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Welcome to the Daily Stoke. For each day, we read a short passage designed to help you cultivate the strength,

insight, wisdom necessary for living good life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2000 year old philosophy that has guided some of history's

greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us at DailyStoic.com.

Hey, this is Brian Holiday. Welcome to another episode of Ask Daily Stoke.

You send us questions about stoicism. I answer to the best of my ability. I give you some my personal advice and then of course some advice from the stoics.

So our first question today is, according to stoicism, we must work on things that we can control and not on the results.

But when one is trying to be ambitious in sets goals, most of the goals are result oriented. How can I be ambitious and not worry about the results at the same time?

This is a great question because it is kind of a paradox in stoicism, but there's some really good advice for Marcus to realize on this. So he talks about how

to tie your ambition to external results is to hand your sanity over to other people.

This is a recipe for misery. What you want to do is focus your goals on things you control. So I can only really talk from experience here, but when I think about this as a writer, my goal is not to write a book that sells a certain amount of copies.

My goal is not to hit the best seller list or to win certain awards. My goal is to write the best possible book that I can. Obviously I want to sell lots of copies. I want to reach lots of people.

I'm not averse to receiving awards or recognition, but ego is the enemy came out. It should have debuted on the New York Times best seller list, but it did not. Stillness is the key came out and it debuted at number one.

Am I calling one a success in the other failure, even though by the same objective criteria, they both deserve to be in similar places. No, I think stillness is better not because it hit number one, but because I know that I would be able to do it.

I was better as a writer. I put in more work. I put in more energy. I didn't leave any stone unturned that it was recognized that it externally noticed fantastic, but that's not why it was better. I'm focusing my goals always on the parts of it that I control.

I think if you have a football player, if your goal is to win a Super Bowl, it's great, but what if somebody drops a pass in the in zone, your goal should be to have the best season you can to do as much as you can for the team to think about it in that sense.

I think I think the Stoics try to make it is it's not that their goal a verse is also kind of an eastern concept, but it's when we're thinking about goals, it's like how do we make the goal primarily about things that we control that things that are up to us and to use epic teetuses terms so that's how I think about it in my in my own career, I want to get better, I always want to improve, I always want to be making progress, but I don't want that progress to be up to other people necessarily, I want that to be extra.

I want that to be bonus and actually one of the things I'm proudest though, which is actually kind of part of my goal on stillness is the key was to be more indifferent to the external results. So my first book, which came out about 10 years ago, trust me, I'm lying.

Let's say I was 10% convinced I did a great job and 90% looking to see how it debuted on the best so I think it debuted on the Wall Street Journalist. Now I would say by the time stillness came out 10 years later or nine books later, it was precisely flipped, I was 90% inwardly focused on what I controlled in 10% looking for that external validation, and I think that's a stronger position to be in and that's a better way to live.

All right, so somebody writes in my sister has a bit of depression, I've been trying to encourage her to learn and practice stillism. One day I introduced momentum, or he to her asking her to stop paying attention to criticism and trivial matters, and she asked me, so if I'm going to die one day, why should I work at all, why shouldn't I go and play and enjoy my life, she's not happy at work. And so how does stillism and momentum, or answer this question.

The first thing I would say if you're talking to a depressed person who's not feeling great about themselves, letting them know they're going to die is maybe not the best pick me up, but I think what the Stokes would say is not, they might not actually disagree with your sister, she's, you're telling her, look, life is fine at you, you don't get to do this forever, it's not, shouldn't I go and play and enjoy my life, you should absolutely enjoy your life and you should realize that life is too short to be spent at a job, living

in a place that does not make you happy that is not getting the best out of you. So I do think part of momentum or is designed to provoke the exact question that she's asking. I think it's not, oh, you're going to die so let's go do heroin, let's have an orgy, as I've said before, it's, let's make sure I'm fully living this moment, and I think when I feel a little bit depressed, that's something I think about, look, I'm not going to be here that much longer.

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