The Stoic Way To Handle Real Problems

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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 to another episode of The Daily Stoic Podcast. I told you this the back end in February. I had to fly to Hawaii to do a little chat with a leading named Oprah. That hasn't come out yet, but another honor happened to me on that trip, which is that I did a virtual talk to the team at the Irwin Army Community Hospital

in Fort Riley, Kansas. There's a group that included more than 150 healthcare staff members, both military and civilian providers who all serve at that hospital. And before I hopped on the talk, I heard a bunch of them were listeners of The Daily Stoic Podcast, which was really cool. So on today's episode, I wanted to bring you some of their questions. Some of these are men and women in uniform serving in a difficult, stressful,

complicated moment in our history. Appreciate them having me on. I appreciate that stoicism is something they are relying on. And it was an honor to get to talk to them. By the way,

“if you want to see me come talk, if you want to ask me some questions, I'm going to be”

in Portland. I think in two weeks, I'm going to be in San Francisco, Boston, DC, Chicago, bunch of cities I'm going to Australia in the fall. You grab all those tickets at dailystoiclive.com. Most of the shows are almost sold out. So you've got to grab those. I'll sign in your books. You can ask me questions. All that kind of stuff, dailystoiclive.com. So how do you apply stoic principles when the obstacle isn't abstract, but emotional and human?

That's a really interesting way to think about it. So it's like, if you're deciding to take it personally, that can be good in the sense that you're like, this is designed just for me. And this is a test that's going to make me better. And I love this challenge. This might be, there's this expression popular in stoicism called Amor Fati, which means a love of faith, where you don't just like sort of bear the circumstances, but you're like excited about them.

So if you're taking things personally that way, like, go for it. That's awesome. But if you're taking it personally, like I'm being singled out. This is singularly unfair. This is, you know, they're out to get me. No one has to deal with as many things that as I have to deal with. You know, now what you're doing is you're taking an objective thing and you're making it subjective in a way that's only making it harder. And I do think it's worth, you know, pointing out,

like, okay, first and foremost, like the world is indifferent to us, right? Like the pandemic doesn't

care about you. The hurricane doesn't care about you. The snowstorm doesn't care about you. Whether you're in an economic bull market or bear market, these things that they are abstractions and they don't care about you at all. And they don't know you exist. And so if you take them personally

“or you sort of ascribe a personality to them, that's going to be a good harder to deal with. And then I think”

something that you bring up that is also a timeless fact of civilization, which would be bureaucracy. That's also not single and single in you out. It's, it's not deliberate. It could be different. It would be better if it was different. But it's not, right? And it's sort of, this isn't to say that we just tacitly accept and resign ourselves to bureaucratic injustices. And we don't try to fix them or improve the system. But yeah, if you, if you let that where you down, you're not

only going to have trouble with the individual instance that you're dealing with. But you're going to burn out and not be able to be of use to yourself, your family and sort of future, you know, patient or people in need. So I think just understanding that like, this is a fact of life.

This has always been there. This is an imperfect solution to an impossible problem. And that,

you know, our job is to find the little pockets of change or improvement or humanity inside that system is really important. There's actually an interest in passage and meditation. But for a long time, I didn't quite understand what he meant. This is meditation's book seven. Okay, book seven 65. He says, take care that you don't treat inhumanity as it treats human beings.

meditations because he is dealing with an enormous, you know, Roman Empire. He's dealing with

an fundamentally dehumanizing colonial sort of brutal power that that it was in the ancient world. I think he's saying to himself, don't become like this thing that you're a part of or that you're fighting against, right? Like, don't, don't just because the system is inhuman, just because the

“system is slow, just because the system is de-personalized doesn't mean that you have to be that way.”

And I think this is kind of the primary struggle of our time. Like, we live in a de-personalized dehumanizing, you know, you can even say outright cruel and dysfunctional moment in American history and maybe even in world history. And I think our struggle is to not accept that and become that.

So like, when the stoics are saying, don't be affected by it, right? When they're saying,

remain unaffected. I don't think they mean, okay, you see the suffering out there and you go, that's just the part of life, that's not my problem. That's not what they mean when they say, don't be affected by it. What they're saying is, don't be affected that is to say changed by a world that largely does accept that, right? Like, when you're in a slow-moving bureaucratic system, where a lot of people are just doing their job or saying things like, that's not my job.

It's very easy for that to become your attitude, right? And so when the stoics are saying,

“don't be affected by it, that's what they mean. They mean, don't become that person, right?”

When Marx really says, the best revenge is to not be like your enemy, right? And in some ways, the best way to fight back against bureaucracy or reactionaryism or any of these sort of trends that can be happening at one time or another, the best revenge is to not let that change who you are, to keep being hopeful and good and hardworking and compassionate and all the things that, you know, you value about yourself as a person. That's what we have to hang on to. And we have to

outlasts some of these temporary forces and outlasts some of these temporary trends and, you know, last as long as we're able to last. What is doing the work, though, mean or look like maybe when people are already exhausted, burned out or just even discouraged? I think there's a couple of things there. So first and foremost, you make a good point. So the famous passage from Marxist, where he's talking about the obstacle being the way, what obstacle

is he referring to? He's actually referring to annoying people. He's saying that like people can

get in our way, people can obstruct what we're attempting to do, but he says we always have the ability

to change what we're trying to do. And that this annoying obnoxious person presents an opportunity for us to practice different virtues, you know, patience, understanding, creativity, you know, empathy, finding the good, you know, all of that, right? So so this is a fact of life that goes back at least 2000 years. And I think you also make a good point that he's not sort of superhuman. He's writing in meditations. The reason we had this this book and the reason

we're talking about these ideas is because they were not natural and second nature to him, but he really had to work at it. And so if we can see this as a muscle, that's I think that's also

“really, really important. As far as actually putting into practice, I think that's the other thing”

you raise there, which is great. This isn't something you are or you aren't. It requires willpower, it requires work. And the more you are taking care of yourself, the easier that's going to be. Like if we're saying, hey, obnoxious people are a chance to practice patience, we're going to have more patience if you've got a good night's sleep, if you've been eating well, if you've been, you know, if you have a workout practice that can be kind of a, you know, a

release valve for you, the more you are taking care of yourself, the easier it is to bring some of these virtues to bear on this situation or even something simpler, right? If we take it as a virtue, you know, you want to get up early, you want to get after the day, which is something that the stoics talk a lot about. Like I think it be who's you not to stay up until two in the morning scrolling on your phone, right? Or, you know, it's easier to be cheerful and to see the good in

a situation if you're not shaking off a hangover, right? And so, so how you take care of yourself

practices, whether it's a journaling practice where where we sort of can work off some of that frustration or sort of fight to be our better selves. If we have, you know, a friend group or a support group where we're working through things, if we're, you know, taking advantage of therapy,

if we're not overpacking an over scheduling our day to the point where we never have two seconds to

“sit down and just be reflective, like all this stuff is really, really important. And so, I think”

we can't just expect ourselves in the same way that an athlete doesn't, you know, treat their body like a garbage can and then expect elite performance. It's about structuring your day, your life, your habits around facilitating being what you're, what you want to be in those high stakes, you know, or tempting or frustrating situations. Maybe you've been hearing the buzz about live shopping lately. I know I have, and it makes sense. Like, people are already on their phones,

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“control, what we can influence, and then where our energy is best spent? Yeah, I think the stoics are”

pretty black and white, right? There's there's some stuff that's up to us and there's some stuff that's not up to us. The serenity prayer, the things you can change, the things you can't change, and the sort of the courage and the wisdom to know the difference. But I think in real life, it is a bit more complicated. There is that gray area of stuff that is kind of up to you, but not fully. I'll give you an example just in a lower stakes one than your world, but like

you can say like, I control my book, I control my writing, I control all of that, but I don't control whether the audience likes it, right? I don't control how many copies itself. Like, I only control making it, I don't control how it does in the market. And that's true, but then sort of in the middle there, there's what we might call marketing, right? There's the stuff we have influence over. And the decision to not try to influence it in a way is seeding control

and taking away something that maybe you could have made some kind of positive contribution to. Now, I don't want to be flipped and go like, look, there's some stuff that's up to you and some

“stuff that's not up to you. You don't control whether the patient gets better or not, right?”

Because because we're talking about a life or death situation and we have to think about, you know, these did you try everything that you could? You know, did you do everything that you could? That obviously that matters. At the same time, if we overstate what is in our control or not, if we get a bit of a God complex, then what happens is when results come in that are fundamentally not a reflection of us, but just a reflection of the reality of life. You know, if you have a,

do you give someone a medication that has a 20% chance of treating this condition or not? 80% of the time, then it's not going to give you the result you want. And if you take that personally, that's not only going to harm your ability to bounce back and help, you know, with treating number two and treating number three and treating them at number four, but it's also going to make it harder for you to show up fully with a clean slate on the next patient as well.

And so part of this, like, hey, what part is up to me and what part is not up to me is about seeing life as an infinite series of games, as they say. Like in game theory, it's a finite

interaction. If I'm overstating my sense of control, I'm going to give myself credit when it's not

up to me. And I'm also going to credit myself with failures and setbacks that are not up to me

“that make it harder for me to sort of start again. And so part of, I think stoicism is this idea”

of, like, focusing on the process, focusing on what's up to you and then being willing to not see what comes back as a reflection of you as a person, but just as a reflection of, hey, you're not God and you don't get to decide how this goes. So how can leaders help their teams recognize meaningful progress, even when the obstacle isn't fully resolved? Yeah, that's a great point. Looking for those little wins, I'm just a big believer in momentum. I think momentum is is kind of

“everything in life. And so I'm always trying to break big things down into smaller pieces,”

so I can feel like I'm moving towards them. One of the lines from Zeno, he's the founder of stoicism, he says, you know, well being is realized by small steps, but it is no small thing. And so, you know, whether it's a patient, whether it's your own career, whether it's a, you know, a project around your house or even, you know, a book you're writing, I like to think about how am I making progress as opposed to have I checked off that box. One of the writing rules that I love

because a book can be such a big overwhelming and demoralizing process. It's it's just write a couple crappy pages a day. And the idea is is if you are just, if you are showing

up every day and putting something down, eventually you'll get to a first draft. And first drafts

are universally bad, but but you can turn a bad first draft into a pretty good second draft in a better third draft and fourth draft. And eventually, you know, you'll have something publishable, but you can't improve something that doesn't exist. And so sometimes our perfectionism actually Churchill said this Churchill said that a better way to spell of perfectionism is paralysis. And so if you need it to be perfect, if you need this sort of singular, conclusive solution to a

problem, you're often going to to do end up doing nothing. But if you're, if you're focused more on shipping away at it, if you're just helping one person, if you're solving one problem, well, then you actually are moving forward. It just might not, it might not be measurable day to day. Like I think about this, I talk about this in the wisdom book. Like when the interesting

things about wisdom is that you never, you never actually get it. I say it's kind of like the horizon,

right, you're walking towards the horizon and you, it's just always getting a little bit further away. But if you walk towards the horizon for a long time and then you turn around, you'll look

“back and see how far you've come. And, and I think that's how we want to think about these problems”

is like, hey, am I moving forward? Am I creating momentum in my crossing things off? That's, that's really what's up to me. Am I solving the whole thing all at once? You know, that's probably not what your individual job is.