influence each other because also when you boil something down to its essence like in the way that in comedy the really specific becomes universal because it's actually not that specific it's tapped into something uniquely human uh that everyone can relate to even if the experiences are very different yeah yeah very much so i i was also thinking when i was when we were talking about this book that in a way maybe maybe not everyone knows this but i actually think the daily concept is slightly it goes back to the very beginning for you because i remember correctly you told me once that the original plan for the 40 laws of power was 52 laws which could have been a week you know of reading uh a passage a week although you if i remember you got you got rid of that specifically so people didn't do that yeah it was also like playing cards which there were 52 uh right no no i mean but the calendar 52 weeks but i mean what happened was i mean i've told the story before is the publisher normally my relationship to publishers is don't tread on me hands off get as far away from my material as possible do not edit it i don't trust you but in this instance i'm open to their ideas and in this instance they said 52 laws of power doesn't sound so great what we really want is 48 and the 52 sounded too much like a gimmick yeah and i agree because i can't be rigid about things sure so what i did was i took four of the laws and combined them with other ones so i didn't get rid of anything i just kind of made in into 48 i just sort of fitted it in well and that is the 48th aw formlessness right that actually they can be moved around yeah and combined with each other violating a lot which don't show your own tricks but that's true but it's 23 years later so i don't really care well and isn't it also funny that like so when it's when you're working on it it could be 42 it could be 48 um and then uh then once it's done and in the world it's like 48 is obviously the right number like no other number is going to work yeah people always say what's the 49th law power i said there's no such thing it's only 48. everything in the universe but you know numbers have a kind of a feel to them you know and so the word for the number 48 has a kind of power already in it which is whereas 47 or 46 doesn't have that kind of resonance although if it had been the 47 miles of power and it had sold millions of copies and had the influence i think everyone would be saying obviously there's no 48th law there's only 47 months yeah that's true that's true so we sort of look backwards and we're like it could have only been the way that it was but in reality there was it was more malleable than it was it was and you know to be honest with you when i first started doing the research for god so many years ago i had like 72 laws i mean the original concept was i was going through all my research and yoast the man who kind of packages my channel into the cover of this book um he said well robert what do you how's it coming and i said well i'm working on these kind of laws of power he goes wow that sounds great just that phrase yeah he goes i said yeah i kind of have like 72. he goes well just no go with it and then i sort of like which kept reducing the reducing and reducing them until it came to 48 so or 72 whatever well that's what so on the for virtue series that i'm working on this is the weirdest one where i'm doing i'm having to like for you it's the same with me where you wrote each book not knowing necessarily what the next one would be or they were sort of contained although they work as a trilogy or that yours works as sort of a body of work that's now distilled down into this one but this is the first time i'm having to think about how four books interrelate with each other and you mean the um the four books yeah because so first courage then temperance self-discipline then justice then wisdom yeah and so like i had a whole bunch of ideas that would go in the courage book and then as i looked at the finished book like you you read a galley of it um there were laws that there were chapters or ideas i was like actually this has to go in the other book and i think that was something i learned from you though was like you have to sort of ruthlessly coal you think it's 72 i mean that would be heartbreaking to be like actually have to either combine or get rid of 30-ish laws like but but that is a part of the process is like really boiling it down right to the only the best stuff yeah and uh you know i had to get rid of a lot of material for i mean someday people might want to look at that i had a couple of chapters that we totally got rid of that no one has ever read no one has ever seen can i say that i had one chapter it was called use religion and the idea was to use religion to gain power yeah and i just changed it into create a cult like following one of the best chapters yeah it is but i wrote a whole chapter on how to use religion and we thought that that's too nasty that's too controversial we got rid of it but you have to be willing to get rid of things you have to be kind of ruthless with yourself and you know a lot of books now certainly yours excluded they're they're too wandering they don't have a structure you get the feeling that somebody had an idea for a first chapter and they kind of riffed on that and the first chapter might be good then they kind of lose their way they think that everything they say and think is brilliant they don't know how to structure they don't have to be ruthless with yourself like to say this idea actually isn't true it actually isn't very good it's not relevant get rid of it what's like that stephen king line about kill you have to kill your darlings which i like because it's such a it's a machiavellian like dark almost robert green waves expressing the writing which is like you love this thing and you sweat it over it and you think it's so clever and cool and that's why it has that's why you have to get rid of it yeah otherwise you're being self-indulgent or um yeah i mean 48 laws there's a lot of laws 72 i mean i could see people being sort of like that's a lot yeah yeah yeah it would have been a 600 page book it would have been no good yeah yeah i've killed millions of darlings over the years i have a whole bloody battlefield full of them i heard robert caro cut like 300 000 words out of the power broker are you kidding me which is already like 1100 pages and you just imagine how painful that would be even just the fact that he writes longhand just yeah he writes long hand and his wife types it but you're just like how i mean that's like two books at least three maybe and yes he just left it on the cutting room floor but it's a great book yes it is of course of course i've raved about athletic greens before with all the things we've all got going on trying to to work stay healthy stay strong work out it's hard to get the right mix of nutrients in your diet and athletic greens is a great product i actually first heard of athletic greens almost 10 years ago from chris the kiwi the founder he and i met through tim ferriss he's a great dude athletic 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that in the month of september you would only have been drawing on the 33 strategies of war but actually there's seduction in there and laws of human nature is it interesting to you that that how often you touch on the same themes across your books even though you're you're looking at it either from the ones of warfare or seduction or power or psychology well i've always been kind of attracted to that idea where you pull material from places that aren't so logical so for instance when i was doing the art of seduction i really really wanted to have war stories in there i really wanted to be able to quote sun tzu you know and like because seduction i thought was kind of strategy and then when i did the 33 strategies of war i wanted to have a seduction story in there and i actually did incorporate a couple of seduction stories in there sort of show how they cross reference but things that are are are not so predictable that come to you from right angles where like you're reading about war and suddenly i'm narrating a story about a film director right so i'm trying to give it relevance to all aspects of human endeavor so a politician is seducing the public a war strategist is actually playing on the mind of the enemy and seducing them to believe something and misleading them so um these kind of cross reference points sort of fascinate me yeah that's what i was going to say i thought that august's chapter about persuasion was an interesting way to look at what otherwise might have been categorized as seduction or manipulation it's like oh zooming out like even if you're married and even if you're you know not engaged in whatever but you're trying to sell something to someone or you're trying to you know get people interested in a story or an idea or a cause you still are relying on the same uh timeless themes to do that well it all kind of boils down to human psychology and how you you know how the human mind works and our weaknesses and our vulnerabilities and that's what all of my books kind of play on and to some degree even mastery is trying to work with your your brain how it's structured and your own strengths and your own weaknesses so that's that's a through line that goes through all the chapters but for the month of august i mean one thing we didn't say is each month is introduced by kind of an essay that sort of reflects my own personal experiences that's something i've never done before because i'm actually quite low to talk about myself this is your first book i think other than maybe the intro to the 50th law where there's the word i in heaven i think so well you talk about you and 50 meeting but i'm just saying this is the first you're it's not breaking the fourth wall because this is like how it works but you're like robert greene the character person is in this book yeah i usually try to avoid that because i'm trying to give out like my books are narrated by the voice of god that sounds very pretentious but um it's like this is the timeless wisdom of five thousand six thousand years of human experience it's not me robert yeah but in this instance each month is kind of illustrated by things that have happened to me personally because believe it or not these books actually do reflect things that i've felt and i've dealt with and the month of august i kind of talked about the process of writing a book and the pro we've talked about a little bit earlier the process of writing a book is a form of persuasion it's a form of seduction right and so i say what goes it's about to be pretty enthralled to make it through a 600 page book you have to carry them from here to here with all the things that are happening in the world right drawing them away from that right and so i tell people like the main reason why i think books fail and i honestly honestly believe most books written now fail i i have a hard time getting through a lot of new books although there are some very good exceptions is because the writer assumes that the reader is on the same level they have the same amount of knowledge and the same amount of interest as he or she and so they write as if the reader is just a reflection of them they don't realize that that person that you're reaching has comes from a totally different socio-economic background maybe a different gender all these other things that are completely different from you and you have to kind of straw them into your world and if you start out by being all academic and quoting these things people turn off right yeah so it's a writing a book is a form of persuasion but everything is a form of persuasion in life if you're in business and you have a product you're trying to sell it you know you have to understand human psychology you have to get inside your clients mentality if you're a politician i mean whatever maybe athletics is a little different but if you're a coach and i've dealt with coaches before that's very much part of the game well yeah and i think like the decision not to be in most of your books is part of that because it's easier as a writer to be like here's what i think like yesterday i was at the store it's actually harder and requires more work to go how can i find something in history or that's bigger or more universal or more compelling that is more likely to persuade the reader because you i think it talked about ego is the enemy if you assume the writer is your fa if you assume the reader is your fan that they care about you that they know who you are that they're interested in what you had for lunch yesterday you are deluding yourself you have to do the work to say like no i want to i want to create this vision or this universe that sucks you in and napoleon is way more interesting than you or i yeah so i'm kind of violating that here i hope that doesn't turn people off see i think it's the opposite because now that you are like i think if this was your first book it would be indulgent but now 20 years in you so now people do you know you've cultivated this era of mystery to go to the laws and now by revealing just a little bit you're actually making it i think more seductive because now i'm matching the words i'm matching the ideas with the human being who made them and it's i think more enthralling well there's a lot of things i didn't reveal a lot of stories about my past that i will never reveal that are weirder than anything in there sure so you know don't think that you those are in your papers yeah yeah well anno could narrate them someday or my sister or somebody but yeah yeah it's uh i i do think most books don't do a good enough job convincing the reader to give a right you know and that's why i think it's good that your books are controversial and people i think sometimes misunderstand why that is but it's like controversy is also caring you know like you're if you have a negative like i've liked like people will be like uh i haven't read your book ego is the enemy but i disagree and i go that first off that is what ego is but um but the fact that you have a strong opinion right based on the title alone yeah is already it's already won out over 90 of books that are out there and so i think when you can make a strong argument like i think with the new book the um the sublime just even that like i'm like what is that right like that's not it's a thing i vaguely know but i don't know and so i'm already like want to know more i'm really struggling with that book i mean it's you know i think it's going to be very interesting and very successful but i have to make an even extra leap to try and make this so relevant to the reader it's very difficult because it's it's experiences that aren't having to do with power it has to do with things that are slight i hate the words slightly more spiritual please excuse me but um what's more ineffable it's not like that here's what troops did on this battlefield and this is the terrain they won right so how do i relate that to the reader i had that problem with the war book how do i make napoleon relevant to your personal life so it's actually been a problem throughout all my books but don't you think that's the journey you're on like if if it was getting the whole point of mastery is that you should be applying it to harder tasks yeah well i don't know if you go through the same thing you should answer it um if i ever feel like the the next book is kind of dead it doesn't really feel like a challenge it's like i'm just kind of riffing off my past success and kind of just doing variations on this thing something dies inside of me and then something dies inside of the book it has no spirit no life so i have to feel like i'm surprised by i have challenges i'm like you know i have to up my game i can't just rest on my laurels it should scare you a little bit you have the same thing yeah so um because this series is sort of scary for me and so i found this um quote from uh martha graham who actually i heard about through you there's did i guess um was agnes demille wrote this fascinating biography about her oh you do yeah maybe you're the one that told me about it but um it's a it's a quote from martha graham where she's saying like um uh never fear the material the material knows you're afraid and it won't help and it's great but i love the idea that it should be scary it should be and i guess this goes to the idea of courage but it should scare you but then you also can't be afraid of it that's the weird tension of it now what do you think about people that are going into your book um where i feel like there's so much people are so timorous they're so afraid they appear to be very strong and full of rage and anger but really they're just conformists to the highest degree and we're seeing like a plague of conformity in politics in all areas don't you feel are you worried that people are going to be almost like shocked by your book or like how to i don't know about that i i do i do the problem i i think one of the things that scared me about the book is when you're talking about courage you're implicitly uh uh condemning or indicting people for not being corrupt so so it's somewhat of a sensitive topic right because when you hold up courage you're sort of implying that by definition certain people are not courageous we're all start as cowards yeah you and i talked about that on we discussed my own experiences and your experiences so it's not like you know you feel superior but still um well it's interesting to me about courage because courage is the thing that we all admire i don't think there's any culture that's ever existed in which courage was not not only a virtue but probably the primary virtue right whether it's a matriarchal society or patriarchal society ancient modern courage is like as core as it gets as the human species and yet it's extraordinarily rare and i don't know why so it seems so strange right and it's not like it's not like uh mastery or like technical skill is also uh uh held up and rare but it's rare because it's really hard to cultivate courage is so much more accessible to people like you have a choice every day and yet it's rare and i think that's what's most interesting to me about it like yeah and and often and i get that there's obviously self-interest in self-preservation but so often when you're looking at politics or business i think peter drucker said like um like the future is scary or something about how like you have to invent the future it's the safest thing what's so interesting about courage is that often courage is the less risky thing for people they do the cowardice cowardly thing even though it's not in their interest right right but it's weird because um nobody really talks about courage anymore it's kind of a word that almost seems like 19th century like it's winston church and like some dusty thing that you know so it's kind of weird that it's so important but nobody really talks about it anymore well i i have a chapter in the book about earnestness and there's a great quote from general mattis that where he says cynicism is cowardice and i think that's that's part of it it's like to talk about courage it feels like a little sentimental sentimental or it's just like it's like we have this expression now like someone to try hard like they didn't know that or like someone's thirsty like they they want it too bad like it feels a little lame to be to like talk about courage right like the great man of history theory feels silly compared to the idea of like systemic oppression and and like it's easier to be cynical and say that it's hopeless and broken than to courageously like believe in or be committed to anything right right which is sad it is sad that's why i think this book is so important because you bring it down to the level of the individual so we often think like we think in large big paid strokes of society at large for change that we all have to organize etc but it comes down actually to individuals making certain decisions and cert taking certain actions that are courageous well that's what i've been trying to wrestle with where it's like let's say you look at a politician you're like why won't they just do this right and it seemed and and they should and that's obvious but don't you think there's also it's like when was the last time i jeopardized the future of my profession for an idea that i believe so i think one of the weird things about courage is that we spend a lot of time questioning other people's but less time actually like looking hard in the mirror and going like yeah when you know you know what like it's easy to go why don't lebron james you know talk about china it's because he's afraid of losing his endorsements and that may or may not be completely true and uh fair criticism but like when was the last time i you know like said anything negative about a major source of my income you've said you've had you've stirred up a few hornets that's about i have i'm just saying i'm just saying it's really easy to question other people's currency as a as a as a smoke screen for having to be like what are you doing in your own life yeah yeah well you know that's probably why i didn't go into politics in the first place so i didn't have to have get into that dirty position but you know that's what we did in the last talk we had i kind of examined my experience at american apparel sure which you know could be a slight profile in cowardice in that you know it took me a few years to make a hard decision and i could have me on the board could have made the decision earlier but you know i had to confront certain weaknesses in myself that were emotional about betraying a friend etc so i can understand what you're saying you know it's it's not it's it's easy to always see the other person as being courageous yeah there's a story i have in the book about khrushchev where he was like this is after the death of stalin he's sort of railing about stalin and all his abuses and uh somebody passes a note up and it says like yeah but where were you at the time and you know he was gonna like have him killed or yelling and just goes well i was where you are right now you know like also in the audience dude in the 48 law oh really i got it from nick i read a book that nixon wrote it's this fascinating book called leaders where nixon wrote about all the leaders he had spent time with uh-huh and i just love yeah i love that story and it's uh it's true by nixon it's just called leaders it was really interesting he's actually a very intelligent interesting person despite the big stain on him in history what's the book you recommended to me about him that was uh what was it called the one that i use for human nature yeah um it's by the guy that works with walter isaacs in heaven something i feel like that's really good um but yes uh actually an interesting sort of concept it feels like it ties into the daily laws where it's like nixon often knew what to do was kind of have this inner battle inside of himself but you know the thing is you talk about how difficult it is but i still have the feeling that people back in the past and i could be totally wrong we're a little more courageous than we are now that we're kind of losing something because i can think of three or four instances even in nixon's smarmy career where he was actually very courageous this guy was supporting the voting rights act and civil rights measures in the late 50s that could have gotten him in a lot of hot water you know he he he did a lot of things that went against his own self-interest even though he was such a conniving politician well look even his resignation was certainly more courageous than uh than trump yeah yeah yeah um no nixon is nixon is fascinating i did i do think in the past we were more courageous yeah although an illusion well there's this um i talk about this in the book because there's another similar book to the nixon one that churchill wrote called great contemporaries who wrote biographies of people that he knew in his own time and he was talking about like the word ashby some british character that wasn't particularly important but that was the point he was saying that he was a great man who lived in a time of small events and i thought that was interesting because i think people see themselves that way now um you know we're not in the middle of the civil rights movement or this or that um but i was kind of thinking about okay well when did this guy live and it was like you know like 18 30 to like 1900 or whatever and it's like it's small events but also like slavery still existed in england yeah in england i'm talking in the world like slavery still existed imperialism still existed he had the poor war she had so he lived in a time of small events but only because he chose not to participate in larger events so when you look at it and you go oh people were more courageous in the past they were but also they also kicked the can down the road on a lot of stuff yeah as well yeah but you know you take something like world war ii where every american at least going on that had to make incredible sacrifices sure for the you know personal sacrifices for their food their clothing their their health their welfare they were willing to do it because they saw a greater cause and that took some i don't know if that's quite courage i'm not sure but now where people i just wrote i'm just writing an article about this right now where like um i was describing a school teacher and she's asked to do something that is against her conscience and the power of the state comes down on her the parents are angry uh you know uh everyone you know she's embarrassed in the media it's this huge thing she says i won't do it i'd rather be fired than do it so like on paper that's admirable courage but what if i tell you that what she's expressed what what she's doing is refusing to take a vaccine and so it's interesting too that courage isn't simply defiance or courage isn't simply standing alone it also matters what you choose to be courageous about and so i think that's also something we're struggling with is like we do live in a time of relative peace and prosperity and so i think people like they want to be courageous but they grew up admiring courageous people and they're not they don't a left and right don't always they kind of will make either a mountain out of a molehill or they'll ignore some they don't quite know where to apply the courage and courage isn't it courage it's only valuable in conjunction with the other virtues i see and you mean you make that point and then yeah there's a lord byron quote he says the cause makes all that hallows or degrades courage and its fault er yeah how those are the greats courageous fall but who's the arbiter of what the great cause is i know they touch upon a problem there that's the tricky thing for sure but like okay um uh was it uh lieutenant william callie the miley massacre he everyone in his unit under penalty refuses to testify against him right is that courage no but it was scary right like so if there's a tension in courage and i it's like courage is rare but then courage applied to the right thing is rarer still yeah but then you come back to the point who's the arbiter of what is right i mean i know um i mean maybe that's what you're going to discuss in your your a way to kind of a standard that we can apply well that's how the virtues relate to each other right so courage and self-discipline are connected because if you're you know like you think about restraint or when to retreat or discretion is a better part of valor and then yeah justice and courage are inextricably intertwined because courage in pursuit of an unjust cause like plenty of uh brave southerners fought in the civil war right but it's not the same we instinctively we know there's something hollow about that but that only came out through a historical vantage point like they at the time never thought that and really even up until like contemporary times people really i remember growing up where the south and the cause of the confederacy yeah it was kind of despicable but robert e lee he was a courageous general right so this is what trump just said this this week he said if robert e lee was in charge in afghanistan he wouldn't have lost right right he'd be on his horse right with who leaving the cavalry i hate to break you but he did lose the civil war also but you know the woman who's who's you mentioned yeah i mean is it really courage because she's got these this this these this crowd that she belongs to and she's kind of conforming to their opinions and she's perhaps afraid of what her neighbors will think if she gets a vaccine it's true there's no like kind of higher well i think i think it's just important courage is not just not doing like courage is not just not doing what people want you to do just as freedom is not just freedom to give people a deadly virus so i think you have to think about what are you deciding to be well think about it with dove right dove saw himself as this courageous liberator and you know like uh that he was breaking down boundaries and he was brave enough to be in celebrate yeah and it's like actually you had lost all self-control and it's not the same not the same thing yeah i mean i think it's important though to have kind of icons of courage in the world and so like one person i looked at right now i've mentioned you before is the russian navalny yes i think i included him in the book because of after we talked oh yeah yeah i'm like you know i couldn't have that kind of courage but i can admire it because he's basically so he was in germany after being poisoned he got away you know yeah he knows they're going to kill him or they say he's going to suffer and he goes back to russia and i couldn't do that no but i admire that so greatly so i think the ability to have people that you can say maybe i can't do that but boy i admire it maybe that will have some meaning if ever i'm in similar circumstances because i have a role model you know yes it's important what you know that i live up to these certain particular ideals no i think that's right and i talked in the book about it's like sometimes you need the courage of the immigrant to leave the old world and come to the new world but then you also sometimes if everyone did that things would never get better there and so yeah you think martin luther king could have lived out his life peacefully and then you know influence or i mean in new york city and many times he would go back to the places where he knew he would be arrested specifically he said i have to go back into the valley right and i think that i think that's what navalny did is he went back even though he knew what would happen and to me that's not just courage that's uh a higher plane of of what you would call heroism if you think about like the spartans were brave but the decision to go to thermopylae is a level of courage that's i think almost transcendent right right yeah and i think your point about examples is good and i love the longfellow poem where he says the lives of great men all remind us we can make our lives sublime yeah you need that's also the problem with our study of history where we try to project certain things we we strip ourselves of the ability to have heroes that we admire oh yeah yeah right right it's all like looked after the prism of our own values now and so you know they believe in things that we are despicable they did this one act that right is morally dubious to us today who who would ever survive that kind of scrutiny you could even apply it as opposed to navalny if you wanted to be that cynical there's a bunch of regressive ridiculous beliefs from what i've what i've read we did earlier on yeah yeah um yeah and that was actually something maybe that's a good place to wrap up i remember you told me this you were like read older books like read older biographies it's you know back to plutarch and beyond in that like the point there was a pivot point litter in the literature where we decided that the role of the biographer was not to find what we can learn from this person or what made them great or special or whatever it was like either let me literally compile as many facts as possible or let me destroy this person piece by piece to the point where there's really no reason to study them at all and i think the older books do a better job not of uh like sort of you know turning someone into being more than just a person but actually looking at it from the frame of like what can i learn from this person yeah and then of course we now have like 100 years later we're able there are a lot of books that were written in the past that we wouldn't like now so we we were able to judge that with the perspective of the years gone by but i found um basically that people in the past had fewer acts to grind yes that they were that they took the role of the biographer as almost like it was a sacred thing that they were doing that they had a role and a purpose which was to try and bring this person to life yes now of course i'm being idealistic and there are certainly exceptions but i find that now people just come with their their narrow little banal perspectives from 2021 and there's no kind of larger expanse there's no sort of understanding of the psychology you don't get inside the person yeah you know and i talk a lot in mastery and then that's a quote from nietzsche i can't remember which one about when you read a book your first move should always be not should be to try and get inside the author get inside the world that you're entering and then if you find things that you don't like then you can kind of but you first have to enter into the spirit and i find a lot of biographers fall below that standard and that goes the idea of earnestness like actually caring and being open and not being cynical and superior and superior that's the right word um and and you have to believe right so it's like if you don't believe that an individual can make a difference then when you write about churchill or whomever yeah your frame of reference is to think about how this person wasn't special right and that there isn't anything to learn from you're you're you're going into it with the spirit of debunking or minimizing right and you might just don't do it then you know why why spend five years of your life writing about someone you don't respect or that we shouldn't be because it'll sell because audiences will read the audiences love the debunking they love the cynicism it feeds what kierkegaard calls the leveling process we're going through where there shouldn't be any great men or great women that we all kind of envious and that if you debunk a lincoln who people are doing now or you debunk a roosevelt remember wow then i don't need to feel so inferior i'm just as you know he's worse than i am then i don't have to do anything yeah so last thing um you mentioned nietzsche and i thought we should always talk about these the more foxy point that we did oh yeah together yeah um walk people through what the more foxy means and i thought i know we sat on this exact couch and talked about it like two years ago or more but it strikes me that a lot of things which have required the idea of a more pathy have transpired in the last in the years since we talked about it last you mean for me personally well no i i for you personally but i just mean in the world like it's easy to say like we're love it all and then the world grinds to a halt in a deadly pandemic and businesses close and society's tearing itself apart how do you think about that now well it's it's it's a truth it's a principle that will stand the test of time it doesn't matter what happens in the world it's not like the pandemic is suddenly going to going to prove nietzsche was wrong the idea is things happened in the world 98 of it's beyond our control we're constantly dealing with pain we're all going to die right life involves obstacles as you titled your book etc yeah there's no getting around it right so what is the point of kind of complaining or pushing against them to nietzsche that meant you are denying life itself because life involves adversity and pain if you embrace the pain if you embrace the adversity you are embracing being alive itself right sure so in the course of the pandemic there are many advantages that you can get from that i mean of course if members of your family died i don't mean to be you would never have chosen it to give my butt yeah but um you know and even if people even if friends are dying it teaches you about the the transience of life the impermanence and how you you could be dead tomorrow you need to think about that you need to think of deeply about your career perhaps your industry that you're involved in got wiped out you need to like reassess who you are where you're going in life it's a time for meditation it's a time for reassessing your position you know and then um it's not like it's i'm trying to elevate my story but when i had a stroke you know everything that was a pleasure in my life was taken away from me swimming hiking biking etc and then i had to find well what's the point this just happened i have to accept it right and i have to find a way of finding something lessened from it that are incredibly valuable so when you have a morphate when you say everything happens for a purpose and everything contains a potential for me to turn it into just some incredibly valuable lesson it means that you love life itself that you are not a denier and that was nietzsche's greatest bet noir his greatest pet peeve was people who deny life who in the guise of being all about um you know virtuous etc are against you know are basically trying to repress the joy of being alive and the joy of being alive involves all the pain that goes with it i was thinking about that because when i was driving and we're driving across the country we get this terrible tire blow out the middle of uh arizona in the middle of the summer to spend an hour and a half on the side of the road with two kids two kids well that's my point so so hour and a half on the side of the road if we get the tire change you have to drive it to a tire store takes two hours can't wait in the waiting room because of the pandemic so we end up spending two hours waiting in cemetery across the street uh in the arizona heat but my son said something to me um that made me realize in the midst of all this he didn't understand or he didn't understand that this was not part of the trip like like that this was like that we were supposed to be driving arrive at the place and be done like because he had no expectations he also understands he's not in control of where we're going what we're doing he i think was under the impression that we chilled for a while on the side of the road and then we went and hung out in the cemetery right and and that he was able to do that because he was kind of naturally at this place of like life just is what it is there's no way it's supposed to be and since you don't get to have an opinion about it you might as well have the opinion that it's great yeah yeah this is was this clark yeah this was clark uh jones my youngest just had even less understanding of what was happening and obviously there was points where they were uncomfortable or hot or whatever but it just struck me as like as an adult my view was like this is not how it's supposed to go right so therefore it's bad and then as i was thinking about it from his perspective it's like well what a cemetery is really a park right just outside yes they're standing on top of dead bodies but um it was also like well when would we do this we would never just go sit in a park for two hours with no plans in the middle of a weekday ordinarily and so we might as well see this as if not good just life yeah it was part of the plan it was actually something that you planned on doing yes you know um sometimes when i'm meditating i'm sort of seized by this idea that the world just is as it is it has no it doesn't have anything to do with my thoughts or my feelings it just has this reality right right that completely transcends me as an individual so whether i'm upset or angry or whatever it doesn't matter it has no connection to me right yeah it's just is what it is and it's actually a really awesome feeling to sense that there's this kind of thing that transcends you completely and it's just life going through its emotions happening every day it's the sun is shining and the plants out there don't know anything about robert's problems right you know so yeah yeah there's a marcus aurelius quote he's quoting a lost play from euripides but he says and why should you feel anger at the world as if the world would notice yeah yeah and it's like yeah why would you be upset by this and punish yourself by not enjoying whatever it is it's not a horrible thought a lost play of euripides i'm so upset that we can't have these things you know what's what struck me is that euripides was more this is like also i think when you zoom way out you get a different perspective of history euripides was farther away from marcus cornelius than we are from shakespeare yeah and so you're just like oh man you know yeah so he could read these lost plays he either had a fragment of it or he knew the play or it was performed still and it was lost and you remedies about like 70 80 plays of only which like seven or eight survive and they're all amazing or maybe more yeah and i mean obviously there's lost princesses with stokes yeah do you do you think that um a morphati uh because i was thinking about this definitely during the pandemic but amur foxy to me also feels very intertwined with the best piece of advice you gave me which is a lifetime dead time idea because to me a live time amura foxy is saying yes to life which is actually that there's a new victor frankel like a series like a lost set of his lectures called yeah the title to me is amazing it's yes to life the subtitle is in spite of everything oh that's good and to me i feel like um saying is that his own title or did they just put it i think he's i think that phrases is from but the idea that um morphati is saying yes to life or to me it is choosing a lifetime does that sound right to you yeah i mean um so let's take the the idea that you're in some awful awful job which the majority of people are in to be honest and i was in earlier so i understand it very well so if your attitude is god damn this job sucks i can't wait till i get out of there i hate these people why do i have to serve them etc that is dead time right because you're not thinking you're not interacting you're just going through the motions eight hours passes and nothing has happened inside of you you are dead you are spiritually and morally dead inside right but let's turn it around and you say man this job is kind of boring but actually i'm learning a lot about myself i'm learning i don't want to have this job i'm going to go to night school i'm going to go home and i'm going to study and actually these people i'm dealing with if i try and actually help them or be nice to them maybe something will come back to me or maybe i'll learn something about people's psychology so your attitude is i'm going to learn from this experience right now everything comes turns green inside of you it's like a plant that's living and growing and developing and so that's to me is a lifetime and it can happen in any situation and in meditations and that's why we have the fire on the front works really says that you know a fire turns everything into flame and brightness it's great and i think it's also the indictment so if you're if you're deciding to see it as dead time where you're deciding to resent it or argue about it what you're implicitly admitting is that you don't have a very strong fire that your fire because you know what if you just have a little fire and you throw a big log on it it puts it out right or too much oxygen can put it out but if the fire is really going it trends it lights it right up right it's able to consume its great woods so you're essentially admitting like i don't have what it takes to like you're the one that sucks the job is is what it is right you're the one who's not talented enough driven enough open enough whatever to at least use it that's not to say you have to do it forever you can't leave and change well you will but the thing is think of it this way when you're going through it and you're in the dead time zone which is happens a lot and i've known i've dealt with it personally you actually feel pretty bad about yourself at the end you start getting down on yourself and you start developing this attitude that you maybe aren't worth more that you really can't achieve anything else but if you can if you make that transformation like the fire that you're talking about you have a tremendous sense of pride sure like i have been able you know all these rich privileged people they don't understand i actually am going through hardship but i'm turning into something great you feel pride you feel a sense of that you're worth something and that translates in a year or two into actually creating and getting out of your job right so you create in in creating this larger fire you create an attitude that's actually going to change your circumstances and it makes you feel much better about yourself so why go in the opposite direction right it's like life is too short to not to feel anything but more fatty yeah because you're you're well again you don't have a choice you might as well like yeah yeah it's not easy no one says it's easy no but it's simple but not it's simple but in doing something that's hard there's an incredible value in in taking these challenges head on sure and not you know not being a win and not being lacking the courage to to turn it into something positive that's right well it was awesome to see you again yeah yeah that's great

Channel: Daily Stoic

Views: 128,844

Keywords: Stoic, Stoicism, Ryan Holiday, Ryan Holiday Stoicism, Daily Stoic, Ryan Holiday Interview, Ryan Holiday Stoic, Ryan Holiday Daily Stoic, einzelgänger, massimo pigliucci, einzelganger stoicism, Stoicism TED talk, marcus aurelius, marcus aurelius meditations, ryan holiday podcast

Id: S7UeH0sZ4_c

Length: 58min 36sec (3516 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 15 2021