#(partly because I know so many cool good writers and I wanna be able to at least have something new down you know)

[captainsparklefingers]

When you haven't written anything in like 2 or 3 weeks, a sudden burst of creativity that ends with you writing 573 words and ending the scene you'd been working on in your crappy lil story feels like a victory.

...of course the burst doesn't last but hey, any progress is good progress, right? And maybe that'll make working on this easier, too. Today isn't over yet, maybe the juice will come back, and even if it doesn't, I'll take a win, no matter how small.

[butterflies-dragons]

You were too kind to that jonarya anon. Well this is nice of you. But why didn’t you just mention that Grrm has already very openly denied Jonarya? He said Jon seeing Arya in Ygritte was not a romantic hint. This is Grrm we are talking about... He would say keep reading or no comment if he took them serious... That boat (not even gonna call ship) is dead but jonaryas still lurking under our posts like stalking us is going to change the reality. Sad.

Hi Anon,

I didn’t mention the Balticon 2016 Report because that’s what GRRM has said, and they only asked about “my opinion”, so that’s what I said, my opinion. 

Now, if you are asking for the author’s own voice, I will answer citing GRRM words.

This is not a shipper or anti shipper opinion, this is citing the author’s own words, and this is something that even in a platform like asoiaf reddit, is taken as “denial of the romance between Jon & Arya” [Source]:

MAY 2016 - BALTICON

After the Coffee Talk just outside the room:

My Con Friend asked about Arya and Jon again. This time GRRM gave some very pointed replies:

GRRM finished (in the hallway now) by saying that he “wished some past things weren’t such strong foreshadowing,” and that he, “wished some new things had stronger foreshadowing then.”

Friend: Ok, if you foreshadowed something in the first book, like, really cleverly hidden, would you then follow through on that hint? For sure?..

GRRM: “Well, this goes with what I said before, the story changes and expands as I write. I wish I was able to go back and make revised drafts, but that’s not going to happen.”

Here is a transcript of the outline discussion and Jon/Arya portion of the coffee talk:

[question about Jon/Arya]

GRRM: “Alright, you’ve thought about this more than I have. I mean it’s simple, Jon is very fond of Arya. They were the two odd birds in the Stark family nest, here. They didn’t quite fit in with the others, they look like each other, they both had the brown hair, you know, as opposed to the auburn hair of Sansa and Bran and Rickon and Robb. So there was always that closeness between them. And, you know, Arya didn’t mind that Jon was a bastard, and Jon didn’t mind that Arya was a tomboy, so there is that closeness there.”

[question about Jon comparing his lover to his sister]

GRRM: “If he did it, uhm… I began writing these books in 1991, and, uhm, I worked on it in 91 and then I got a tv play, so I put it aside to really work on ‘Doorways’ tv pilot and did a tv show in 92-93. In 94 I returned to it [the books] and worked on it. You know, up till then, in my career as a writer, I’d always written the entire book before I opted for sale. That’s unusual. Most writers do chapters and an outline. They write a few chapters, they outline the rest of the book, give that to the publisher and the publisher says ‘oh okay, I’ll take that’.

“As some of you may have noticed, those who have been paying very, very carefully attention, I’m not good with deadlines. And, uh, and I’m not good with outlines, either. I always hated outlines. So with Fevre Dream and with Armageddon Rag and with Dying of the Light and all my novels, I wrote the entire book. I didn’t do chapters and outline. I sat down, I wrote a whole book, and I sent it to my agent and said ‘Look, here’s a whole book, and it’s finished’. That way I ran into no deadline, it was finished before it even went on the market. And it worked well for me. And my initial thought was to do this the same way, but what happened, you know, was in 1994, uhm, when I returned to it and I’m working on it and I’m very enthused about it and I say ‘I really wanna write these Game of Thrones books as the next part’. But I was still in Hollywood and I’d just lost all this groundwork on ‘Doorways’, I was still in… The studios and networks still wanna work with me, so I’m getting other offers, like ‘We want you to write this movie’, ‘we want you to do another tv pilot’. And, you know, I took a couple of them and was ‘Oh god, I gotta have to put the book away again’. Cause I have no deadline [for the book]. You know, when you think Hollywood, they will give you a deadline, you know, they say ‘here, son, write this movie, we want it in three months’.

“So, I said ‘look, if I wanna get back to being a novelist, I’m gonna have to sell this even though it’s not finished’. So I had my 200 pages of Game of Thrones at that point, but they wanted outline. I said ‘I don’t do outlines. I don’t know what’s gonna happen, I figure it out as I go. And that’s how I always did it.’ No, we had to have an outline. So I wrote two pages, a two-page thing about what I thought would happen. It’ll be a trilogy, it’ll be three books, Game of Thrones, the Dance with Dragons, and Winds of Winter. Those were the three window titles. And, uh, it’ll be three books and this’ll happen, and this’ll happen, and this’ll happen. And I was making up shit.

“And I had thought that those two pages were long forgotten, because, of course, the books did sell. They sold in the United States and in Great Britain, both. They sold for enough money that I didn’t have to take any more Hollywood games. So I was able to say ‘no’ around. I had a few less [?] to wind up in in 94 and 95. Once I had, I said ‘no, I don’t want any more movies or tv shows, I’m going to write these books now’. And I started writing the books. And in the process, I pretty much disregarded the outline. The characters took me off in entirely different directions. So, for 20 years I had forgotten that that two-page thing even existed. And then someone in my British publisher, HarperCollins, they got a new office building, uh, brand new offices, and new conference rooms, big conference rooms that they decorated with books and stuff like that. And they named the conference rooms after the writers, so one of the conference rooms [?], and they put up these plastic display cases, including the outline. The two-page outline, yes. [?], they didn’t ask my permission, they just put it up. And in that two-page outline, Jon and Arya become a romantic item.”

“You know, I don’t think it’s a reference for that [for romance]. It’s a reference to a certain physical type, and  a certain indication of what Jon finds admirable. It’s like someone who reminds you of, you know… Other people might be put off by this, you know, hair that looks like small rodents have been living in there. It doesn’t put him off because he is used to that.””

[someone says they have 5 minutes left]

“You know, I was pretty pissed that that outline got out there. It should not have happened. Outlines and letters like that are meant only for the eyes of the editor. They shouldn’t go on public display. And, uh, they also [?] my papers on [?], all my papers and correspondence. You know, I’ve been sending that stuff there for years, and it’d be, you know, available for future scholars or whatever, just like the papers of many other writers. Somehow, in the back of my head I was like ‘yeah, 20 years after I’m dead some scholar will go in and find them’. They’re going in right now!”   ”

[question if he is still going with the 1991 ending]

“Yes, I mean, I did partly joke when I said I don’t know where I was going. I know the broad strokes, and I’ve known the broad strokes since 1991. I know who’s going to be on the Iron Throne. I know who’s gonna win some of the battles, I know the major characters, who’s gonna die and how they’re gonna die, and who’s gonna get married and all that. The major characters. Of course along the way I made up a lot of minor characters, you know, I, uhm…Did I know in 1991 how Bronn, what was gonna happen to Bronn? No, I didn’t even know there’d be a guy named Bronn. I was inventing him along the way when I was writing, ‘Okay, he gets kidnapped. Let’s see, there are a couple sellswords there, their names are Fred and Bronn’.

“It was actually Bronn and Chiggen, and then one of them dies, I flipped a coin ‘okay, who dies? Chiggen dies, cause his name is stupid. Bronn is a better name, so I’ll keep Bronn’. And then Bronn became quite an interesting character and plenty of these characters take on minds of their own. They push to the front till you [?] speech and you think of a cool line and you give it to Bronn because he’s trying to talk, and now Bronn is somebody who says something cool. [?]. That’s how characters grow on you. “So a lot of the minor characters I’m still discovering along the way. But the mains-”

[question if he knows Arya’s and Jon’s fates]

“Tyrion, Arya, Jon, Sansa, you know, all of the Stark kids, and the major Lannisters, yeah.”

This report appears in the following sources:

fattest leech of ice and fire blog [Source 1]

asoiaf.westeros.org [Source 2]  

westeros.org [Source 3]

Thanks for the question. 

[notwhelmedyet]

TF Fanfic Census 2017 (pt. 4) : IDW Reader Response

Ever wonder what the ‘average’ reader response to fanfic in this fandom was? ...Well, that turns out to be hard to quantify, but I’ve got a lot of graphs and I’m gonna try.

Then we’ll look at the most popular IDW fics and see if they’ve got anything in common.

So, first off! If you have trouble reading the graphs, they’re also available in an image post here and here.

Now let’s look at IDW compared to some other Transformers shows. Shows that have aired on television recently have higher hits, which I’m taking to mean a larger readership. (The size of each bubble indicates the number of stories published) However, maybe readers reread those series more often.

IDW has a smaller median hits than any of the major sub-fandoms except Gen 1, but has the highest median kudos. Cool! That seems to indicate that IDW readers are really invested and active readers. (Or, possibly that all of the readers are also writers and they know how much their fellow writers appreciate kudos.)

I’m going to usually neglect comments and bookmarks for this analysis because they’re usually equal and somewhere between 2 and 5. Pretty boring.

Also, I should note that there are some things I can’t measure here. Presumably a lot of popular works are well written, by well-regarded writers, about characters or subjects people wanted to read about etc. I can only quantify data that is tagged and easily searchable.

Anyway, let’s look at Transformers compared to some other random fanfiction communities.

Yeah, I randomly picked a bunch of things I’ve read fanfic from + Harry Potter cause it’s big. Sue me.

Anyway, I’d say the interesting trend here is the lack of a trend. There’s no correlation between number of stories published and hits or kudos. There’s a general trend line: the more hits you get, the more readers are around to give kudos, which is what’s throwing the Marvel cinematic stuff up so high. IDW Transformers is a bit of an outlier for median kudos compared to median hits. 👍

Breaking It Down

Let’s get interesting - Does the rating of a fic (G, T, M, or E) impact its reader response? What about one-shots versus multichapter stories?

Looking at hits, we can see that readership is strongly stratified. If you want more hits, write multi-chapter works and write explicit fic. (There may be a wordcount bias here, we’ll explore that later)

But then, if we look at Kudos, we see that gap narrow. One-shots, G, and T fics get fewer many fewer hits, but only somewhat fewer kudos. This is borne out by my sample data, where we can examine median Kudos/Hits directly:

6% for explicit works, 7% for mature and teen works, and 9% for gen works

So if you’re writing explicit fic and have a low kudos to hits ratio, don’t worry - that’s apparently normal.

Comments is...weird. Overall, the readership here is doing a healthy amount of commenting, obviously most of it on works with lots of chapters and lots of hits. The other fandoms I looked at had between 1 and 7 as their median number of comments, while AO3 as a whole has a median of 3.

Overall, good work readers! Keep commenting! Us authors love comments, it literally makes my night when I get a comment. 😍

Bookmarks are less weird. They’re basically hits, scaled down by a factor of ten. No big surprises here. The AO3 median here is 2, so once again we’ve got some invested readers compared to the average. 👍

Now, I mentioned above that length and reader response are generally proportional. @toastystats has done some general analysis on this if you wanna check that out. I also pulled from our sample data to generate the median values for different wordcount ranges (we top out at 5000 because there were so few >10,000 word fics in the sample).

Here we can see response climbs with wordcount but that the increase from fics 2500-5000 words to >5000 words is fairly insignificant.This could just be due to the small sample size, however.

So is the link between response to M and E works just because they’re more likely to be longer? Remember that the median wordcount by rating broke down as such:

G: 857, T: 1509, M: 2600, E: 2626

Let’s graph it and see.

Not so much - M and E are nearly identical median lengths but have very different median responses. Meanwhile G and T have fairly different median lengths but have very similar median responses.

We see a similar trend in bookmarks and comments, though the G to T gap widens somewhat.

What does this mean? Well, presumably, readers come in knowing what sort of fanfiction they want to read and readers of different genres/ratings respond to fanfiction in different ways. *shrugs* You could probably do a whole post on trying to quantify this one trend.

Update Year

Well, that was interesting. I don’t know if we learned anything, but charts are pretty. Let’s look at another dataset that might not tell us anything - the year works were last updated. I’ve looked as far back as 2012 because before then there are a vanishingly small number of IDW fics.

Okay, so there’s a clear trend here. Newer works have fewer hits. Which makes a lot of sense; 2013 works have had years of readers tag searching and browsing to increase their readership.

This chart doesn’t necessarily mean that there are fewer readers now than in the past, though I can’t disprove that either.

Interestingly, while kudos holds with the general decline in hits when viewed by update years, comments and bookmarks hold steady. Either the vast majority of comments and bookmarks happen when a work is first published or...I haven’t come up with a second theory yet. Ideas?

‘Top 20‘ - What Defines the Most Popular Works?

To answer this question, I collected data on all works that fell in the top 20 / first page of works ranked by kudos, hits, bookmarks and comments. There was a lot of overlap: only 44 works occupy these 80 spaces. Let’s see what they have in common.

Well, the first thing we can see is that a top 20 fic is far more likely to be explicit and far less likely to be mature or gen rated. Surprise, surprise.

I had figured the majority of top 20 fics would be about the cast of MTMTE/LL, since that seems to be the most popular series. Ah...nope. This is partly due to crossovers - most of the works in that vague ‘other’ category are about Optimus Prime and other bots that were main characters in Gen 1.

If we look at common traits...there are a lot of crossovers (anything with multiple series tagged or where the author said they were combining IDW with G1) and there’s a lot of alternate universes.

Short story and/or drabble collections are much more common in the top 20 than in general - 18% here vs. 4% of all IDW fics.

This is a lovely chart that Tumblr has mangled. With a tiny sample set I was able to assess what the primary pairing was in fics with a singular focal relaionship. The frequency of these relationships is shown here: Megatron/Optimus Prime (7), Drift/Ratchet (5), Optimus Prime/Starscream (2) and Cyclonus/Tailgate (2) were the only focal couples to appear more than once.

Color indicates faction - red for Autobot/Autobot, purple for Con/Con and grey for cross-faction or other.

So, so far we’ve learned that to Top 20 are disproportionately explicit, featuring lots of crossovers and AUs. Also, they’re big into MegOp. When were they posted (and for how many years?)

This chart is showing us the start and most recent update for all the fics in the ‘Top 20′. Bubble size indicates number of fics matching those years, color indicates number of years the fics were in-progress (red=1, orange=2, green=3 etc.) We can see that the vast majority of ‘Top 20′ fics began in 2015 or earlier. A lot of them are still in progress or ended recently (36% updated in 2017).

General Stats

What else defines the most popular works? Well, length, for one thing. The median IDW fic is 1 chapter long, while the median ‘Top 20′ fic is 21 chapters. The median IDW fic is about 1743 words long, while the median ‘Top 20′ fic is 59,500 words long. While 86% of all IDW fics are currently complete, only 62% of ‘Top 20′ fics are already complete.

Just for fun, there are 24 writers represented in the 44 most popular fics. 24 fics showed up on only 1 ‘Top 20′ list, while 8 appeared on 2 or 3 lists.

4 fics showed up on every single ‘Top 20′ list: Turn of a Switch by spaceliquid, The Chemicals Between Us by SlimReaper, Domestic Electronics by Bibliotecaria_D and Locks to Fit the Keys by TF_Pratchet and Im_The_Doctor.

So congrats to those four authors (and everyone else on the ‘Top 20′ list)!

What’s Next?

Pt. 1 - Quantifying TF Fanfiction between Adaptations

Pt. 2 - Relationship Scoreboard (All Series) - A Quick Look at the Most Popular Pairings

Pt. 3 - Quantifying Properties of IDW TF Fanfiction

pt 4 - this post!

pt 5 - IDW Relationship Spectacular (½)

pt 6 - IDW Relationship Spectacular (2/2)

[gethealthy18-blog]

289: Stoic Wisdom for Modern Life and Parenting With Ryan Holiday

New Post has been published on https://healingawerness.com/news/289-stoic-wisdom-for-modern-life-and-parenting-with-ryan-holiday/

289: Stoic Wisdom for Modern Life and Parenting With Ryan Holiday

Child: Welcome to my Mommy’s podcast.

Today’s podcast is sponsored by one of my favorite companies… Four Sigmatic. I love all of their delicious coffees, teas and elixirs and they are such a part of my daily routine that I can’t even remember the last time a day went by when I didn’t consume at least one of their products. With both caffeine free and naturally caffeinated options like coffee and matcha combined with superfood mushrooms like chaga, cordyceps and reishi. Their drinks are functional and delicious and I notice a difference when I don’t drink them. My normal routine is to drink coffee with Lions Mane in the morning, cordyceps or chaga while I work during the day and reishi to wind down at night. My kids also love the reishi cocoa and it helps them sleep better. Check out all of their products and save 15% on any order with the code wellnessmama at foursigmatic.com/wellnessmama

This podcast is brought to you by Magic Spoon Cereal. I know, I know… never thought you’d hear me recommend cereal, did you? That’s because almost every cereal out there is full of refined sugars and grains and often GMO ingredients and dyes. Yet, Americans certainly love it! In fact, the average American consumes 100+ bowls a year, and that number accounts for people like me who don’t consume any at all! Now, cereal lovers can rejoice that there is a high protein, low carb, grain-free, gluten-free, nothing artificial, childlike cereal for grown ups. With 12 g of protein per bowl and only 3 g of carbs it tastes like the cereal you remember but without the sugar high or the guilt! Check out magicspoon.com/wellnessmama for all the details.

Katie: Hello and welcome to the Wellness Mama podcast. I’m Katie from wellnessmama.com. And today’s guest, Ryan Holiday, has been on my dream list of interviews for a long time. He is the bestselling author of many books, including “The Obstacle is the Way,” “Ego is the Enemy” and his newest “Stillness is the Key” that just released. He also wrote “The Daily Stoic” and its companion journal, which is a book I read every morning. I read one page corresponding to the day and it’s had a big impact on my life.

He’s a prolific writer. He’s also written for many publications and he’s written books on other topics besides just stoicism, although that’s what we go deep on today. And he has been accredited by “The New York Times” as kind of ushering in the modern popularity of stoicism. And in this episode, we really go deep on how this can apply in the modern world, especially to parents and as specifically to parents and with a lot of practical and tangible methods that we both employ in our daily lives to make that happen. This is one of my favorite interviews I have done. I know that you are going to enjoy it, too. And without further ado, let’s jump in. Ryan, welcome. Thanks for being here.

Ryan: Thanks for having me. I wish I could be where you are.

Katie: Well, you’re always welcome here. We love it when you come visit, but I can’t wait to interview you. You’ve actually been on my list of people I’ve wanted to interview for a really long time and you’re one of my favorite authors, so I can’t wait to get to spend this time with you and record it. And I think we actually share an interesting piece of past that I don’t think most people share, which is the, I also dropped out of college at 19. And if I remember correctly, you did as well. Is that right?

Ryan: I did. I did. Although this is why you should always be, you shouldn’t compare yourself to other people’s biographies because I’ll give you this. I moved to LA, left college on June 15th and I turned 20 on June 16th. So, I say that I dropped out at 19, but technically it was 20. So sometimes, you know, you always gotta realize that people are slightly exaggerating and inflating their biographies to make them as cool as they can be because that’s the point of a biography. So I’m curious did you actually drop out at 19, or is it more like 20 like me?

Katie: It was actually 19. I’m pretty young…

Ryan: So you’re better.

Katie: Well, but I was almost done with college. I had done everything pretty early and I had entered college essentially as a junior because of testing out of stock.

Ryan: Oh, nice. And you still dropped out?

Katie: I did. I was like really close to being finished and realized I was journalism, pre-law and international studies thinking I could, you know, change the world through that and realized once I got in there that you weren’t gonna change the system from the inside out. And I also realized I wanted a family and wanted to do things in my own way. So I walked in, I was actually the presidential scholarship, and I walked in and quit.

Ryan: Wow. So had you met Seth yet?

Katie: I had. I had met my husband that summer before walking. And we actually did a nonprofit walk from Los Angeles to DC, and we hit long distance dating since then. And I just knew like that was the direction I wanted to go with my life and that I definitely did not want a political career or journalism career in the traditional sense. And I just walked in and quit. And he’s like, “You can’t really do that. You’re on scholarship.” And I’m like, “Well, I am.” And I did. I’m curious what your story was. Why did you end up dropping out?

Ryan: So similar story in that I’d already met my wife, so like, you know, sort of number one goal of college crossed off. I’d met the mentor and the writer who I admired and wanted to be like in Robert Green and I had a job offer to go work at a management firm in Hollywood, which is sort of where I wanted to go career-wise. And I had a bunch of other awesome stuff going on. So I felt like I wasn’t leaving college, you know slinking off into the night. I’d accomplished a lot of what I wanted to do there. And like you, so I was set to graduate in three years and I left in two years. So I probably did like two and a half years of academic work in college. But it was primarily, I felt like I had accomplished everything that I would have used to say that my college career was successful.

So I wasn’t gonna turn my back on that to keep going to class. But the funny thing was, and I think people should bear this in mind when you’re thinking about making some of these life-changing decisions, is they can feel very drastic, but they are much less so. I also had a scholarship, it was not president’s, this was a chancellor scholarship. So I think it was 75% of my tuition. And I walked in and I said, “I’m here to drop out.” And they said, “You know, that’s not a thing like you don’t drop out of college.” And I was like, “What do you mean?” And they said, “Well, look, you just take a semester, you just don’t enroll in classes for a semester and you can come back whenever you want.” And I think I actually have a couple years left, maybe that I don’t know how long it is.

But the point is you don’t drop out, you just stop going and you can always go back, right? And so these things often feel much scarier than they are. Like people go, I don’t wanna quit my job and start a company. It could ruin my life. No, if the company doesn’t work, you would just go get another job. Like there’s millions of jobs out there. So we’re intimidated because we don’t wanna lose the status quo, but often you can very easily get right back to the status quo.

Katie: That’s a good point. I think any kind of life changes like that, they always seem so daunting until you get through them. I always try to remember that metric of in 10 years is this gonna seem as big and daunting as it seems right now and almost never does it. I’m curious, I wanna get deep on stoicism, but first, I’m curious, what do you think about college now that you have kids? Is it something you’re going to encourage and push them to do, or do you have a different view of it now?

Ryan: Yeah, I mean, I have a different view of it in that I know that it’s possible to succeed without college, but I also know that the fact that I was college-ready that I’d succeeded at college was partly why I was able to succeed as a college dropout, right? So when I hear from young kids, they write me and, you know, they’re like, I’m failing out of college, I wanna drop out like you. And it’s like, that’s a very different thing, right? Like if you can’t figure out how to make college work, that’s a sign that the real world is gonna be quite difficult for you as well. And in fact, I think college is easier than the real world. So I’m torn. I mean, we save for college, we have, you know, money taken out of our bank account each month to put our children in a position to be able to afford college if that’s what they choose to do. But I’m not gonna be like my parents, which, you know, sort of collectively lost their mind and, you know, did some very serious damage to our relationship by not supporting me in that decision that I decided to make. And so I think the idea is like, keep your options open. Colleges, neither the solution for every kid and it’s not, you know, to be avoided by every kid. It just depends on who you are and I think what you wanna do.

Katie: I think that’s a great point. And I had the same experience, not quite to that degree with family, but I come from on both sides of family of academics and PhDs and even now at family reunions, I’ll have relatives be like are you gonna go back to school and get a PhD?

Ryan: Right, right. Man, you’re like, I’m doing good. I’m probably doing better than you. But that college does occupy some degree of safety to people. That’s what I think it represents. And that’s great, you know, but I also, you know, going to college because you don’t know what you wanna do with your life and then racking up $200,000 in debt to find out that actually what you really wanted to be was a nurse or what you really wanted to be was a welder or you really wanted to open your own small restaurant, well that was actually a really dangerous decision for you to make then.

Katie: That’s a great point. Yeah. Especially with the amount of debt so many kids take on to get through college. Okay. So you are widely known for, in fact, I think “The New York Times” even said that you are largely responsible for the modern rise and the interest in stoicism. So I think that’s another place I’d love to start and to hear what brought you into that and how you discovered it yourself.

Ryan: Yeah, stoicism seems like this sort of stodgy old useless philosophy, right? When we hear the word stoic, we think has no emotions and it almost feels like it’s the opposite of where we should be going, especially as, you know, culturally we’ve come to understand the importance of vulnerability and the importance of empathy and the importance of processing your emotions. Well, I’m here to tell you that’s not what stoicism is. Stoicism is a way of living. It’s a guide to what the stoics would call the good life, human flourishing. And really at the core of stoicism I think is two assumptions. Number one, we don’t control what happens to us. We control how we respond, right? And I think this is something that intuitively mothers understand probably better than other people. You don’t control that your kid is throwing a temper tantrum, but you control whether you’re gonna make it worse, whether you’re gonna use this as an opportunity to teach them something, right? Mothers are constantly in the position of responding to the stresses and the difficulties of life. And I as a father, I am as well, right? Like how can I control how I respond to this situation? I can’t magically make it go away. I can’t make this hard thing easier. All I can do is focus on what I control, which is my emotions, my thoughts, and then the actions that I take. So that’s, I think point number one about stoicism.

The second is I would just give sort of four virtues that I think are essential to stoicism and I think they’re probably ironically or fittingly the same virtues most of us associate with our grandparents, with really wise or powerful people that we admire. So the first virtue of stoicism is courage, right? Courage under fire. Courage in painful situations, the ability to persevere, right? How do you stand up and do a really tough thing? The next is the discipline of justice, right? Doing the right thing. That’s good morals, that’s good values. That’s how do you have the courage to do the right thing when everyone is doing the wrong thing, right? So all these virtues are related. The next virtue is the virtue of temperance or moderation, right? This is something we have to teach our kids, right? You might think you want to eat this entire box of cookies, but you will feel awful after, right? Or drinking might be fun. It might be something your friends are doing, but it can get you in trouble if you don’t have self-control, right? The importance of resisting peer pressure or the importance of being too obsessed with what people think or being too dedicated to sports or this activity or that.

And then the final discipline of stoicism and the final virtue is a virtue of wisdom, right? How do you learn, how do you make education a priority? How do you better yourself? How do you expose yourself to things you disagree with or new perspectives or ways of thinking? And so those are the virtues, courage, justice, wisdom and temperance. And I think if we can teach those to our kids, if we can model them ourselves, we are gonna be happier, they’re gonna be happier and more importantly, I think the world will be a better place.

Katie: I love that. And I think you’re so right. I think those are things that moms are very on the ground day-to-day involve with kids. I mean, justice with working out and I know yours are still pretty little, but like sibling rivalry is a constant thing and temperance, teaching that to kids is a huge point. I think obviously wisdom for all of us is a lifelong journey. But I’m curious, what was your entry point into stoicism? Has it always been part of your life or did you discover it at some point?

Ryan: I mean, I wish that I could say that my parents had exposed me to this, right? I feel like it’s something I’m gonna do better with my kids is like, what are the great books, what are the great ideas, who are the great thinkers that I wanna make sure my kids are exposed to. A book recommendation for everyone, Senator Ben Sasse from Nebraska. He’s a Republican. You might not like him or maybe you’ll love him. But he wrote this book called “The Vanishing American Adult.” And it’s about how too many parents are basically raising infants, like sort of perpetual adolescents. This is kind of the things we’re seeing on college campuses these days. And he said every family should have a 5-foot bookshelf filled with the wisest best books that teach the values and the ideas and the insights required to be a successful adult. So that’s gonna be different for each family depending on what you do, what religion you are or what culture you’re from that everyone should have a book that they’d go, these are the books that we cherish as a family, that we read, that we talk about, that we reference.

So I wish I could say that’s how I found out about stoicism. But as it happens, I was a journalist in college. I was writing for the college newspaper and I was at a conference about sex that Dr. Drew, the television personality, was speaking at. And I went up to him afterwards and I just, I said, “Hey, like I’m young, I’m learning. You seem smart. What are some books you’re reading?” And he told me about Epictetus, one of the stoic philosophers. And from that, I went back to my hotel room. I bought the books and my life’s never been in the same since.

Katie: Wow, that’s awesome. And that I have not heard that book recommendation, but I’m definitely gonna check it out. I’m completely in agreement on that point. And that’s something that my husband and I have actively really thought about is how can we make sure that we’re raising competent adults and not perpetual children. And so we have some kind of principles in our house and things like we won’t do things for our kids once they’re capable of doing it themselves. So once they’re physically capable of doing their laundry, they do their laundry, they help in the kitchen, they help cook, and they are largely responsible for their relative existence. And also, we have like these things we say all the time explaining that life is not fair for instance, or that we were made to do hard things. So I’m curious, how does that, I know your guys are still young, but how does that roll over into your parenting?

Ryan: Yeah, I think there’s all sorts of great lessons from the stoics. One would be that thing we were talking about earlier that I think I wish I had learned earlier, right? We don’t control what happens. We control how we respond. So even the lesson you were just saying like about life’s not fair. Life’s not fair. Someone hurt you. Someone cheated and got away with it. You know, someone lied and didn’t get caught. Someone, you know, their parent lets them do this and I don’t let you do that. We don’t control that particularly as children, because so much of the world is outside of the control of young people, adults get to decide. Well, that’s true, but the child does retain the power and no one can take the power away from them that they decide how they’re gonna respond. They decide what they’re gonna do about it.

So are they gonna throw a temper tantrum about this? Are they gonna complain about it? Are they gonna whine about it or they’re gonna cry about it. They’re gonna blame other people for it. You know, you had this toy and you knocked it off the counter and it broke. Okay. So we can be sad about that. We can be mad about that. We can whine until we get an a, you know, to that we need a new one. Or we can decide we’re gonna figure out how to put it back together or we’re gonna decide to break, have fun breaking it apart even more. Or we’re gonna, you know, we’re gonna be more careful next time, right? Or we’re gonna wait, what are we gonna learn from this? How are we gonna benefit from it? And to me, that’s kind of the central lesson of stoicism.

But one of the things I’ve taken from stoicism and that I’m trying to think about now as a parent, I started this website on Father’s day this year called Daily Dad. And it’s just an email that goes out every day where I sort of write about the lessons that I learned from the sort of ancients that I think apply to parenting. And so I would say one of the things that, a mistake I see moms and dads make and I’ve seen my friends make is people are way too focused on like the trends of the moment as far as parenting, right? So people are like, do we do this or do we do that? What does the research say about X, Y, or Z when really like, clearly humans have been successfully raising children for, you know, hundreds of thousands of years, right? The broad strokes we’ve got.

And so one of the things I think people should do and what’s influencing my current parenting strategy is like going backwards. What are the best practices from history? And I think some of the ones you just touched on are exactly right. You know, teaching self-sufficiency, teaching that the world is relatively indifferent to you or your desires. So if you want something, you have to make it happen, right? We wanna look backwards to history to learn the best parenting strategies. We don’t wanna look at what the latest parenting magazine is telling us the fad of the moment is.

Katie: That’s such a great point. And it’s something I actually remember my grandmother saying when I had my first child is that our generation tries to make parenting so complicated and so much more difficult than it needs to be. And I think like the, I know this is something else that you’ve written about, but with parenting as well as with life, it’s almost like the less that we do and the less that we try to take on, the happier, calmer and more successful it is. Because I find kids are naturals at, you know, finding obstacles to overcome and climbing creativity. And so often we put all these things in place thinking we’re benefiting them when really we’re taking away opportunities where they could be exercising their own natural creativity or their own natural problem solving.

Ryan: That’s totally right. I actually wrote about this as one of the early emails for Daily Dad. I was thinking, why do kids like grandparents so much? It’s because grandparents are just way more chill than parents, right? The parents are thinking, no, you can’t do that. No, you’ll spoil your appetite. You know, parents are stressed so much more than they need to be, right? And they’re trying to, like, you never get a…look, there’s obviously bad grandparents out there, but grandparents are so much better at accepting kids for who they are and giving them the space to become whoever they’re gonna come, right? In a way, grandparents are better at, I think that unconditional part of parenting, right? Even if they struggled with it, with their own kids, the distance of that extra generation allows them to step back and give kids the space that they need.

I was just, I’ve read a bunch about Mr. Rogers. It was, I think it was grandpa McFeely was his grandfather. You know Mr. Rogers was his kind of sickly kid. He had allergies. He was chubby. His parents were a little clingy. They tried to keep them inside all the time. His grandfather was the one who encouraged him to go out and experiment and to get into trouble and to mess around. His grandfather was the one who told him, look, you make the world special just by being who you are. That was what empowered Fred Rogers to become the amazing human being that he did and influence and impact all these kids. And I think grandparents just because they’re less anxious, they’re less worked up maybe because they know they get to go home at the end of the day, do actually provide a great model for how parents should think more about their own parenting.

Katie: That’s such a good point. Yeah. I think grandparents are such a gift and that’s probably one of the very big reasons why. I’m also curious, so you’ve written, I’d love to go a little bit granular about some of the things you, because you have multiple bestselling books and I’ve really enjoyed all of them. But I’m curious what the thought process was of tackling each of those subjects in that order. So for instance, the first one, “Ego is the Enemy,” what was the impetus for tackling ego first? And I’d love for you to just walk us through some of the core principles of that.

Ryan: So I actually wrote “The Obstacle is the Way” a little bit before “Ego is the Enemy,” and it comes from a quote from Marcus Aurelius. He says, “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.” And what he meant is that every obstacle, every difficulty, every messed up thing that we didn’t want to happen, as undesirable as it may be presents also an opportunity, right? Someone is rude to you or mean to you, betrays you, that’s a chance. Yes. That’s not fun. But it’s also, if you think about it, a chance to practice forgiveness or a reminder of why you can’t trust so easily, right? The computer eats all your work, that’s really frustrating. Obviously, you don’t want that to happen, it’s a reminder of why you need better practices for saving your work. And it’s a chance if you think about it, to start over from scratch with no baggage, right? Every difficulty we face in life is, in a way, an opportunity to practice a different virtue.

And so the stoics thought of obstacles as fuel. Marcus Aurelius says, “You know, what you throw on top of a fire is fuel for the fire.” And so that book is really about that mindset. How do we decide that I’m gonna be better for all the adversity and difficulty that life throws at me? And I wanna expand people’s definition of what adversity is. Adversity is not just what happens to you because you’re a minority, you know, because you’re a woman, because you grew up poor, because you lost an arm in an accident. Adversity is waking up to two sick kids, right? Adversity is going out to the garage and finding the car tire is flat. You know, adversity is, you know, one of the parents is on a business trip and the other has to, you know, do double duty for the next 48 hours. How are you going to respond to this? What’s the mindset you need to bring? What are the tools and creativity you need to bring and how do you have the strength to persevere through that difficulty?

So that’s what “The Obstacle is the Way” is about. And then the next book was “Ego is the Enemy.” Because what I realized is that ego is something that gets in the way of doing what we were just talking about, right? Ego is this kind of force field between you and being a great parent, being a great employee, or being a great boss, being a great neighbor, being a great leader. I don’t think it’s a political point to say someone like Donald Trump has taken a difficult job being president, probably the hardest job in the world and made it much harder with his ego, right? He’s created unnecessary enemies. He’s passed up easy opportunities for compromise. He said things, you know, out of arrogance or anger that have come back to haunt him, right? And that’s what ego does. It just makes a hard thing harder. And I don’t think any parent, any business person has ever thought, you know, what would make this really tough situation that I’m in easier, like more ego. No, ego makes hard things harder. So that’s what egos about.

And then the third book in the trilogy is “Stillness is the Key.” And I think stillness is another thing that stillness makes overcoming obstacles easier. Stillness is what you get when you sweep ego away. We all benefit from slowing down, thinking more clearly, being intentional, having routines, getting rid of chaos or unnecessary obligations and burdens. And so that series that it’s all influenced by stoic philosophy, but it’s really about, you know, how can we improve important domains in our life through that philosophy.

Katie: Got it. And my apologies. I read he goes the enemy first and so they always reversed those two when I think about which one was written first.

Ryan: No, they’re not really meant to be in any order. That’s just sort of the journey I went on as a writer. But I think people should just pick up if they are willing to give the books a chance, I would just say pick up whichever one feels like it resonates more with where you are in your life. If you’re anything like me or probably you, I would imagine that just we’re all suffering from like information overload, over commitment, mental exhaustion. And so to me, I feel like stillness is this urgent sort of epi…stillness is a solution to an urgent epidemic that we have as a culture and as a society right now. But you know, maybe you’re going through a difficult obstacle in your business or your personal life or with one of your kids and that’s the best place to start. They’re all interchangeable.

Katie: Let’s talk a little bit more about stillness because I’m guessing there might be some moms listening who are thinking things like, that’s a great idea, but I have kids and that’s not possible. And it’s always chaos because I think an important point that I pulled when I read “Stillness is the Key” is that stillness doesn’t have to mean physical stillness, doing nothing. That was really important distinction. I loved that explanation of like that the stillness of being wrapped up or fully immersed in an activity. So like for me, paint more, or drawing or writing. But let’s talk more about stillness and practical applications when we are in such a busy world.

Ryan: Totally. Well, look, what I would say is that it’s the busy mom who needs stillness more than ever and needs to be able to…I’m not saying like move to an ashram in India or go on a 30-day silent meditation retreat. Most of us can’t do stuff like that financially or, you know, just time wise. So what I’m talking about is how does the mom or the dad or the CEO cultivate stillness inside the chaos? Right. I opened the book with the story of Seneca, who’s trying to write in Rome in, like, the year 100 AD. And he’s just distracted by all the ear-splitting noise outside of his window. And he talks about how you have to develop strategies for tuning all that out and focusing on what’s in front of you because you can’t control the noise, as you were saying you can only control how you respond to the noise.

So, you know, it’s funny that like, I feel like most of the times in my books I’m really writing about things that I learned from my wife and my wife has just this model of stillness. I think we bring different strengths and different traits to the relationship, but like and you helped us with this because you gave us advice on this that smart pillow that helps put kids to sleep. But our son, Clark, I would say for the first two and a half years of his life, never slept. Like, I’m not sure how he’s alive. He never slept more than two hours or three hours in a row. It was brutal. And so bedtime was a nightmare. Like putting him down, it was so hard. So much easier with our second. But I think we just, you know, that’s just sort of who he was.

But like my wife would go in to put him down to bed and I might not see her again for like two hours. Like it was a two-hour experience of nursing and holding and putting him down and just getting him like, you know, the transition from your arms to the cradle and then, oh, it didn’t work. And she would just, the stillness required to do anything that hard in the dark for two hours. I mean, I can’t even do anything for like seven minutes without getting impatient or frustrated. And so, you know, to me, the patience and the stillness that mothers bring to parenting, to me embodies all the things that I’m talking about in the book. I’m talking about cute Kennedy and the Cuban missile crisis and the brilliance and the patients and the perspective and the empathy that he brought to that difficult situation. How he was able to resist the advice that his generals had to rush into action. He’s like, no, we should think about why the Soviets did this and how we can give them a way out and what they’re gonna do in response. I feel like and this might seem a little sexist, but I bet Jacqueline Kennedy, if she had been invited into the room, intuitively would have known and suggested all of those things. And so stillness to me is something we can take a lot of inspiration from women for, but we all naturally possess stillness. And the key is how to cultivate it and develop it so it’s more at the forefront of our lives.

Katie: That’s such a great point. And you’re right. I think that was one of the lessons for me several years ago and actually when I was kind of delving into the idea of stoicism was that when it comes to cultivating these things, it can’t be left into the like little bits of time that we have left over or just added to a to-do-list. And I realized this in my own life when I almost, I think had a nervous breakdown trying to balance everything between the blog, the family and all of it. And came close to actually deleting “Wellness Mama” because I realized I couldn’t do everything at that level anymore and I wasn’t willing to sacrifice family. And in that moment, I realized there was a drastic difference in how I was managing the two things.

So in business, the most important things always happened first. And I had objectives and goals and I objectionably evaluated things. Whereas at home, I was trying to juggle everything in my head and just manage it myself and take on everything. And that wasn’t realistic. And so I sort of switched the entire idea of how I ran our family. And put the actual most important things first like family dinner and like spending time together and having time for self-care and for exercise and the things that help cultivate stillness. And it was a really drastic shift in the family because I was calmer and encouraged the kids to be calmer. We all had so much more bandwidth. But I think you’re right, like motherhood is wonderful for kind of building in some of those lessons of stoicism.

Ryan: Well, so two things. I think one like I don’t think this is just limited to women, but like one of the things that having a newborn really taught me and now my son’s three and my other son’s about four months is like, what we’re doing is what we’re doing, right? Like I don’t think playing in the dirt is fun, but that’s what he thinks is fun. If he can do it for hours and hours, so that’s what we’re doing. Do you know what I mean? That like stillness is just being present and enjoying and finding, you know, experiences in sometimes in the most mundane and ordinary things. And I think one of the things that having kids really teaches you that is such a critical part of stillness is presence and not like you go…so many parents, it’s like, “Oh, now we have to go.”

It’s like, do you really have to go or is this made up thing that you are deciding to do? Can’t you just do this and why don’t you just play? Why don’t you just sit here at the park for three hours instead of running? You know, you think this other thing is more educational and important, but really like sitting here playing in the sand is teaching all sorts of lessons. So I think I learned a lot of presence from parenting and that’s been an important part of stillness in my own life. And you brought up that idea of burnout. Like people think, Oh, I can’t afford stillness. I’m busy. I’ve got a company to run, I have money to make. I’ve books to write, a blog to keep you know, I have a career I’m trying to advance in.

Well, if you ended up working so hard that you work yourself into an early grave, that’s not good for your career, right? If you work so hard that it sucks all the joy and love that you had out of what you were doing, and so you wanna quit, that’s not good for your career. If an athlete is so unable to balance and pace themselves that they injured themselves, that’s not good for their career. Look at Kevin Garnett. He or, sorry, not Kevin Garnett, Kevin Durant. He hurt himself in the playoffs this year. He was recovering. Against doctor’s advice, he rushed back. He played like for like eight minutes in one of the games in the finals and blew out his leg and is now missing an entire season. So, you know, we say we wanna be there for our kids. We wanna provide for them, but if we actively injure ourselves mentally or physically because we can’t find a balance and we are incapable of moderation, one of those keystone virtues, well that’s pretty self-defeating.

Katie: So for you, personally, as both a business owner and a parent, what are some of the ways that these ideas of stoicism manifest in your daily life in a practical way? So how do you implement some of these? What are your own strategies?

Ryan: Sure. Well, give you some, I think some strategies that I’ve tried to practice that I think will be helpful for cultivating stillness and make people a better parent and a more stoic one. Number one is…this comes from Winston Churchill. Winston Churchill said the most important thing that a powerful public person needs to have. He said a good hobby. You need to have hobbies that balance you out, right? You can’t just be all about work. You can’t just be all about family, right? How many stay-at-home moms live and die by their kids and that’s why they hold onto them so tightly and why they get so wrapped up and say their personal lives or, you know, trying to bribe their kids way into college or whatever. It’s like, no, you should have been painting Martha or you should have, you know, gotten into doing triathlons and that would’ve been a good outlet for some of that energy, right. And allowed you to have some more balance and perspective with your kids.

So for me, and this ties into a second part of stoicism like physical exercise almost enduring or seeking out suffering in your life. So I try to swim or run every single day. And that exercise I think makes me a better dad. This morning I gave a talk here in Austin. And so I had to take my son to daycare, in pre-K and then I had to go do this talk and I had to be there by 10:00. And then I’ve been in recording interviews and preparing for the book launch all day. So it was a busy day, right? But it was important for me to exercise. So I got up at 6:30. I did some of my work. My son woke up at 7:30 and I took him on a four mile run in a stroller. And so that was our time together in the morning when we talked. We had fun, we were out in nature, but I was also taking care of myself. Sometimes when we do it in a bike, you know, sometimes I carry him in a backpack, but we experienced that morning together. And I think it’s really important.

Another important habit, and I know you’ve talked about this before, but like the power of journaling. You’re gonna wish in 20 years that you wrote down some of the memories and the experiences that you have while raising your kids, or just that you journaled the difficulties and the tough times that you had. And so, you know, we’re gonna want those journals in the future and your kids and your grandkids and your great grandkids will be grateful, you know, to look at those journals 50 years from now, 100 years from now. And so I’d encourage everyone to grab a notebook and try to jot a few thoughts in it every single day. So those are just be a couple straightforward strategies that I think are pretty practical and usable.

Katie: Those are great.

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Katie: And to circle back to something you said earlier when you were talking about “The Obstacle is the Way,” I think that’s another really profound mental shift that is especially beneficial in our specific period of time. I think at least the social media world that I see people are so easily angered and emotions skyrocket and they escalate and people build on each other for that. And I think that mindset shift of away from the idea that any obstacle is bad and actually to the idea that an obstacle can be very good is really profound. Are there any ways that you, like tangible ways you get people to start implementing that mindset shift because it is a big one?

Ryan: Well, you know, there’s this expression that’s become so popular now. People are like, oh, that’s trigger. You know, you’re like, “I’m triggered.” You know, and we wanna like we wanna sensor unpleasant or offensive viewpoints. And look, I’m not saying anyone should say anything offensive. Like, I try not to hurt people’s feelings. I don’t wanna be rude. I don’t like to just say mean or hurtful things for the sake of it. But I also, at the end of the day, think truth is important and I am not a fan of censorship. So like the idea that we should be teaching our kids to shout “trigger”, you know, that you’re triggering me and close their ears, you know what that’s doing? That’s setting them up to be hurt more because they’re more vulnerable to those things because they have no experience.

Adam Carolla, who I think is hilarious. I don’t agree with him on everything, but I think he’s hilarious. You know, he gave this great talk. I think he was testified before Congress and he was talking about this sort of censorship. It’s popular on college campuses. And he was like, look, this is the parents’ fault. You know, he’s like, this is like parents who have given their kids really bad allergies by not exposing them to things, right? By keeping your kids sheltered, by not, you know, by no nuts allowed or you know, like by overprotecting them, you’re actually made them incredibly vulnerable. By not letting them play in the dirt, they’ve not gotten the antibodies and the sort of exposure to things that they need to build up in a strong immune system.

And so I think one of the things we’ve gotta be really careful with as parents is not sheltering our kids from all the bad offensive things. Like people go, What should I tell my kids about what Donald Trump said on television? What should I say about these, you know, vulgar television shows?” Well, you should have an intelligent adult conversation with your kids about why certain things shouldn’t be said, why it reflects poorly on the person who said them, what it means, you know. It’s your impulse to block them from the unpleasantness of life that will ultimately make life much more unpleasant for them once they leave your house.

Katie: So true. And I love that you brought that up about allergies because that’s been, I think a shift that’s finally happening in the nutrition world is that for so long they had pregnant moms avoid allergens like nuts and avoid giving them to kids and it actually made the kids more likely to have allergies. And now the science is saying actually early careful introduction is much more effective and important. And so we’re starting to see that. And the same with dirt and like how we now know of kids play in the dirt and have pets in the home, they’re less likely to have allergies and less likely to have problems. And then how much of a metaphor for life that is like we can’t protect our kids from the emotionally tough things in the world either. A friend of mine, Aaron Alexander has a quote, he said, “Never waste a trigger.” And he goes onto how that shows you something really important about yourself. Like if someone else doing something that’s not directly aimed at you as causing you to have some kind of really strong emotional reaction, turn that around and figure out why because that’s really enlightening thing to look at.

Ryan: I just wrote that down, never waste a trigger. That’s so good. Well look, and you might agree, you might disagree with this which I, I would be perfectly fine to hear it, but like one of the things like my wife doesn’t eat gluten. I try to eat sort of mostly Paleo, the whole 30, I don’t eat a ton of gluten, but we let our son eat gluten. Like obviously as he gets a little bit older and is sort of more nutritional health matters. Like if he was an athlete or something, we’re gonna try to eat healthy and we don’t just like make him sandwiches all the time. But we didn’t wanna be the parent that says like, don’t give my kid pizza at this party, right? Because one, we didn’t want to be that. But also we know we can’t be there preventing him from eating a cupcake or a cookie at school if someone gives it to him.

So we wanna make sure that he has an, you know, the first five years of his life, he didn’t grow up in a bubble just because we eat healthy and we know what’s good or bad. We wanted to make sure he was prepared for a world in which, you know, stuff gets slipped in your food or you feel pressured to eat something because you don’t want to upset people or somebody doesn’t know. And are you making a mistake? We didn’t want that to be the first time that he, you know, eats this or that and it throws his whole body into shock. We wanted him to have the freedom to know, you know, does that make sense or is that crazy?

Katie: Absolutely. No, and I’m right there 100% with you. I actually invested in a company that’s doing the research on early introduction, introducing gluten, peanuts and dairy to babies starting at six months when they get food, but in very small doses and building because of that exact thing. If they’re not exposed at all, and I’m the same way, I eat, almost never eat those things. I almost never eat gluten or dairy or processed food in general, but I don’t forbid my kids from it and I don’t tell them they can’t eat things and when they’re out in public, they 100% make their own choices about food. And my thought is at home I’m responsible for cooking for the family and I’m gonna cook what I believe to be healthy and good for them. But I’m also not gonna control them when they’re not there. Because if anything, it’s like when you, you know, an alcohol is this completely forbidden thing, then they more likely, you know, to consume that when they’re older. And so having those conversations about it, certainly educating about why they might choose not to do those things, but not forbidding it because I think that can make them more likely to actually want to try the thing.

Ryan: That’s a great point. Yeah. And you don’t like, I think it’s important with kids like, eh, I don’t wanna give them any issues regarding food. Do you know what I mean? Like, I don’t wanna make food an obsession in their lives. I don’t wanna give them body or you know, mental issues pertaining to food. I want them to eat when they’re hungry, eat reasonably, you know. I just, and then we’ll handle it when they’re a little bit more capable of having an adult discussion about it. But I think you’re right. This is a great metaphor for parenting and for life in general. Like I think with this college admission scandal, like introduced a new term to me. Like I was familiar with helicopter parents, right? You don’t wanna be the parent that’s constantly hovering, making sure they don’t fall down, you know, being way too involved in their business, always watching, always observing, spying on them, whatever. That’s helicopter parenting and it’s bad for a lot of reasons.

But what these parents were, was snowplow parents. That’s what I heard. They were constantly, they were in front of their kids removing obstacles, removing difficulties. So they always had a clear and pleasant path to wherever they wanted to go. And that involved cheating on the SATs, that involved bribing their way into college. These kids never experienced difficulty failure, setback. The parents removed obstacles and then wondered why the kids were so fragile and you know, didn’t thrive. And so the job of the parent is not to prevent your kid from experiencing adversity. It’s to equip the kid to know how to respond to adversity because what’s a better strategy for life? Pretend that you can always be there and always eliminate obstacles or help raise and instruct a kid so obstacles never slow them down more than they need to.

Katie: Wow. Yeah, I heard that term as well, snowplow parent. And I feel like I’d be the complete opposite of that because when I look at my own life, I realize a lot of my accomplishments have come as almost a direct result of obstacles and overcoming those obstacles. And some of those things I had to work through where things I would certainly never wish on my child. But obviously as parents we wish our children every success and happiness in life. And that’s something I’ve really wrestled with as a parent is how do I, like, how do I hopefully give them those same skills and lessons without them hopefully having to go through some of those hard things that I did. And also realizing as a parent I can’t purposely make their life hard. That kinda goes against parenting.

And so for us, we tried to find ways to build in natural good challenges in ways that we can tackle as a family and that might be travel, that might be tackling new skills together, like handstands or whatever it may be. I’m curious how you guys approach that with your kids as they start to get older. How do you approach the idea of obstacles and equipping them for those things and also, giving them chances to fail and have obstacles?

Ryan: Well, that’s a funny thing cause I’ve heard from lots of people, adults since the book was written and they go, you know, “Does that mean I should seek out obstacles?” And it’s like, what life is gonna throw enough obstacles at you that you, I don’t know, you need to go seek them out. But I do think making sure that we’re not actively preventing those obstacles from happening is really important for kids and also, putting them in positions or giving them experiences that force them to learn. So like, I think it’s interesting, like obviously you wanna be cognitive of say choking, but like the idea that that you should give two craps what the toy box says, the suggested age for a toy is to me is hilarious. Like, I’m gonna give my kids the toys that challenge them, that make them that they have to figure out. I’m not gonna give them the simplest, easiest toys. Like, that’s not how you learn. That’s not how you get better. You get better by being put out of your comfort zone, by having to figure things out.

So yeah, we’re constant. Like our, you know, our kid was swimming from like, you know, three months on where he likes to wear a life jacket, but we encourage him to swim without a life jacket when we’re in the pool because, you know, if we let him in our pool in a life jacket, we find that the next couple times he’s swimming without a life jacket, he’s too brazen and his skills have atrophied, right? Because he’s gotten used to just jumping in off the side and not having to swim back to the side, right? And so we’re constantly trying to put him in challenging situations and experiences, not like throwing up obstacles in his path, but sort of like you’ve done with your kids. And I’ve seen them, they’re wonderful. Like they’re out there exploring outside, you know, their free range or whatever the expression is, because that’s what’s gonna put them in a position to naturally experience obstacles that they grow and learn from.

Katie: Yeah, exactly. And I think there’s also ways as parents, we can easily let build an obstacles in the form of just natural consequences by not problem solving for them, like you said, or not doing things for them when they could have done it themselves. So for instance, like with our kids, if they don’t like a food that I cook, they don’t have to eat it, but they’re not getting anything else. And our thought is that hunger is a great natural teacher and that is, you know, an obstacle that’s not life-threatening in any way that they will gladly overcome by the next meal. But that they can learn from that scenario. Or now that they all do their own laundry, if they don’t do their laundry, they don’t have clothes, and that’s an obstacle they’ve created and then they have to solve because I’m not gonna solve that problem for them. And so I think you’re right, like all of those things, if we just build in those lessons, life certainly throws plenty of them at all of us.

Ryan: Yeah, I think that’s right. I think that’s right. And not solving the problems for them when they come to you with a, “Hey, fix this.” And it’s like, you know how to fix this. You show me how to fix it. And I think that’s really important.

Katie: So one of the critiques I’ve heard of stoicism is that it’s an ancient philosophy and how can it actually, you know, fit into modern times and that these philosophers didn’t chase a lot of this stuff that we face in the modern world, which I’ll agree with that point. They didn’t deal with social media trolls and they didn’t deal with the constant demands of all of the things that necessarily hit us in modern life. But I’m just curious your take on that. When you hear people say like, you know, how does stoicism really fit in the modern world?

Ryan: To me, people are people. And the more things have changed over the passage of history and time, fundamentally, the more they’ve stayed the same, right? Marcus Aurelius had like 9 or 10 kids, you know, he ran an empire. He had people who worked for him. You know, if he was cold in the winter and hot in the summer, you know he dealt with critics. He dealt with fans, you know, he dealt with plans that he had that fell apart. He was trying to solve the problems of existence just like we are. And he was coming at it from a position of great privilege, which many of us have, right? We’re lucky to be born in America. We’re lucky not to be impoverished. You know, we’re lucky to have our health.

On the other side of the stoke spectrum, there’s Epictetus and Epictetus was a former slave. He was disabled. His leg was sort of all but useless and he walked with a limp all of his life. And yet he was the other famous stoic philosopher so much so that he was probably Marcus’s favorite philosopher. And he has all sorts of interesting things to say about those experiences, which are timeless as well. How many people are disabled? How many people have come from less than desirable circumstances? How many people have anger and resentment about things that people have done to them? Right? Stoicism is ultimately a philosophy that’s I think applicable to whoever you are, whatever you’re doing, wherever you are. Because ultimately those virtues we talked about earlier on, temperance, courage, wisdom, justice, we all need more of these things. And the ancient world has a lot to teach us about them just like the research that we’ve done, you know, in psychology and biology and neuroscience has a lot to teach the Stoics, right?

Like Marcus would have been a better parent, I’m sure if he had John Bowlby’s, you know, breakthroughs about attachment theory pertaining to kids. Maybe his kid, Commodus, wouldn’t have been so messed up if Marcus probably hadn’t had and, you know, had a closer, more involved relationship with him. So it’s not to say stoicism is perfect. No. Nothing is perfect and everything, you know, from the past has biased and flawed assumptions. The stoics didn’t have a problem with slavery, right? Even Epictetus who was a slave never seems to have questioned whether as institution that was okay or not, right? So there’s a lot that needs to be updated within stoicism and I kind of tried to do that in my books, but the idea that you would write it off just because it’s all this ridiculous. The Magna Carta is old, the Constitution is old, you know, Christianity is old. But that doesn’t mean there’s not a lot of good ideas in those things.

Katie: I completely agree. And another thing that you have is you have these coins that I actually keep with me all the time now. Yeah. I have memento mori and I have a amor fati. And so I took Latin all the way through high school and I love Latin phrases, but I love if you could just kind of give us an overview of those two specifically because I just find them really helpful in my own life. And I think it’s so cool that you made those.

Ryan: So I have those two coins. I have in my left pocket, I have the memento mori coin and it comes from an ancient stoic practice. The idea of meditating on your mortality on the back as a quote from Marcus Aurelius, he says, “You could leave life right now let that determine what you do and say and think. And so I think about that always, and I made this coin for Daily Stoke. You can see it if you’ve got a daily stoke.com/store. But the idea of the coin is like a reminder that…a physical reminder can reach in my pocket and touch it. I can spin it around on the table and it’s a reminder to me constantly not to take life for granted and not to take anyone for granted.

One of the, I think the most provocative exercises in all this stoicism, and this might trigger some moms listening, Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus both said that as you tuck your child into bed at night, you should say to yourself this could be the last time that I see them. You know, that they might not make it to the morning. The idea of thinking that your children are mortal is so repugnant and so terrifying that we don’t wanna do it. But the purpose of that exercise is not to detach from your children. It’s to not just go through the motions as you’re tucking them down, not to take them for granted, not to hold a grudge, not to yell at them because they’re, you know, putting on their pajamas too slowly or to get upset that they, you know, they spilled their food on the way into the bedroom or to take it personally that they yelled or got frustrated with, you know, like, enjoy this. Don’t take it for granted. Don’t take anyone for granted. We do not possess the people that we love. They can be taken from us at any moment. And this is an essential part of stoicism.

And then in my other pocket, I have amor fati, which it comes from that other metaphor from Marcus Aurelius we talked about earlier, the idea that, you know, he says what you throw in front of a fire is fuel for the fire. Amor Fati means you just love everything that happens. You embrace all of it. Your family is stuck at the airport for three hours because your flight is delayed. You can sit there and complain or you can go, this is the best thing that ever happened to me. I’m gonna say yes to this and we’re gonna have a fun family experience. Or at the very least, I’m just not gonna yell at anyone. You know, I’m not gonna take this personally. I’m not gonna get upset by it. Just gonna accept it and I’m gonna enjoy it as best I can. And so this idea of memento mori and amor fati to me are two critical practices to parenting, to life, to entrepreneurship because I mean, what else are you gonna do?

Katie: I love both of those so much. And okay, so I always love to ask book recommendations at the end of interviews and your books are actually some of my most recommended, but I’m curious what books besides your own you have really taking like life lessons from or have really been foundational for you?

Ryan: Yeah, so I’ll give you a couple. I think some of these kind of pertain to stoicism. Some of them pertain to parenting. One of my favorite books is a book written by a woman named Totto-Chan who is sort of like the Ellen of Japan. And she wrote this memoir of growing up in Japan as a young girl during the Second World War called “The Little Girl at the Window.” And it’s about this sort of untraditional education that she had, this wonderful school principal who embraced her strangeness and weirdness. She’s clearly a kid with ADHD is what you would call it now. But this teacher instead of trying to change her, embraced her and encouraged her to be who she was, and it’s one of my favorite books and I just absolutely love it. I would recommend “Antifragile” by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. I think that’s an important one. I think that’s what we’re trying to do with kids is not raise fragile kids, but kids who are strong and resilient.

I really like “The Second Mountain” by David Brooks, which I read recently, which is like, so the first mountain we try to climb as career success that’s being famous, that’s being rich. But it says the second mountain is your family is the impact that you have on your community. It’s what you do for other people. It’s figuring out why you were actually put on this planet and what kind of impact and difference you can make. That’s a really important one. And then I have one that I think Seth would like that I just found out about recently. I didn’t know Herbert Hoover, the president, you know, the guy who basically didn’t respond right to the great depression happened to have written a book called “Fishing for Fun” and the subtitle is “How to Wash Your Soul.” And he wrote a book about the therapeutic philosophical and spiritual benefits efficient. And I just I thought it was beautiful. We have a little lake behind our house and I’d love to go out there and fish and my son fishes with me even though he’s three and it’s totally true. You never come back from fishing worse off than you did before you came, even if you don’t catch anything,

Katie: I love all of those and I’ll make sure they are in the show notes as along with links to the Daily Dad and all of your books and all of your sites. But where can people find you online if they wanna follow your work and stay in touch?

Ryan: Well, that would be really cool if they did. So I’m @ryanholiday on pretty much all social platforms. You can go to dailystoic.com/email if you want an email inspired by stoicism every day, dailydad.com if you want a parenting email each day. And then I hope they check out “Stillness is the Key” which is available in bookstores everywhere starting October 1st.

Katie: Awesome. And I got a pre-release copy, which I was really grateful to get and I highly recommend that you guys, it’s awesome. I think it’s especially like we talked about, applicable to parents and I think it’s a really important message in today’s world. But Ryan, like I said at the beginning, you are one of my favorite authors and I have looked up to you for a long time. So I’m really grateful that you took the time to be here today to share with the audience. And I love that we took such a parenting direction because I think that’s such a perfect and applicable way to talk about stoicism.

Ryan: Well, thank you. And I’m so glad. That was very nice of you. I’m so glad we met at John Durant’s event and that I overheard you talking about where you live because that’s a place that my wife and I visited a lot and it happened. I think that’s why we connected and here we are talking. So it’s awesome. And Samantha says hello. I just texted her to say we were talking and she says hello and hopes you’re doing awesome.

Katie: Oh, I love it. And tell her hi for me and your little ones as well. And thank you for your time today and thanks all of you for listening and sharing your time with us today. We’re so grateful that you did and I hope that you will join me again on the next episode of the “Wellness Mama” podcast.

Source: https://wellnessmama.com/podcast/ryan-holiday/

[aboylikethat]

wow, what a fancy graphic. i put SOOOO much effort into that. anyway, this list isn’t for anything special — no milestones or anything. lately i’ve just been so in awe of the people that are on my dash, and i wanna express that!! if i forget anyone, trust me, it’s not because i don’t think you’re awesome, there are just SO many people i want to talk about. thank you all so much for following me and writing with me and letting me cry about my snarky little son. you all mean so much to me.

loves of my life ( — friends that i absolutely adore )

@stillgcy / @cobxltblue / @sophxmanic, whichever blog you’re on. there’s so much i could say about you. you’re my best friend and i love you so freaking much. a day that i don’t talk to you is a day that’s just not complete. and thankfully, we don’t go very often without talking to each other. i love you so much and i’m so glad that i met you and that we’re gonna be able to see each other in just over a month, dude. it’s crazy. thank you for always letting me rant and scream about my babies and making me laugh. i’m so completely thankful for you.

@sereprin / @androxeda. you’re a gay piece of shit and i love u.

@erosheart. vALK. i love u. i love u. listen, i could sit here for hours and talk about how funny you are and how smart and kind and what an incredible writer you are, but if i did that, i’d be here all damn night ( you voice fucking americans it’s 5 am here ). i’m so grateful to have met you and i’m so happy you’re in my life.

@heartgiven / @butlittle. ALEX. you are. so good. like, seriously. we don’t talk as much as i’d like for us to ( which is partly my fault for being so terrible at conversation ) but you’re so FANTASTIC. i love what an authentic person you are?? you’re intelligent and so kind and you deserve such incredible things, and i love that you explore how blatantly problematic your characters can be and don’t hold back. basically, i just love you.

@aqvcmarine. silv u are the cutest person i love u u make my days so much better like. I FELL IN LOVE WITH YOU WHEN YOU AGREED TO WATCH ANDREW RANNELLS VIDEOS WITH ME?? we bonded sm over that and hsm and you’re just a gem

shi. I DON’T FUCKIN REMEMBER YOUR URL BC I’M A TERRIBLE FRIEND BUT I LOVE U YOU’RE SO SWEET WHY AREN’T WE BETTER FRIENDS

the cool kids ( — my rad mutuals that i wanna get to know more and write with tons )

@blaxneydays @killerblonde @withstoopid @warbleralways @avcntgarde @alticsfortius @awesomegaydar @ofscarllet @ofmanyworlds @ofberries @starhaze @shootingoldstar @snowtist @singingsabourin @forrkeeps @lionwept @liecaught @lingeringscars @zensuality @heartguided @deathcheatcd @vicemirrored @heartfrosted @theoriginalbadasspuckerman — there are many more, but if you aren’t on here, it’s not because i’m not super grateful to know you, i’m just tired and forgetful!! 

[aurimeanswind]

Weak at the Knees—Sunday Chats (9/24/17)

What a week it has been.

It’s more personal life/work related, which I notably don’t talk about here on the inter webs, but it’s been a good, hard working week in my life!

I’m just gonna go right into the games, forgo the editorial, and focus on the questions, since there are some good ones this week. Back-to-back late postings of the Sunday Chats though, just been some late Sunday nights is all!

Alright. On to it!

What’s on Tap

Metroid Samus Returns

I mentioned it a bit last week but Samus Returns continues to be absolutely excellent.

It’s the full Zero Mission treatment for Metroid 2, and it’s an amazing reimagining of the classic Metroid formula from that game.

It keeps everything that made that game super rad, and is just exactly what I wanted the 3DS 2D Metroid game to be: an amazing 2D Metroid with 3D graphics!

I love it. Yay!

Destiny 2

Still chipping away at Destiny 2, trying to make it into that upper echelon of “above power level 280″ and finally being one of the cool kids.

After the demoralizing failure of not finishing the Leviathan raid this past week, there was definitely some time off necessary.

I walked away, but now I’m back up to the plate and ready to knock it out of the park.

What I’ve Been Working On

It’s been an interesting few weeks of working on things. I am still cranking those words out everyday, and I can feel something coming. I wanted to release something this week, what with it being a full year since the release of the first episode of Alex Talks Season 3, but we’ll have to wait a bit more. Stuff is coming. I do promise. I have so much written, and I wanna wait for the right time to record some footage and do some new things with video content, but I am also extremely lazy.

So, with those to things going at each other, we’ll see how it turns out.

I’ll say this week I’ve been writing almost exclusively about Destiny and Metroid, and it feels real good to write about those two things again!

Questions

Remember to look for my tweet from my @ALFighter27 twitter account on Sunday afternoons soliciting Sunday Chats questions, respond, and you’ll be in here! Having fun! Yay!

Hrm. I mean I could take this a bunch of different ways.

I think there are definitely a few things that I’ll list off. Like, I could always be a better person. I honestly, truly believe that, and I think that mentality is partly what leads people to believe I am one at all, is because I strive to be better, to be more inclusive, to be more empathetic and understanding.

Like one thing I hate about myself is how lazy I am, ya know? Like I procrastinate a lot. Whether it’s little things like doing the dishes or cleaning my bathroom, or big things like writing projects, articles, editing writers’ work, responding to important emails, or otherwise. I wanna focus on that and be better.

I also generally want to be healthier. Like, both my parents were, for a time, overweight, and had gastric bypasses done and now they’re healthy and skinny, but I don’t wanna lean on that as an option, and I know the odds are stacked against me. I wanna be happy with my body, but also I have so many medical things wrong with me that I’d like to prolong the feeling of being able to get up, and run, and play, and just be active as long as I can, because ya know, you don’t appreciate that kind of thing when you have it.

So yeah, I hope that answers your question.

But also I am not a very good writer and could be so much better but I’m trying. Putting in the work and time, so to speak.

It’s only been...

*checks calendar*

928 days today! That’s not that long at alllllllllll....

*dies*

I have talked about this before, but my Growing up with a Generation piece is definitely up there. My Twilight Princess piece is too. And I actually legitimately love my Breath of the Wild review. Super proud of that.

I think there are some reviews that could have been better, especially the ones on episodic games. But I’ve kind of stopped reviewing them now because it’s hard to encapsulate those feelings. Especially if you’re going to try and do so without spoilers. 

But nothing sticks out to me that I am particularly not proud of because I just haven’t published those things. I wrote a thing about JRPGs versus WRPGs that I ended up just not liking at all, and scrapped. But that’s really the biggest one.

Haha I think I’d want Christopher Nolan to direct it, just because he is my favorite director, but no. That won’t do. 

Ugh, Logan this would be such a terrible movie oh my god.

Okay, either the Russo Brothers, or, preferably, Phil Lord and Chris Miller, directors of 21 & 22 Jump Street.

Actors?

Uhh, for me I’d want like, Miles Teller for myself, because we kind of have a similar “look”. In a PERFECT WORLD a young French Stuart would play Scott, oh my fucking god that’d be so perfect. You have no idea. But like, a young one. I could totally see a Josh Gad playing Evan Wall. Joseph Fait is tough, he’d maybe be like an Andrew Garfield type. Tony Horvath would be really tough. I’d love just like, a Justin McElroy for him, honestly. 

Nabeshin is a tricky one. Like, maybe a Michael B Jordan, but I’d think a Chadwick Boseman could do great too.

Danny Juarez would be played by either Michael Peña or Rob Schneider. One of the two.

Haha I mean, I think I already covered Tony, I really think the J-man could do a great job, but I’m sure there is a better pick out there.

Jurge Cruze Alvarez? Joseph Gordon Levitt. 

Jarrett Green? Don Cheadle. 

Logan Wilkinson? Grant Gustin. Who would also probably play Jacob Bryant. He’d play both of you.

I have to think about this more you put me on the spot haha.

Ahhh, the classic question. Actually the dogs I grew up with!

The Saint Bernard.

Although I love huskies too. Here is the only picture of a couple of them I found on my Facebook. 

They are siblings so that’s why they look so similar haha.

I fucking love Saint Bernards, and big dogs, and dogs you can hug. But I love all kinds of dogs.

So HAH Joey! I bet you thought I’d say corgi! And I got you!

Definitely had to google this.

No.

NEXT QUESTION!

Goddamn Wrestlers I swear.

So i have never seen Face/Off, and I KNOW. I WANT TO. So by default it’s The Rock, and The Rock is a fucking amazing movie, so I ain’t even mad.

Not to late at all!

The BEST snack food... Hrm...

I mean I love potato chips, personally, but I try not to eat them. Not anymore, at least, because I can feel my arteries slowly closing as I put every chip in my mouth...

I’d honestly say, if accessible, the french fry. The french fry is the perfect snack-um. My brother actually just made home-made french fries, like cut the potatoes himself, last week, and they were fucking amazing.

Yeah.

Yeah I would.

I mean, I’d like to know the chance, ahead of time, personally, but I could get more than just burritos at Chipotle. Now, if my burrito BOWL exploding in my face randomly that’d just be kind of funny.

METROID.

Shit, they already did that one.

This is tricky, because there are a ton of really cool one offs that would be fun to bring back. But my totally bullshit answer is just gonna be a REAL Paper Mario RPG again. Even a Super Paper Mario 2 would be fucking amazing, but a sequel to Thousand Year Door, in conjunction with a TYD remaster on Switch, would be incredible.

Listen, I’m sorry I deleted you off my friends list in such glorious fashion Max. I’M SORRY!

But apparently Danny Juarez is gunning for my position, so in short, he’s dead to me.

Will keep you posted.

So here is a big thing I’ve realized, and there are still occasionally games I’ll like to stream, but I tend to listen to podcasts when I play games. When I stream, I can’t do that, and I end up falling really behind on my podcasts. But I’ve been streaming Destiny a lot lately, and will try and continue to do so.

Not having a schedule makes it super hard for me, and if I could figure out something consistent and fun to stream, I’d definitely give it a shot. But right now, I just don’t know. I got a new capture card, and that definitely helps, even though I mostly got it for video, but it ebbs and flows. Maybe there will be more on the horizon!

I got nothing else left in me this week, I am tired, and tuckered, and ready to just play some games and chill for the rest of my night.

Thank you all so much, for reading, supporting, asking, listening, everything you do.

Next week I’ll be asking YOU ALL a question for Sunday Chats again, so keep on the lookout, and until then...

keep it real.