Stoicism Requires You to Stay a Student | Codie Sanchez

Ryan Holiday (0:00)

Welcome to The Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of The Daily Stoic Podcast. It's crazy to me, right? We've been doing this Daily Stoic thing for 10 years. I've been doing this writing, researching, philosophy thing for 20 years.

I know a thing or two, but I'm just constantly humbled by how much I don't know.

First off, how many new things I'm learning, and then how often I'm having to learn the same lesson again and again in a new way, in a new context. That's just what it is, right?

You never get the hang of it. There's always something new. There's always some new situation, new crisis, new problem. You have to become a student and then you have to stay a student. I talk about this in the ego book, but I talk about it a lot in the wisdom book. Like, the stoic virtue of wisdom is embodied in that idea of Marcus Aurelius seen leaving the palace in Rome. Where are you going? I'm off to see Sexist the Philosopher to learn that, which I do not yet know. That's what it is. You're waking up every day and you gotta go learn that, which you don't know. You gotta read, you gotta ask questions, you gotta listen to podcasts, you gotta have a mentor. That's one of the things we're gonna talk about in today's episode. You might have caught some of the previous installments of this little deep dive, but we had Codie Sanchez out a couple of months ago and we walked through how each of the stoic virtues applies to business. Courage, it's putting yourself out there, going after it. Discipline, that's staying at it. Justice, that's the ethics, that's the integrity, that's the values you bring to the business. And then this is wisdom. How do you learn from the experiences of others? How do you make sure that you remain humble so it doesn't humble you? How do you stay hungry? How do you focus on all there is to know, not just what you do know? And that's what we get into in today's episode. Codie is an entrepreneur and investor. She's the founder of Contrarian Thinking. She's also the author of Main Street Millionaire. She has a new book that just came out on September 18th called Own Or Be Owned, Build a Business So Good It Doesn't Need You. So again, that's something I am learning and working on. Like how can I not be so central to everything? Cause I have other priorities, I have other things going on. You know, you get burned out in some ways. How do you build a business at scales that work? And then, and the way you learn it is by talking to and working with and modeling yourself on people who are a bit further on, who've learned these lessons in painful ways and have come back to share that with you. You can follow Codie on Instagram at Codie Sanchez, on TikTok at Codie Sanchez with an underscore in between. You can follow her on YouTube at CodieSanchezCT. I've been admiring some of the stuff she's been doing on YouTube and trying to learn from it, right? That's what this is all about. You can grab signed copies of Main Street Millionaire by Codie Sanchez at The Painted Porch. We don't have signed copies of Own Or Be Owned because it wasn't out yet when she came out to do it. But you can check the show notes to listen to the other episodes or watch the full episode on our YouTube channel, which I will link to.

Okay, so the last virtue is wisdom, which I think people tend to think of is like this thing that you have at the end of your life, not a thing you're accumulating through the course of your life. It's not this place that you arrive, it's more of a process, it's a byproduct of learning and experience and mentors and all these things. But it is weird how often people will be like, I'm going to risk my entire life, all my money to go start this business, and then, by the way, I'm not going to read any books about it, I'm not going to ask anyone's advice, and I'm going to totally learn it on my own as if nobody has done this before. It's crazy.

Codie Sanchez (3:58)

One of my lessons that I learned early on in life is like, I remember talking to one of my mentors, he gave me a piece of advice that was basically like, whatever you learn from somebody, try to be the person that they tell other people about.