How Does Stoicism Help You Overcome Guilt and Shame?

And with the checkout with the world-famous convention, you can see the checkout with the world-famous convention.

“The legendary checkout from Shopify, just for the shop on your website,”

you can see the social media and everything else. That's the music for your ears. Videos on the rest of the windows, with Shopify, can be helped to help a real help. Let's get started and test on how to tune in on your own promonat of Shopify.de/regard. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast.

Designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome back to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. The dates for Australia are all booked. I'm going to be there in October.

Our travel is all booked. And I was talking to my kids. I was like, hey, are you guys ready? I'm going to be doing talks. And where are you doing your talks?

And I was like, well, I'm going to be in Sydney.

“And they're like, is Sydney the place where the fire alarm went off right before you went on stage?”

I was performing at Sydney Town Hall two July's ago. And yeah, right before I was supposed to go on, they just loaded everyone in the fire alarm went off. And I just totally forgot about it, which was hilarious. Actually, here's a clip from that. So I'm like five minutes before going on stage to do my talk here in Sydney.

And then the final alarm went off. And we've all had to evacuate. The whole place is MD. They just let me back in.

It's never a dull moment, which is actually what I'm going to talk about a little bit in the talk,

which is that you got to roll the punches. You can't let it shake you. You just got to deal with it. It's funny, right? Like you could talk about stoicism. But if you do anything out in the world, if I was getting there talking about,

I don't know, black and white movies. I'd still have to be stoic in response to the fact that right before I'm about to go on stage, something goes totally sideways. And I'm not in control. And I just have to figure out how I'm in respond.

And how do I make sure that doesn't throw me the fans are already a little off. They're a little frustrated. Things are late. I actually not only could I not let it ruin it. I have to figure out how to compensate for it and make things better as a result. And, you know, here I am two years later on my way back.

And I get to tell that story and share for you that that's one of the perks of being a writer or making YouTube videos or podcasts.

You can always use this stuff as material.

So I will be back in Sydney on October 16th. And then also Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Auckland. Before that, I'm going to be in Portland, so I'm just going to go Minneapolis, Chicago and Detroit. You can grab all those tickets at dailystoiclive.com in the meantime. Here are some questions from some folks in Sydney that they asked me right after the fire alarm went off.

Are you going on? Hi. I just wanted to kind of off the back of that question. How do we keep ourselves more honest about our own ego? And, especially in the times, it's pretty easy to stay humble if things are gone well for you. But if things are starting to improve and you're on a bit of a winning street and how do you keep yourself honest? And not this late to your own ego.

Yeah, I was talking about the stories that we tell ourselves, right? It's especially hard not to tell yourself a story about your success. When that success is public and other people are telling a story about you. When you're seeing it in print or in video, right? When you're seeing other people tell you, oh, you're a genius.

Oh, you're special. Look how great this thing you did was. So we do have to actively kind of go and remind ourselves of how things actually were. What we did it know, we have to kind of repeatedly insist on the truth. The truth, maybe even of it's cynically just to make sure we're not getting popped up by things. I think that's that's really, really important.

“People around you who can tell you the truth is so important.”

This is Elon Musk's big problem is companies all of all these hand-picked board of directors who are all very indebted to him. And nobody tells him like you're being crazy. This is insane, don't do this.

I think his second wife, the one he married twice, she said her job was to keep him from going king crazy,

like the way that a king goes crazy. Well, they're obviously not together anymore. I think we see in the results of that. But in meditations, Marx was he explicitly talks about this. He says, you have to be careful not to be ciserified or died purple.

The Emperor of Rome would have a purple cloak. And we can all be ciserified. We can all be changed. They say power corrupts. Having people tell you what you want to hear.

Not getting feedback. Not having people who can deliver truth to you.

Imagine a Marx really is.

And there is a hundred plus meter tall marble monuments. You know, detailing your genius and accomplishments. Right? There's a triumphal arch of your greatness that you go under every day. Caesar, Caesarification was a real thing.

People are worshiping you as a god. And what he does in meditations, what he repeats to himself. How worthless clapping is. How worthless compliments are. How worthless it is to be remembered.

And he's trying to overcorrect to deal with all the stuff. And the unnaturalness of that success. And we all have our own versions of that that we need to work on. Good night, Ryan.

Hi, good to have you back.

Celebrity here. You describe your time here in a beautiful country with your family. Which leads me to ask. You didn't mention daily, Dad. Yeah.

Which as a father and a grandfather, I find it almost believable. You give it a few examples of people who are doing this work in the public. Why? Who in your mind is doing this work so well as a father. Perhaps even the leader of a company or a country.

That's a great question. You know, I got so much out of writing a daily stock that everyday thinking about these things. Being forced to think about them from these different angles.

To repeat these kind of timeless principles over and over again.

It's been so valuable to me personally, the reason I started daily Dad was to force myself through that process as a parent. What's important? What actually matters? What's easy to miss? What are the values that I want to parent by?

So, so I started daily Dad around that idea. I think I started it with my young. This was maybe two or three. So I've been I'm an addict quite a while. And I think this may be better.

I know means perfect. I'm struggling with it every day. I lose my temper every single day. It was probably a better way to say it. I wonder if you're any good at this.

I wonder, you know, if you're doing this well.

“I think these are all important questions to be asking.”

But I've been doing daily Dad for that reason. And I've gotten a lot out of it. And you can sign up if anyone wants to get it. It's just daily Dad dot com. It's not for dads.

I'm a dad. It's one piece of parent to get by every day. But I wish I could say, hey, these people are great parents. Unfortunately, most people in the public eye are not. We find that out in retrospect.

And I'll leave it to their kids to decide whether they're good or not. But I do try to learn little things here there. Oh, this is an interesting way to think about it. Or it conversely, here's a colossal tragic mistake that this person may that we can learn from. What are the parents who have lost children have to tell us?

What are parents who you know, lost touch with their children? What do they have to tell us? What do parents who little further along which they've done differently?

“That's what I've tried to build it around.”

It's just my favorite thing to do. So thank you for subscribing. Hi. Hi. I think a lot of people in this room would be in a similar boat where you may have invested

time to become more self-aware or conscious of your ego, which also catalyzes you to reflect on your own life. And things you may have done in your life. And I've personally experienced moments of reflection or maybe guilt or shame of previous actions, which may have been as a result of your ego. And they are no longer within your control.

So wondering how you navigate those experiences where you feel like you're not in control anymore and moving forward with those feelings of guilt or shame? Seneca said, "When I think of all the things I have said, I envy the mute." As someone who has had the deeply unpleasant experience of editing my own books that have come out, I can relate to that. Nothing makes you cringe more than having to see things that you put out in print for millions of people.

And now you go, "What was I talking about or how did I possibly feel qualified to say that?"

“So yeah, I think if you look back on things you have done and said in ways you've treated people and you never think, "Wow, I was in enormous idiot."”

You are probably in the sway of ego. You're either a saint, which you are almost certainly not or you're delusional. This sort of cringe and pain that we feel. I mean, a positive way to think about it is we feel that because we've changed and evolved and it would be strange if we look back at who we were when we were younger, when we knew less, when we experienced less.

So it's good that we have this, but the ability to make a man's to own mistakes, to be responsible for things that this is a key thing is certainly key as a parent.

I don't remember my parents ever apologizing for my, I try to apologize. So apologizing today for something I said when I was frustrated. I try to own what I've done, I try to look honestly in the mirror. Sometimes that's really painful, sometimes you can't look at it straight on, you've got to see it from an angle and you're working on it. But to me that's a sign of progress and I'm trying to get better at making him men's.

And I see that as part of that self-improvement process.

“That's why we're doing the work, to learn things and be better and not be who we used to be.”

It's spring here in Texas and that means new kinds of bugs. We are dealing with it because we have a house at the bookstore, we have traces of the street, a little grocery store. And we don't like bugs and the customers don't like bugs. Well, Pesty has helped make hanging outside at home more enjoyable by keeping the bugs at bay with their DIY pest control kit. The Pesty kit comes with everything you need to do your own pest control, pro grade pesticide that's the same stuff that the pros use, sprayer mixing bag gloves and instructions.

You can even get a kit customized to the season location and weather. And with Pesty, it starts to just $35 a treatment with their DIY kit. There's no strangers in your house or appointments to make. Pesty gets rid of over a hundred types of bugs from spiders to ants to roaches and scorpions. It's also a kid and pet friendly.

Get bugs out of your house with Pesty, just go to Pesty.com/dode for an extra 10% off your order. That's Pesty.com/dode for an extra 10% off. If you're selling online or out of a storefront, it's full-time gig for you or a side hustle. You know, the challenge. It's not easy. It's a lot of work. You're hoping that people find you're listing, you're waiting for them to walk in.

Well, what not flips that? On what not, you go live and sell directly to people in real time. They see what you got. They ask questions and they buy and they keep coming back. What not is the largest dedicated live shopping platform. Beauty, collectibles, electronics, luxury fashion, even cookies. Sellers can build real thriving businesses.

What not, buyer, spend more than an hour a day in the app and they're not just browsing. They're bidding, they're buying, they're coming back and you can go live and show off your products to those people. And turn what you love into real income. People selling on what not sell 10 times more than other major marketplaces. 'Cause you're not just listing products, you're building real connections with your buyers.

And for a limited time, what not, we'll match your first $150 in the first month.

Is it what not dot com slash sell to start selling? W-H-A-T-N-O-T dot com slash sell. What not dot com slash sell? That's a big fan of yours. Oh, thank you.

I have your books here. Oh, I wanted to ask you about the daily stoic of today. Today's one is about not letting your career be your life sentence and eventually letting it go.

“Since your career and way of life is stoicism, what is your successions and how do you plan to let it go?”

Well, what are you trying to say in my past, my friend? No, look, I have a thing I do. I go into like, use bookstores.

And I'm always struck by the large piles they have of books that were once popular.

And then people got rid of them. They don't want them anymore. No one cares anymore. And we can see we know no one's moment in the spotlight is forever. We say that everyone has their 15 minutes of fame.

You know, no one's career goes on indefinitely. So I try to remind myself, look, there's at some point you reach the peak. And it's all downhill from there. It might be slow. It might be steady.

But at some point you'd have done your best work. And everything else is an echo or a shadow of that. And I try to be honest about the fact that that will happen to me. Maybe it's already happened to me. But in the meantime, I'm going to keep doing my best.

I'm going to keep showing up. And generally though, try not to think that much about how things are selling or how there's doing.

“You know, early on in my career, I was, as I said, I was like, how did this do?”

What did they say about it? I would say I was probably 90% focused on that. And 10% satisfied with the work that I did. I tried to flip that. The irony has been the less I've cared about the extra results.

Right thing right now, David, a number one in the US.

“And June, which was actually a surprise was very cool, but it was a one I was thinking about.”

Now, maybe that's the high watermark. And if so, so be it. I'll gladly take that as a high watermark. And in the meantime, I just want to keep doing what I I love doing. And I keep doing it if the audience was half as big or 10% as big or 5% as big.

Maybe if I got to a certain level, I had to stop publishing it and just do it for me.

But I'd still be doing the thing because I get the value out of out of doing it.

Ryan, sitting next to my boss definitely offered a few of the negative feedback compliment sandwiches in my time. Mate, discipline is destiny. Definitely one of your best books to date. Thank you so much for that. Oh, I appreciate that.

One thing which really surprised me was the passage on psychedelics. And it seemed to you can flated it in a way with the opioid epidemic over in the US. Granted a lot of people do misuse psychedelics, but considering the abundant research showing the positive impacts in the things like anxiety, depression, PTSD, and addiction, tens of thousands of years of humanity using these things. If not longer compared to the havoc which is written by things like opioids, benzodiazepines, alcohol, and so forth.

Could you please expand upon that passage? Sure. Yeah, look, first off, if you're suffering from severe trauma, you have treatment, resistant depression. If you are really going through it, you've tried everything.

“I have no interest in judging you or what you're working on or whatever works, right?”

Everyone should go on their own journey, should find the things that help them improve the change. The human mind is a wonderful thing and it's also a terrible thing. And if yours is torturing yours, I fault no one for finding solutions. I, what I was just trying to say is two things.

Number one, I am always very skeptical when people have a thing that they say is the magical solution to all of their problems.

And then two, I've talked to a lot of people that have done psychedelics. And I would just say I haven't heard a single thing from one of them that is not in every philosophy or religious text. These are basic assumptions or insights that humans have unleashed over thousands of years also of tried and true experience. And so is there obviously some difference between knowing them and knowing them? Yes, and if psychedelics help someone get that, again, I've got no problem with it.

What I dislike is a lot of people who are definitely not doctors telling people to fuck with their brain chemistry at dinner parties.

“Because it's the key to enlighten it inside.”

I find that to be very alarming. I just happen to know a lot of those people who have built big platforms around it and that that unders me. Just remind me of what the story because I had to say about navigating profound loss in terms of losing loved ones. Sure. Yeah, this is a timeless part of this human experience, unfortunately.

I've talked about Mark Schwartz, he varies half of his children. Seneca varies his only child. He writes a series of very beautiful essays. They're a series called Consolations. He writes one to his mother when Seneca is exiled. He writes another to the daughter of a friend who had died. The idea that the stoics were unfeeling that they were unaffected by loss or pain or grief is to me totally belive by these beautiful moving essays. That I reread when I lose someone that I passed to people when they asked me this question.

There's some of the most beautiful profound writings that the stoics have ever produced. My favorite one in one of the essays, Seneca is writing to this woman who lost her father and she's talking about how the memory of him. Every time she thinks of him, she just breaks down crying, she's so sad, she can function, and he says, "But your father loves you a great deal." Obviously, he wants to be remembered by you. But if you told him, he says, "If he's up there somewhere, you could tell him that after he died, that his memory, whatever you thought of him,

it brought you crippling sadness and despair," he'd be like, "What? That's not how I want this to go at all. We don't want people to be glad that we're gone, but our memory should be something positive."

What would this person want me to think when I think of them?

“And so the stoics are not saying you feel sadness and loss, stuff it down, don't be a weakling.”

But some of the only stories we have about Marx Reas from other historical sources involve him crying over the loss of people that he loved.

It tutor, he's weaps over the victims of this plague, it's devastating pandemic that he experiences.

“So the stoics were not unfeeling, they were not brewed.”

But they did try to, when they were overcome by those feelings, and when they were crippled by them, try to go, "Okay, let me think through this. Let me question some of these assumptions."

“And how can that help me move on and process these feelings instead of denying that?”

Thank you. Yes. Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to The Daily stoic podcast. I just wanted to say we so appreciate it, we love serving you.

It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in a couple years.

We've been doing it, it's an honor, please spread the word, tell people about it, and this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say thank you.