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RyanHoliday.net - Meditations on strategy and life
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12 Extraordinary Stoic Moments

Unlike the “pen-and-ink philosophers,” as the type was derisively known even 2,000 years ago, to the Stoics, Stoicism is something you DO. They were most concerned with how one lived. The choices you made, the causes you served, the principles you adhered to in the face of adversity. They cared about what you did, not what you said.

Throw away your books, Marcus Aurelius said. “Don’t talk about what a good man is like. Be one.”

So in this article, I want to show you some DOERS. I want to share with you some of the most extraordinary, most inspiring moments of Stoicism in the real world, in history, practiced by real philosophers—whether they knew that’s what they were doing or not.

Shunzo Kido

At the 1932 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, California, a flashy Japanese equestrian named Shunzo Kido gave one of the most remarkable performances in the history of sports.

He was competing in the 22 ½ mile, 50 obstacle jump endurance horse race. It wasn’t his usual event. His horse wasn’t trained for it. But a teammate was injured and without hesitation Kido replaced him. Off to a solid lead, he surprised the crowd and was in a position for gold. But just as he pulled away from the pack going into the finish and cleared the second-to-last jump, he stunned the crowd by pulling the reins and dropping out of the race.

Why?

He could feel the horse struggling and sensed that even just a few more seconds at full speed would kill the horse as it crossed the finish line.

As the plaque on the Friendship Bridge along the Mount Rubidoux Trail commemorating his unprecedented displayed of sportsmanship reads,

“Lt. Col. Shunzo Kido turned aside from the prize to save his horse. He heard the low voice of mercy, not the loud acclaim of glory.”

As the Stoics would say—it’s not winning that counts. It’s character.

Epaminondas

Plutarch tells us about a general and statesman in Greece named Epaminondas who, despite his brilliance on and off the battlefield, was appointed to an insultingly minor office in Thebes responsible for the city’s sewers.

In fact, it was because of his brilliance that he was put in this role, as a number of jealous and fearful rivals thought it would effectively end his career.

But instead of being provoked or despairing at his irrelevance, Epaminondas took fully to his new job, declaring that the distinction of the office isn’t brought to the man, the man brings the distinction to the office.

With discipline and earnestness, Plutarch wrote, “he proceeded to transform that insignificant office into a great and respected honor, even though previously it had involved nothing more than overseeing the clearing of dung and the diverting of water from the streets.”

By the way, this story is adapted from my latest book, Discipline is Destiny: The Power of Self-Control. The aim of the book is to teach you how to harness the powers of self-discipline and self-control so that like the many great men and women throughout the book, you too can fulfill a great destiny. It officially releases on 9/27, but you can pre-order it right now!

We’ve put together some exciting bonuses, including a signed and numbered page from the original manuscript. You can learn more about those and how to receive them over at Dailystoic.com/preorder.

Jackie Robinson

In 1945, a couple years before Jackie Robinson broke into Major League Baseball, he had a meeting with Brooklyn Dodgers owner Branch Rickey. “l’m looking for a ball player,” Rickey said, “with the guts not to fight back.”

There would be hotel clerks refusing him a room, rude waiters, and opponents shouting slurs. Any bit of retaliation, Rickey knew, would not only end Robinson’s career, but would set back his grand experiment of breaking MLB’s color barrier for at least a generation.

The manager of the Philadelphia Phillies, Ben Chapman, was particularly brutal. “[He was] the most vicious of any of the people in terms of name calling,” Robinson said.

Despite, as he later wrote, wanting to, “grab one of those white sons of bitches and smash his teeth in with my despised black fist,” Robinson never retaliated. Not only that, but a month after playing the Phillies in 1947, he agreed to take a friendly photo with Chapman to help save the man’s job.

The thought of touching, posing with such an asshole, even sixty years removed, almost turns the stomach. Robinson would write in I Never Had It Made, “I have to admit that having my picture taken with this man was one of the most difficult things I had to make myself do.” He was willing to do it, he said, because it was part of a larger plan.

Knowing what he wanted and needed to do in baseball, it was clear what he would have to tolerate in order to do it.

Marcus Aurelius, who also brushed up against a fair share of terrible people, said that asking to never encounter a shameless person is to ask for the impossible, but, “the best revenge is not to be like that.”

George Marshall

George Marshall never wanted anything more. It was the promotion he worked for his entire career, the opportunity he dreamed of his entire life. To lead a historic military invasion—it’s what a soldier’s reputation depends on. It was Marshall’s for the taking. But he turned it down.

The U.S. was preparing to launch the invasion at Normandy. Marshall wrote the document outlining the strategy. It was assumed he would command the invasion.

But President Franklin Roosevelt wanted to keep Marshall in Washington. Marshall was his chief of staff. In the waging of a global war, Roosevelt said he didn’t think he’d be able to sleep without his chief of staff in Washington. But Roosevelt also knew what Marshall wanted. He wanted to storm the beaches of Normandy. He wanted to be an American hero.

So Roosevelt left it up to Marshall. If he wanted the command, it was his.

No, Marshall said, this isn’t about what I want. He told Roosevelt to, “act in whatever way he felt was to the best interests of the country…and not in any way to consider my feelings.”

Roosevelt gave the job to Marshall’s protégé, Dwight Eisenhower. The next day, Marshall had to draft the letter to President Stalin, informing him that, “The appointment of General Eisenhower to command of OVERLORD has been decided upon.” Roosevelt added the word “immediate” before “appointment” then signed it. Marshall sent the original copy of the letter to Eisenhower with the note: “Dear Eisenhower: I thought you might like to have this as a memento. It was written very hurriedly by me as the final meeting broke up yesterday, the president signing it immediately. G.C.M.”

Eisenhower became the famous leader of the Normandy invasion. Eisenhower became president. Eisenhower became the American hero. Not Marshall.

Eisenhower later called that copy of the letter, “one of my most cherished mementos of World War II.”

Martin Luther King Jr.

At the SCLC conference in 1962 in Birmingham, Ala., Martin Luther King, Jr. stood before a large, integrated audience and gave the closing address. As King spoke, thanking the audience and reminding them of plans for the next year, a white man named Roy James walked onto the stage and began to savagely beat him.

The first punch struck King with such force in the face that he spun around. King turned to face his assailant and dropped his hands, “like a newborn baby,” as one observer recalled, to receive more blows.

The next blows came in rapid succession, hitting him in the head and the back, filling the now silent auditorium with the sickening sound of bone connecting with flesh.

He was opening himself to an attacker, instinctually, under fire, proving his commitment to nonviolence.

As an angry crowd of people tried to come to King’s defense, he shouted, “Don’t touch him! We have to pray for him.” As the crowd began to pray and sing, King spoke kindly to the man who had just beaten him, reassuring him that he would not be hurt. After he went to a private office where he was given two aspirin by Rosa Parks, King concluded the conference as he held an ice pack to his face.

I tell this story in more detail in Discipline is Destiny—King appears throughout the book and is one of the great examples of what one can achieve with self-discipline and self-control. As I said above, Discipline is Destiny officially releases on 9/27, but you can pre-order it right now!

Zeno

Zeno lost everything. He was forced to start over. He could have resented this. He could have been bitter. It could have broken him. Instead, he used his disaster to change the world.

He was a merchant from a family who made their fortune trading Tyrian, the purple dye used to dye the robes of kings.

On a voyage across the Mediterranean, Zeno’s ship and all its cargo sank.

No one knows how it happened. All we know is that Zeno was stranded somewhere in Athens, while his ship sat at the bottom of the sea.

He made his way to the nearest city and walked into a bookstore where the bookseller happened to be reading works about Socrates. Spellbound, Zeno asked the bookseller where he could meet someone like Socrates. He introduced Zeno the famous Cynic philosopher Crates of Thebes.

Zeno trained with Crates and other Socratic philosophers for the next twenty years. Eventually he founded his own school on a public porch in Athens called the Stoa Poikile

“Well done,” Zeno would later say to Fortune, “to drive me thus to philosophy!” “I made a prosperous voyage when I suffered a shipwreck,” he said.

Theodore Roosevelt

It was over a century ago now that Theodore Roosevelt walked out of the Gilpatrick Hotel on his way to the Milwaukee Auditorium to give a speech to a packed crowd as part of his independent campaign for president.

As he approached the venue, a man rushed from the crowd and shot him at close range.

The bullet—a .38 caliber—hit Roosevelt in the chest but was miraculously slowed by the eyeglasses case and the thick folded speech he had in his overcoat pocket.

His staff tried to rush him to the hospital, but Roosevelt insisted he still had to give the speech.

He walked on stage, quieted the crowd, and said, “I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot—but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose.”

When something goes wrong, a Stoic isn’t cowed by it. They don’t quit. They say to themselves, It’s going to take a lot more than that to stop me. They don’t just accept that it happened, they love that it happened.

Marcus Aurelius said when things happen that we would have preferred didn’t happen, there’s basically two kinds of people: people who see an obstacle and people who see an opportunity. He loved the metaphor of fire—he wanted to be like the “blazing fire [that] takes whatever you throw on it and consumes it, and rises higher” because of it.

Like a Bull Moose, a blazing fire, a Stoic, next time something goes wrong, say to yourself: it’s going to take more than that to stop me.

Steve Scott

In 1996, Tiger Woods headed into the U.S. Amateur Championship having won thirty straight matches. With a win at Pumpkin Ridge Golf Club, Tiger would become the first golfer to ever win three straight U.S. Amateur Titles.

The first five rounds of match play were uneventful. Woods advanced to the finals where his opponent was the relatively unknown 19-year-old Steve Scott.

After the first 18 of the 36-hole final, no one could believe it: Scott led by 5 holes.

The final 18 holes were a battle. Tiger cut Scott’s lead to 1 by the back 9. On the par-3 10th, Scott drained a flop shot from the deep rough to stretch his lead back to 2. Then Tiger sank a legendary thirty-five-foot putt for eagle to move within 1.

On the 16th hole, down two with three holes to play, Tiger hit his wedge shot within six feet of the pin. He placed a quarter to mark his ball before picking it up. The marker was in Scott’s putting line, so he asked Tiger to slide it over, and so he did. Scott made his par putt.

Forgetting he’d moved his marker, Tiger put his ball down and was about to putt from the wrong spot. If he did, he’d automatically lose the hole and the tournament.

But before Tiger could make this historic mistake, Scott intervened, “Hey, Tiger, did you move that back?”

Tiger paused, returned his marker then his ball to the correct spot, and made the putt. He birdied 17 to force a sudden death playoff. On the second playoff hole, Scott’s putt lipped out, and Tiger tapped his in for the victory and his place in history.

It would be Scott’s one and only moment in the spotlight. He hoped to have a career on the PGA Tour but it didn’t quite pan out. But in an interview for a piece commemorating the twenty-year anniversary of that 1996 match, Scott said “[I’ve] gone on to have a great life. I think I’m walking proof that you can win in life without winning.”

“Runners in a race ought to compete and strive to win as hard as they can,” the Stoic Chrysippus said, “but by no means should they trip their competitors or give them a shove. So too in life; it is wrong to seek after the things useful in life; but to do so while depriving someone else is not just.”

Frederick Douglass

It was the 1840s. Only a couple years after Frederick Douglass had escaped the slave state he was born in and “bade farewell…to that slavery which had been my abhorrence from childhood.”

The young man, still in his early twenties, was on a mission. A member of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, Douglass toured all across the Northeastern United States. He attended abolitionist meetings. He told the story of his escape from bondage. He lectured at churches and chapels and universities and small town centers and anywhere there was a chance people might congregate.

Traveling somewhere in Pennsylvania, Douglass was forced to move and ride in the baggage car because of his race.

A white supporter rushed up to apologize for this horrible offense. “I am sorry, Mr. Douglass, that you have been degraded in this manner,” the person said.

Douglass wouldn’t accept any of the gentleman’s consoling.

No, he wasn’t angry. He wasn’t hurt. He replied with great fervor: “They cannot degrade Frederick Douglass. The soul that is within me no man can degrade. I am not the one that is being degraded on account of this treatment, but those who are inflicting it upon me.”

The ancient Stoics—because of their independent thinking, their positions of leadership, and their willingness to stand on principle—were often the subjects of verbal and physical mistreatment.

But it was Epictetus, the slave turned Stoic teacher, who said that a person can only degrade you with your consent. “It is not enough to be insulted or to be harmed. You must believe that you are being harmed. If someone succeeds in provoking you, realize that your mind is complicit in the provocation.”

James Stockdale

On September 9, 1965, Admiral James Stockdale’s A-4 Skyhawk jet was shot down in Vietnam.

“Five years down there, at least,” Stockdale said after ejecting from his plane. “I’m leaving the world of technology and entering the world of Epictetus.”

The North Vietnamese used thirteen prisons and prison camps. The Hỏa Lò Prison was famously the worst. Hỏa Lò means “fiery furnace” or “Hell’s hole,” which is what it was—a dark dungeon where captives were physically and mentally tortured to the unimaginable extreme.

It was the center of North Vietnam’s propaganda exploitation and psychological warfare where no limits were placed on getting the enemy to break down and confess war crimes. So if you were a high ranking American troop that got captured, you went to Hỏa Lò.

Stockdale was not only high ranking, of the 800 prisoners estimated to enter Hỏa Lò, Stockdale had no superior. Victory then for the captors in the “Hanoi Hilton,” as Stockdale and his fellow inmates would come to call it, was getting Stockdale to break.

His captors kept him in the main torture room in the most isolated part of the prison. After a month straight of torture, they thought they had him. They thought he was broken and ready to be marched down town to commit treason in front of television cameras.

Before they could, they needed him to look presentable, so they took him out of the torture room to a bathroom where he’s told to shower and shave.

Left alone in the bathroom, Stockdale grabbed the razor he was given to shave, and sliced open his scalp. He’s bandaged and thrown in a cell while his captors look for something to cover the wounds, now even more determined to parade him in front of cameras.

Stockdale, realizing he needed to further disfigure himself, took a wooden stool and bashed his face until he could barely see.

Guards rushed in and debated with one another about what to tell their commander. “You tell him,” Stockdale interrupted, “that the captain will not be going downtown.”

The sheer bravery and strength. It’s just unreal—a living embodiment of what Epictetus said, “you may bind up my leg, but not even Zeus has the power to break my freedom of choice.” His captors deprived him. They tortured him. They beat him. They stripped him of his possessions. But they could not break him.

Simone Biles

She was called “selfish,” a “quitter,” a “shame to the country,” and the proof that, “we are raising a generation of weak people.”

But actually, what she did was incredibly disciplined and unselfish.

At the Tokyo Olympics, four-time gold medalist Simone Biles withdrew from the all-around competition, an event she won gold in at the Rio de Janeiro games. Had she competed, Biles would have been vying to become the first woman to win back-to-back gold medals in the all-around in over fifty years.

The day before she made the decision to withdraw, Biles felt off. Her take-offs felt off. Her aerials felt off. Her landings felt off. And she knew, if she were to perform the way she was performing, she would have cost her teammates a medal.

So Biles put the team first. “I can’t risk a medal for the team,” she explained, “so I need to call it.” She admitted, “you usually don’t hear me say things like that because I’ll usually persevere and push through things, but not to cost the team a medal.”

Stoicism, being disciplined, is not about punishing yourself. It’s a firm school, for sure, but as Seneca, after a lifetime of study of philosophy, came to judge his own growth: “What progress have I made?” he wrote. “I have begun to be a friend to myself.”

It is an act of self discipline to be kind to yourself, to rest when you’re not feeling your best, to put the team first—that’s what friends do.

Marcus Aurelius

Late in his reign, sick and possibly near death, Stoic Emperor Marcus Aurelius received surprising news. His old friend and most trusted general, Avidius Cassius, had rebelled in Syria. Having heard the emperor was vulnerable or possibly dead, the ambitious general declared himself Caesar and assumed the throne.

Marcus should have been angry. After all, this man was trying to take his job and possibly his life. If we think about what other emperors did to their rivals and enemies–for instance Nero killed his own mother and Otho had Galba murdered in 69 A.D. and paraded his head around Rome–it makes Marcus’s response all the more unusual. Because he didn’t immediately set out to crush this man who had betrayed him, who threatened his life, his family, and his legacy. Instead, Marcus did nothing. He even kept the news secret from his troops, who might have been enraged or provoked on his behalf—and simply waited: Would Cassius come to his senses?

The man did not. And so Marcus Aurelius called a council of his soldiers and made a rather extraordinary announcement. They would march against Cassius and obtain the “great prize of war and of victory.” But of course, because it was Marcus, this war prize was something wholly different.

Marcus informed them of his plan to capture Cassius, but not kill him. Instead, he would “forgive a man who has wronged one, to remain a friend to one who has transgressed friendship, to continue faithful to one who has broken faith.”

In a true Stoic fashion, Marcus had controlled his perceptions. He wasn’t angry, he didn’t despise his enemy. He would not say an ill word against him. He would not take it personally. Then he acted—rightly and firmly—ordering troops to Rome to calm the panicking crowds and then set out to do what must be done: protect the empire, put down a threat.

As he told his men, if there was one profit they could derive from this awful situation that they had not wanted, it would be to “settle this affair well and show to all mankind that there is a right way to deal even with civil wars.”

It brings to mind a line from another Stoic, Seneca: “Bestow pardon for many things; seek pardon for none.” This is a common theme in Stoicism—one we hear often in the writings of Marcus Aurelius: Hold yourself to a very high standard, and don’t make excuses when you fail to meet it. Meanwhile, leave other people to their standards and make every excuse you can when they fail. Be tough on yourself; be understanding to your fellow citizens.

–

Stoicism is not a philosophy for school. It never has been. It’s been a philosophy for life.

“Show me a Stoic, if you know of one,” Epictetus said. “Show me someone untroubled with disturbing thoughts about illness, danger, death, exile or loss of reputation. By all the gods, I want to see a Stoic!”

So go and do as the Stoics have done all throughout history. Do the right thing. Be strong in the face of adversity. Show us a Stoic. Show us the actions of a philosopher.

Today. Tomorrow. Always.

August 30, 2022by Ryan Holiday
Blog

Why I Pick up Trash at the Beach

I have lived on a rural country road for many years.

It is unpaved and unmaintained by the county or the state, lined with trees, and more frequently crossed by deer and jack rabbits than people.

It’s a throwback to an older, simpler way of life.

It’s also a throwback to a scene I’ve always remembered from Mad Men, where Don Draper and his family finish their picnic and then nonchalantly throw all their trash into the grass below.

My experience walking and running and biking and driving on this road has been to witness the return of that attitude. People dump tires and old mattresses. They dump debris from construction sites. They dump beer bottles and candy wrappers. They dump illegal deer kills and for some inexplicable and alarming reason, a lot of dead dogs.

At first, this just pissed me off—especially because the nails kept giving me flats. It made me angry at humanity and the place that I lived. I tried calling the police and animal control and my local politicians—of course, they did nothing. I put up cameras which did nothing. I despaired about the climate and the future. I thought about moving.

But then one morning on my walk with my kids, a thought hit me that was both freeing and indicting. How many times do I have to walk past this litter, I thought, before I am complicit in its existence. Even if I moved to a place where this didn’t happen, I thought, it would still be happening here. Marcus Aurelius was right when he said that you can also commit injustice by doing nothing.

So I started cleaning it up. The tires went into the back of my truck—and I paid to have them properly recycled. I was down in the gullies by the side of the road picking up soda bottles and plastic bags. I tossed countless nails and screws into the trash. I have put on face masks and gloves and scooped up dead goats, a dead calf and dead dogs which I burned or took to the back of my ranch to decompose in a less disruptive place.

I can’t say the experience was pleasurable, but it was empowering.

The Stoics would agree that the world can be ugly and awful and disappointing. They would just remind us that what we control is what we do about this. We control what difference we try to make. We control whether it makes us bitter or makes us better—whether we complain or just get to work.

But the ultimate reward came more recently, because we spent the last few weeks at the beach as a family. My kids were excited to play in the ocean and to build sand castles and have ice cream, of course. Yet they seemed to have the most fun running up and down the empty beach in the morning—unprompted by me—picking up trash left by the beach goers the day before and asking for my help lifting them up so they could put it in those paper bag trash cans that the county puts up every few hundred yards.

I posted about it on Instagram once and people showed me there was a whole hashtag of people doing this. It started with a viral Facebook post in 2019, which has 335,000 shares and 102,000 likes (and counting). A guy posted before and after photos with this caption:

“Here is a new #challenge for all you bored teens. Take a photo of an area that needs some cleaning or maintenance, then take a photo after you have done something about it, and post it.”

The challenge spread globally thanks to the #TrashTag hashtag. You can see people cleaning up a beach in Mumbai, filling up dumpsters full of trash in Kansas City, and collecting garbage in Vietnam.

A Daily Stoic reader emailed me a little while back to tell me about how his picking up trash spread locally. In his townhome community, there’s a trash dumping problem. “It was driving me mad,” he wrote. He put up cameras to try to catch offenders. He stayed up late to see if he could run them off. Then he came across the video I made and instead of policing his area, he began cleaning it up. “I saw it rub off on some of my neighbors and family,” he said. And now, the number of neighbors picking up trash outnumbers the number of neighbors dumping trash.

The Stoics spoke of our “circles of concern.” Our first concern, they said, is our mind. But beyond this is our concern for our bodies then for our immediate family then our extended family. Like concentric rings, these circles were followed by our concern for our community, our city, our country, our empire, our world.

The work of philosophy, the Stoics said, was to draw this outer concern inward, to learn how to care as much as possible for as many people as possible, to do as much good for them as possible.

There’s a sign by the track I run at in Austin, put there by the football player Hollywood Henderson (who paid for the track). It says, “Leave This Place Better Than You Found It.”

To me, that’s a pretty good life philosophy. In things big and small (but mostly small). As Zeno said, “well-being is realized by small steps, but is truly no small thing.” You don’t have to save the planet. You don’t have to save someone’s life. Can you just make things a little bit better?

There is a Mr. Rogers quote I love. “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news,” Rogers said, “my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’”

We decide what we look for in life—do we get mad at the people making the mess or do we look towards the people cleaning things up? We decide whether to despair or find hope and goodness.

But I actually think we can go further. Do we decide to be one of the helpers? Do we decide to pick up the trash? Do we decide to leave this place a little better than we found it?

That’s what makes the difference…and life better for everyone, but especially you.

August 17, 2022by Ryan Holiday
Blog

This Is The Best Career Decision You Can Possibly Make

At birth, each of us is original. Our DNA has never existed before on this planet. No one will ever have our unique set of experiences. No one will ever have our totally unique point of view.

There has never been anyone like us…and there never will be again. We have been given a complete and total monopoly over the business of being us.

Yet what do we do with this rarest of rarities? We give it up! We choose not to be ourselves. We become our own trustbuster.

That’s something I’ve always loved about the Stoics. They were characters. The Stoics were not afraid to be themselves, to be seen as weird. Epictetus tells us about the Stoic Agrippinus being asked why he was so difficult, why he couldn’t just conform to the same practices as everyone else. “I want to be the red, that small and brilliant portion which causes the rest to appear comely and beautifully…’be like the majority of people?’ And if I do that,” Agrippinus liked to answer, “How shall I any longer be the red?”

Sure, being ‘red’ got Agrippinus into trouble. It also made him great. It made him one of the only people who actively resisted the tyranny and injustices of Nero’s regime. It made him famous for all time.

When we are ourselves, we have value. When we are like everyone else…we are fungible. We are replaceable–by definition. We have little value…by definition.

Peter Thiel has said before that the only kind of business worth making is one where you can have a monopoly. The profits, he said, are in owning an entire market. So it goes with ourselves as individuals. You want to be just another investment banker? You want to be another business writer publishing the same boring books that quote the same boring studies with the same bland covers fighting for spots at the same bland conferences?

No way.

BE YOU. Be the only one of you in the whole world. Be the red. That’s where the fun is (without having to fake it). That’s where the money is (you can name your price). That’s where the value is (you can’t be replaced).

When my wife and I decided to open a bookstore, I bought a course from a bookstore consultant. One of the first things they told me was we’d have to carry at least 10,000 titles. That’s what the average indie bookstore carries. It was, as far as I could tell, an unques­tioned assumption in the business.

Naturally, the first thing we did was the opposite of that. At the Painted Porch, we carry roughly 600 titles. The vast majority of them are not new, or even particularly famous. But they are books we have loved over the years.

It was one of the best decisions we made–both personally and professionally. Not only did this make it cheaper and easier to run the bookstore, it makes us stand out. The store reflects who we are. If people want a specific book, they go to a certain trillion-dollar e-commerce behemoth. If people want to discover new books and have a unique experience, they come to us. There are a lot of bookstores in the world, but there are none like ours.

The Stoics had a head for business in that way. Two thousand years before Peter Thiel said that, “competition is for losers,” Epictetus quipped that, “You can always win if you only enter competitions where winning is up to you.”

When you’re the fortieth Indian restaurant in town, your chances of success are dependent on so many things that are outside your influence: how good the other restaurants are, who gets the best location, whether the critic at the local paper likes your biryani. The margins of victory are likely to be small, even if you do get lucky, because the spoils are split between so many competitors. Worse still, if your success and happiness are dependent on winning that kind of difficult contest and you don’t win, you have set yourself up to be a double loser.

It’s far better then, if you were to launch a restaurant, to come up with something totally new, or to create a new kind of dining experience for which you can have a monopoly (there is a wonderful book on this called Blue Ocean Strategy). Where the contest is not with other people, but with being the best version of yourself. It’s better still that you so enjoy this endeavor that your happiness comes from the process and the pursuit itself, rather than the outcome. In this way, you’re set up, if not guaranteed, to be a double winner.

Too many people pointlessly enter contests where the outcome is dependent on forces outside their control. They think it’s safer to be like everyone else…when in fact, what they’re really doing is hiding themselves in the chorus, protecting themselves from judgment. They’re less likely to be singled out and laughed at, sure, but they’re guaranteeing that they’ll never really be noticed or appreciated. Theirs becomes the Indian restaurant that will never be great, but it will never be closed. That is the best you can expect when you’re not playing to win…you’re playing not to lose.

How sad that is. What a waste of their uniqueness.

I read an interview recently with the great architect and designer Frank Gehry. “When I teach a class” he said, “the first thing I do with students is ask them to write their signature on a piece of paper. And we spread them out and I say, ‘They all look different and that’s you, and that’s you, and that’s you, so stay with that forever.’”

Staying with that forever doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be the biggest or most popular thing in the world. But it does mean you’ll have a monopoly. And that you’ll always be a winner.

The wise, whether it’s an Epictetus or a Peter Thiel, know that the better contest is with yourself. They know the best route to success is to be yourself.

And to stay that way forever.

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August 3, 2022by Ryan Holiday

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.” - Murakami

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