PNTV: Stoicism for Dummies by Tom Morris (in 20 minutes)

If you were to ask those Stoic philosophers, how do you live? How do I live a good life? Means something closer to being your best self, expressing the best version of yourself. If you're fragile, when life hits you, you break. You're like that little flame that gets extinguished when you put trash on it. Know who you are at your best. Do those things when you feel your worst. Going to the gym and you're lifting weights. Life's challenges become your weights when you use them right. Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to Philosopher's Notes TV. Today we've got another great book, a fun one, Stoicism for Dummies by one of my favorite people on the planet, Tom Morris. Tom was professor at Notre Dame for 15 years, one of their most beloved professors, before becoming a public philosopher. He's written a ton of books. We've done Philosopher's Notes on 6 of them. You can get the notes on this book for free check out the show notes and get the 7-page PDF, 20-ish minute MP3, in which I pull out my favorite big ideas that we're going to talk about today. Uh, what more about Tom? So I heard about Tom, uh, years ago, maybe 15 years ago. Was out to dinner with a friend of mine, mentor of mine, John Mackey, who founded Whole Foods, and he told me, you have to read Tom Morris. I was asking him for book recommendations back in the day. You have to read Tom Morris. I've read all of his books, got into him, absolutely love him. An Integration of Ancient Wisdom the modern, uh, self-development energy of how we can show up as our best selves. Again, Stoicism for Dummies. Let's get to work. We're going to talk about 5 of my favorite ideas from the book, including— we'll do a quick origin story, the, uh, big 3 Stoics. We'll talk about the founding of Stoicism, who the 3 primary Stoics are that you're going to want to know about. Then we're going to talk about the one word answer the ancient Stoics would have given you if you asked them how to live a good life. I might have tattooed my body with it, and Tom might have actually included a picture of my tattoo, Figure 8-1, in the book. Check it out. Then we're gonna talk about the summum bonum, the greatest good of a life well lived. When you live with arete, you experience something called eudaimonia. We're gonna define those two beautiful ancient Greek words and talk about how you can apply them to your modern life. Then we're gonna talk about antifragile fuel, using all of life's challenges to get better. I have another tattoo on this arm of antifragility. We'll talk about that and why it's such an important theme in my life and how I encourage you to integrate the wisdom into yours. Then we're gonna talk about an ancient Stoic practice, having a role model who inspires you. What would X do in this situation? X role model. Think about that. We'll talk more about that. And then most importantly, plus one, let's go. Let's move from theory to practice to mastery together today. Think about an idea that you can apply to your life today. That is why we do what we do. Let's get to work. The Big Three Stoics. As you may know, and I talk about this in a class we have on the Heroic platform called Stoicism 101, 10 big ideas on Stoicism. We've got dozens of Philosopher's Notes on Stoicism. It is my preferred flavor a believer of ancient wisdom that I combine with modern science and practical tools and everything that we do with Heroic, et cetera. But here's the origin story. So Zeno is a merchant traveling to Athens, and he arrived in Athens via shipwreck, which the Stoics thought was the perfect way to found a philosophy. He shipwrecked. He loses everything in a shipwreck Boom! Needs to figure out who he is, how he wants to live. He found Stoicism in the process of navigating that. Again, the ancient Stoics loved that. Now, that was in Greece. Stoicism really flourished in ancient Rome, where we have the big three Roman Stoics, who include Seneca, who was born and lived in around the same era as Jesus, around zero AD, common era, etc. Then we have Epictetus, who was a teenager when Seneca was teaching. Then we have Marcus Aurelius, who was a teenager when Epictetus was teaching. And there's another guy, if we had a big three, uh, plus one, it would be Musonius Rufus, who actually taught Epictetus. Fascinating guys. Seneca was essentially a political advisor, um, for emperors including Nero, who he tried to bring the best out of. Didn't quite work out. Nero wound up having him executed via suicide. Not so pleasant end to Seneca's life, but lived that experience, lived through that experience nobly. He was essentially a billionaire advisor, etc. Then you have Epictetus, a former slave turned philosopher who taught the guys who taught Marcus Aurelius, who of course, if you know anything about Stoicism, you know is one of the most respected leaders in history, integrating his ancient Stoic philosophy with his call to be the emperor of the Roman Empire. Super inspiring group of guys. Check out Stoicism 101 in the Heroic app for more and all those Philosopher's Notes we have. Now, if you were to ask those Stoic philosophers, how do you live— how do I live a good life? They would have given you a one-word answer, and that answer is arete. I will write that up here as well. Arete. Now, we translate the word arete as excellence or virtue, but it means something closer to being your best self, expressing the best version of yourself moment to moment to moment. The way that I like to map it out is imagine that there's this version of you who you're capable of being in any given moment, and oops, there's a gap between who you were capable of being and who you were actually being. When you close that gap, you're living with arete. When there is a gap between who you're capable of being and who you're actually being, it's in that gap in which regret, anxiety, disillusionment—do it long enough, more nuanced than this, but depression—creeps in. Close the gap. Be your best self. Live with arete, and you will experience the summum bonum, the greatest good of life. If you ask those guys, well, why do I live with arete? They would tell you and Socrates and Plato and Aristotle would echo this. You live with arete to experience, with virtue, with excellence, expressing your best self, to experience eudaimonia. Eudaimonia literally means eu daimon, good soul. It's as if you have this inner guiding spirit within yourself. The ancient Greeks called it a daimon. The ancient Romans called it your genius. Longer chat. But they believed we all had a genius. We all had that guiding spirit, the daimon. When you live with aratē, you have a good soul. You experience this deep sense of well-being, meaning, purposeful joy. It doesn't mean life's easy, but you know that you're doing your best. And when you do that, you— in modern English, we translate that word roughly as happiness, but it means something closer to flourishing. Knowing that you're, you're growing and becoming and expressing that best version of yourself. Arete, eudaimonia, two of the highest ideals of the ancient world. That's what we want to focus on. We can talk about modern science, and we do a lot in our work with Heroic. I'm not going to go into details on this right now, but if you asked the ancient Stoics, they'd tell you arete and eudaimonia. If you ask the modern positive psychologists, the Martin Seligmans, Sonny Lubomirskys, all these great teachers of the modern scientific approach who basically validated ancient wisdom traditions, they tell you the same thing. The ultimate purpose of life is to flourish. You do that by putting your virtues in action. Pay attention to that. Next big idea as we march through this. Antifragile fuel. And I'm actually gonna pick up my note and read this line. If you've heard of Ryan Holiday in his book, "The Obstacle Is the Way," which I highly recommend, check that out. This book, of course, The Daily Stoic. These are some great books on Stoicism if you're just getting into it. So Ryan wrote a whole book on this basic idea, and it's called The Obstacle Is the Way. And this is Marcus Aurelius. Aurelius tells us— no, I'm sorry, this is Seneca. No, I'm back to— I quote Seneca and I quote Aurelius in the same big idea here. This is actually Aurelius. He says, while a small flame A small flame can be extinguished by trash that's dumped on it. A big enough fire will just use and consume anything dropped in it. The more that's thrown at it, the higher it rises and the hotter it burns. 2,000 years ago, Marcus Aurelius is talking about that. In the modern world, Nassim Taleb coined a word to describe that process where when you throw trash into— you throw obstacles at something, it gets stronger. That is a word. Antifragility. To be antifragile is the opposite of being fragile. Nassim Taleb tells us, and we talk about this all the time, if you're fragile, when life hits you, you break. You're like that little flame that gets extinguished when you put trash on it. The metaphor that Nassim Taleb uses is similar but a little different. He says the wind will extinguish a candle, a little flame, but it will fuel a fire. The wind, same wind, Challenges in life, trash in life will extinguish a tiny little flame, but it will fuel a big flame. Then he says, knowing that, you want to be the fire and wish for the wind. Wish for life's challenges. Tom quotes Seneca, who says, disaster is virtue's opportunity. When we approach it with the right mindset, the right antifragile mindset, the Stoic antifragile mindset, we use challenges to get better. Again, longer chat, but this is a huge part of our philosophy. How do you use challenges to get stronger? The short answer to that question, to take it off the bumper sticker and apply it to your life, you need to know who you are when you're at your best. Here's a little exercise I always do anytime I give a keynote. I have all my keynotes these days, and over the last couple few years have been essentially on how to forge antifragile confidence. I've been blessed to work with some of the most elite performers in the world military commanders, special forces, uh, naval special forces, general special forces, Notre Dame football, Ryder Cup, Europe, etc. Come in and talk about antifragility. I always have them do this exercise: bust out a piece of paper, and I want you to think about you when you're at your best in the past. What did you do? What did you do when you were at your best? Again, think back right now to a time in your life where you're just on fire. What were you doing? And very importantly, what were you not doing? There were certain things you were doing when you're at your best in your life, in energy, in work, in love. You did things that helped you show up energized. You were eating, moving, sleeping a certain way, I would guess. You were productive. What were you doing specifically? And you were connected to your loved ones. What were you doing specifically? And most importantly, what were you not doing? And I've said this a number of times in these PNTVs. I say it all the time. The fastest way to change your life is to stop doing the things that you know don't work for you, your kryptonites. But anyway, identify who you were at your best in the past, then look at your current life and think about one thing that you need to start doing and one thing that you need to stop doing and start doing those things and stop doing those things now. Then, and here's the kicker, here's how you become the fire and wish for the wind. You need to know what you do when you're at your best. We call that a protocol. The entire Heroic app is built to help you get clarity on that, right? Who are you at your best? Distill that. Commit to that every single day. And then when life hits you, rather than spinning off the rails and doing all the stupid things you do when life gets hard that you've done in the past, in that same moment, you realize, hey, this is one of those hard times. The wind is blowing. I'm getting a lot of trash thrown on me. Rather than go do all the stupid things I do when I'm not plugged in, I'm going to use this as an opportunity to do these things. That's how you take this wisdom off the bumper sticker. Know who you are at your best, and when life hits you, do those things with an even deeper level of ferocity. Then it's like you're going to the gym and you're lifting weights. Life's challenges become your weights when you use them right. We can talk about that for about a month, but I'll leave it at that. Um, hopefully there's some wisdom there you can apply to your life today. The next idea and final idea is role models. Again, an ancient practice for the Stoics was to imagine their ideal sage. First of all, they knew no one was perfect, but who was an ideal sage for them? They would imagine that individual watching them throughout the day, and they'd want to, to basically make them proud. And they'd also think about, and Tom encourages us to think about, well, what would your Ideal Sage. What would your role model, what would your hero do in any given moment? You're facing those challenges, what would this person you admire do? Think about that. I've got my heroes on my office and studio wall. I've got Ralph Waldo Emerson, Joseph Campbell, Epictetus. I've got Abraham Maslow. And I have another dear friend of mine that inspires me deeply. I think about these guys, they're looking at me all day, every day. And they're whispering to me certain pieces of wisdom. So I encourage you to consider who your heroes are, who your role models are, and imagine them giving you wisdom throughout the day, watching you, guiding you, encouraging you when you face inevitable challenges throughout your day. That is a very quick look at this great book, Stoicism for Dummies. Bless you, Tom, love ya. Big Three Stoics. We had Zeno arriving via shipwreck in Athens. Founding Stoicism, moved over to Rome. We had Seneca, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, etc. The one-word answer to how to live a good life? Arete. Express that best version of yourself. Close the gap. When you do that, you experience eudaimonia. You have a good soul. You feel that deep sense of meaning, purpose, joyful flourishing, etc. And easier said than done, but remember the next time life hits you, double down on your protocol. Know who you are at your best. Do those things when you feel your worst. Disaster is virtue's opportunity. The wind will extinguish a candle, fragile, but it will fuel a fire, antifragile. Again, who are your role models? And always most importantly, +1, let's go! What's the idea that most jumped out and landed for you today? How can you move from theory to practice to mastery? Let's do it together. Let's do it today. It's an honor to spend time with you. Hope you enjoyed, and I look forward to sharing more with you soon. See ya.