What You Need is a Small Crisis | Show, Not Tell, What You Know

Hey, it's Ryan hope you are well

“I am just working on my talk. I'm going to be giving a talk in San Francisco and Portland in”

Mid June. I'd love to see you there. You can grab tickets at daily stoic live.com If you're not on the west coast you want to see me in the Midwest or on the east coast tickets are a Chicago miniapolis Detroit Boston DC I'm forgetting another one and then I'm going to be in Australia in October as well all those tickets at daily stoic live.com What you need is a small crisis

It was one thing after another for Mark Serelius floods and famines wars and coups

Disorder and destruction matters of life and death

These crises are instructive naturally and more specifically opportunities for virtue But they are also in their overwhelming and tragic nature

“Often much more than we need for those purposes”

No one would choose something like that no one would choose to go through what Zelensky has gone through or Churchill or to trade places with Queen Elizabeth during her Anis Horabless what is valuable however are those small crises those wake-up calls those close calls It's these situations There's significant but hardly mortal that can make us focus the can drive creativity and connection and clarity

They are serious so we have to get serious they're challenging and challenge us to rise up and meet them They can make us better If we insist on it in the moment they may seem like they are great greater than we can imagine and yes We might lose some things in the process. Yes, there might be some consequences

But in the grand scheme of things we are alive and that was never really endowed and if we are alive, then we can learn

It's in fact often when we don't pay attention to and learn from these small crises that the world sends the big ones Our way the ones that come crashing down on us to finally get these lessons through our thick skull When we stop resisting and start learning the obstacle becomes the way and obviously that's the idea behind the obstacle is the way Which I wrote about over 10 years ago now having not been through too much I was in my early 20s when I sat down and wrote that book and I've been through some bigger stuff since then

But the idea is is about how we respond to those day-to-day obstacles and how we see them as an opportunity for growth We have a 10-year anniversary edition a new edition of the obstacle is the way available. I'll link to that in today's show notes

“If you want me to sign if you want to give it as a gift to someone you can grab all that at steward.dailystowook.com”

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W-h-a-t-n-o-t dot com slash sell what not dot com slash sell Hey, it's Ryan today's episode is from the daily stoic 360 six meditations on wisdom pressure variants in the heart of living

Probably annoying that I'm always saying the title, but you know what every time we post about this book on Instagram

People go oh, what book is that as if it's not the book that kicked off the whole thing so I Try to take the humility in remembering that even though I have lived and breathe this book and these ideas For a very long time they're new to many people and maybe they're even new to you listing right now So you can grab the book Are you book physical you have a cool leather edition and so I'm gonna bring you this entry which starts with the quote from Epictetus his discourses

He says those who received the bare theories immediately want to spew them as an upset stomach does its food First digest your theories and you won't throw them up he says Otherwise they will be raw and spoiled and not nourishing After you've digested them show us the changes in your reason choices just like the soldiers of gymnasts display their diet and training And as the craft of artisans show what they've learned

Many of the stoic aphorisms are simple to remember and even sounds smart one quoted But that's not what philosophy is really about the goal is to turn these words into works as Musonius Rufus that was Epictetus's teacher as he put it the justification for philosopher is one one brings together sound teachings Sound conduct today or anytime when you catch yourself wanting to condescendingly drop some knowledge that you have crabden asked

But I'd be better saying the words or letting my actions in choices illustrate that knowledge For me So a couple thoughts here as we kick this around number one

“I think Musonius Rufus was a guy who walked the walk in addition to talking the talk”

This is a guy first off who teaches Epictetus. I mean, he's a philosophy teacher. He's known as the Roman socket. He's a wise powerful important dude

In here he has teaching us lay no discrimination no judgment In fact, he makes Epictetus into his greatest student and he also teaches women. He was very ahead of his time and Right, it's fascinating. I say about how women are just as capable of virtue as men and should be taught philosophy and excellence

But Musonius Rufus is exiled four times three. We know for certain four. We speculate about But he deals with I'm in justice. He deals with difficulty deals with adversity All these things he talks about he has to put into practice Epictetus. Of course. We know this without question

But what I sort of think about when I think about the school. Actually, I want to go back to something for a second to you

You know, I said that they call them the Roman socket is We talked about this before, but Musonius doesn't write anything down What he left behind was his example, right? His example is so compelling that It makes for a great writing by Plato, but Socrates is a philosopher because of how he lived

because of what he did in the room in conversations with people not what he Not pouring over his No books and writing and rewriting and all that. He was a philosopher because of how he lived and in fact a great

stoicato gives us a similar example. Epictetus himself was a teacher. Yes, but he doesn't write any books It's what he told his students and how he lived

“It survives down to us into a form of lecture notes. That's what Mark's really reads”

and that's what we have now in discourses and in curriting But I just think about this with my own understanding of stoicism. So I read Mark's realist in my late teens, 18, 20 years old and I started writing about it immediately. I was immediately regurgitating it off because it was the smartest, most interesting thought provoking,

challenging, eye-opening stuff I'd ever read, but it took many, many years for the ideas to firmly take hold. Seneca talks about ideas, winning firm, hold in your mind. Now the brilliance of the writing and the phrasing and the humor and the wisdom, all that immediately hits me. I get that immediately but it takes a lot longer for it to

warm its way into my DNA into my life. And I talk about this in the in-right thing right now. The the third book in the Virtue Series, the Justice book. I don't think I could have written that book in my 20s. I don't even know if I could have written it in my early 30s. I don't even know if I could have written it three years ago, right? It took a long time to hard-won experiences. It took the

is it's working on you as you are working on it. And what Epictetus is saying and what ultimately

“the stoics want you to understand is that studying stoicism, talking about stoicism, thinking”

about stoicism, reading about stoicism, all this stuff is great. It's part of it. But

first off it's going to take time and patience. It's going to take work, turn those words into works,

which is the whole point of the philosophy. It's supposed to translate down to the conduct. So interesting quote from Mark's real is about temper or about anxiety. Those hit me at 20.

But it took a long time, maybe longer than it should have, but it took me a while to actually start

applying that stuff to start acting differently to let it really get into my system. And so I would just, if you feel like you've been studying this stuff and talking about it, thinking about it for a while and it's just, you don't know if there's a difference yet, give it time. It's working on you as you are working on it. At the same time, I would say keep working on it, right? Actually actively try to get it in there. I remember when I was doing

jujitsu, I went one time I was working out a Brazilian jujitsu gym in New York City and the professor said something like, you've got to come every day with something specific you're trying

“to work on something specific you want to take out of it. I think if we think of stoces in that”

way too, what am I trying to get out of this? What am I really working on? What am I trying to translate into conduct today? I'm not trying to reinvent myself, change everything. But I'm trying to really get it into my system. And I want to try to act and behave differently as a result of

“what I'm learning here. That's what we're doing. That's what epictetus is talking about.”

That's today's message. I look at weekend. I'll talk to you soon.