Profound Lessons From Stoic Philosophy - Ryan Holiday

If you don't know what's important to you, what kind of work you want to do, what you want your life to look like, you end up defaulting to one of two things: what pays most, or what are other people doing? You can end up very far from what you actually want, and you'll only know that when you get there. So you have to have a very clear sense of, like, where you're trying to go, or these things, these opportunities are chances to get super off track. (wind blowing)

You've got this quote that I referenced a couple of weeks ago. "Be quiet, work hard, and stay healthy. It's not ambition or skill that is going to set you apart, but sanity."

Yeah. (laughs)

What's that?

Uh, well, I find, uh, as a former, like, sort of young person going places, that when I am hiring someone or I'm looking for someone, like, that could... I wanna, like, mentor or help or whatever, it's not like how talented you are or what your background is. But it... Like, the first test is like... (laughs) I just had to find this. Like, is this person fucking nuts or not? You know what I mean? Like, does this person have their shit together or not? And so I, I think we often think a lot about, like, getting better at what we do, like the craft of the thing, which is really important. But then when you look at, like, why did this person make it and this person not make it, it's usually, you know, very... some stark divergence where they started making bad decisions, they, you know, started being very egotistical, they had this shot and they blew it. You know, it's not, it's not like in sports where you're like, "This guy's just faster than that person." It's some other thing that usually sort of prevents a person from reaching everything they're capable of reaching.

Is there an element in there as well about playing a long game?

Yeah, for sure. For sure. Definitely. I mean, one of the hard parts about having sort of potential and ambition is that it burns sort of very hot and bright. And, you know, if what you... If you wanna be established, you wanna do it for a long time, you have to figure out how, yeah, to play a long game, to not blow yourself up, to not... It's like, how do you care about it very deeply but not sweat it so much that it's like a liability?

Needs to be sustainable, man.

Yeah.

Yeah. I, I play with this all the time, and a lot of the guys that I see that have flash-in-the-pan successes on the internet are very similar.

Yeah. Well, look, and we live in an environment where algorithmically you can just be given a huge gift. You can just sort of blow up, right? And so that really has nothing to do with whether you deserve it or not. But then once you have it, the question is, can you maintain it? Can you do the work necessary? Can you not fuck it up, right? And I think we t- and I... When I talk to groups, I, I usually start with some version of like, you know, like, the biggest enemy in this room is not, like, what the other people are doing. It's not the economy. It's not, like, gatekeepers. Like, the person who determines, like, how this is gonna go is you, really. Like, for the most part, most failures are self-inflicted, or most big mistakes are self-inflicted, and they often come, like, right after some form of success. That's kind of the most dangerous point. That's when we overreach. That's when we go- it goes to our head. That's when we... You know, it's like, it's in that moment of success or triumph or whatever that, like, you need the most discipline. But there is the highest justification for slacking on said discipline, right?