PNTV: The Stoic Challenge by William B. Irvine (#399)

You're listening to Optimize with Brian Johnson. More Wisdom in Less time.

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another episode of Philosopher's Notes tv. Today we've got another great book, the Stoic Challenge by William B. Irvine. The Stoic Challenge Subtitle A Philosopher's Guide to Becoming Tougher, Calmer and More Resilient. Awesome book. William B. Irvine is a professor of philosophy at Wright State University. He is also a practitioner of Stoic philosophy, which in our modern world is a rare combination. A practitioner of philosophy vis a vis simply a scholar or an academic. We talked about Donald Robertson being a librarian of wisdom, which is kind of the modern day academic philosophical orientation versus the ancient applied warrior of wisdom. Not librarian catalog ideas, but living them. So William B. Irvine is that rare breed of a practicing Stoic philosopher and scholar and teacher. And this book is just awesome. It's the second book of his that we featured. The Stoic Art of Living, I believe was the title of the other book. No, I'm sorry, A Guide to the Good Life. That might have been the subtitle. Check that one out. Professor Irvine also joined us as a luminary in our guest faculty for our Optimized Coach program where we have dozens of my favorite teachers join us like Cal Newport, Tall, Ben Shaharch, Donald Robertson, how to Think Like a Roman Emperor, William Robert Bezois, Diener, our last episode, et cetera, et cetera. And everybody loved him. He was just awesome. Super practical Stoic wisdom. Great book. Highly recommend it as always. Check out the Philosopher's Note. We've got 600 plus of them and counting as I march to a thousand. We've got a ton of Optimum Living 101 classes and then the plus ones, et cetera. Check that out. At Optimize Me we've also got apps, iOS and Android that we're really proud of. And people are telling us that they love Optimize Me apps, Philosopher's note, big ideas. Let's jump in. So the Stoic Challenge, you want to be tougher, calmer in the face of challenges. Awesome. Let's start by looking at setback exemplars. So we think that when we face a setback in life that the only possible response is to crumble. And he says, well, no, actually there's a range of responses and suffering is optional in this scenario and we need to look toward exemplars to see what's possible. And we talked about the exact same thing in how to Think Like a Roman Emperor. Donald Robertson tells us about Marcus Aurelius practice of imagining the ideal sage. And he aspired to be that best version of himself. I translated that into what's the best version of you look like? Let's aspire to be that. But we know in the science of self confidence that seeing someone else achieve success basically says if they can do it, then I have a chance of doing it. That gives us a higher level of self efficacy and confidence. And I should say too that William or Professor Irvine makes the explicit point that he's taking ancient stoic wisdom and kind of polishing and sharpening the tool or the sword of the wisdom with some modern day science and positive psychology, etc. But anyway, starting with exemplars is huge. He shares a number of them. Bethany Hamilton, the young woman whose arm was bitten off by a shark while she was surfing. What did she do? You know how long it took her to get back in the ocean and start crushing it again with one arm? I think it was her right arm she got. She kept 26 days. Bethany Hamilton was back in the ocean after a shark bit off her arm. Setback exemplar. If she can do that in her life, what can you do in yours? That's a pretty big setback. Oh, ouch. I'm into surfing. I want to be a pro surfer and a shark just bit off my arm. Whatever. Shake it off stoic style. Get back in the water, get better. Become a radiant exemplar. Goosebumps as I say that. He talks about Stephen Hawking. He's getting destroyed with Lou Gehrig's disease and his body's atrophying and what does he do? Steps up from a wheelchair, can't talk, big deal. Theoretical physicist, one of the greatest scientists in history. Set back exemplar. And then in the note I share a story of me seeing another setback exemplar. This is last year. Almost exactly this time last year, we go to Lake Tahoe for the Spartan World Championships. It's Emerson's birthday. Joe Decenta, the founder of Spartan Race, has become a friend and kind of soul brother. He invited me to come up and do an interview with him on this podcast because again, we had one of the largest teams in Spartan history, blah, blah, blah. So I'm there and I plan to race that world championship in Lake Tahoe that year. But unfortunately, earlier in the year I broke my wrist and I had to have surgery and had 20 screws put into it. And the surgeon told me this is in February, that I wouldn't even be able to do burpees by September. So I kind of, you know, that world championship was off my calendar, certainly competing in it, and I wasn't even planning to do it right now. I was able to do burpees in three months instead of 12 months with the help of a great physical therapist who happens to be an optimized Coach. Thank you, Dr. J. Anyway, so I'm there at the Spartan event. It's awesome. And Emerson comes up to me after hanging out and cruising around the little campus they have where everyone converges and he says, daddy, there's a guy here who's doing the Spartan race and he has no legs. He. He has no legs. And he says, daddy, if he can do it, you can do it. Game on. That guy's name is Casey McAllister. He's amazing. No legs, and the dude does Spartan races. He's extraordinary setback exemplar. So I may have pulled some strings. Joe helped me get in the race. Thank you, Team Spartan. He also gave me a little extra energy boost through some. Some concoction of pills that he had that he was testing out. I became a case study for him and I went out and I hammered the race. It was awesome. Didn't do it to win it, but had a great time completing it. And I was inspired by a setback exemplar. If he can do it, I can do it. How about you start with the setback exemplars as we move to the stoic challenge and then remember this. Antifragility. Since I took the two year break on doing these philosopher's notes tv, antifragility has become an even more powerful theme in everything that we do at Optimize Now, Professor Irvine tells us there's a spectrum of resilience. You can be fragile, right? And if you get hit by life, fragile. If you get hit by life here, you just break. I'm fragile. You're like a package being sent in the mail. Handle me gently because I'll break if you drop me right? Or you can be resilient on the spectrum, which means, you know, you can throw me around, I'm going to bounce back a little faster, et cetera. Resilient. Now, he doesn't use the word antifragile, but the entire book is basically this, which is there's something more, there's something beyond being resilient. And that is what we call antifragility. And that actually gets an exclamation point. You're antifragile when you're Antifragile, the opposite of being fragile. You literally say, hey, kick me around, because the more I get kicked around, the stronger I get. Obstacles make me stronger, which has become our mantra at optimize. Ohms. Not om ohm, but o M. S. Obstacles make me stronger. Ohms. Those obstacles give us an opportunity to grow. Literally, right? That's how we want to approach life's challenges. Almost like going to the gym. We're not trying to. We're not going to get strong by lifting styrofoam weights. We got to lift the real thing. And if we can see life's challenges through that lens, we're going to be a lot stronger. That's the idea of antifragility. And just to make the point a couple different ways, Nassim Taleb, who coined the word antifragile, says that the wind is neutral, right? But the wind will extinguish a candle, which is fragile, right? Candle going to be extinguished by the wind coming at it. But it will fuel a fire. The wind will extinguish a candle, but it will fuel a fire. This is Ryan Holiday's the obstacle is the way the true Stoic philosopher uses everything as fuel. We are antifragile as we pursue life's challenges or life's, you know, opportunities to grow. And those challenges are fuel for us. Which leads us to the third idea, the test. And this is the Stoic challenge. So this is the essence of the book, and I just absolutely love it. So Professor Irvine says when he faces a challenge in life, he imagines it as if the Stoic gods are giving him a test and seeing just how strong he is. So if he gets, like, delayed on a flight, he tells a bunch of funny stories, right? One of them is, he's on a flight and he's sitting there for, like, minutes, becomes more than minutes, becomes an hour. And then he's like, okay, what's going on? He's stoic challenge. Oh, the stoic gods are challenging me here to maintain my equanimity. Everybody else is complaining, boom. Can I practice my philosophy? Then they have to get off. Then they wait. Then they have to go to the hotel that night. Ah, very clever. Stoic philosophers or Stoic gods. You're really challenging me. Very good tactics. Then he gets a room. That's just horrible. And it goes on and on and on. All the while, he's laughing to himself, thinking, ah, this is an opportunity for me to practice my philosophy. The Stoic gods are blessing me with this opportunity. We've taken this and run with it as well. Thank you, stoic gods. Something goes wrong, someone cuts you off on the way to work. Thank you, stoic gods. Whatever you want to fill in the blank for, you're giving me an opportunity to practice my philosophy. That's the stoic challenge in a fun little game. And psychologically, we want to revisit the theme that you can view life's growth opportunities as threats or as challenges. If you see every little thing that goes on in the world and every big thing that goes on in the world as a threat to your well being, same exact thing can happen. But if you see it as a threat, oh, I don't know if I can handle this. Or you see it as a challenge, boom. Let me step up and see what I'm made of here. It's going to be tough, but I'm going to go for it. Same exact external event, different internal frame for it. Your physiology will change, your overall well being will change, and your ability to meet that challenge will change. If you see it as a threat versus a challenge, you want to see things as stoic challenges, then another practice from the stoic toolkit is negative visualization. So he talks about this in the context of some other ideas, but it's a powerful practice. The Stoics embrace this. And again, Professor Irvine has kind of dusted it off for our modern times. But one way to appreciate your life is to imagine it being worse than it currently is. Weird practice, and you don't want to live in this state. He says it should be a flicker every once in a while flicker, this awareness that, hey, your life could be a heck of a lot worse than it is. Quit complaining. You got two legs or you don't. But you've still got your life, right? For Casey McAllister, one of the things I do to remind myself of this is a Ryan Holiday. It's buried deeply into my pocket this morning. Let me see if I can get it. Ryan Holiday, Memento mori. Remember death. That's a flicker. Boom. I'm alive. I could be dead. Right? That's a very quick way to flicker. Negative visualization. I'm going to be dead at some point, which is why that practice is so powerful. So I'm going to appreciate my life, however imperfect it is right now. In the note, I mentioned Eleanor, the day, I think the day after, the day before I wrote this note, she fell at the park hard enough on her head for Alexander to call her pediatrician. And so I remember sitting there, actually, as I was reading the Book sitting there holding her while she's crying and thinking, wow, she's a blessing. And then the next day when we realized that she was fine and there was no actual damage done, I can appreciate with that flicker of it could have been a lot worse. And we fail to realize things can be a lot worse. And we'll talk about the science of gratitude, but gratitude is important. And one of the things that gets in the way is entitlement. You and I think that everything should go perfectly all day, every day, from the Internet to even the things that are going on right now as I film this with COVID the pandemic going on. Well, fantastic. All those things you took for granted, take them as granted. The fact that you used to be able to go do all the things you did, you took them all for granted, take them as granted. That's a humble stance, which is a powerful place from which we want to live and deal with any entitlement. We take things again for granted versus as granted. We're going to talk about that in Robert Emmons, great book. And then more practically speaking, even this morning, or I should say more timely, we live, you know, out in the country outside of Austin, right? We're on eight and a half acres. It's beautiful. Absolute heaven, right? Literally. We have a trail that I walk around it multiple times a day, feel so blessed and perfect little hermitage, right? And the prior owner sold an acre and a half to another person, so they own an acre and a half of the prior 10 acre lot. And in Texas, people burn things and kind of, you know, they just create burn piles, etc. Right? So we're walking on our trail the other day and we see this like growing huge heap of kind of trash that I think they're going to burn, but I'm not sure. There's now there's like a chair on it, you know, that's sitting there. And it's like the initial response I had was, you know, that is, what are you doing? A and B, I'm pretty sure that's actually on our property. If we were going to do the survey and look at where it is and then running it through the stoic challenge of, oh, thank you, stoic gods. That's an opportunity to practice this. And my current decision, which may evolve is that is my flicker of beautiful imperfection. You see it right when you're walking on the trail and you're kind of turning the corner. Boom. Beautiful imperfection in this space of otherwise pretty close to perfection. And I love that as A constant reminder. A reminder when I see that of a flicker of look. Nothing is ever perfect. Let's not take anything for granted. Let's not pretend we're ever going to be perfect and take the time to negatively visualize when and as appropriate. Then we get to the final idea. Lazy Bill. So Bill is a funny guy. Professor William B. Irvine, AKA Bill. He's into rowing, right? He's into rowing as a practice of facing challenging things and doing things he doesn't want to do. Which is precisely why I'm into Spartan races. I literally pay to go face obstacles. I do things that are hard because I know that's how life is and I want to train for it. It's a perfect metaphor. Well, he rows for the same reason. And then he tells a hilarious story about a rowing competition he went to. He's on a rowing team, et cetera. He's like, I'm not good at all. I show up and I do my best and I'm competing against myself. That's it. But one race he just went all in and he was just crushing it and just pushing in this race right, as hard as he possibly could. And then, you know, the rowing races are handicapped and scored based on kind of like golf. You know, you got an adjusted score depending on how good you normally are and then you're compared against your field so you can actually compete. And you know, it's age comes in. I don't know how they do it, but it's calculated on a sliding scale of some nature. Anyway, after his race he's like, I just crushed that. They announce that he won and he's like, yeah baby. And he's just going off and he's just celebrating and doing whatever he does to celebrate. And then X minutes later they come back on the loudspeaker and they're like, excuse me, we have an announcement. We actually calculated the last results wrong. The new winner is, or the actual winner is so and so. And I think if he didn't place last, he was close to it. So he literally had to. I don't know if he had to give back the little trophy or medal he got or something, but it was one of those opportunities that he tells. That's so funny. Perfect opportunity. Well played, stoic gods. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to practice this. That was a good one. But the point he makes here is that every single day he uses rowing and the rest of his life as an opportunity to basically confront Lazy Bill. Lazy Bill is that lesser than version of himself. The demon is actually what they would call it in ancient Greece. You had your daimon, which is the. The best within you, right? Here's your daimon. That's the angel within you, the highest version of you. That's what you're capable of doing in any given moment. Here's your demon, which is the diminutive of daimon. Demon is just the diminutive of daimon, the best you, the not so great you. It's like the angel and the devil. So he calls his little demon Lazy Bill. And every single day he's going at it with Lazy Bill because he knows that if he can close that gap consistently, his life will look like that. And if he doesn't close that gap consistently, his life will look like that. And we don't want to get to the end of our lives and have a gap like that. And guess what? You don't need to wait till the end of your life. Because if you do that on a daily basis, you. We use another metaphor all the time, right? You can go minus one or you can go plus one. Demon daimon. If you aggregate a bunch of those plus ones, you feel great at the end of the day. If you go backwards, demon, demon, demon, at the end of the day, you don't feel great. That's when the gap exists. So we need to deal with lazy. Bry. Lazy. Fill in the blank as we visualize negatively what could be wrong, what could be different in our lives, and appreciate that which we have with humility. We have the test. We celebrate the stoic, optimizing gods when they give us good opportunities to practice our philosophy. Epictetus, I think it was, says, when you face a challenge, imagine God or the gods, he would say, sending you a young buck to wrestle with you. And he says, if you want to be Olympic caliber, you better train against the best. That's what the stoic gods are giving you. Opportunities to get stronger. Anti fragility. We're not fragile, we're not even resilient. We get stronger as we face challenges. And by the way, one important thing to note, the way that we operationalize that, that we talk a ton about in Optimize Proper, is you got to run protocols. And one of the protocols is the worse you feel, the more committed you are to doing what you know is best for you. So when Lazy Bill, lazy you, is barking in your ear. That's when you got to do the right thing. You got to close the gap, express the best version of you. That's how you develop antifragile confidence and you truly respond to life's challenges with all you got. Then remember your setback exemplars. Whether it's Bethany with one arm, whether it's Stephen hawking or Casey McAllister with no legs doing a Spartan race, what's your excuse for whatever it is you say you can't do? Come on, step up. Stoic Challenge. Thank you, Professor Irvine. What's the idea that jumped out and landed for you? We'll pause, reflect on that for a moment. Seriously, what is it? What's one idea that you know you could be doing that would most positively benefit your life? Think about how you can move from theory to practice to mastery on that today. Make today another awesome day and I look forward to seeing you tomorrow. See you.

We hope you enjoyed this episode of Optymyze with Brian Johnson. To find out more, go to Optimize Me Foreign.

Hi, this is Brian. Hope you enjoyed that.

Quick note.

If you want to go deeper into.

Optimize, check us out at Optimize Me.

The team has set up a free two week trial where you can get.

Instant access to all 600 plus philosopher's notes, all the PDFs, the MP3s, get it on the app, etc. And 50 optimal living 101 classes on a range of subjects and of course the thousand plus optimize ones.

And then if you want to go.

All in, check out Optimize. Coach Optimize Me for the free trial for the core wisdom Optimize Me Coach.

If you want to go all in.

And master yourself, serve heroically and empower others to do the same.

Have a great day.

See you tomorrow.