Hey, I'm Jake Humphrey and you're listening to High Performance. Our conversation for you every single week.

This is the podcast that reminds you that it's within your ambition, your purpose, your story.

It's all there. We just help unlock it by turning the lived experiences of the planet's highest performers into your life lessons.

So allow myself and Professor Damien Hughes to speak to the greatest thinkers on the planet so they can be your teacher.

And I am so excited about today's episode. Can I just apologise for the number of times that I've mentioned over the last few years,

stoicism, the daily stoic and Ryan Holiday. It has become a little bit of an obsession with mine. I listen to it in the car,

when taking the kids to school and they start rolling their eyes when the amazing daily stoic podcast episodes start playing,

because they hear them every day, not because they're not brilliant, because they are brilliant and they are game changes.

And before we tell you more about Ryan Holiday, I read his book, The Daily Stoic Everyday, and I opened up a random page,

and this is what it said. We don't abandon our pursuits because we despair of ever perfecting them.

Now that was said thousands of years ago by Epic Titus. And what Epic Titus is reminding us is that we're never going to be perfect.

If there even is such a thing as perfection because we are human, our pursuits shouldn't be aimed at perfection.

They should be aimed at progress. And with that in mind, welcome to High Performance, Ryan Holiday.

There's nothing that isn't enhanced by discipline. So this idea for The Stoics was that, you know, the most powerful you can be is to be under your own power,

that they said no one is fit to rule who is not first master of themselves.

As life throws difficult things at us, discipline is required. And you don't want in that moment of trial or adversity or difficulty to find that this is a totally unfamiliar space for you.

When you live below your means, when you, you know, sort of live and you try to avoid superfluous things when you try to keep ambition and check,

it does have the benefit of creating a kind of a buffer or a freedom that allows you not to always need, need, need to do more and be recognized.

Don't think of death as something in the future that you are moving towards.

Think of death as something that's happening right now. So the time that passes belongs to death.

And so the idea that, you know, that time once, once it goes by, once an hour is wasted, it is dead forever.

Once a year of your life is dead forever because you spent it being sorry for yourself, you spent it drunk, you know, you spent it scared, whatever it was, you know, you never get that back.

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