The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 485: Ryan Holiday - The Power Of Self Control, Loving The Process, & Building Endurance (Discipline Is Destiny)

Duration: 1h 7m
Broadcast on: 14 Aug 2022
Audio Format: other

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Ryan Holiday is the best selling author of 11 books including The Obstacle Is the Way, The Daily Stoic, Ego Is the Enemy, and Stillness is the Key which has sold millions of copies and been translated into thirty languages. His latest book is called Discipline is Destiny - The Power of Self Control.

Notes:

We must be in command of ourselves. We have to conquer ourselves before others.
Self Discipline - Freedom is the opportunity for self-discipline.
The trivial - The people who sustain excellence fall in love with the process. They don't cheat it.
Choose to see obstacles as opportunities.
Dr. Drew recommended to Ryan that he should read books about stoicism when he was 19. This was a pivotal moment.
Carry The Load For Others – General Jim Mattis. "The privilege of command is command. You don't get a bigger tent. "Being the boss is a job. Being a leader is something you earn."
Seek Discomfort – Seneca was a rich man. He inherited estates from his father. He invested well. Yet every so often, for a few days, he would eat only the scantest fare and wear his coarest clothing. He would actively seek out discomfort, mimicking abject poverty and harsher life conditions.
Having a full calendar - "That doesn't seem like a rich life."
Just show up — Consistency. Thomas Edison said "I've got no imagination. Thank never dream. I've created nothing." The genius hangs around his laboratory day and night."
Your Why must be intrinsic.
Just work - in Ancient Greece, there was a word to describe a ceaseless work ethic — philoponia (about the author Joyce Carol Oates). She published a ton over the course of decades.
Work out -- "Obviously the philosopher's life should be well prepared for physical activity." — the Stoic Gaius Musonius Rufus explained, "because often the virtues make use of this as a necessary instrument for the affairs of low." The strenuous life is the best life — exercise. You must take care of your body. And eat well.
Endure - Shackelton's family motto — "Fortitude Vincimus" — "By endurance we conquer."
George Washington — When he was 26, he watched a play about the Stoics and started repeating the phrase "in the calm light of mild philosophy."
Focus Focus Focus — In Yogic tradition they call this Ekagrata — intense focus on a singular point.
Do the hard thing first — Mark Twain - "the idea is that if we eat the frog at the beginning of the day, it will be next to impossible for the day to get any worse."
Can you get back up? "Losing is not always up to us, but being a loser is. Being a quitter is."
Silence is Strength — The Spartans' "laconic" style. Never use 2 words when 1 will do. Archimedes once explained at a Spartan dinner, "An expert on speaking also knows when not to do so."
When Ryan speaks to NFL teams: "I try to give them one or two practical things to implement."
Be Your Best - "Conquering the world is rather easy after we have fully conquered ourselves. Certainly fewer people have done the latter than the former."
Taking a stand - How successful are you really if you can't be yourself?"
Lou Gehrig - "When you love the work, you don't cheat it or the demands it makes of you. You respect even the most trivial aspects of the pursuit."

A quick note before we get started, we are hosting our once per year learning leader growth summit September 21st to September 23rd in Nashville, Tennessee members of my learning leader circles will be there and it's built to be a small less than 50 person workshop with a lot of interaction and group dialogue. There's a few guest speakers, a few surprises. We'll do some hard work together and we'll also have some fun. If this sounds like something you'd like to go to, email [email protected] and in the subject line write growth summit and in the body of your email tell me why you'd like to join us. So once again, our once per year learning leader growth summit September 21st to September 23rd in Nashville, Tennessee. If you want to go email [email protected] growth summit in the subject line and then let me know why you want to be there. All right, here we go. Welcome to the learning leader show presented by Insight Global. I am your host, Ryan Hawk. Thank you so much for being here. Text Hawk to 66866 to become part of mindful Monday. You along with tens of thousands of other learning leaders from all over the world will receive a carefully curated email for me each Monday morning to help you start your week off right. I also received details about how my book The Pursuit of Excellence will help you become a more effective leader. Text Hawk to 66866. Now on tonight's featured leader, the great Ryan Holiday is back best selling author of 11 books, including the obstacle is the way ego is the enemy stillness is the key. Those books have sold millions of copies and have been translated into 30 languages. His latest book is called Discipline is Destiny, the power of self control during this conversation. We discuss how to be more in command of yourself than the importance of loving the process of what you do. Why you should move to our body every morning and how he handles a tough audience when giving a speech. I think there's some useful advice there. Ladies and gentlemen, I know you're going to love this one. It's the great Ryan Holiday. All right, Ryan. It's the seventh time, man. You're number one on the list of a guest appearances on the show, and I'm so grateful to you. So thanks so much for coming back for the seventh time. That's incredible. That's incredible. When was the first one? What year was it? It was 2016. We did two that year. I just wrote down the case of all of them. So we did two that year and have just been kind of going along every year since. So it's pretty neat, dude. All right. But since then, a lot has happened. He wrote a number of books and Discipline is Destiny is one of my favorites, the newest, the latest. And I'm really appreciative of the book. There's on page 184, you write. Conquering the world is rather easy after we have fully conquered ourselves. Certainly fewer people have done the latter than the former. Why do you think it's so hard for us to conquer? For us to conquer ourselves. Yeah, Seneca said, no man is fit to rule who has not first conquered himself. The stoic idea is that self discipline or temperance or moderation, whatever the word you want to use for the idea of sort of being in command of oneself was the first part of being. Let's say qualified to be in charge of others or qualified to be in any position of leadership. I would argue, though, that there are a lot more powerful people than there are people in their own power, right? We see this all the time, people who are extraordinarily talented or they inherit things or they build things, they get lucky at something, whatever it is. There's lots of people who are good at what they do, but are not particularly good people and are certainly not particularly temperate people, right? They're out of control and maybe even in the thing they're actually good at, but they tend to be out of balance in some other way. And the book is really about trying to bring those things together. There's the maximum discipline equals freedom. Because you're a very disciplined guy prior to recording, I asked you, I don't know how your output level with a high level of quality and consistency remains so high and you simply said it's every day. But that's discipline, though. It's almost like you've taken it for granted the amount of discipline you have for the output because it's not only the books, there's tons of articles, there's your emails, there's your podcast. I mean, there's a lot going on. So, can you talk about how that discipline is what's led to both your freedom and your output? Well, I think it's important what we're talking about here is self-discipline, right? You can imagine an environment in which my day looks exactly the same and my output looks exactly the same, but there's like a gun to my head, right? And suddenly it's not the same thing, right? So I'm talking about self-discipline. Of course, discipline is important, discipline is important on a football team, it's important in the army, it's important in a prison also, right? Discipline is there and it matters. But I'm really talking about self-discipline and there's that line discipline equals freedom from Jocko Willing, because great, there's a quote from Eisenhower that's similar that I think illustrates the angle that I'm thinking about it. Eisenhower said, freedom is the opportunity for self-discipline, right? So the idea is, once you, first off, we're lucky to live in a society where we have all sorts of freedom that most of what we, most things that we do are voluntary, right? Choices to be and act however we want, for the most part, that's good, but also success creates a certain kind of freedom. There's different forms of freedom, but the point is, I'm talking about what happens when you can do whatever you want, but you choose to continue to keep oneself in check or to stay disciplined. Several books ago, I could have said, I'm going to take it easy from here on now, I'm not saying I don't have to work, I'm just saying the pace or the system, the structure that I've set for myself, is not a function of needing to eat. It's also not a function of some sort of, which is another form of slavery, I would say. I'm not trying to prove something to someone, right? Like I'm not also like, the reason I'm doing this many books is because I want to sell the most books out of anyone in the world and that's what, you know. So I'm talking about how do you get to a place where you're doing these things voluntarily because it's who you want to be and it's what you want to do. You write about Joyce, Carol Oates, and this is in the section titled Just Work, and in Ancient Greece there was this word to describe a ceaseless work ethic called Philoponia. Yeah, close enough. Oh, okay, close enough. And she published tons over the course. So someone like her, a motivator for you to say, I want to be that type of person? I'm not necessarily like, hey, her output, like I want to publish as many books as she has published an insane amount of books and she's also gotten to do it for a very long period of time. I think she's in her fifth or sixth decade as a published author, which is incredible and I very much admire that. But I like the idea of what happens if you do the craft every day for as long as you are able to, if you trust that process, whether you get to do it for three years or 30 years, I think that output is going to be impressive. It's also going to be the maximum that you were capable of doing. How do you relate that to somebody who's building a career for themselves within a Fortune 500 company as a mid-level manager? They're a VP of sales somewhere and they love your stuff, but they don't necessarily fully relate to your lifestyle because they're not necessarily a published author. They may give some speeches at town halls and things like that, but they're working to build a career, support their family, and hopefully create a culture where people want to do good work. How do you relate that type of ceaseless work ethic loving the process with that person? To me, it's about what is the craft of what you do, right? So I was talking to a baseball player yesterday on the Daily Stoke Podcast and he was thinking about retiring and we were talking about what he was considering doing next and how he was thinking about the transition to coaching. And how baseball for him was like, "Hey, how many hits am I getting? How many runs am I batting in? How many games are we winning?" Obviously, that's part of coaching, but you have to find some craft within that. So maybe it's like making people better or raising boys or girls into adults, right? You have to figure out what the actual craft of that thing is as opposed to what is the external metric that people tend to measure you by, and I think the ideal scenarios you fall in love with that thing. Like, I, Cheryl Straight has talked about the distinction between writing and publishing. Like, I publish a lot of books, but what I do is writing, right? Like, I write books every day, or I write every day, and what tends to come out of that is published books. So if what you love is relationships, maybe what comes out of those relationships are great teams, or sales, or, you know, bonds with the customer, whatever it is, right? But you have to figure out the craft of that thing and find out how to dedicate yourself to that. Lou Gehrig said, which you write a lot about Lou Gehrig. I love the stories. When you love the work, you don't cheat it, or the demands it makes of you. You respect even the most trivial aspects of the pursuit. Again, I sense that relates to your life. It seems that discipline has been how you've been so productive, and this Lou Gehrig quote, "I think can apply to people and whatever their pursuit is of how they go after it." And I love the John Wooden story about putting on their socks. I wrote about that in my first book, and the fact that some would say are trivial pursuits.

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