YouSaid · the spoken record

William Irvine

lines on the record: 74
first: 2021-11-02
most recent: 2021-11-02
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Father, husband, and teacher, that would do it. So on my tombstone, if I have one, I would actually like to be described this somewhere composted down of spread in a tomato, a garden, and be served as a tomato salad on some fine summer day. But if I did have a tombstone, husband, father, teacher would be the three.”
2021-11-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #123 William Irvine: How To Live a Stoic Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of teaching. I reach a whole lot more people than I do in the classroom. And I get emails from people. It's wonderful to be changing people's lives. And if I'm changing them for the better, that's better still, right? But that I'm reaching an audience. That's wonderful.”
2021-11-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #123 William Irvine: How To Live a Stoic Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“that students and their parents said, okay, you've got to do this. You've got to take this guy because he's going to give you some very important insights about something. And in fact, most of my students, if they weren't forced to take my classes, would not take my classes because they're in it for a career. And there are people who are interested in law or politics who actually take philosophy. So it's curious we still have that aspect going. So I regard myself primarily as a teacher. Professionally, I'm a teacher, and I regard my teaching as having two forms of outreach. I teach in the classroom and I teach through publications. And I'm one of the luckiest people alive in that I get paid for thinking about things I want to learn about and then sharing what I've learned with a broader audience. And I regard it as a wonderful form.”
2021-11-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #123 William Irvine: How To Live a Stoic Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In modern times, academic schools of philosophy, and these would be departments of philosophy and universities, I don't have to attract students. They have to take me. That's just the way it is. But then you realize, gosh, what would it be like if I had to have a product”
2021-11-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #123 William Irvine: How To Live a Stoic Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, there is one, the skeptics, there's the Epicureans, there are numerous schools. These were schools in ancient Greece. So they had, it was like schools of martial arts, right? So if you wanted to start a school of philosophy, what did you have to do? You had to have a formula and then you had to gain students. But there was an ongoing business of creating philosophy schools. And you kind of had to come up with a, you capture one corner of the market by coming up with one particular way of thinking. The people who went there, some of them came for self-improvement. But parents would have sent their kids there so they could gain skills that the kids could use in their adult careers. So there might be politics, so you learned logic, you learned speaking skills, might be the law. So you did that. So it was very much unlike.”
2021-11-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #123 William Irvine: How To Live a Stoic Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you'll listen very carefully to what they have to say. You'll talk to them not trying to refute them, not trying to disprove them, not trying to show your mastery, but to learn from them. And then the follow-up thing a lot of people say at that point is, well, in this particular debate, there are no intelligent, articulate people on the other side, which, I should add, is a sign of closed mindedness on your part. So then you're precisely the person who needs to seek out those people, because almost invariably they're out there, almost invariably, you can gain something from talking to them.”
2021-11-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #123 William Irvine: How To Live a Stoic Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not only letting new ideas in, but exploring new ideas. One of the new ideas is that many of your old ideas are mistaken. That's a sign of open-mindedness. You know, if you sort of acknowledge, yeah, a bunch of what I believe right now, those beliefs are mistaken. Things I was told when I was a kid wasn't true. Things my tribe believes they aren't true. And so one thing you'll do is you'll reach out to intelligent articulate people on the other side of the debate.”
2021-11-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #123 William Irvine: How To Live a Stoic Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That he simply wouldn't open himself to. And we have this psychological phenomenon called confirmation bias, which unfortunately, left to run, will make us more and more closed-minded. Confirmation bias is when you believe something, you start looking for evidence that what you believe is true and you start ignoring evidence that what you believe is false. So you can imagine it like dropping a little one crystal of sugar into a super saturated sugar solution in that one tiny little crystal will grow into a massive crystal. That's how it is with your beliefs. So a little tiny belief can get into your mind. And once it's there, it can grow until it becomes a major, major obsession. So the trick, if you want to have a healthy mind, is you're simultaneously.”
2021-11-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #123 William Irvine: How To Live a Stoic Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right now, the project I'm working on is about being simultaneously skeptical and open minded. And I think that's the key if you want to be a person whose mind is full primarily of true and useful beliefs. So imagine somebody who is open-minded but not skeptical before you knew it. Their mind would be full of conspiracy theories.”
2021-11-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #123 William Irvine: How To Live a Stoic Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“the optimal option. You can put all the thought you want. But one thing's for sure, and that is that if you don't even consider the optimal option, there's no way you can pick it, so that notion of okay control things that you can have control over or worry about things that you can have control over and spend active thought laying out the options because there can be multiple options. So my wife and I, when we're trying to decide whether to go somewhere, what to do when we get there, I'll say, okay, well, here's a bunch of different options we have available to us. And so for me, that's just second nature. You actively think about options, and some of them can be way out there options because you never know. And then you choose among those in a rational way.”
2021-11-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #123 William Irvine: How To Live a Stoic Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Stoic advice on decision making is you fragment it into the part you can control and the thing you the part you can't control and you focus your attention on the part you can control and of course they were also logicians so you know there's a very rational way you can go about making decisions number one is you map out your options so I'm actually at work on a project right now where I go into that in greater detail you know mapping out your options there will usually be the obvious thing to do which might not be the optimal thing to do and so one thing I tell my students when I teach critical thinking is it's very important that you invest quality time into thinking about what your options are and that can involve a degree of brainstorming there's no guarantee you're going to pick”
2021-11-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #123 William Irvine: How To Live a Stoic Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was smooth and easy going when someone else took care of whatever bothered you, you would be like the bubble boy. And as a result, as soon as you were exposed to psychological challenges, you would crumble. They would seem like major, major incidents. I worry we live in a time when a lot of people are in, to some extent, one of these psychological bubbles and we're protecting them from being exposed to these irritants. And we want to help them. We're trying to protect them. But it could be, I think if you brought the, traveled the Stoics forward in time to today, they would say, you know, what they need is just a kind of a more challenging environment. And then they will be able to cope with the challenges they experience.”
2021-11-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #123 William Irvine: How To Live a Stoic Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the bone marrow, and it killed him. It killed the guy. So I have a relative who's actually a pediatrician, and I asked him about the immune system and how you should respond to that with respect to kids. And he said that the official medical advice is a kid should eat a pound of dirt. And that's not literally a pound of, literally dirt, but to be exposed to germs growing up is a very healthy thing because you'll have a healthy immune system. And a kid left to his own devices will do strange things, will suck on the remote control for the TV, will taste the dog, you know, if you have a dog, we'll do these things. A psychological immune system is a similar thing. If you lived in a psychological bubble that is in an environment in which you never had challenges in which people never insulted you, in which it was just all.”
2021-11-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #123 William Irvine: How To Live a Stoic Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Psychological immune system, a biological immune system, of course, in order to be healthy, your biological immune system, you have to expose yourself to germs. I'm going to use germs in the broad sense, but you have to expose yourself to germs and foreign bodies for your biological immune system to be healthy and active. So there are these cases like the case of the bubble boy who doctors early in his life figured out that he had no immune system. He grew up in a bubble, literally a plastic bubble with filtered air, meaning no human contact, meaning none of this was doing okay. And then when he was 10 or 12, he got a bone marrow transplant from his sister thinking this will cure it. Unfortunately, she had someone germ lurking in.”
2021-11-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #123 William Irvine: How To Live a Stoic Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now, the thing is you are wired to care very much about insults because, again, on the savannas of Africa, if you allowed yourself to be insulted, you lost social status, meaning you were less likely to eat, you were less likely to mate. So it's wired into you. And I remember being a teenager, what a troubling time of life. You know, you felt everything deeply. So there should be a stoic answer to that, but I haven't experimented deeply with that.”
2021-11-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #123 William Irvine: How To Live a Stoic Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They'll be kind of wondering did he hear me? I just insulted him. Did he hear me? And you let them stew like that. And then with luck, they'll say, they'll repeat the insult, at which point you say, yeah, I heard you the first time. And then you just go on with your conversation once again. It requires very little effort on your part, and yet it's a knockdown punch because here they are hitting you with their best shot and you aren't even hearing it. So a better way still would be to slip into a coma, you know? I mean, if you went up and were insulting a person who was comatose, man, you're an idiot that you would be doing such a thing. But what you do, it's the ultimate put down of, you know what you can say what you want. And it's just words. It is simply words. Go ahead.”
2021-11-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #123 William Irvine: How To Live a Stoic Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A better way to respond to an insult is with no response at all. So somebody says their insulting remark and you just carry on having whatever conversation you are having. And the interesting thing is, and you can watch this happen. So I wrote a book on insults called The Slap in the Face. So this was a follow-on book to a guide to the good life. And to say nothing at all. So you watch what they do. And it's really kind of fun because at first...”
2021-11-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #123 William Irvine: How To Live a Stoic Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That you can use, so I haven't given it a whole lot of thought. I'm aware that there are some people who have, but just the whole notion that kids are a prime candidate. You know, and other things like being grateful. And you have to be careful. You would have to package it with kids in mind. But here would be a great example, and that is kids can be very insulting. Number one strategy how to respond to an insult. Make a joke out of it and in other words, turn it around. So if somebody insults you, so here's one turnaround. You know, if that's the worst thing that you have to say about me, you really don't know me well enough to be insulting me. You should really put your attention somewhere else. But that requires a little bit of thought and a little bit of presence in the aftermath of being in.”
2021-11-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #123 William Irvine: How To Live a Stoic Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I used to think that Stoicism was a philosophy for older people, and in particular really old people, people facing near death. I thought, though, that's the primary target for them. But then at age of 40, you know, our age 50, I discovered it myself or stumbled across it myself and realized, no, no, it's not for old people. And I have had numerous people write to me and say, what about kids? And the more I think about that, the more I realize, for instance, your teen years are just a prime time for you to develop stoicism because that's when you really have to deal with your fellow human beings up close. You can't get away with them. You're stuck with them. You encounter them every day. And then you can have stoic coping strategies.”
2021-11-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #123 William Irvine: How To Live a Stoic Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Your ways, I can't bend over backwards for you the way you're sure you're bending over backwards for them. So can't live with them, can't live without them. But hey, welcome to the human experience.”
2021-11-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #123 William Irvine: How To Live a Stoic Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Does. And this sounds cruel, but he can't control himself. That's just who he is. It isn't cruel, though, because that's how you are. There's just things that you do because they just feel like the right thing to do. And so that's how you behave. So I'm not there yet. I'm working on it. Again, get back to me sometime in the next decade, and I might have the final solution there. But it really is tricky. So we human beings, we're social animals. We need other human beings around us. I call it vitamin P people. We need that contact. And you're going to be very unhealthy if you don't give that contact. The problem is people are just so difficult, right? They can't see things.”
2021-11-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #123 William Irvine: How To Live a Stoic Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, once you've realized that somebody has the ability to get under your skin. And, you know, I don't even think that they think of it in those terms. And so the best way to think of it is that's just them doing what they do. I think there are people who are allergic to me. So that's kind of how it goes. And so what is it that they're allergic to? Well, it's something about my personality. It's something that grates against their personality or their values. You know, relatives, you don't get to choose. And if you have relatives, it's wonderful if you can get along with them. You can work at getting along with them. But sometimes the best solution for all parties involved is you just keep your distance. And if they come up and start doing their normal act, then you just remind yourself, that's just what he does.”
2021-11-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #123 William Irvine: How To Live a Stoic Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It means you are controlling the one life that you have to live. And then the follow up question is, so if you're not controlling that life, who or what is? And why would you allow something else to control the one life you have to live? What a waste”
2021-11-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #123 William Irvine: How To Live a Stoic Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yep, giving into those voices encourages them hugely. You know, they live in the back closet of your mind, and they're always trying. But you give them one big success, you know, where you actually do quit. And it's like giving them superpowers. You know, it's like you injected them with adrenaline or whatever, because after that, they're going to own you. So there are times when I do quit. There are times when I'm not proud of it when it happens. But to wrestle with them. To wrestle with them, you're going to build up your sense of I can control aspects of my life. Self-discipline, right? Self-discipline. A lot of people undervalue self-discipline. You know, you're so straight and always doing what you want to do. But when you think about it in a different sense, self-discipline means what?”
2021-11-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #123 William Irvine: How To Live a Stoic Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, there are people who came in ahead of you. But no, no, no. I was playing a different game. Yeah, I know I was playing the rowing game, but I was playing a different game. And the game is number one, not to be afraid of failure, to go out there, to grapple with these voices in my head, and to do the training, the physical training necessary to be out there. And there's a background kind of thought of, yeah, you know what? I may have come in last place in that race, but I beat the approximately $7.5 billion people who didn't even show up at the starting line. Which is something to be proud of.”
2021-11-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #123 William Irvine: How To Live a Stoic Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Then the question is so did I fail? Well, actually not because one of the reasons I wrote is it's part of my Stoic training. Stoic training involves doing something that's very hard to do, running the risk of failure. Doing something that's going to activate. Remember we talked about the roommates that you're trapped with. If you're rowing a race, those roommates, when you're two-thirds of the way through the race, they come out and they haunt you and they say, Bill, wouldn't it be nice to slow down at this point? You know, why not quit altogether so you get to grapple with those voices and you get to tell them to shut up and you get to push on to the end. And I think you're a better person for having done that. But when I come in last, so from that metric, yeah.”
2021-11-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #123 William Irvine: How To Live a Stoic Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're going to fail sometimes. You might fail a lot. And if you never fail, you might say, I've never failed. And then the Stoic response is, well, do something hard then. Well, the things are easy for me. We'll then switch to something.”
2021-11-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #123 William Irvine: How To Live a Stoic Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And when somebody is attacked, I'm going to pile on. And that for me is a good day. So let's see. I piled on to 18 different people today. Yeah, I've earned my beer. Here's another wrinkle on that, and that is the notion of failure. I happen to be a big fan of failure. Don't get me wrong. I don't like failing. I don't go out of my way to fail, but I know that a capacity to fail in some sense of the word, and the Stoics had their own kind of conception of what it was involved in failing. For somebody to fail is actually an interesting sign. And for somebody to fail in public is an interesting sign because what is it an indication of? One of the things is that they're trying to do things that for them are hard. It's an admirable trait that some human being is trying to do things that are hard to do. And if they really are hard, you're going to...”
2021-11-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #123 William Irvine: How To Live a Stoic Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, to criticize other people is now frighteningly easy because social media has made it possible to anonymously criticize other people. There was a time when I was a kid, when you had your neighborhood, you know, and if you wanted to spread a bad word about somebody, you would have to do it either verbally to somebody's face or to people who knew them. Or I don't know, mimeograph papers and put it in people's mailboxes and people very quickly would have found out who it was. And the interesting thing is whoever you were attacking would be very angry at you. But the people who saw you attacking him would be thinking, you know what? He might be doing that to me when I'm not around. So there was a price to be paid for being negative in that way. But now you can do it anonymously. And there are people who, that's how their meaning of life is I'm going to be outraged.”
2021-11-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #123 William Irvine: How To Live a Stoic Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Then it's on you. Now, in other cases, you know, you have relatives, you have co-workers and so on. You can't quite do that. But yeah, so this notion of people who are just have different values or are having a different game for them to approve of you is a bad sign.”
2021-11-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #123 William Irvine: How To Live a Stoic Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The game I'm playing. I'm playing a radically different game. And so when they look down on me, you know, I think, oh, oh, that's a good sign because they're playing a different game. And for them to win their game, what I'm doing would be craziness. You know, it'd be like bringing a hockey stick to a baseball game. You know, it just, that would be absolutely crazy. So if they criticize me, I perk up a bit. Oh, good. I'm not playing their game. I don't want to be playing their game. I think their game is kind of foolish, not that I'm going to tell them that. Guess what? That's how they feel about the game I'm playing. So that would be an anti-mentor. One thing you can control is your exposure to various people. And if there's a person who's not doing you any good and doing you harm and you are consciously going out of your way to expose yourself, well, then...”
2021-11-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #123 William Irvine: How To Live a Stoic Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There have been people I have chosen as rowing mentors in so what they tell me about rowing. I take very seriously and if they criticize me, I take that very seriously. I don't get hurt feelings, but I know, oh, great. Here's something to work on. So that would be a limited mentor. And I have multiple limited mentors in my life. And, you know, the danger is that you think you don't need mentors because that means you think you know everything. And that's a really bad state to be in. So an anti-mentor is somebody that I've had a chance to observe to get to know and have drawn the conclusion that they're playing a radically different game than I am. So there's one game, the social status game. There are people who live to create a certain social impression, so they buy a car, they dress, they buy a house, they do all of that.”
2021-11-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #123 William Irvine: How To Live a Stoic Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Anti Mentor and again a mentor and you can have I guess you could have a life mentor I don't think I have I think if Seneca had been around yeah he would be a life mentor in fact in the day as a kind of a guiding technique sometimes when I'm really stymied I will ask myself what would what would Seneca do under these circumstances if I'm lying in bed I ask myself what would Marcus Aurelius do right and and he famously said you know is it my purpose here to lie and keep warm under these blankets no you know I have a social duty to go do things so there are people that I would give blanket mentor status to normally though it's a limited status so I row competitively I skull more precisely that's with tours rather than one oar and”
2021-11-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #123 William Irvine: How To Live a Stoic Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Be taken over by the praise or criticism of complete strangers whose values you don't understand, and might not even agree with. So it's really risky. And, you know, there are people who can do that. You know, I've certainly seen people who don't even look at their Twitter feeds. You know, they just dump stuff because there's going to be so much stuff. And that's maybe the healthy way to proceed. But I know I would read them and I know I would react to them. So I don't want to expose myself to that risk.”
2021-11-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #123 William Irvine: How To Live a Stoic Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This concept of an anti-mentor, and that is there are people who, if they praise you, it's a sign that you're doing something very wrong because they have such different values than you do that if they think you're doing the right thing, whoa, hold on. You've got to correct that. Now with social media, and I have all, I have as little social media in my life as I can. But you see the effects of that, and that is people can now react to praise from complete strangers, thumbs up or becoming a follower, and it's a metric, and you can check how it changes from day to day. And the thing is that you don't know who these are.”
2021-11-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #123 William Irvine: How To Live a Stoic Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then spend the next seven minutes of my speech. You know, trying to respond, trying to work around it. Praise I tend to shrug off. I'm pretty good about shrugging off praise. If I get a positive email, I will thank the person who sent it. But Stoic is going to be very picky about praise. If I designate somebody a mentor and they praise me, that's cause for celebration because the mentor is a person that you've said, you've decided this is a person who really understands something. So when they're talking, I'm just going to shut up and take notes. I'm not going to try to correct them. I'm going to ask lots of questions, but I'm going to take notes. And if that person says, you know, you did X and that's a good thing. Wow, right? That's great. But praise from a variety of people? I don't know. What are their values? In fact, I have.”
2021-11-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #123 William Irvine: How To Live a Stoic Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, you're absolutely right. Let me tell you something else that's happened. I've done a bunch of these Zoom speeches and Zoom interviews and so on. And what I found is you can do it in such a way that people can chat while you're giving your talk. And then you have the option. You can see the chat or you can not see the chat. And at first, I thought, oh, the chat is a really good thing because you've got instant feedback. And you know that the weird thing about giving a, like a Zoom talk is you'll tell what you think is a really, really great joke. And there's no audience response because you can't hear therein. And then you're thinking, was it a bad joke? Did they just not get the joke? The little chat stuff that went by, I finally decided, number one, it's distracting. And number two, I would see one negative chat.”
2021-11-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #123 William Irvine: How To Live a Stoic Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“and setbacks hurt us, most of the harm is self inflicted, and it's us letting that flood of negative emotions take us over.”
2021-11-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #123 William Irvine: How To Live a Stoic Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I use the analogy of a broken water pipe, right? That's a setback if you discover that you have a broken water pipe in your house, that's a setback. But that can be cured quite easily. You have a plumber come out and for a few hundred bucks, it's all fixed. What causes the harm is not the pipe itself, but the flooding water emitted by the pipe, which can cause all sorts of damage. It can cause ceilings to collapse. It can flood basements. It can do any number of things. Same with you and your setbacks. The setbacks themselves can be tiny little things like somebody making an off-handed remark about your appearance or about something you did. That's the setback. And then what does the harm is you dwelling on that, you tossing and turning on that. And that's an important insight that it self-inflicted harm.”
2021-11-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #123 William Irvine: How To Live a Stoic Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can I repackage this in some way where it's not going to trigger those feelings that are going to wake me up in the middle of the night? And there's this whole notion in the book, Stoic Challenge, the title says it all. So we treat these episodes as challenges and we deal with them as such. We say, oh, it's a test. It's a test. What do I have to do to pass this test? Two things. Number one is I have to find a successful workaround to the setbacks I experience. I have to get out on the other side. And number two and even more important, I have to not let myself get out of control and angry and upset while I work around to the other side. Because if you think about the things, the setbacks you experience in life, usually the setback is going to harm you, but usually what harms you the most is your response to the setback.”
2021-11-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #123 William Irvine: How To Live a Stoic Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Five second rule. So within my mind, I'll notice that something has happened and I'll notice the earliest signs of anger, just little smolderings of anger. And then my theory is I've got five seconds to reframe that because otherwise once the anger bursts into a flame, it's going to be there. And it's a strange thing, but you can talk to people who have lost most of their memory, older people, you know, demented. You know, they don't know what day it is. They don't know what season it is, but they can tell you in graphic detail about something that happened to them 40 years ago that was upsetting. So anger has that power over us. So what you do is you try to take incidents that could make you angry and you frame them as a kind of a test that it's a test of seeing, hey, can I work around this?”
2021-11-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #123 William Irvine: How To Live a Stoic Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because there you knew the COVID was going to come to an end and you'd get out of this apartment and so on, but you are locked inside your skull with these two roommates for the rest of your life. So you have systems within your brain that respond with anger to whatever to bad things that happen. How come because your ancestors who were very angry, for instance, when something happened to lessen their social status, they survived and reproduced. Those who just took it and stride, oops, same thing with the emotional aspect of it. You're wired to have those feelings. So the next step, a strategy for dealing with them is number one, to realize that's what the game is. You're locked into the skull with them. So in my most recent book, The Stoic Challenge, I describe what I call the”
2021-11-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #123 William Irvine: How To Live a Stoic Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To whom I'm simply allergic. It's kind of a psychological allergy. They know how to get under my skin. I can have any number of techniques, you know, standard technique is that's just Bob being Bob. That's just what Bob does. And I'm working with that. Check with me again in a few years and I'll tell you about that particular experiment. And because of COVID, people were locked into small spaces with people perhaps not of their choosing. So imagine that you're locked into an apartment with two roommates, one of whom has anger issues.”
2021-11-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #123 William Irvine: How To Live a Stoic Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I have noticed this in my own life there are things I will toss and turn at night as a stoic everybody does you know you'll have some intrusive thought that you're trying to fall asleep or you wake up in the middle of the night the intrusive thought says oh he's awake okay here we go we're gonna party in his in his mind and then the question is uh what do you do about it and it's it's really interesting when you become a practicing stoic then uh you get upset at a whole other level i call it meta anger so you're angry about something but as a stoic you're angry that you're angry at it because you realize that as a stoic you've let it get to you it's under your skin and it really is an interesting and challenging thing uh i've decided that there are people”
2021-11-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #123 William Irvine: How To Live a Stoic Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What do I value the most? You can pick that, you can set that, and then develop a strategy that'll get you to the things that you value the most.”
2021-11-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #123 William Irvine: How To Live a Stoic Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You need to focus your attention on the things you can control, and sometimes there's very great degree of control, and sometimes there's moderate degree of control. But that's what you should be thinking about because the things you can't control, you're just wasting your time because you can't control them. You can't affect them, you can't change them. So to spend your time and energy worrying about them is a waste of your time and energy. And it's a profound insight. You know, some people are anxious, some people are not. But the people who are anxious, often it's because they're concerning themselves with things they can't control. And so an important insight. So focus your attention on things you can control. And I mentioned that among the things you can control are your values. So what is it I want in life?”
2021-11-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #123 William Irvine: How To Live a Stoic Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You can control the values you pick for yourself. You can control the goals you pick for yourself. You can, with a little bit of effort, control how you respond to the challenges life presents you. So I've used the example of a tennis match. So suppose you're scheduled to play a tennis match. So a stoic would say, okay, so what you want to do is you want to think about the three elements of control here. You can't control how hard your opponent trains. You can't control what strategy your opponent uses. You can't control how hard your opponent plays. But what can you control? Well, you can control how hard you practice. You can control the strategy you use going into the game. You can work on your conditioning.”
2021-11-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #123 William Irvine: How To Live a Stoic Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, another one is the dichotomy of control, so Epictetus is normally identified as the source of this psychological insight. The dichotomy of control, which I have transformed into the trichotomy of control. So it says, look, there are things you can control and things you can't control. And I've actually put it into three different categories. There are things you can control, meaning you have almost complete control over. Things you can't control, meaning you have no control at all over. And things you have some but not complete control over. So that would be that middle category. So I'm putting a spin on Epictetus here. So what are the things that you can't control? Well, you know, if an asteroid hits the Earth tomorrow, hey, you can't prevent that. You can't stop that. What are things you can?”
2021-11-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #123 William Irvine: How To Live a Stoic Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To kind of think about that for a sec, fill in some of the details, and then snap out of it and go on with life. I do this on a routine basis about any number of things, common things. And my wife knows I've been doing it because she'll hear me yell out from the back bedroom. Thanks for existing and she'll know that I imagined her suddenly being absent from my life. And then it all rushes in. Oh, wow. That would be a huge loss. What does that mean? That means I've got something really wonderful. And what am I doing? Well, I'm a human being. I'm taking it utterly for granted. Or, you know, in a worst case, I'm just sort of saying, yeah, yeah, this is fine for now. But you know if only I had, and then you're on that hedonic treadmill. If only I had something better than that, I would finally.”
2021-11-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #123 William Irvine: How To Live a Stoic Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Take a look Isn't that absolutely incredible? And yet two minutes ago it was something you took utterly for granted. And your life is full of things that are like that. Your sense of balance, your ability to walk, your ability to breathe without needing an oxygen tank, you can go through things. You're one of the luckiest individuals ever to inhabit the universe. And yet, if you have the wrong frame of mind, you know, poor, poor, pitiful me, somebody feels sorry for me. Look how terrible it is. It's a mind game. It's a psychological technique. So it's a flickering thought that you have and you can fill in some detail on that flickering thought. So imagine that you've lost your job. Then you allow yourself.”
2021-11-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #123 William Irvine: How To Live a Stoic Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT