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This is the story of how a group of people brought music back to Afghanistan by creating their own version of American Idol.
0
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The joy they brought to the nation.
0
SPEAKER_00
You re free completely.
0
SPEAKER_00
No one is there to destroy you.
0
SPEAKER_05
The danger they endured.
0
SPEAKER_01
They said my head should be cut off.
0
SPEAKER_05
I m John Legend.
0
SPEAKER_05
Listen to Afghan Star on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
0
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Guess what, Will?
0
SPEAKER_09
What s up, Mango?
0
SPEAKER_09
I ve been trying to write a promo for our podcast, Part-Time Genius, but even though we ve done over 250 episodes, we don t really talk about murders or cults.
0
SPEAKER_08
I mean, we did just cover the Illuminati of cheese, so I feel like that makes us pretty edgy.
0
SPEAKER_08
We also solve mysteries like how Chinese is your Chinese food and how do dollar stores make money?
0
SPEAKER_08
And then, of course, can you game a dog show?
0
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So what you re saying is everyone should be listening.
0
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Listen to Part-Time Genius on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
0
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A new season of Bridgerton is here.
0
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And with it, a new season of Bridgerton, the official podcast.
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I m your host, Gabby Collins.
0
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And this season, we are bringing fans even deeper into the ton.
0
SPEAKER_02
Watch season three of the Shondaland series on Netflix.
0
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Then fall in love all over again by listening to Bridgerton, the official podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
0
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Subscribe to catch a new episode every Thursday.
0
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If success is this lagging indicator of commitment now, how can you be sure that you are paying your dues?
0
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The best-selling author and host.
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The number one health and wellness podcast.
0
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On Purpose with Jay Shetty.
0
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Hey, everyone.
0
SPEAKER_04
Welcome back to On Purpose, the number one health podcast in the world.
0
SPEAKER_04
Thanks to each and every one of you that come back every week to become happier, healthier.
0
SPEAKER_05
When the Taliban banned music in Afghanistan, millions were plunged into silence.
0
SPEAKER_05
radios were smashed, cassettes burned.
0
SPEAKER_05
You could be beaten or jailed or killed for breaking the rules.
0
SPEAKER_05
And yet, Afghans did it anyway.
0
SPEAKER_05
This is the story of how a group of people brought music back to Afghanistan by creating their own version of American Idol.
0
SPEAKER_05
The danger they endured.
0
SPEAKER_01
They said my head should be cut off.
0
SPEAKER_05
the joy they brought to the nation.
0
SPEAKER_00
You re free completely.
0
SPEAKER_00
No one is there to destroy you.
0
SPEAKER_05
I m John Legend.
0
SPEAKER_05
Listen to Afghan Star on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
0
SPEAKER_03
Hey everyone, this is Molly and Matt and we re the hosts of Grown Up Stuff How to Adult, a podcast from Ruby Studio and iHeart Podcasts.
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SPEAKER_07
It s a show dedicated to helping you figure out the trickiest parts of adulting.
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SPEAKER_03
Like how to start planning for retirement, creating a healthy skincare routine, understanding when and how much to tip someone and so much more.
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SPEAKER_07
We re back with season two of the podcast, which means more opportunities to glow up and become a more responsible and better adult, one life lesson at a time.
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And let me just tell you, this show is just as much for us as it is for you.
0
SPEAKER_03
So let s figure this stuff out together.
0
SPEAKER_03
This season, we re going to talk about whether or not we re financially and emotionally ready for dog ownership.
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We re going to figure out the benefits of a high-yield savings account.
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And what exactly are the duties of being a member of the wedding party?
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All that plus so much more.
0
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Let s learn about all of it and then some.
0
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Listen to Grown Up Stuff How to Adult on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
0
SPEAKER_08
Guess what, Bango?
0
SPEAKER_08
What s up, Will?
0
SPEAKER_08
So iHeart is giving us a whole minute to promote our podcast, Part-Time Genius.
0
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I know, that s why I spent my whole week composing a haiku for the occasion.
0
SPEAKER_09
It s about my emotional journey in podcasting over the last seven years, and it s called Earthquake House.
0
SPEAKER_08
Mango, I m going to cut you off right there.
0
SPEAKER_08
Why don t we just tell people about our show instead?
0
SPEAKER_09
Yeah, that s a better idea.
0
SPEAKER_09
So every week on Part-Time Genius, we feed our curiosity by answering the world s most important questions.
0
SPEAKER_09
Things like, when did America start dialing 911?
0
SPEAKER_09
Is William Shatner s best acting work in Esperanto?
0
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Also, what happened to Esperanto?
0
SPEAKER_08
Plus, we cover questions like how Chinese is your Chinese food?
0
SPEAKER_08
How do dollar stores stay in business?
0
SPEAKER_08
And of course, is there an Illuminati of cheese?
0
SPEAKER_08
There absolutely is.
0
SPEAKER_09
And we are risking our lives by talking about it.
0
SPEAKER_09
But if you love mind-blowing facts, incredible history and really bad jokes, make your brains happy and tune in to Part-Time Genius.
0
SPEAKER_08
Listen to Part-Time Genius on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
0
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and more healed.
0
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Today I m talking to a guest who I ve had the pleasure of interviewing, I think, I think this is the fourth or fifth time that I m getting to sit down with him.
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Probably the person I ve interviewed the most in my entire interviewing career and it s because he keeps putting out incredible work and incredible books that I hope you re going to read.
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I m talking about Ryan Holiday, who s one of the world s best-selling living philosophers.
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Ryan s books, like his new one, Discipline is Destiny, which is available right now, number one New York Times bestsellers, multiple.
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SPEAKER_04
Some of my favorite ones, The Obstacle is the Way, Ego is the Enemy, The Daily Stoic, and they ve been translated into over 40 languages and sold multi-millions of copies.
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SPEAKER_04
I m so excited to talk to Ryan today about this new book, The Power of Self-Control.
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SPEAKER_04
I know it s been out for a bit, but this is a topic I m fascinated by.
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SPEAKER_04
If you don t already have this book, go and grab it.
0
SPEAKER_04
If you have one, go and grab one for a friend.
0
SPEAKER_04
Ryan, thank you for being back on the show.
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As always.
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SPEAKER_04
Yeah, it s always great, man.
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It s great.
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I remember when...
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I first met you, it was such an inspiration for me because seeing you uncover stoicism for the modern world definitely was parallel to how I felt about what I wanted to do for Vedic knowledge and Vedic wisdom.
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And it s been exceptional to watch.
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And I love that.
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I hope there s more.
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I don t know.
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SPEAKER_04
This is the end of the series, right?
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This is two and a four book.
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SPEAKER_04
Okay, good, good, good.
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SPEAKER_04
Okay, okay, yeah.
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You keep finding a way of doing that.
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I need to figure that out.
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But no, it s great we re talking about this.
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And I love that you chose what I think today is considered as such an unsexy topic.
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And I don t know if you see it that way.
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Discipline, I mean.
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I do.
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I mean, especially because the ancients, the word they used for discipline was temperance, which sounds even like discipline.
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We at least know that there s like a kind of a coolness to it, but temperance feels like the opposite of fun, right?
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It feels like you re telling me what I can t do, all the things I have to avoid or all the things I have to stop short on.
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And people don t like that.
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Even though, when you actually think about the people who do whatever they want all the time, they re actually some of the most unhappy, miserable people in the entire world.
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Yeah, and it s funny you say that now because I started thinking back to Vedic knowledge and the word is Tapa, T-A-P-A, and it means austerity.
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That s the closest translation.
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And the idea that discipline is often compared to austerity.
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Right.
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And austerity, the purpose of it is not deprivation.
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The purpose of austerity is
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to be not corrupted, to be sustainable, right?
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To avoid what is superfluous or unnecessary.
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And it s not even about a thing.
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It s not even about avoiding pleasure altogether.
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Like in the ancient world, the big, in the Western ancient world, the big
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Dispute is between the Epicureans and the Stoics.
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And you d think Epicureans are the lovers of pleasures and the Stoics are the haters of pleasure.
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But even the Epicureans believed that any pleasure taken too far becomes a source of pain or suffering.
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So it s what we re really talking about.
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Then it comes down to this idea of temperance or balance.
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What is the right amount?
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Some things, the right amount is zero, but for most things, the right amount is some sort of moderate or midpoint.
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And you have to have wisdom and self-control to not only figure out what that is, but then to stop at that line.
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Yeah, yeah.
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And that s the hard part because I feel like society has gone in the direction of becoming addicted to pleasure or pleasure seeking.
0
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from the Stoics  perspective, why did we even ever go down that road?
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Like, why did we leave wisdom and self-control or did we never have it at all and we ve always been trying to balance it?
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Yeah, I mean, I guess that s the big question is like, why do we take something that we like too far?
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Yeah.
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Right?
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So the Epicureans would say like, look, drinking is great.
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But if you have a hangover the next day, was it actually so great?
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And so, you know, if you, if you push the pleasure too far, it becomes not pleasurable.
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But in the moment that feels very far away, right?
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Like in the moment you want the thing now, obviously sex is this thing for people.
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It s like the thing you re attracted to in this moment, you re not thinking about the shame or the regret or the consequences or the pain.
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or the loss or the grief.
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You re not thinking of all those things you re just thinking of right now.
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So I think a big part of this, this is where the wisdom comes in, the ability to step back and go, what am I going to think about this after I get it?
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What am I going to think about this later?
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And realizing that your mind is very good at tricking you.
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Just as your mind often tells you like, stop, you re too tired.
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You can t go any further.
1
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You actually have a lot less left in the tank.
1
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Your mind also tells you, you need this thing, you won t regret it, it s amazing, whatever.
1
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And it s really good at putting those blinders on.
1
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And so part of, I think, any meditative practice, any philosophical practice, any journaling practice, is being able to argue with yourself a little bit, to step back and have that conversation about,
1
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Well, is what I think about this true?
1
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Is the story I m telling myself about this true?
1
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I think nowhere is this more important than for like ambitious people who have told themselves, I will be happy when I accomplish X, right?
1
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Like of all the things we need to be most disciplined about, ambition is one of them.
1
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Because it tells you this lie that after I become a New York Times bestseller, after I make a million dollars,
1
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after I get a gold medal, then I ll be good, my parents will be proud of me, I ll be happy, then I can relax.
1
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And you have to have the perspective, the wisdom to go, was that ever been true ever in my life before?
1
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Has that ever been true in history?
1
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And then go, oh, okay, no, I can t tell myself that lie.
1
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That doesn t mean you don t work really hard to do stuff, but you re not doing it under the false pretenses that it s going to,
1
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be conditional to your happiness.
1
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Yeah.
1
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But there s a part of us that, and I love what you re saying, but there s a part of us that always believes that we are the exception, that we will know how to spend money better, that we ll know how to have love in our life better.
1
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Like we won t be the one who fumbles off the edge of a cliff.
1
SPEAKER_01
Like we re smarter than all our friends, even if we don t say that we re wiser than the people who came before us.
1
SPEAKER_01
And that s the, and that s ego is the enemy.
1
SPEAKER_01
But of course, like that, that idea, I think is what misleads us so much.
1
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
1
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It s, it s like, okay, you re on the medal stand.
1
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You ve just won the gold medal and you re not feeling happy for yourself.
1
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You re thinking, well, I could have done it faster.
1
SPEAKER_00
You re thinking, oh, I got to do it again.
1
SPEAKER_00
Right.
1
SPEAKER_00
Even in that moment, you re not able to think I m doing it to myself right now, what I will be doing to myself in the future.
1
SPEAKER_00
And that s this sort of insidious thing.
1
SPEAKER_00
And you can understand why from an evolutionary perspective, it drives the species forward.
1
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you can also see the immense personal cost that it inflicts on us because it never allows us to be present or content or happy with what we have in that moment.
1
SPEAKER_00
And so I think, again, people think discipline is the, I always push myself to do better, do more.
1
SPEAKER_00
Discipline can also be curbing that very impulse, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
Like,
1
SPEAKER_00
And ordinary people, when we re talking about discipline, what we re talking about is getting off your butt, working out, resisting eating candy and eating nutritious food instead.
1
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It s managing your screen time.
1
SPEAKER_00
But I think for a lot of more disciplined people or for people who have tasted the rewards of discipline, you have to learn how to be disciplined about discipline, which is maybe the highest level of
1
SPEAKER_00
of the whole thing.
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
1
SPEAKER_01
Now we re, I guess now we ve started talking about discipline as a tool to achieve daily or weekly, monthly, yearly tasks.
1
SPEAKER_01
But you re actually saying that we need to go back a bit.
1
SPEAKER_01
Like how would you unpack that for how you re defining discipline there?
1
SPEAKER_00
Well, it s like, what s the number one cause of injury for athletes?
1
SPEAKER_00
It s overtraining, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
So like, yeah, your ordinary person, it s like, you re not training enough.
1
SPEAKER_00
You re not working hard enough.
1
SPEAKER_00
But then at a more elite level, at a more accomplished level, actually the trouble is,
1
SPEAKER_00
hey, the race isn t for six weeks.
1
SPEAKER_00
Do you want to peak now or do you want to peak at the right moment?
1
SPEAKER_00
Or this is just a practice session.
1
SPEAKER_00
You don t have to go all out.
1
SPEAKER_00
Or it s a long season.
1
SPEAKER_00
Are you prepared for that?
1
SPEAKER_00
And so discipline
1
SPEAKER_00
has to be balanced with sustainability, with rest, relaxation, recuperation, recovery, all these other things.
1
SPEAKER_00
And that requires kind of a spiritual discipline, not just, hey, I can run an hour without getting tired, but like, can I stop myself from doing that?
1
SPEAKER_00
That s not what I should be doing in this moment.
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
1
SPEAKER_01
And what I like about that is that I feel there s different phases and stages.
1
SPEAKER_01
Like in the first two years of my career where we would have met in New York and we went on a walk once as well, I think, and we were walking around the city and I remember talking about a few of these themes, but it was at that time in my life, I was working probably 18 hour days because I had to, in order to kind of break through that first level.
1
SPEAKER_01
I was still disciplined in the sense that I would make time to eat to some degree and meditate, and I would make some time to do a few things of rest, but generally I was working seven days a week, 18 hours a day.
1
SPEAKER_01
And I m very grateful I did that.
1
SPEAKER_01
I don t look back and go, oh, I wasted two years.
1
SPEAKER_01
It was brilliant.
1
SPEAKER_01
But then in the last couple of years, I ve taken my evenings back.
1
SPEAKER_01
And so I don t work after 6 p.m.
1
SPEAKER_01
It s just a rule.
1
SPEAKER_01
I don t wanna work.
1
SPEAKER_01
I don t wanna be on the phone.
1
SPEAKER_01
And I was talking to a friend and it s exactly what you said.
1
SPEAKER_01
He was saying to me, he was just like, well, don t you get less done?
1
SPEAKER_01
And I was like, no, I get more done.
1
SPEAKER_01
Because I know how much I have to get done.
1
SPEAKER_01
I m far more attentive and focused.
1
SPEAKER_01
And then I m not working at 9 p.m.
1
SPEAKER_01
when I can rest and recuperate.
1
SPEAKER_01
And now the next day I m better for it.
1
SPEAKER_01
And so I hear that idea that that is also a discipline, although it could be seen as you being lazy in the evening.
1
SPEAKER_00
And I think it s the question of, well, is it easy for you to do that?
1
SPEAKER_00
Yes or no?
1
SPEAKER_00
Right.
1
SPEAKER_00
It s hard.
1
SPEAKER_00
It s actually harder for you, I imagine, to say, I m stopping at six than it is to say, I m going to work all night till I fall asleep at my desk.
1
SPEAKER_00
Right?
1
SPEAKER_00
Like, yeah, I could do that.
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
1
SPEAKER_00
If my wife s not around, I could work every weekend and evening.
1
SPEAKER_00
And also it s realizing that you have multiple things that you re trying to do simultaneously.
1
SPEAKER_00
So yeah, sure.
1
SPEAKER_00
Working, continuing to work 18 hour days may help you continue to advance in your career.
1
SPEAKER_00
But if one of the other things you re trying to work on is to stay married, or to better yet, have a happy marriage, or you have children, or you have your health or whatever, like you were telling me before we recorded that you got in at 3am last night.
1
SPEAKER_00
Let s say you re a person who always wakes up very early, like I m a person who wakes up early.
1
SPEAKER_00
But then I also have to understand that sleep is a discipline.
1
SPEAKER_00
And so if some changes outside my control mean that I didn t go to bed to a certain time, the fact that I wake up at five, that s a bad idea.
1
SPEAKER_00
And it actually requires, you wouldn t think that sleep discipline would be a thing, but in the military, they talk about that sleep discipline.
1
SPEAKER_00
You gotta get your hours because you make bad decisions when you re not rested and other people bear the consequences of those decisions.
1
SPEAKER_00
And so deciding, hey,
1
SPEAKER_00
I m going to skip this thing that feels comfortable to me to do, that feels natural for me to do, that I feel like I m letting some part of myself down by not doing, I actually have to be the bigger, more self-controlled person and say, in this moment, I m not going to do that, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
And I think at the end of the day, self-discipline is the ability to have an emotion, an instinct of feeling to do a thing,
1
SPEAKER_00
and then to catch yourself and go, is that actually the right thing to do, yes or no?
1
SPEAKER_00
And sometimes it is, sometimes it s, hey, it s cold outside and it s 5 a.m.
1
SPEAKER_00
and it s still dark and I don t wanna get up, but I have to get up because I ve made these commitments, I m behind, blah, blah, blah.
1
SPEAKER_00
Then other times it is to stay in bed, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
Just like, you know, sometimes you feel that surge of temper coming on and you have to go,
1
SPEAKER_00
No, that s not a good, like, it s always the ability to step back, put the emotion, the instinct, the opinion to the test.
1
SPEAKER_00
And I think you learn this in meditation.
1
SPEAKER_00
I think you learn this for stoicism in the journaling of going like, here s the thing, and I can choose
1
SPEAKER_00
it or not.
1
SPEAKER_00
I can choose to identify it or not.
1
SPEAKER_00
It is not me.
1
SPEAKER_00
The Stoics have this word ascent, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
Not like ascent up a mountain, but A-S-S-E-N-T.
1
SPEAKER_00
Do you ascent to the feeling or not?
1
SPEAKER_00
Do you agree to it, rubber stamp it, approve it, go along with it or not?
1
SPEAKER_00
Do you subscribe, yeah.
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, that s what discipline is about.
1
SPEAKER_00
What do you ascent to and what do you not ascent to?
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I want to go out of a tangent.
1
SPEAKER_01
I want to come back to that because I actually really like that point.
1
SPEAKER_01
But a few words ago, there was something that you sparked for me.
1
SPEAKER_01
Sometimes I feel like with work, it s doable.
1
SPEAKER_01
Sometimes with even our partner or with friends, it s possible to say no, to be disciplined.
1
SPEAKER_01
I find like, and I want to ask you this from your perspective, what about a sense of dad guilt?
1
SPEAKER_01
Like we talk a lot about mom guilt and, you know, if it was speaking to mom, I d ask about mom guilt in this scenario.
1
SPEAKER_01
But from a dad guilt point of view, like you re a dad, you know, and I see you wanting to be a good dad and you re very involved with your kids, but at the same time you re a writer and you re in a bookstore and you re doing activist work.
1
SPEAKER_01
Like there s so many things that you do.
1
SPEAKER_01
Do you ever feel like that s like the hardest place where discipline, because it s like, even if a dad comes home at 3am and the kid wants him at 4am, like, does the dad stay up?
1
SPEAKER_01
Like, what does the dad do?
1
SPEAKER_01
How does it work?
1
SPEAKER_00
Well, it s so insidious what we do is we go like, I m doing this for my family, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
And it s like, are you?
2
SPEAKER_01
Or are you doing it for you?
2
SPEAKER_01
Are you doing it for the money?
2
SPEAKER_01
How can you be doing it for your family if you don t see those people as a result of what you re doing?
2
SPEAKER_01
Someone told me many years ago, they said love is spelled T-I-M-E and
2
SPEAKER_01
I think about that all the time.
2
SPEAKER_01
I mean, obviously, I always have things that take me away more than I would like them to be.
2
SPEAKER_01
And I suppose I could do nothing, but that would also leave me unfulfilled.
2
SPEAKER_01
That would not be me setting the example I want to set for my kids.
2
SPEAKER_01
But at the end of the day, realizing that everything I said yes to also means saying no to someone or something else.
2
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And in some ways I try to use that dad guilt a little constructively.
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I try to go, okay, this person s asking me to do this thing, or this person s offering me money to do this thing, or this is some cool opportunity.
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They want me to go hella skiing in British Columbia or something.
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And I go, I don t want to say no to this cool opportunity.
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I don t want to miss this memory.
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I don t want to hurt this person s feelings.
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Then I go, but I am hurting a person s feelings.
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I am saying no to a memory.
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Like I am taking something away from someone.
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And that person is a five-year-old and they re going to feel it far more deeply.
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Someone else will take my spot on that plane to British Columbia.
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no one will spend that time with my kids.
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And so I try to use that guilt constructively in the sense that I m reminding myself always that saying yes to one thing means saying no to something else, and that conversely saying no means saying yes, right?
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And that I always, as much as I can, I want to be saying yes to the things that actually matter to me.
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and I want to be putting my money where my mouth is.
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It s like, if someone looked at your calendar, you say you put your family first, you say family is important, blah, blah, blah.
2
SPEAKER_01
But then if I looked at your calendar, what would it show, right?
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If there was a custody hearing or, you know, if you were being investigated, if you were being audited, what would the receipts show?
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Do you actually value them?
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Do you put them first?
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And like, it should be pretty, pretty obvious whether that s true or not.
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Yeah, no, I have an exercise in Think Like a Monk where I ask people to do their time audit for the week.
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And it s literally that where it s like, and it s against your values, because someone s values may be different.
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But the idea that your
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bank statement and your schedule show your values more than what you say.
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The words that come out of our mouth are not actually our values.
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There are aspirations.
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Those are the values you wish you had, but the values that actually go, what do you spend your money on?
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And what do you spend your time on?
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Like that s far more what your real values are.
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Yeah, I think about that.
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I saw this interview with Jimmy Carter many years ago, and he has this sort of crisis of faith, and he goes like, if I was put on trial for being a Christian, would I be convicted?
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So it s not what you say, not what you think, not what you wish, but like, what did the action show?
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And I think about that with Marcus Aurelius, who I write a lot about, the Stoic emperor.
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He never identifies explicitly as a Stoic, and one of his translators says,
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He never even says the word stoicism in his writings, but he s considered this philosopher-emperor, and he probably still would have been, even if his writings had never survived, because the deeds are there.
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There s a Latin expression, acta non verba, like deeds, not words.
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And so you have to always think not, what do I write about?
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What do I think about?
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What do I wanna be true?
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But what do the actions show?
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And no one is perfect.
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And I think anyone auditing themselves is going to be there s going to be some disappointments, but you want like the big statements of priority to be there.
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And to go back to the idea of guilt, when you re looking at it, you shouldn t
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like whip yourself and feel, but you should be like, okay, this is not the painting, the picture that I want to paint.
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And that you re lucky enough in that moment to catch it now, not when you re 80, you know, not on your death bed, you ve caught it now.
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And so what changes are you going to make to get closer between the ideal and the reality?
2
SPEAKER_00
A new season of Bridgerton is here.
2
SPEAKER_00
And with it, a new season of Bridgerton, the official podcast.
2
SPEAKER_00
I m your host, Gabrielle Collins.
2
SPEAKER_00
And this season, we are bringing fans even deeper into the ton.
2
SPEAKER_00
Colin Bridgerton has returned from his travels abroad.
2
SPEAKER_00
Is Betrothal written in the stars for the eligible bachelor?
2
SPEAKER_00
Meanwhile, the ton is reverberating with speculation of who holds Lady Whistledown s pen.
2
SPEAKER_00
We re discussing it all.
2
SPEAKER_00
I sit down with Nicola Coughlin, Luke Newton, Shonda Rhimes, and more to offer an exclusive peek behind the scenes of each episode of the new season.
2
SPEAKER_00
Watch season three of the Shondaland series on Netflix.
2
SPEAKER_00
Then, fall in love all over again by listening to Bridgerton, the official podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
2
SPEAKER_00
Subscribe to catch a new episode every Thursday.
2
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Yeah, absolutely.
2
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And something that s interesting that s coming out from me here is that pretty much everything we do every day can be defined by thinking, feeling, and doing.
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But I think we re living at a time where we re stuck in the feeling generation.
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So we do things because we want to feel a certain way, but then when we feel things, we don t know what to do with it.
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So I ll give an example of what I mean by that.
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If we feel guilt,
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Most of us don t know how to shift from that feeling into thinking and doing something different in order to not feel that guilt again.
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And if we want to feel happy, we just try and feel happy, not realizing that you have to change your thoughts and what you do in order to feel happiness or whatever it may be.
2
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What I m trying to get at there is like,
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That to me sounds like a discipline too, but we ve gone so into feeling because I think for so long, thinking and doing were the only things talked about, and we didn t feel enough.
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I think realizing that almost all the things you want in life are accidental byproducts of
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habits, processes, systems, routines, right?
2
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So Viktor Frankl famously said that happiness can t be pursued, it must ensue.
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It s the result of getting those big things right and then you just feel this kind of feeling of happiness as a byproduct.
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You don t, as you said, you don t go, today I must feel happy, right?
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It s the result of having meaning and purpose and taking the right actions.
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And so people sometimes look at the books that I ve written and they re like, what?
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How did you publish so many books?
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And it s like, publishing is not what I think about.
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I think about writing.
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I wake up every day and write.
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And the accidental byproduct of that is the publishing, right?
2
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And so good habits, good routines, like if you want a happier home life, it s like, are you spending more time there?
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How are you setting up systems or processes that the result is that outcome?
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Right.
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You control what you put in the outcome happens or it doesn t happen.
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And I think so often we, we just, you re right.
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We just want the feeling.
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So we try to cheat it or steal it, or we feel guilty that we don t have it when really you could start small right now and, and just get yourself closer to it.
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What do you think is the best discipline you ve built over time?
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Is it writing?
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Obviously, that would be the obvious one, but is there another one that you think underpins that success?
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Is there a discipline you ve worked on the longest?
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Well, I think writing is such a sedentary sort of intellectual cerebral thing that I try to balance it out with like a physical practice.
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So I try to do something hard every single day, running, swimming, biking.
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I do a walk once a day, like I do something hard every day.
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And part of what that is, is
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transferable back to the practice, right?
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Because again, it comes down to the, you don t want to do it, it s hard, it s not going the way you want it, but you ve cultivated the muscle of being able to push through that.
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Like there s lots of claims about the health benefits of cold plunges and they may or may not exist.
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That s not why I do it, right?
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The muscle for me is the cranking of the knob of the looking at the cold plunge at my house and going, it is going to be unpleasant to get in there.
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But I have the ability to force myself to do that.
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That s the muscle that you want to cultivate.
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And I think, you know, people want to be the person on the other side of that, but they don t realize that the way you do it is by just starting it, just starting it.
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Yeah, it s so true.
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I can relate to so much of that in my own life.
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And when you re saying that it s, I feel like today, most of what I do, I d say I spend a lot, I d say I spend like 75% of my life outside of my comfort zone.
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I am constantly doing things that demand more from me than I believe I m skilled and able to accomplish.
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Yeah, yeah.
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And in a healthy way, in a good sense, because I feel challenged.
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And I feel that challenge forces me to grow my skills, which then meet a new challenge, and then that keeps growing.
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But then I find myself in my personal life often resorting to comfort, because I need to kind of cushion the amount of pressure and stress.
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And so it s like this balance.
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For me, I m at that place in my life where I m like, okay, I m pushing so much.
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I need my personal life to be super like, you know, cushioned to some degree.
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It is interesting, right?
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We will take, and Seneca points this out in one of his letters, we ll push ourselves, we ll take risks to succeed financially, to succeed in business, to succeed in our careers, to buttress our reputations.
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But then we don t want to do it in the other places
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where most of us would admit it actually matters, right?
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My favorite passage is in Meditations, Mark Cerullos is like a better wrestler, but not a better forgiver of faults, a better friend in tight places.
3
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He s pointing out how we ll go like, yeah, I m trying to like...
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You ll talk to someone that have this well laid out plan for how they re trying to increase their back squat or their mile time or how they re trying to, they ve got these aggressive goals for their stock price or, you know, how many copies they want to sell of this thing.
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We have really clear financial and professional goals.
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And then in our personal life, we just wing it.
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And I m not saying- Yeah, I didn t mean that, but I know what you mean.
3
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Yeah, I love that point.
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And I think the point is you have to be challenging yourself in your personal life, also getting vulnerable, getting outside your comfort zone, having the conversations that you... I think it s because our professional stuff is so much more quantifiable and then there s other people are looking at it, whereas the other stuff is private.
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And so we hold ourselves to different standards and you think about what that cost
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costs us in terms of a place you get to in your marriage in 10 years that had you thought more consciously about or put one tenth of the focus on, maybe you could have got there in one year and then had nine years of enjoying it.
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Yeah.
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No, that I fully agree with and maybe I didn t clarify.
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When I said comfort, I mean more apart from like my sleep schedule.
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I have so many routines that are already set up that I try and make my personal life more comfortable as in my individual life of my own self-care because I find I m pushing myself in so many areas.
3
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But I love where you took it to because I think that s the critical one, right?
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What you re kind of leaning towards is most people will become people they don t want to be in order to achieve something.
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And that external pursuit often does that.
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By the end of building a billion-dollar company or whatever it may be, you end up going, well, I don t even like the person I am anymore, or I ve lost the person who I thought I was.
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whereas the pursuit of doing it inwardly with your family, with your friendships, the openness that s required, chances are you ll become the person you want to be.
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Like chances are you ll become someone that you re proud of being.
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And I think that s such, I want to dive into that.
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That is such a powerful way of looking at it.
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And you re saying it s because of the quantifiability, which I think there s truth in.
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I also think it s the, it s harder.
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It s harder because,
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Like you re saying, there s no external reward.
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There s no number that proves you did it.
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And it s fluctuating way more because people s emotions, like anyone in your family and friends, you can t control it.
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You can control or master an algorithm or the stock market to some degree.
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But with a person, you can t do any of that because you can t set something up and then be like, you re going to stay this way.
3
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Well, it s like you get so used to the control and the power that you have from the mastery of your professional domain, right?
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Like when I sit down to write, I m in control.
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I m comfortable.
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This is a place that I have carved out for myself.
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when I m arguing with my wife or I am dealing with a three-year-old who s having a meltdown, I m not in control and I m humbled by it and I m struggling with it and I don t feel like I ve got it.
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Because I have so much less, I ve literally never done that before.
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And I ll have such a short window where I ll ever have to do it.
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It s not like, oh, I ve been in this place and a book 12 times.
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I ve only had one five-year-old.
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And so it s just so much more challenging.
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much more multi-dimensional, you know, N of one, like, difficult thing.
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And so it s going to demand more of you.
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And I think it s like, look, optimizing your professional life or maximizing your professional life, very unlikely to improve your personal life.
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But if you have optimized and maximized and improved your personal life, gotten your house in order, you re going to be better at what you do, or you re going to care less in some degrees about things that used to bother you so much.
3
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And so which one are you going to focus on, right?
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Because you can get, you can be a Titan in your industry and then be a total amateur at home, right?
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And I think go where it s easy.
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And that s the thing, I think discipline often gets applied to the titan in the industry, not the amateur at home.
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And that s how we think about discipline.
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We think about discipline as what can I achieve through this in an external sense.
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At least today, that s the language.
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And you can get away with so much more.
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If you re really talented, you can be a jerk.
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You can demand a lot of people, because you re paying these people.
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I m not saying you should, I m just saying that there s accommodations that are made for you.
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And sort of insidiously, the more successful you are, the more needed you are, the more accommodations you are.
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There s none of that in the other area.
3
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And so you have to, there s some humility required, right?
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You re meeting equals on an equal playing field and the discipline to say, like, yeah, I m going to wrestle with that.
3
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I m going to try to get better.
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I m not going to allow myself to do these following bad habits.
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That takes a certain amount of self-control and focus and discipline.
3
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Yeah, I guess one of the biggest challenges with discipline is that we re trying to destroy a habit that we hate.
3
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Like there s this idea that it just has to break and go, right?
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If you have a habit that you don t like about yourself, whatever that may be, it s like you re just, or at least I found when I m coaching clients and working with people is that they have this
3
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like bitter feeling towards this thing that they have.
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And they want it to go at all costs, but that almost makes you hold onto it harder.
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Like that makes you grip onto it and wrestle with it more.
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And I remember when I lived in India, a lot of the time, the analogy that was given or the metaphor that was given to meditate on, because we d see all the time was like snakeskin.
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And the idea was that when snakes shed their skin, they just slither out.
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They don t one day just go... It s not like the Hulk.
3
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Yeah, they re not like the Hulk where it s like... Snakes just slither out and then their skin gets left behind and then they ll grow more.
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And so the idea that it s such a natural organic process of if you just slither, if you just move forward, you naturally shed.
3
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That s the beauty of process, right?
3
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You don t sit down and go, I have to do this right now.
3
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What do I have to do today?
3
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What are the small steps?
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And you get great by minor improvements compounded on top of each other day in and day out, showing up day in and day out.
3
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And that s the same, hey, we were fighting like crazy six months ago and now things are awesome.
3
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Why is that?
3
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They made a change and you made a change and you made a response and it changed in response to their change and it compounded and now you re here.
3
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That work can fall away at any moment, you have to rebuild it.
3
SPEAKER_01
But I think, you know, the Buddhists talk about willful will, like almost the more intentional you are about it.
3
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That s the irony too, is we re talking about how, you know, being intentional in your professional life often pays off.
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Being intentional, having clear expectations, wants, desires in your personal life is harder because it depends on other people.
3
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people who are not like you, people who did not sign up for that.
3
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And I think one of the things you learn having kids and then also being married is that like a sense in that same sense of like acquiescing to things, adjusting to things, like I m a routine person.
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Kids don t care about your routine.
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They fall asleep when they fell asleep.
3
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And you have to adjust.
3
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You re no longer the center of the universe.
3
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And that is such an important thing that you have to figure out and adjust and accommodate towards.
3
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You re the master of the universe here, but that you leave that behind when you walk through the front door.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, absolutely.
3
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I was talking to Amar from Yes Theory.
3
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I don t know if you know the guys at Yes Theory.
3
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Yeah, they re awesome.
3
SPEAKER_00
And we ve had them on the show before.
3
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But I was talking to Amar the other day, and they just released their project Iceman.
3
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I think their documentary, first time like their feature documentary, but he was talking about this.
3
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And he was saying that
3
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When they built yes theory, the goal was like, how can we say yes to things we would usually say no to, right?
3
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Like that was the obvious point.
3
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And now he s learned that it s equally important to say no.
3
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But the part that really hit me when he was explaining it, I think we both vibed with the idea.
3
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He was saying that, and it s something you said earlier, he said, I have to start saying yes to the things I find hardest.
3
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And so he was saying that today,
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no matter how many marathons he s done, no matter how many crazy expeditions they ve gone on, no matter how many countries they survive with no money, he said the hardest thing for him to do is sit with his thoughts for 15 minutes.
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He was like, that s the hardest thing.
4
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He goes, I don t look forward to doing that.
4
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He said, if someone told me to train for something, he goes, I look forward to that.
4
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But if someone told me to sit down with my thoughts for 15 minutes, he goes, I don t look forward to it.
4
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So that s what I m doing.
4
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And he was saying that s why he s trying to build that.
4
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And he was like, that s his new definition of seeking discomfort.
4
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Because he said, when people come up to him and say, do you want to build like a million dollar company, a billion dollar?
4
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He s like, I can get excited about that.
4
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But he goes, I don t get excited about it.
4
SPEAKER_01
Is that a good sense of people finding what discipline is for them?
4
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Or how do you see that?
4
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I think restraint is the hardest thing, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
Blaise Pascal in the 1500s.
4
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said, all of humanity s problems stem from our inability to sit quietly in a room alone.
4
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It was hard 500 years ago.
4
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It s harder now when you have a cell phone in your pocket, when you could get on a flight and travel anywhere you want in the world, and there s unlimited distractions, opportunities, things to get excited about.
4
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Like, it s hard to hold the mind still
4
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to be physically still, or maybe not to be physically still, but have the mind still while the body is in motion.
4
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This requires like so much discipline, so much self-control, so much self-awareness, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
Even to understand that it s hard for you, that it s something that you
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are naturally averse to or avoid is a step in that journey to getting better at it.
4
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Because a lot of people are just doing, doing, doing, and they re not even aware they re running away from something.
4
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They re not even aware that it makes them uncomfortable to be still.
4
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So I think we have to understand it s this journey and hopefully as you go, you get more and more comfortable.
4
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Because at the end of the day, that s the one constant in life.
4
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Wherever you go, there you are.
4
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There you are, as the expression goes.
4
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You re there.
4
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And if you can t get comfortable with that, can t get in touch with that, you can t see what s there, then you re going to wake up one day and realize
4
SPEAKER_00
I did all of this stuff to get away from something that s been inside me the whole time.
4
SPEAKER_01
And that s very, very sad.
4
SPEAKER_01
That is, that s, yeah, that s, well, that s the inconvenient truth of it, right?
4
SPEAKER_01
Like that s the hard part that you chased pleasure for so long that you completely missed what was already there.
4
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I think, is it that we don t, what is your take from studying it?
4
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Is it that we don t know the benefits enough?
4
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Is it that we don t like processes enough?
4
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Is it that we re just addicted and there isn t a, because I look at, and I do think looking at very daily habit changes is the easiest way to build the muscle to go, I can do this.
4
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So I always give the example of,
4
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When I met my wife, I was addicted to sugar.
4
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Like I genuinely was, and I didn t even know it.
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I had a Sprite and a chocolate bar every day without thinking about it.
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It s how I got through college.
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It was life.
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When I was a monk, I didn t have either of those things, but that was more of a suppression.
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And there was lots of other interesting things to do, or I didn t need that kind of energy.
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When I came back,
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You re like the convict who s sober in prison, just because you don t have access.
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Exactly.
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I didn t have access to it.
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And I definitely built a discipline where I didn t feel like I needed it.
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But then when I came back to the real world, all I wanted was chocolate and sugar.
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And so when I met my wife, it s like, you know, we ve been married for six years now, together for 10.
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And at first, she would just educate me.
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Like she would just tell me, because she s a dietician and nutritionist, this is her job.
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She s laying out all the dangers of sugar.
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Then she s like taking it out of the home, like it s not around anymore, it s not accessible.
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And then almost like it s taken six years and I would say now I m at a place where the habit has really transformed.
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That s like a six-year journey.
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And obviously, it probably happened like halfway through, I d say, like probably happened three years ago where I really started cutting out sugar.
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But it needed a coach.
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My wife was the coach.
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It needed an obedient or submissive student.
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I trust my wife on this area.
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It wasn t like... I didn t have an ego about it.
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She knows more than me about the body.
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And then on top of that,
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It needed a focus in the sense that in my health, we kind of did it one at a time without even trying, whereas we took out sugar first, we started working out next.
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She kind of did that even unconsciously.
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It just took so much.
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And I go, and I know obviously with the Stoics, we talk about mentoring and coaching, and there s always this cross learning.
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But I feel like now we re all trying to do it on our own.
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We are, and we re also expecting that it just happens, that it s this like epiphany.
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If knowing what to do was enough, everyone would be in great shape.
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No one would have any of these illnesses or problems that we have.
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It s so much more complicated than that.
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And I do try to remind people that it s a journey that you re on your whole life.
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There s passages in meditations where Marx realizes going,
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You re an old man and you re still losing your temper.
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You re still worried about what other people think.
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He s like, you re still afraid of death and it s almost here.
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And realizing that if the wisest people in the world struggled their whole life with this thing, the idea that you, who were lucky enough to hear about it in your 20s or 30s or 40s, that you re just gonna get it, it s naive and it s also unfair to yourself.
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The question is, are you getting better at it as you go, right?
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Seneca says, how do I know I m making progress?
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And my philosophy says, I ve begun to become a better friend to myself.
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So discipline is not just squeezing blood from the stone.
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It s not just whipping yourself.
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hiring a coach, it s setting reachable goals as you go, it s stepping back and giving yourself credit and saying, look how far we ve come, man, like we re doing great, right?
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It s not just this sort of like in your face, like how are you not there yet-ness, right?
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It s a journey and you re not,
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supposed to really ever get there.
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It s like the horizon, it s always a little bit further away.
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And so, you know, I think when we hear discipline, I think we think of like the marine drill sergeant.
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This is kind of transformative.
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You didn t have discipline and now you do.
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We should also think about it like having a discipline.
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It is a thing you do your whole life and realizing that that s how we should measure this progress.
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I think, though, that that s what we re banging our head against, is that the mind has been so far removed from the idea that things take time, that patience is required, that one step at a time.
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We hear those things all the time.
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But there s literally nothing we do in our lives that requires us to move one step at a time anymore.
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It just doesn t work.
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And we know these examples, like whether you re ordering food to your house, or whether you re getting this delivered, or whether you jump into an Uber or Lyft.
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We know that.
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But I found it really interesting recently.
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I just went through a double hernia surgery.
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And it s not life-threatening and it s meant to be routine, but it s far worse than the doctors make it out to be.
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And the journey back to feeling like I can operate normally, it s been two months now, and I d say I m 75% there.
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I would say that the first four weeks were like learning how to walk again.
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And I have never, ever moved that slow in life in a good way.
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as in that every movement of the body or the mind had to be slow.
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Because if I moved fast, I could potentially relapse.
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So I still can t pick anything above like 15 pounds if not allowed.
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I couldn t for that first month like walk
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for the first week and then I had to shimmy for the rest of it.
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And I had to like, when I sat down on a chair, I had to be so mindful.
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I was like, wow, I thought I was mindful.
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And having this surgery has made me the most mindful person ever.
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I ve never eaten that slow because the digestion was harder and there was pain in this area.
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And so it was the first time in a long time I felt that present.
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And I consider myself to be a present person.
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I think at the root of it is this illusion we have that we re in control, right, that we re deciding how things go.
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And then we have an injury or a problem or something that disrupts it, and we are rudely but also kindly reminded how little control we have.
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I remember when I moved across the country, I was writing my first book.
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The two days before I was supposed to start riding my bike, New Orleans, I get stuck in the streetcar tracks.
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I go over the handlebars and I break my left elbow and I m left-handed.
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And so like all of the way that I was thinking about writing this book goes out the window for like six weeks.
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I couldn t get like the adrenaline or the endorphins that I needed just to function as a person.
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I had to go on these like long walks.
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So, you know, I get the news and it s like, okay, I m not going to be able to work or think for like six weeks.
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This is a total dead loss for me.
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But then I started taking these walks, like hour, two hour, three hour walks just around.
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And what do you know?
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I start writing the book in my head on these walks.
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If I had gotten things the way I wanted them to go, it would have been
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far less advantageous to me than me having to respond to the way they did end up going.
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So at the core of stoicism is this idea that we don t control what happens, we control how we respond to what happens.
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It seems like it s this curse, this human frailty or weakness that we re not in control.
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But our superpower is our ability to respond to that, to find good in it, to be made better for it.
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And you go through this thing and you realize, oh, this is an opportunity to practice.
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all of the things that I ordinarily take for granted, I assume I have.
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There s this one Japanese Zen master, actually the Zen master from Zen and the Art of Archery.
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And he s at the end of his life, he s dying and he goes to urinate in the snow and it s red.
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He s like bleeding.
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He s dying and the students are alarmed.
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He goes, this too is practice.
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all of these things that we experienced, that we didn t want or we thought they should go a different way, they re actually the opportunity to practice the way, or the logos as the Stokes would call it, in the way it s actually meant to do.
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If we choose to be present, recognize it and take that opportunity instead of fighting it or resenting it or wishing it were otherwise.
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I love that point that you made, that even that was practice.
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That is beautiful.
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That s magical.
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That idea that even in that worst scenario, at the end of all of it, it was still practice.
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And if we could only wrap our head around that, because I think we still think of practice and performing, practice and arrival, practice in the end, we still see it as separate.
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And there is nothing that s separate.
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that tree outside that s huge is still growing and being nourished.
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It s just you don t see it anymore.
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And I almost, sometimes what I do with clients is I ll give everyone a seed and I ll ask them to plant it and take care of it.
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And that s like an old way of just learning growth because it s so painful to be watering something every day and not seeing it grow, only to realize it is growing.
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Or I remember something they gave us in the monastery was like, they gave us this rope.
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It was like this really old rope.
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and it was already tied and we were asked to untie it.
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And it s like most of us spent the whole of the first day we got it trying to untie it and failing.
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Yeah.
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Only by like day 21 to realize all we had to do is pull it a little bit every day and hopefully it would unravel because it was so tight.
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And so even if you sat there all day, you would just, you d go mental and you wouldn t achieve anything else.
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Right.
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Yeah, it s the willful will, right?
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It s like wanting it a certain way, needing it a certain way, trying to force it, as opposed to stepping back and letting it be what it is.
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It s like the way our mind works.
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Whatever is happening now, you will look back on sometime in the future as formative to who you become, right?
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And yet in this moment, all we re doing is trying to make it something other than it is, right?
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Like we will look back on COVID and see the good in it, the lessons that came from it, the reminders it gave us, the weird experiences we had, the connections, all of that, we ll look at that.
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But in that moment, all we re thinking about is when this will be over, whose fault it is, what it s cost us, right?
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Freud says, in retrospect, the struggle will strike you as most beautiful.
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But it s such a shame, so unnecessary to deprive yourself of understanding the beauty of it now.
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Certainly perspective adds to it, it allows you to see it differently.
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But what if you could just not feel guilty, worried, anxious, resentful?
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Like, you know, in the future, this will be a story, right?
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You ll, you ll have learned, but you could give yourself the gift of at least some of that now by accepting it and just seeing it as what it is in front of you, that it s practice.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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And the, and the challenge, I guess, is that because we ve not
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had an experience maybe in our early childhood or in our teens where we saw that where it was like we went through a difficulty, we built discipline and we got over it or we learned from as you re saying.
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I find that a lot of people have experienced difficulty
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but then they were given comfort or shelter, or the difficulty was somehow removed or left, so you never got the opportunity to build the discipline muscle, if that makes sense.
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My wife will often talk about, for her, if she went through a difficulty, her parents would come and save the day.
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Someone would swoop in and solve the issue.
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Her sister would do her homework for her.
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And so as that happened more and more and more, it created this behavior of someone will save the day that I don t need to build a discipline around this.
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Obviously saving is coming from a good place.
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The other thing we do is we tell, oh, it s so bad that that happened to you.
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I m so sorry.
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You re this victim, right?
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Like the first year of COVID, they would describe for kids that this was like a lost year.
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And I just remember thinking like how patronizing, but also self-fulfilling that was for kids.
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Like when I would talk to my grandparents or old people that lived through the depression or the second world war.
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which were, by the way, a lot longer than COVID, they weren t like, oh, it was a lost time.
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It was a transformative, formative experience that, in retrospect, made them who they were that maybe even if you d asked them if they would have wanted things to be different, they would have said no.
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And we have the power to transform whatever we re going through into that thing.
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So yeah, by rescuing someone, you re depriving them of that thing, but also by telling them that there s nothing in this thing that it s indisputably, inarguably bad, is to deprive them of
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the agency, the perspective, the gift that they have in front of them if they choose to see it that way.
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And we should emerge from this period, at the very least, as you said, like if you haven t been through stuff like this before, you just lived through an event of historic proportions.
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Like you just lived through event that your kids and your grandchildren, future generations will marvel at.
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And you emerged unscathed, maybe even improved in some ways.
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Like you, you should emerge from this with a real sense of what you re capable of enduring and surviving and adjusting towards.
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And that should give you a lot of confidence as you wake up and you experience things that
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are so microscopic compared to that thing, right?
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And you should feel armed with a certain set of weapons or tools that maybe you didn t have before.
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You ve been knocked around and you didn t
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get knocked out.
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That s, that s powerful.
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Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
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And in my own little way, it s like in while I was going through my surgery, it was exactly that was like, I can either sit here and think this is the worst, because it did feel like the worst for someone who s active, always on planes, and always traveling, always working.
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to be completely off and it wasn t even restful because it was painful like it wasn t restful time everyone s like we didn t work for a month it must have been amazing i was like well no i was in pain yeah but the idea that my mind at the time was like this is the worst
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I hate this and when s it going to be over, right?
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Which is the same as COVID, which is the same as anything.
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Like those are the three thoughts that go through our head pretty much, whether it s surgery COVID or anything else that s going on.
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And having to reframe those thoughts in the moment made it become a really beautiful process at the time.
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And now a sense of gratitude for it having moved on.
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But that s what I m hearing from you.
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It s like, you will reflect, well, hopefully you reflect afterwards.
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But there is a bit of reconfiguration that has to happen at the time.
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Yeah, there s a story about Phil Jackson when he s a coach of the Lakers, he gets this back surgery, super bad back surgery and he can t stand on the sideline.
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He has to sit in a chair and the way they had him sit, it s like a row back.
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And so suddenly all the things that he s comfortable with as a coach are not possible.
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He s not able to pace the sidelines, get up in people s faces, intervene, direct people.
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He just has to sit back, he has to watch.
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It s like the antithesis of his coaching style.
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And yet, and he s a sort of a Zen Buddhist, a sage guy, he realizes that this is practice.
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He realizes that now the team s having to come to him.
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Now the team s having to solve some of the problems.
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He s having to explore a different way of communicating.
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He s having to communicate verbally better than physically.
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It s a way to change, adjust.
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He s forced to do it differently, and thus learns some things he wants to continue doing differently,
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now realizes he was taking for granted certain things that are actually super important, right?
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And so you can always take from this, like it s this forced lifestyle experiment.
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Just see it as that, right?
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Like COVID, the biggest forced lifestyle experiment in human history.
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Things that people said were impossible had to become possible.
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Remote work, you know, e-commerce, all these things.
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And then you want to throw that away by saying, I can t wait for things to go back to normal, right?
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It s like normal is what caused this, right?
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Normal was you before you learned the things
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that you learned in that intervening time.
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And for COVID, for Phil Jackson s back surgery, insert whatever disruptive event you re undergoing in your life.
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You don t want things to go back to how they were.
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You want them to go to a new place where you have the old perspective and the new perspective fused into something new.
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When Marx says the impediment to action advances action, what stands in the way becomes the way.
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The Zen expression is the obstacle is the path.
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Same East-West coming to the same idea.
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It s like,
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This thing has opportunities inside it to make you better.
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Should you choose to accept them?
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Yeah.
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And that s what I like.
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It s not the simplistic idea of, and I m always trying to address this.
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It s not the simplistic idea of look for the positive in the negative, right?
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Like that s not what we re saying here.
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This isn t the idea of like, Oh, there s a, a beautiful side to this.
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That s not the point.
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Let s, let s get into that a bit because I feel like people kind of simplify and go, Oh no, that just, yeah.
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We ll just look for the silver lining, which is not what we re saying.
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Well, do you know the Stockdale paradox?
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No, tell us.
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So James Stockdale, he studies stoic philosophy, and then he s shot down over Vietnam, and he s taken prisoner.
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It s been seven years, horribly tortured in this Vietnamese prison camp.
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Afterwards, he s speaking to Jim Collins, who writes Good to Great.
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Yeah, Good to Great.
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And he formulates what becomes known as the Stockdale Paradox.
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Jim Collins says, who has the worst trouble in the prison camp?
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And Stockdale says, oh, that s easy.
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The optimists, right?
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The people who thought, I m going to be out by Christmas.
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I m going to be out by the spring.
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This isn t going to be hard.
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When Stockdale s parachuting into this camp, he says, I am leaving the world of technology and entering the world of Epictetus.
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He says, it s going to be seven years at least.
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But he said, the first step is I had to unflinchingly accept the reality of my situation, which is that I might not get out, which is that I m probably gonna be tortured, which is that I m not in control, which is that there s so much unknown pain and suffering ahead, I have to accept that.
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This is not gonna be fun, this is not gonna be easy.
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He says, but simultaneously, I said to myself, if I get out,
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I want to have transformed this into something that in retrospect, I would not have traded away.
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That s the paradox of what we re talking about.
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Stuff happens, life gets in the way, you lose someone, your company goes bankrupt, the market shifts, you know, a natural disaster, your life can get flipped upside down.
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at a moment s notice.
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You have to unflinchingly accept the reality of that situation, the unfairness, the unexpectedness of it, your blamelessness or your blameworthiness for it, and then simultaneously go, okay,
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I m not saying this is wonderful, that I m glad it happened, but I can make choices now that derive positive benefits from this, that make me better for having gone through this.
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I was at the beginning of the pandemic in the middle of opening this bookstore.
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I d sunk my life savings into opening this bookstore that by the time it was ready,
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It was impossible to open.
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It was looking like this enormous failure, mistake, you know, like albatross around my neck.
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And I wrote this note card to myself, and I have a picture of it because I wrote it to myself.
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I was thinking about it every day, and I took the picture in front of the bookstore.
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And I just wrote to myself, I said, 2020 is a test.
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What makes you a better person or a worse one?
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Right?
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I have no idea whether the bookstore will work.
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I have no idea where things are going.
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I have no idea what life is going to look like.
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What I control inside that is do I emerge from it a better person, right?
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More community minded, a better spouse, a better thinker, a better writer, more patient, more self-aware.
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Those are the things I control within it.
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And so when we say the obstacle is the way we re not like,
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oh, it s great this terrible thing happened to me, but you re saying what I took from this terrible thing, or maybe you re trying to strip the labels altogether, but you re saying what I took from this was positive I made from it.
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That s the paradoxicalness of it.
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Yeah, yeah, that s a great breakdown.
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I m so glad you went into that because yeah, I ve heard the example in the same way of when there were soldiers who said, we ll be home by Christmas, their hope was shattered because they weren t home by Christmas.
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And whereas the people who said, we ll figure out a way to get home.
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And if we get home, we ll see our family.
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And that person was more likely to be able to deal with the fact that it didn t happen by this time.
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And I think that s become our obsession with controlling time.
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Yeah.
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is partly where that comes from, where it s like, we want this done by this time.
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And then whether it s positive or difficult, when it doesn t happen, we re completely demoralized, right?
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It s almost like it s all over just because it didn t happen by an arbitrary date.
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Well, you re setting yourself up for disappointment or frustration or resentment or despair by attaching to an outcome that s not yours.
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If you get lucky, sure, you ll feel wonderful.
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But if you work for years on a book and success or failure of it was, did it win awards?
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Did it sell lots of copies?
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Did your parents read it?
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You know, those are things that are not in your control.
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But if it was, I understand this better than when I started, I am more confident than I was when I started.
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I said something, I got on the page what I thought only in my head at the beginning.
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When you move the outcome or the goal to something that s up to you, you ll always win.
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And I think that s what wise people do.
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It s not that they re not ambitious.
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They are ambitious, but their ambition is things that are up to them.
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And so when Marcus is saying better wrestler, as opposed to better philosopher, better friend, whatever, he s shifting from like this external societal driven thing to this internal thing that he controls, that he gets to judge the success or failure on.
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And it s not.
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It s not so quantifiable either.
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It s something deeper, more human, more connected.
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And so as you shift that, not only do I actually think you do better work, but you are increasing your chances of feeling good about yourself at the end of that.
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Yeah, and I think the challenge, Ryan, though, is that today we want both, right?
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We want the feeling of, I did something that was true to me, and it resonated with a lot of people, or whatever that means, right?
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And I feel like that s where everyone kind of gets stuck because it s like,
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you know, especially when people watch people do what they love and it gets received well, it s like, oh, well, I want to do that too.
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Where do you think people go wrong in that journey?
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Because like, what are the mistakes we make on that path?
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Because I feel like that s pretty much where people are headed.
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Well, yeah, I mean, I think we re sometimes not honest.
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You re like, I m just, I want this album to be true to who I want to be.
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My artistic expression, blah, blah, blah.
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That s why you made all these sort of individualistic decisions.
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But deep down, you have this sort of secret lie, which is that you re actually judging yourself on where it lands on the billboard charts, right?
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So that s the worst of both, right?
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Because you re not going, well, what do I need to do to be commercially successful?
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And I m consistently judging myself on whether it was commercially successful or not.
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You ve set yourself up for maximum disappointment.
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But if you can say, look,
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Here, my goal is to do my absolute best.
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My goal here is to get to the truth of what I m saying, to express what s true inside here.
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And that s what I m going to focus on, and I m not going to waste any time on these other things.
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I actually do think, I m sure you ve found this,
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that that does make better work.
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It makes truer work.
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It makes more authentic work, more relatable work.
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It actually does make a better product, but only if you are fully and honestly and deeply committed to doing it.
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It can t be like, I m making the charitable donation.
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I m doing it anonymously.
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but I still hope everyone sees how wonderful I am.
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You know what I mean?
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You can t have your cake and eat it too.
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Yes, exactly.
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And I think it goes back to what you were saying a few moments ago, where it s like, you have to accept the reality, which includes your own intention.
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Like I know that I like creating things that are true to me, but are commercially successful.
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That is important to me, is a value of mine.
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And I m okay with that because,
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I don t want to lie about those things to myself at all because I enjoy the idea of creating thoughts and ideas that can affect lots of people.
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That is something that gives me a sense of feeling that I ve understood an idea and been able to communicate it well enough.
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I guess what I m saying is that it comes back to what you were saying at the beginning, that I don t set out to write a commercially successful book or launch something commercially.
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That isn t what I use set out to do.
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Set out to understand, articulate, communicate with myself and write an incredible book.
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And then that leads to that.
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But at some part of that process, you have to think about the sharing of it.
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Yeah, of course.
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And I ve learned a lot from you in this regard, like you re not helping yourself or your ideas by rejecting what makes them accessible or shareable.
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or turning your nose up at this tool or that tool.
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Like, look, like when I wanna learn about an idea, I wanna read long form books about it.
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That s the medium that I m comfortable in.
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I don t think TikTok, but millions of people do think TikTok or Instagram.
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And to turn your nose up or close your heart off to those people because they re not like you is not just snobbish, but if you actually care about the ideas, it s selfish.
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And so I don t think they re mutually exclusive, but I also think if you re on those platforms and you re letting the algorithm decide what you do and don t do, you are sacrificing the whole reason you became a creator in the first place.
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Correct.
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Absolutely.
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And I think that s the balance, right?
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It s like there s people who just completely sell out for the algorithm.
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And then there s the selfish creator or the snobbish creator on the other end who thinks they re too cool.
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It s kind of like this badge of honor where it s like, oh yeah, I don t need to do that.
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I don t care.
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And I m like, that
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That defeats the whole point, because I m hoping this book was a compassionate expression of service, hopefully.
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And maybe it wasn t.
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Maybe it just was a selfish, arrogant move of professing your ideas, and that s the best thing about it.
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And so you have sellouts on one end, and you have selfish on the other end.
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And to me, service is kind of in the middle, where it s like service means I understand people s needs and interests and concerns and where they re at, but I also have to serve them what s most beneficial.
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It s like you meet people where they are and there s almost a greed to it.
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It s like, well, I wrote in a book, if you want to hear it, you can buy it, right?
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Well, what if they re not ready for that?
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What if they re too busy for that?
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What if they already did buy it, but they just need a reminder of it, right?
7
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And so there s different, just in the way that like, look, I also read in English.
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That s the only language that I speak.
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But I don t turn up my nose at all these different translations.
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I go, oh yeah, there s a process.
7
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These ideas get translated into those languages and they reach people who otherwise wouldn t have consumed it.
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And understanding that different people have different native languages.
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Some people like audiobooks, some people like podcasts, some people like this social network or that social network, and that by thinking that
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you know, one is superior to the other.
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In fact, you should be translating your work in all these different areas, long form, short form, audio, video, text, whatever.
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You should be everywhere that s possible and understanding that the win is that the ideas are reaching people and helping them in their life.
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If some of those things translate to sales or followers, great, but like,
7
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I always think about, again, what is success?
7
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At the end of the day, if your thing sold zero copies but it changed the world, you d be like, that was a win.
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Totally.
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So why don t you just do the stuff that changes the world and trust, again, trust the process that
7
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you ll probably be able to make a living.
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Absolutely.
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And most things that do change the world or have an impact started non-commercially, right?
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Like in that sense of, especially creation or ideas, I mean, maybe not businesses, but ideas.
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Like when I started creating content, even the first few interviews I did with you, like I didn t, I mean that Nasdaq, that whole Nasdaq, I never got paid for that whole series.
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I was interviewing authors every week because I was fascinated by the idea that I get to sit down with people that I find interesting.
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You re also putting in your hours.
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You re getting good at this thing.
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Yeah, exactly.
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And you re getting good at it.
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You re enjoying it.
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You get to meet awesome people.
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And even when we did the show at HuffPost, it was like, I was leading the show of what kind of show we wanted it to be.
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It wasn t like, it was already set up.
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And so, yeah, I look back and I think like all stuff that had an impact and grew was always from that deep intention, pure intention of, I want to create something that will hopefully help people have these conversations
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That was what it was for me.
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I felt when I started creating content, there were so many people who had deep, thoughtful conversations offline, but there was no spaces online really to have those, or there wasn t a piece of content you d send to your friend and be like, did you see this?
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Like, have we talked about this?
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And I wanted to create an excuse for people to have more meaningful, thoughtful conversations based on ideas.
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I mean, look, I think at the end of the day, it s like you create a lot of value and if you can capture a small percentage of it, you re good, right?
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Like I think about Craigslist, like the vast majority of stuff on Craigslist has been free since the very beginning.
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Craigslist still makes a billion dollars a year in revenue.
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Like when you create a lot of value, I create so much content and like
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The only part that is not free are the books, right?
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And the books fund that work, and then that work also funds the books.
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You re creating kind of a flywheel of stuff.
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I was thinking about one of my books that hasn t sold as well as the other books.
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Which one is it?
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Lives of the Stoics is different than my other books, but I personally use and then also have reused stuff that I learned while writing that book.
7
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almost every single day.
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So the monetization, to use that word, the value creation there was a personal one.
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And the book is done extremely well by any sort of standard, but the primary beneficiary was me.
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And again, whatever you re doing, you can say, look, the primary beneficiary of this is me having gone through it, changing, developing, learning.
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And then the byproduct is that I paid my rent or that like, you know, this happened, then you ve won and all the stuff that s out of your control is the extra.
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Yes.
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That s where you want to be.
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Yeah, yeah.
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I couldn t agree more.
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And that requires just so much.
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I think that requires refining of the intention.
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It requires having a sense of belief and confidence.
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I think for me it was the other, and for you too, from your journey that we ve talked about before, like,
7
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I spent 10 years doing this without any followers or without any commerciality to it anyway, because it was all offline.
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And it was speaking to rooms of five to 10 people if they showed up.
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And so it was like, for so long, I was doing it without any care of how far it went, because it was just so powerful.
7
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It was so beautiful to live in that world of, even if I had one meaningful conversation with someone after an event, that would make my day.
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Like, I d talk about it for weeks.
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Let me ask you this, I ve been thinking about it lately.
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The work that you re doing now, or that I m doing now, is the result of work you did a long time ago.
7
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It s a lagging indicator of sacrifice and commitment and study and practice from however long ago.
7
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Sometimes what keeps me up at night is I go,
7
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But 10 years from now, 15 years from now, am I putting in the work doing this stuff now that will pay off then?
7
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And how do you know?
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How do you know?
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If success is this lagging indicator or growth is this lagging indicator of commitment now, how can you be sure that you are paying your dues?
7
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Yes.
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I m so glad you said that because I literally just, I ve been talking to my team about a few things that we re doing.
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I ve literally asked us to find three new coaches.
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Like I ve, I ve literally gone, I ve always learned through one-to-one coaching or mentorship.
7
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Like that s my favorite, apart from books, that is my favorite way of learning.
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Uh, and especially when it comes to self transformation.
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So I love ideas through books, but when it comes to me actually changing, I m better when I m working with one person and getting mentorship or coaching.
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So you re thinking about who are your teachers to get you to the next level, a level you might not even know exists yet.
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Correct.
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And so I m trying to identify those people right now.
7
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So when I was a teen, I was reading Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Steve Jobs, right?
7
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Well, Steve Jobs was a bit later actually, but Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, that s who I was reading at 16 years old.
7
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They were hugely formative in my ideology in so many ways.
7
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And then in my 20s, obviously I lived with the monks.
7
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So that was hugely that.
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And then went to public speaking school when I was 11 years old.
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So that has lasted far too long and needs to be refined again.
7
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And so, yeah, I completely agree with you.
7
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I look at all the skills I have today and I go, where do they need to be refined?
7
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And then I look at, well, what are the things I m missing out on?
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Because I m not exposing myself.
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Now, I do think that
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I do find having the podcast very fortunate because I do get to sit down with a lot of people that I seek mentorship from in an informal sense.
7
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And then I can be like, oh, I m really going to do a deep dive on that person s book.
7
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Or like Gabor Maté was just on.
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He s amazing.
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And people have known about him for a long, long time.
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This was the first time I interviewed him.
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But I m like now doing a backwards reading of all of his books.
7
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And so I love that, you know?
7
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Yeah, it s like, what rabbit holes are you falling down?
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What sort of new, it s like a great athlete.
7
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It s like, well, what am I adding to my game this off season?
7
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And like, how do you not get complacent and coast?
7
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Cause you could be coasting for a long time and not realize that your skills or your speed is slowly decreasing before, and then it s too late.
7
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, that s such a good point.
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And I think the thing that hit me there, what you just said is just, it s also what skills do I need that I m not trying to see the results now?
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Yes.
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Like what is something I m happy to let kind of simmer and build and just organically grow rather than like, I m going to learn this skill because next week we re going to launch this thing.
7
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Like that s not what I m talking about.
7
SPEAKER_00
Well, all the things you were talking about that made you who you were, those were never means to an end because the end was inconceivable, right?
7
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It didn t even exist, but somehow it
8
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was the perfect like training montage for who you became and how do you make sure the montage is continuing as opposed to this once in a formative thing.
8
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And then, you know, every once in a while I ll do a talk and like it s the person before me, you re like, Oh, you ve been doing this a long time, the exact same way.
8
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And you, you stopped, you stopped and you don t, you don t want that.
8
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Yeah, exactly.
8
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And I think partly that s also me allowing myself, at least for me, and I m only talking about myself, but I think this is helpful for people.
8
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I think you have to allow yourself to become different things and giving yourself permission to follow that bliss, as Joseph Campbell would say, because, right, for example, when I wrote Think Like a Monk, that was a
8
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the kind of end and beginning of a new journey in my life.
8
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Like, I was kind of encapsulating what I ve learned over the last 15 years.
8
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And then it was like, well, now I m in a new space.
8
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Like, I m a married man now.
8
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I m a business person.
8
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I m so many more things.
8
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And so it was almost like me saying, okay, well, I m going to put this wrapper on this right now.
8
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And now my next book s all about love.
8
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And there s loads of people going, Jay, like, why are you writing about love?
8
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Like, why?
8
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And I was like, because I m fascinated by love.
8
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Like, and I m okay with answering that question.
8
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of why love, I don t want to continue to write books.
8
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I mean, by the way, the love book is full of wisdom I learned during my time as a monk.
8
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Of course it is.
8
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But the point is that I don t want to be defined by that.
8
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And I don t want to limit myself to any human experience, because then I m basically saying I have to be this.
8
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And that s what performers do.
8
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I have to play this character for the rest of my life.
8
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And then you get typecast in your own life.
8
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And you don t let yourself, and I m like, maybe my next book will definitely not be about love.
8
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I know that for a fact, my next book is not about love, but I m okay with that.
8
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Like, I like the idea of I m letting myself go in the direction of whatever I want to become, because why would I limit it now?
8
SPEAKER_04
When we talked about cranking the shower handle, that s a muscle, right?
8
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My first book was about marketing.
8
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I could have sold my next book about marketing, my next book about marketing.
8
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I could be still doing that.
8
SPEAKER_04
I could still be speaking about that first book.
8
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And when I went to my publisher and I was like, you know, I want to write about this obscure school of ancient philosophy, they were like,
8
What?
8
SPEAKER_04
You know, they were like, how s half sound?
8
SPEAKER_04
You know, they gave me half what I got for my first book, but that s that muscle.
8
SPEAKER_04
I was like, I don t care.
8
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This is what I want to do.
8
SPEAKER_04
And so when you cultivate the ability to do that hard thing, the challenging thing, the different thing, the investing in like being bad at something to get good at something, you think about Tiger Woods, he s changed his swing three or four times from the ground up.
8
SPEAKER_04
That s the real muscle that prevents you from sort of ossifying or
8
SPEAKER_04
declining, it s the ability to go like, just because I m here doesn t mean I m going to stay here.
8
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I want to try and do something radically new or different that I hope will work commercially, but I know personally I will emerge better, right?
8
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Like, let s say that the book doesn t work.
8
SPEAKER_04
I m sure it will.
8
SPEAKER_04
Let s say it doesn t work.
8
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But you re like, hey, my marriage is better as having done it.
8
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That s a win from top to bottom, right?
8
SPEAKER_04
And then, you know, you take that with you as you
8
SPEAKER_03
For me writing it, I wrote a completely different book than the one I thought I was going to write.
8
SPEAKER_03
And I wrote it three times.
8
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And the first time it was too raw and probably too, like, it was probably too tough a read.
8
SPEAKER_03
And the second time it was too shallow.
8
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Like it was totally like not what I would want to do.
8
SPEAKER_03
And then the third time we got the balance right.
8
SPEAKER_03
It s funny what you said about earlier, like the discipline of trying to get out of doing things wrong, but the discipline of ambition.
8
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Once you ve had one success in anything,
8
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most people grip onto it because now you ve had a taste of it.
8
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And now you re scared that if you don t be that person, you will lose it.
8
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And I just wouldn t want to live that way because then you are just acting and not being.
8
SPEAKER_04
It s like, you think that having the success, proving yourself should make you more courageous, less risk averse, because now you ve done it.
8
SPEAKER_04
But in fact, the opposite is true, right?
8
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This is where courage and discipline are related.
8
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It s the opposite.
8
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Now you have something to lose.
8
SPEAKER_04
Now you don t wanna change, go in a different direction because the expectation is set with the first one.
8
SPEAKER_04
So you imagine how scary it is, Tiger Woods.
8
SPEAKER_04
You re like, you re the best swing in golf.
8
SPEAKER_04
And you re like, but I think it could be better, but I m gonna have to go have a bad swing for months to get to the other side of that.
8
SPEAKER_04
And so the ability to say, I decide whether I m successful or not, not the external results.
8
SPEAKER_04
And that s why I m willing to go down this detour, try things differently, do this.
8
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That is that sort of key skill and courage and discipline have to be related.
8
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They compliment each other.
8
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And yeah, like it was comfortable.
8
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My first book came out, it debuted on the bestseller list.
8
SPEAKER_04
It was controversial, but if.
8
SPEAKER_04
who I would be today if I continued down that road would be a caricature of that first person, because I would have been a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy.
8
SPEAKER_04
Instead, I went towards something that was interesting to me, which opened up another thing that was interesting.
8
SPEAKER_04
And that, like, I wouldn t be who I am had I done the safe thing.
8
SPEAKER_04
And so they say all growth is a leap in the dark, right?
8
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You have to continually take that leap.
8
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And one of the things I hope you learn when you do that is, first off, it s not as scary as you thought.
8
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But then sometimes like it doesn t work and you go, oh, but I feel great about it.
8
SPEAKER_04
And then it decouples external recognition from the internal process.
8
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And then you go, yeah, I just do what I want.
8
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I do where it takes me.
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And a lot of times it works out.
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Sometimes it doesn t, but it s called being a creator for a reason.
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You re making something.
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You re the leader.
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You re not a follower.
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Well said.
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Ryan, this has been so much fun diving in with you.
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We were talking for ages.
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I had no idea where the time went, but it s been such a joy just always like just getting into it with you.
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And I hope that everyone who s been listening, I hope you go and grab a copy of Discipline is Destiny, the Power of Self-Control by Ryan Holiday.
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And of course, any of the other books that we ve recommended before on the show.
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If you love this episode, you can go back and listen
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to a ton of other episodes with Ryan.
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And again, I hope today s episode I tried not to do for everyone who s listening.
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And you know, I ve been trying this more recently.
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I tried not to do a systematic conversation of breaking down how to build discipline and
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which, you know, I ve been avoiding that kind of hack kind of conversation recently, which I think you ve been really resonating with, because I think sometimes the penny that needs to drop isn t the how-to, it s kind of like the churning of the idea in your own self of
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of coming closer to what it truly means for you and making sense of it.
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So that s been my attempt at least.
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And I hope that s coming through.
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I hope you enjoyed this.
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Please do give me feedback on Twitter, Instagram.
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Tag Ryan and I both with your greatest insights, the nuggets of wisdom.
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And we ll see you on another episode of On Purpose.
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Thank you, everyone.
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If you loved this episode, you ll enjoy my interview with Dr. Daniel Amen on how to change your life by changing your brain.
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Everything in moderation, which is the gateway thought to hell.
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It s the gateway thought to cheating.
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As soon as you hear someone say everything in moderation, they re going to do something bad for their brain.
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Hey everyone, this is Molly and Matt and we re the hosts of Grown Up Stuff How to Adult, a podcast from Ruby Studio and iHeart Podcasts.
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It s a show dedicated to helping you figure out the trickiest parts of adulting.
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Like how to start planning for retirement, creating a healthy skincare routine, understanding when and how much to tip someone and so much more.
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Let s learn about all of it and then some.
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Listen to Grown Up Stuff How to Adult on America s number one podcast network, iHeart.
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Open your free iHeart app and search Grown Up Stuff.