— How to Travel Through Time (Listen)
YOUTUBE VIDEO TAKEAWAY OF THE WEEK:
In the most watched video on the Daily Stoic YouTube Channel, Ryan shared 7 Stoic strategies for being creative. One of our favorites was, “Have a Routine.” Seneca’s line was that “life without design is erratic.” As Ryan said about his creative process:
"It's all about routine for me. So every day looks almost exactly the same for me, whether it's the weekend or it's a holiday or it's a hard working day. I wake up early, I don't use the phone for the first 30, 40, 50 minutes I’m awake. I do my big creative task first. I spend some time with a journal. And I only have three things scheduled in my calendar every day. No more tasks are allowed to be scheduled in the calendar. Then i do some form of hard strenuous exercise. I try to be done with work and at home with my family by five at the absolute latest. We do dinner with the family every day, bathtime with the kids every day, and I read my kids to sleep every day. And that's the perfect day.”
PODCAST TAKEAWAY OF THE WEEK:
On the Daily Stoic podcast this week, Ryan Holiday interviewed Admiral Mike Franken about his campaign for the U.S. Senate in Iowa, the modern political climate, what we can do collectively to improve it, and more. One of the questions Ryan asked Admiral Franken was the question he asked many of the guests on the Daily Stoic Leadership Challenge: how do you think about leadership as a discipline of study? Who have taught you the most about leadership? He said the lesson that has always stuck with him came from his father. When Admiral Franken was nineteen, he was asked to head a team on a big construction project. Here’s Admiral Franken,
“My dad said, ‘don’t tell anybody to do anything. You do it first, and then when you ask them to do it, they probably will.’ So I’d assign a work list, and I’d do the nasty jobs. And you just learn early on you need to be the stand-up person, you need to take it upon yourself to be the first one there and the last to leave, you need to work a little harder than everyone else, and don’t ask anything of anybody that you wouldn’t do yourself.”
WHAT RYAN HOLIDAY IS READING:
“The last time Roosevelt had given a speech—just two weeks earlier, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin—he had been shot in the chest by a thirty-six-year-old New York bartender named John Schrank, a Bavarian immigrant who feared that Roosevelt’s run for a third term was an effort to establish a monarchy in the United States. Incredibly, Roosevelt’s heavy army overcoat and the folded fifty-page manuscript and steel spectacle-case he carried in his right breast pocket had saved his life, but the bullet had plunged some five inches deep, lodging near his rib cage. That night, whether out of an earnest desire to deliver his message or merely an egotist’s love of drama, Roosevelt had insisted on delivering his speech to a terrified and transfixed audience. His coat unbuttoned to reveal a bloodstained shirt, and his speech held high so that all could see the two sinister-looking holes made by the assailant’s bullet, Roosevelt had shouted, ‘It takes more than that to kill a bull moose!’”
YOUR STOIC WEEKEND REMINDER:
You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.
In his book Travels with Epicurus, the writer Daniel Klein recalls a formative moment: “I remember one long-ago evening, on an overcrowded train to Philadelphia, hearing a young woman moan to her mother, ‘God I wish we were there already!’ Her white-haired mother replied eloquently, ‘Darling, never wish away a minute of your life.’”
Remember what Seneca, Epicurus’ rival and secret fan, said: “It’s not that life is short. It’s that we waste a lot of it.” We waste it wishing for things to be otherwise. We waste it waiting for it to be over. We waste it by ignoring what’s in front of us. We waste it resenting, complaining, rejecting. Now is now! It can never be anything else. Now is your life. Live it. Love it. That’s all you can do. You won’t get anything else. You won’t get another moment.
Never wish away a minute of your life.
(For more on this idea, watch this video!)
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