Venture Step

Dalton (00:01)
Welcome to VentureStep podcasts where we discuss entrepreneurship, industry trends, and the occasional book review. Have you ever felt overwhelmed by life's up and downs? I know you have, but a few years ago, a simple gift changed my perspective. It was a book called The Daily Stoic. Before we dive in, I'm your host Dalton. My background is a bit of a mix of programming with a focus of data science and insurance. Right now I work in the commercial habitational space.

which it basically means I help sell insurance to condos and apartments. Offline, you could find me running, building my side business or lost in a good book. That's probably why a philosophy book about finding calm in the chaos resonated with me so much. You can listen to my podcast in audio or video format on Spotify or YouTube and then audio format on Apple podcasts or anywhere else you find your podcasts.

In today's episode, I want to discuss the book, The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday, a brief one sentence of what stoicism is, discuss my thoughts about the book and who Carter is and the person who gave me the gift.

So first thing is the daily stoic is a daily meditations book. It's not meant for you to read multiple pages per day. You're really supposed to read a page a day, write down your notes, your thoughts, and then maybe come back to it later on that day. Like read a page first thing in the morning, write down your notes, and then read again before you go to bed.

and your perspective might change besides the events that occurred during that day or just maybe from something you heard or saw or observed in your external environment, that might've changed your perspective. So you reread the passage and you might get a different take. That being said, there is a summary from Ryan Holiday about what he thinks that the quotes from these philosophers focus on.

But the book is broken up in a couple parts and every month has a different theme. So I don't know, let's see. So part one is the discipline of perception, and then part two is the discipline of action, and then part three is the discipline of will. But each month has, within those parts there's these sub -parts. So each month is split out. So in January it's about clarity, February is passions and emotions.

and so on and you know, Jun is problem solving. And from those they have these, you know, everything is steamed and you read one passage per day. Okay, so now we have a good idea of how the daily stoic is structured. What is stoicism? I think there's some confusion about stoicism where people assume that stoicism means that you shouldn't have emotion.

But it's really not about that. It's about controlling your emotions, not necessarily dissuading them to where they don't exist, but where you focus on the control of your internal environment, how you handle events, and the idea of how you perceive things that are happening to you or how you express yourself will prevent you from having issues.

you'll be able to find peace in your external and internal environment. And from that, you'll be able to practice stoicism. I'm definitely not an expert and there's people that have read a lot more and definitely well -versed and have a lot more knowledge than myself, but that's basically the gist of it. You should focus on what you have full control over and from...

Stoicism is basically your thoughts. You can't control what happens to your body. You can't control what people do outside of your body. You can't control people from going inside your personal space. Really, your only personal space is your brain. Your thoughts inside of your internal environment is the only real place where no one can harm you unless you allow it.

My stoicism journey or stoic journey, I think started when I was a teen, just from the mental models that were provided to me by my coaches and my parents. I never really realized it was related to stoicism. It was just more of the life advice and how they treated different situations that I took from. And then Carter, Carter's my childhood friend who gifted me this book.

A couple of years ago, I've since read the book two and a half times. Didn't finish it the third time, but every time you read the book, you have these different takes. Every time you read the passages, the passage are the same, but the man has changed. So Serenity through Stoicism. I think from reading some philosophy books,

I think some books will make you feel uneasy and kind of gross. A good example would be 48 Laws of Power. 48 Laws of Power is a best seller and it's about manipulating or not being manipulated and just the rules of social engagement. You read the book and afterwards you feel gross. It's just like there is no.

there is no in between. If you would implement everything on the 48 laws of power, it's just you're a gross human being. And maybe that is the way to be the most successful or whatever. I don't think so at all. But from reading the book afterwards, you have this feeling of disgust. And if you don't, then you've got some issues.

And I don't know, there's not much I can say to you. But from the daily stoic, you don't get those feelings after you read a passage. Like you get this, you get this feeling of calm and in this calming feeling and just peaceful and your mind is clear and you feel. You know, if you if you have this kind of chaotic thing going on in your life, you just drift away with these passages and then afterwards go into deep thought.

and ponder what you thought about the passage and what your takes are and maybe some previous life experiences that were triggered by what you read. But it is a great book where...

In times of chaos, you can just find your lighthouse and just sit down and just drift away.

And it's a good place to go to help manage your emotions and manage your response to them. I think that Stoicism is something that you have to practice over and over again and revisit. So just because you've read the passage or just because you are Stoic or whatever the situation is, it's not like

you don't have to constantly work on it. Cause if you don't constantly work on it, then it soon fades away. So, you know, not erodes like, like if a tsunami came in and just wrecked your house, it was more like step by step, like, you know, a raindrop at a time, just rotting away at this, this foundation that you've built. So to keep that, you gotta put up levies. You gotta.

Make sure that you put some sealant on your foundation or whatever you do. You have to work on it and maintain what you've built. Just like anything in life.

So I talked about it a little bit earlier, but the book evolves with you. And Ryan Holiday talks about this when he brings up his book sometimes and I follow him. I like him. I think you should follow him too. He's got some good takes on just philosophy and stoicism. He gives a lot of good book recommendations, but that's sidebar.

But yeah, definitely the book evolves with you. And so, you know, you'll have different takeaways over time. You'll have different life experiences. You if you enter a new chapter, a new job, you get a kid, you have a serious partner, you get married, divorced, anything like that. And then you pick up this book, what you read five years ago is the same exact words, but your takeaway from that one passage.

I'm not saying should, but will definitely be different. And so you'll have these quotes that will resonate with you in different matters as you change as a person, which I think is interesting and is definitely true as I've read the book two and a half times and definitely love it. I don't know. You can't get enough of it.

So I have one favorite passage that I would like to read. So this is June 12th by.

June 12th, a trained mind is better than any script. In this way, you must understand how laughable it is to say, tell me what to do, what advice could I possibly give? No, a far better request is train my mind to adopt any circumstance. In this way, if circumstances take you off script, you won't be desperate for new prompting.

So this is on page 178 if you pick up the book. But the reason why I like this prompt is it's very relatable for myself. And so my first job that I got, my boss was a little bit more hands off and he didn't necessarily give me prompting or a script. He was stated that he didn't believe in giving instructions. He...

believed in giving frameworks of which you should think about problems and how should you go about problem solving. So he wasn't necessarily curious or.

micromanaging the way that I did something, you just wanted to provide the right thought process for my mind to approach certain problems the right way. And that's huge because things do go off script and things do happen that are unexpected. And for you to be able to adapt to the situation because you have the right training to do so is,

I think essential to live a good life. If things aren't going your way, it's easy to say, oh, it is what it is. But if you're working on a project, a personal project or a professional project in your career and things aren't going right and you have this kind of 20 page instruction book where it's like step one, step two, step three, and then your step four,

something happens between step three and step four, you got no idea what to do. So if you train your mind to have the right thought process on, on solving these problems, then you don't have any problems. You just have obstacles. And so I think that is a wonderful passage about not looking for

instructions look for kind of a framework or a mental training process. And that's something I try to emphasize with my peers at the company I work at, not necessarily providing step -by -step instructions, but training people to solve the problem with these various issues.

So I think it's clear that I really enjoyed the daily stoic. I mean, I really got to work on my transitions. That's something I got to work on as a host. But if you listen to the last podcast episode, I think that you'll be able to listen to every single episode because the episode last week was horrible. That being said, I know that...

it's displayed that I have a great affection for this book, which is true. I do. I have some dislikes though. One, I really wanted to read more than one page. It was so tough to put the book down. It's such a good book. So, ah, the daily meditation piece. It's rough for me because I really enjoyed reading more than one page. So I would typically read more than one page and then,

maybe I read five pages and then maybe for the next day I read pages two through five and then add six and then for the next day I read page three through, you know, six add seven.

So that's not really a major critique, but yeah, I just had an issue putting the book down. One thing that was kind of disappointing was at the back of the book, there is book suggestions. And then at the end, they say, oh, if you want a more or additional books, you send us an email and we'll send you a list of books. And so from my experience, and I don't know if other people have the same.

the same experience as myself. Sorry, I had to repeat myself because I accidentally took my face out of the mic. But basically you send an email over to them asking for a book recommendations. And I think that what is holding them up is they do a personalized book recommendation and they have an actual human recommend the books to you. But basically, the book is so popular, so many people send them emails that they're on such a backlog that.

they haven't been able to send me a recommended book list and it's been, I don't know, a couple years. So I don't think they're gonna get to it. But they do have some good recommendations on the back already and I've read some of those and we'll talk about that some other time.

My friend Carter. So Carter is one of my childhood friends that I grew up with. He was definitely my best friend in high school and middle school and I think also in elementary. Yeah. And Carter is a good friend and you know, he went, we went to separate universities, but definitely always stayed connected. And for, I think a graduation gift or for my birthday, he gifted me this book.

And I don't know, one, one cool thing that he did was he, and he didn't even remember that he did it was he put in a, he asked me to read the book within a certain time frame, the timeframe. And he put in a like chicken dinner voucher from Publix. And if you're not familiar who or what Publix is, is basically a grocery store and they have.

obviously they sell chickens. So it was a voucher to get like a rotisserie chicken or in a pie or something. And if I would have read it within the timeframe that he wanted me to read the book, I would have had a chicken dinner waiting for me, but I didn't. So that was, that was pretty funny.

To conclude today's episode, we talked about briefly what Stoicism is, what the Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday book is and kind of the structure, my favorite passage.

A little bit of a critique, not much. The book is very good.

and

I think I improved this episode a little bit. We'll see. But I think today is the day where we say goodbye until next week. I think we're coming down to that time.

I think the Daily Stoic is a great gateway and it might not be for everyone, but the door.

you know, this door was open for me and philosophy helps me in my day to day life. And so I couldn't recommend it anymore. Definitely if it's something that you're just getting into, this is a great book. It's very light. The translation is great where it's not too old English. It's translated recently by Ryan and it is a phenomenal book that I couldn't recommend more.

Thank you for listening today and I'll talk to you next week. Once again, you can listen to the podcasts on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.

Thank you. Have a great day. Bye.