Does Stoicism Actually Work? W/ William Jaworski | Elite Performance Podcast #60

00:00:00:01 - 00:00:06:22
Itamar Marani
If you really were convinced you were a stoic hero, any tragedy would leave you without a sense of who you are. Can you speak to that or what that means?

00:00:07:00 - 00:00:26:01
William Jaworski
Suppose that you have done this or you believe that you have and then suddenly some sort of tragedy comes up. Somebody who's very close to you or some goal that you had in mind that you were very committed to ends up getting lost. You feel the pain of that. And that contradicts the entire image that you have of yourself as a stoic hero who is completely devoid of any kind of emotional attachment to things.

00:00:26:03 - 00:00:34:03
William Jaworski
You start thinking, I guess maybe I'm not that invincible. Then the question is, well, if I'm not that if I'm not that stoic Superman, then what am I?

00:00:34:06 - 00:00:37:04
Itamar Marani
So shattered your sense of identity, the hope of who you thought you could be.

00:00:37:06 - 00:00:41:14
William Jaworski
It's crippling, flattens people, lays them out.

00:00:41:16 - 00:01:01:09
Itamar Marani
Today in the pod, we have Bill Jaworski joining us. Bill is an analytic philosopher, published author, professor of over 20 years, a leading expert in the Field of Philosophy of the Mind and co-founder of Ultimate Studio. He is also one of the key contributors to the people that are helping me with the book writing itself and getting all the thoughts as well together as possible.

00:01:01:10 - 00:01:19:19
Itamar Marani
And he's someone that when I initially met him and we had the first conversation, I was like, Wow, this guy really knows his stuff about how the mind works and its attachments to philosophy. So when me and him chatted after one of the work calls and he told me that they'd just written a book about why Stoicism isn't the real deal and it doesn't really work.

00:01:19:21 - 00:01:36:16
Itamar Marani
I wanted to grab the book, and after I grabbed the book and I read it, I asked him to come on and explain his perspective of why Stoicism or the way at least that we perceive it to be is not the real deal. And why there's a different version of philosophy. It's basically the School of Aristotle that is more effective.

00:01:36:18 - 00:01:40:07
Itamar Marani
So with that, I want to welcome Bill to the show. Thank you for coming on.

00:01:40:09 - 00:01:42:18
William Jaworski
Thank you so much. It's an honor to be here.

00:01:42:20 - 00:01:55:22
Itamar Marani
Great. So I want to open up with a question with a quote of yours from the book. It says, If you really were convinced you were a stoic hero, any tragedy would leave you without a sense of who you are. Can you speak to that and what that means?

00:01:56:00 - 00:01:59:07
William Jaworski
Sure.

00:01:59:09 - 00:02:30:08
William Jaworski
Stoicism aims at achieving a state of emotional detachment or numbness. It is convinced classic Stoics real stocks are convinced that you can eliminate emotions from human life. We've talked about this before in our conversations. Aristotle thinks that that that's false. He says, look, we're we're biological beings. And that means fundamentally, we're emotional beings. You can't you can't eliminate emotion from human life.

00:02:30:10 - 00:02:56:19
William Jaworski
But Stoics think otherwise. They think that you can actually eliminate emotions. In fact, a lot of stoics talk about emotions as a disease, which is not something to be mastered, not something to be trained or disciplined, but something to be eliminated. So the goal then is to eliminate emotion from your life, to eradicate it the way an antibiotic would kill a bacterium.

00:02:56:21 - 00:03:27:21
William Jaworski
That's what you try to do to emotion. So if you do that, if you become the stoic hero, you are completely devoid of any kind of emotion, any kind of emotional attachment to anything, which means that nothing, nothing bad that happens, even massive tragedies, nothing will affect you emotionally. So suppose that you're convinced that this is the kind of human being you are this stoic hero who has achieved complete emotional detachment, who really doesn't have emotions anymore, essentially a state that's very much like a psychopath.

00:03:27:23 - 00:03:54:13
William Jaworski
Suppose that you have done this or you believe that you have, and then suddenly some sort of tragedy comes up, somebody who's very close to you or some some goal that you had in mind that you were very committed to ends up getting lost. You feel the pain of that. And that contradicts the entire image that you have of yourself as a stoic hero who is completely devoid of any kind of emotional attachment to things.

00:03:54:15 - 00:03:59:22
Itamar Marani
So shattered your sense of identity, the hope of who you had before you thought you could be.

00:04:00:00 - 00:04:26:08
William Jaworski
Exactly. You had this ambition that you were going to be some sort of stoic hero who would be unfazed even by huge tragedies in life. And then here comes a tragedy, kicks you in the groin. You feel that And you start thinking, I guess maybe I'm not that invincible. I guess maybe I'm not. And so then the question is, well, if I'm not that if I'm not that stoic Superman, then what am I?

00:04:26:10 - 00:04:35:05
William Jaworski
Who am I? That can be very disorienting. Then it creates a certain kind of cognitive dissonance that's hard to overcome.

00:04:35:07 - 00:04:48:02
Itamar Marani
So in a way, it's when a challenging time comes along, it actually provides you another added challenge there that you weren't expecting because there's this loss of sense of self. Who am I? How actually going to deal with this? Is that accurate?

00:04:48:04 - 00:05:20:01
William Jaworski
Yeah. If if you manage to get past the initial shock to your identity, that would certainly happen later on. What ends up happening in cases where somebody is somebody's sense of identity in that sense gets gets undermined by some life event? It's even more radical than that. People can be utterly paralyzed in life. It's not that they can get on with things and then some other tragedy happens and they're not able to adapt to it.

00:05:20:03 - 00:05:31:23
William Jaworski
They're not even able to move on. They're not even able to make simple decisions about what to eat for breakfast.

00:05:32:00 - 00:06:00:21
William Jaworski
The kind of radical dissonance that occurs when you've been so strongly committed to something that then just gets lost, flattens people, lays them out. So it takes them. It takes them a while to get over that. It's not like, Oh, I guess I'm not a stoic hero. What do I do next? It's crippling when when your sense of identity gets destroyed by a by an event like that.

00:06:00:23 - 00:06:23:17
Itamar Marani
Okay. So let's dive into that because what you're saying you're grouping from wrong is basically that I call it the classic Stoics, the real Stoics. They think you shouldn't have any emotions, period. Any emotions. So when you actually have an emotion, then it leaves you all confused. And all the work that you've done on creating this philosophy in the sense of self, it goes down to the trash.

00:06:23:18 - 00:06:36:06
Itamar Marani
So if that's the case, then why are people clinging on to stoicism? Why are they touting it these days? And when you see the classic or the real Stoics, what do you mean by that?

00:06:36:07 - 00:06:56:06
William Jaworski
These are all worthy questions. So my my background is is actually in philosophy. I have a doctorate in philosophy. That was my that's my field of specialization, taught at university for many years. And so when I think about up to up until just, you know, a year or two ago, whenever I thought about Stoics, there's a list of stocks that you think of.

00:06:56:06 - 00:07:27:08
William Jaworski
You think of the Greek Stoics guys like Chrysippus, you think of the Romans dogs, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus. Epictetus was Greek, but he was taught by miscellaneous. Rufus, who was was a Roman. Those are the those are the people that I thought were Stoics. That's just the classic stoic canon. What I learned recently was that there are people who call themselves Stoics today and who are endorsing the stoic philosophy.

00:07:27:10 - 00:07:55:09
William Jaworski
So to me that that looked like a very bizarre phenomenon because there are, you know, more or less fatal objections to stoicism that have been around for, you know, 2000 years. So to see somebody try to resurrect stoicism, you know, it'd be like somebody trying to bring back rotary phones or something. I mean, it's just like, you know, using some outmoded technology to do a job that we've got better tools to do today.

00:07:55:11 - 00:08:18:02
William Jaworski
So it's very puzzling to me to see that there was a revival of interest in Stoicism. And so I looked at what some, you know, modern kind of contemporary, stoic people are saying, and it's a sort of sanitized version of stoicism. So they they back off of that claim, for instance, that you can just eliminate emotion. And what they give you is something that's actually not true.

00:08:18:02 - 00:08:54:02
William Jaworski
Stoicism, It's sort of like kind of like a course corrected thing that actually isn't stoicism and it's closer to Aristotle's. It's trying to get closer to Aristotle's view. And so initially, for me, I was very puzzled about why stoicism would make a comeback. And so your first question is, why is Stoicism making a comeback now? I think it's largely a byproduct of effective marketing, frankly, that there's a there was a group of people who was just very hungry for some sort of guidance in things.

00:08:54:02 - 00:09:15:18
William Jaworski
And somebody comes along and says, I'll guide you. Here's a way to think about things here, something or other, and they achieve some marginal results and they sort of think it's great. And then effective marketing keeps people coming back. So I think that the the interest in contemporary stoicism derives largely from a very effective marketing campaign by the people who are in charge of that sort of thing.

00:09:15:20 - 00:09:35:03
William Jaworski
And, you know, by by people don't have any any frame of reference. They don't have any point of comparison for evaluating a philosophy of life. So for them, stoicism probably sounds great because they don't even know what the alternatives are.

00:09:35:05 - 00:10:01:22
William Jaworski
They probably aren't familiar with the objections to it. They don't know the history of ideas. They don't realize that it was refuted 2000 years ago. And so they just think, Oh yeah, I guess this is just fine. You know, be like, if you had some sort of cancer causing device in your house, which you actually didn't know the studies that show that it causes cancer, you might just start using the thing, not knowing something, something analogous I think is true about Stoicism.

00:10:01:22 - 00:10:16:17
William Jaworski
If you were to evaluate its popularity today in terms of its philosophical merits, its accuracy, you'd say there's it's utterly puzzling why anybody would take it seriously. I think if you view it through a commercial, Oh, please, just.

00:10:16:17 - 00:10:20:09
Itamar Marani
Question What do you mean by its accuracy? What is the lens of that?

00:10:20:11 - 00:10:45:00
William Jaworski
Well, think about a simple claim. Like it is possible to eliminate emotion. You know, it's possible to to render yourself incapable of feeling emotion. So that's just a single claim. And the question is, is that claim true? That is is the world the way the claim says it is? You know, you can look at a claim like two and two or four.

00:10:45:00 - 00:11:19:18
William Jaworski
And the question is, is the world the way the claim says it is to insure for? And then you compare that to and two or five the world is the way that one of the sentences says it is not the other. So one of those senses is true and the other is false. So when you look at stoicism and they say you have to eliminate emotions because emotion that entails that emotions can be eliminated, that commits them to saying that the world is a certain way, that human beings are beings which are capable of eliminating emotion from themselves, from their behavioral repertoire.

00:11:19:19 - 00:12:03:11
William Jaworski
But that's just not true. You know, try, try as you might. You can't you can't eliminate emotion, because fundamentally, we're biological beings. We are we are hardwired for emotion. Emotion. Our limbic system evolved as a way of providing immediate responses to environmental threats and opportunities. And that's that's part of what we are. So if you were to evaluate stoicism in terms of the accuracy of its claims, in terms of whether or not it's true, there are all sorts of objections to it that have been around for thousands of years that show that, no, this is just false.

00:12:03:12 - 00:12:22:04
William Jaworski
So if you were just to ask why it's so popular now and look at it through that lens, and that's the lens that I looked at it through, I was like, why? Why would anybody think that this is a plausible view? And, you know, in talking to my coauthor, Vishal, he was like, you know, what have you thought about that?

00:12:22:04 - 00:12:48:04
William Jaworski
This might be a commercial thing. And I was like, Oh, hell. Now that I think about it that way, that starts to make sense. Effective marketing. You know, effective marketing gets people to buy all sorts of things that don't work, gets them to endorse all sorts of claims that are false. So through that lens, it makes perfect sense that Stoicism would have made a comeback because people have been persuaded that it has more to offer than it in fact does.

00:12:48:06 - 00:13:08:05
William Jaworski
So I think that that's the lens that kind of that makes better sense, certainly better sense than thinking about it in terms of its actual merits and its accuracy as a philosophy of life. That was a long winded that was a long winded way of answering your question, Itamar. I bet you there's a way of editing this down.

00:13:08:07 - 00:13:30:03
Itamar Marani
I mean, when we talk about it independently, the thing that really came to my mind is there's a quote from a great book called Good Strategy Bad Strategy. And he says that when people are a bit confused, they usually cling on to the first little sense of a strategy as if it's a lifeboat in their drama. And that I feel like there was wasn't a very clear and present.

00:13:30:05 - 00:13:55:10
Itamar Marani
Hey, guys, this is a really effective way to think. And then stoicism came along, and even if it wasn't ideal, it was at least something. And there was positive. And like you said, there's marginal results, which is better than no results. So which kind of leads me to my second question. When you're saying this new version of this, let's call it the 20th century stoicism.

00:13:55:12 - 00:14:06:01
Itamar Marani
Is there an issue with it as it is packaged right now, or is this actually a really good structure, the new stoicism sort of.

00:14:06:03 - 00:14:35:01
William Jaworski
Yeah, that's a that's a great question. I suppose that the if you build a house on a shaky foundation, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter how you what you add to it doesn't matter the kind of paint job you do, It doesn't matter if you add all sorts of extra molding and, you know, fancy stuff onto it. It's on it's on a faulty foundation.

00:14:35:03 - 00:15:16:19
William Jaworski
So if somebody is going to build on the Stoic foundation and that foundation is faulty, which we've done for a couple thousand years, that it is not in, it has nothing to do, not just with the emotions. It has to do with the broader it's broader view of of nature and the orientation of human life. So for Stoics, the real stoic view is that God has a certain way of doing things, and your role as a human is just to be on board with that way of doing things like that's the state of mind that it goes for.

00:15:16:21 - 00:15:40:20
William Jaworski
So the apathy or the ataraxia that that state of acceptance that it aims at that emotional numbness. The idea is that God is a kind of boss man. And you know what? You will just feel better in life if you just accept what the boss man has going on.

00:15:40:22 - 00:16:16:03
William Jaworski
You know, that fundamentally is just a bizarre view of of, you know, the way to go about things because you're actually eliminates agency, your own individual agency from the picture. By contrast, a view like Aristotle's. So Aristotle's God is also a kind of hands off God, sort of the way that's the stoic goddess. But the thing is, though, God sets up the world so that you are an individual agent who has the power to do certain things and to promote or demote as it were, your own thriving, your own flourishing.

00:16:16:05 - 00:16:46:06
William Jaworski
And that's up to you. So at least you have the power to determine whether or not you are going to flourish. You have you have a great deal of say so in that for you to be well is to cultivate the abilities that it takes to live well, to engage in life activities. Well, it's not simply a matter of accept being that you're a pawn in some sort of broader scheme that the boss man has in mind.

00:16:46:08 - 00:17:13:10
William Jaworski
So there are all sorts of dimensions to the stoic philosophy that do things like undermine individual agency, that misrepresent the the emotions. You can try to dress it up. I mean, look, you can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig. And and that's that's kind of that's kind of what happens with contemporary stoicism. It's like you've got a pig.

00:17:13:12 - 00:17:32:06
William Jaworski
That's what you've got. You've got a pig. And you can say, Oh, but we don't have to have its years like that. We can put the years up like this, but it doesn't have to look like that. We put a little makeup on and you know, it's just but it's a pig. It's better to just stick with the pig analogy.

00:17:32:07 - 00:17:53:22
William Jaworski
You, you look at the way that the contemporary stocks are trying to dress up the pig and you say, look, you are trying to get the pig to look like something. It's not what you're trying to get the pig to look like. Is this instead of trying to make the pig look like that? Why don't you just go for this like this thing that you're trying to get it to look like?

00:17:54:00 - 00:18:19:19
William Jaworski
You can do, that you can embrace that kind of a view. That's the kind of view that Aristotle has a abandon stoicism and embrace the Aristotelian view that you are actually trying to get your stoic philosophy to look like. But they won't do that. And the question is, why are you so wedded to Stoicism? And the answer is, I think it's a brand.

00:18:19:21 - 00:18:20:20
William Jaworski
Go ahead. Tomorrow.

00:18:20:22 - 00:18:43:06
Itamar Marani
So, yes, I have a question around that, because my initial my initial thought about that was, well, that's interesting because Marcus Aurelius sounded like he was a person of high ages and he was a very capable leader and he did a lot of great things. So how did the two add up? So that was it just that he did the best with what he had back then.

00:18:43:06 - 00:19:00:07
Itamar Marani
Like let's say old military tech is better than no tech whatsoever. Or what was the thing there could see that being a reason why they said this guy's stoicism works like work for this guy with all his issues with everything. So maybe he can work for us these days as well. Thoughts around that?

00:19:00:09 - 00:19:25:02
William Jaworski
A couple of things. So. So the first one, this is the biggest one. What people preach doesn't necessarily map on to how they practice. And I think that this is this is fundamentally the difficulty with stoicism. If you look at the way people really live and how they think and how they feel and what they do, and then you try to crystallize that into a theory, your theory, your description of what's really going on there can be false.

00:19:25:04 - 00:19:46:23
William Jaworski
This happens all the time, you know, So you might be great at sports that say, you know, shooting hoops, whatever. When somebody asks you, like, how do you do that? Being able to explain how you do that is a very different skill from being able to do that. And you can fail to just to give an accurate description of is what they say.

00:19:46:23 - 00:20:10:00
William Jaworski
Like Wayne Gretzky is a terrible he apparently he was a terrible hockey coach because he would just say, well, just skate faster than everybody else and shoot the puck in the net. What's the problem? It's like, just do it. So think of a description of how. So you know, that's why I like great sport. People who are great at sports don't necessarily make good coaches because teaching that stuff is a different skill from being able to do it.

00:20:10:02 - 00:20:33:02
William Jaworski
And likewise, crafting a theory, an account that describes and explains what you're doing is also a different skill. So you can have somebody who is living a certain way and achieving a certain thing. And then when you ask them, like, What's your secret to life? Marcus, they give you this theory. Yes, that's what they've inherited from their predecessors, even though that that actually doesn't that doesn't accurately reflect what they're doing.

00:20:33:02 - 00:20:55:06
William Jaworski
So that's that's one observation is that just because he was successful doesn't mean that his philosophy or his description of what made him successful is accurate. Well, you know, you can you can have, you know, think about, like hindsight bias. You know, you get you'd make some sort of decision. You get lucky. And because of that, it gets successful.

00:20:55:06 - 00:21:07:12
William Jaworski
And in retrospect, that was because I was a genius, if that's not the accurate account of what really happened. So what you say doesn't necessarily correspond to what it is. The other thing is. So the second point about Marcus Aurelius is.

00:21:07:14 - 00:21:25:05
Itamar Marani
Sorry, just to clarify, please. Just let me I want to repeat it back to make sure I understood it correctly. So there's a difference. He might have thought he was a stoic, that he followed stoic philosophy. He might have really believe that. However, he just didn't recognize there was also doing other things. And he works from a different approach.

00:21:25:06 - 00:21:37:17
Itamar Marani
But he didn't have the terminology for it or a way to explain it. She was like, you know, it's just stoicism, that's my thing. And even doesn't necessarily mean what he done. It's what he thought he did, and that's what he conveyed. Is that accurate?

00:21:37:19 - 00:22:05:16
William Jaworski
Yes, That's that's that's great. That's a great way of putting it. The the how you articulate or describe what you're doing has everything to do with your vocabulary, with your conceptual resources. If those are impoverished or shaped by the surrounding culture in a way that you don't fully grasp, you will use the vocabulary at your disposal to describe what's going on in a way that misrepresents it.

00:22:05:18 - 00:22:35:14
William Jaworski
And you won't know it. You won't know. You won't know any better. The only way to know better is to look at contrasting ways of describing what's going on, you know, opposing views, competing views, and to sort of sort out the arguments among them. But yeah, that's that's exactly right. So that's that's the first point. The second point is it's a it's a bit of an ad hominem.

00:22:35:16 - 00:22:55:13
William Jaworski
So, you know, people point you, oh, Marcus Aurelius is very successful and whatnot. Yeah, but, but Marcus Aurelius was in that small circle of very powerful Roman families. He was already in that, you know, in this very privileged position.

00:22:55:15 - 00:23:31:06
William Jaworski
And moreover, you know, in some ways, the the greatest strike against Marcus Aurelius is character and judgment is that he tried to reinstate a, you know, dynastic succession. So Marcus Aurelius was the was the final of five what are called the good emperors. So you know like Trajan Hadrian where his predecessors or what those good emperors did is they said when it comes to choosing my successor, it's not just going to be my kid.

00:23:31:08 - 00:23:55:21
William Jaworski
I'm going to look around. I'm going to find the best person for the job. And that's who's going to take over. So it worked for a couple successive emperors. And then Marcus Aurelius, though he goes against that, even though it's been working, it's clear that it's working. It's he got his own position because somebody like Marcus, you're the best.

00:23:55:23 - 00:24:19:20
William Jaworski
He decides, though, that he is going to go back and he's going to hand over the succession to his son. It's like, look, we tried that. We tried that. You have, you know, a hundred years of that not working. And you think that dynastic succession is suddenly going to work with you. So that is just a major strike against against using him as any kind of model of of, you know.

00:24:19:22 - 00:24:37:12
Itamar Marani
God, I doing it isn't me here. Very interesting, because that's obviously not a rational decision. It's an emotional one. It's an emotion. I want my son to have whatever it may be I want. It's an emotional it's an emotionally driven decision. It's someone that he said, rationally, you know, this freedom for the best of the empire and so on.

00:24:37:14 - 00:24:53:02
Itamar Marani
And what's interesting about that is that loyalty contradicts not having any emotion, because one of the most important decisions was an emotional one, like handing over the keys to someone you love, not someone who you think has the most merit.

00:24:53:04 - 00:25:15:11
William Jaworski
Well said. That's a that's a that's a fantastic observation. And this is this is this is why there's that tension between stoic theory and stoic practice. Stoic theories will say certain things. If you look at actual stoic breaks is very different, both in the concrete lives of individuals And in terms of its recommendation. And that's a perfect example.

00:25:15:12 - 00:25:22:15
William Jaworski
Instead of giving the decision over the reason it was ultimately made on the basis of some sort of emotion, great.

00:25:22:17 - 00:25:43:20
Itamar Marani
So I think it's a great kind of segue to talking about this. Is the this the issue, so to speak, with stoicism, even with modern stoicism, because it doesn't really talk about how to deal with this reality, just kind of pretends that it's not super there. So let's talk about the difference between self-discipline and self-denial as you called it in the book.

00:25:43:22 - 00:26:05:01
Itamar Marani
And I had an example of a client. He was he taught me a lot from his example that he would do really well in the business. And then sometimes you just do a lot of stupid stuff. And it would always happen during his quote unquote deep work sessions. And the first day, the first part in the morning. And at a certain point I was like, Dude, why do you keep doing this?

00:26:05:03 - 00:26:21:03
Itamar Marani
And he just kind of laughed like, I just think I need some crazy in my life. And it was an interesting thing because we just recognize if he doesn't do his deep work in the morning, but the first thing he does is get out his energy, psycho energy, go crazy mountain biking or surfing or whatever it may be.

00:26:21:05 - 00:26:38:22
Itamar Marani
And he got that emotional need for excitement out of his life. He was then able to actually focus and do very productive work and in a stoic way, if you would have said, you know what, I just need to shut these emotions away, it kept biting him in the ass. He wasn't able to tame that cage, that line, what he called.

00:26:39:00 - 00:26:48:06
Itamar Marani
And I'd love for you to speak a little bit about the difference with our sort of interview about how you don't have to deny yourself, but you actually just have to be able to discipline yourself and what that means.

00:26:48:07 - 00:27:12:17
William Jaworski
Yeah, thanks to Mark. That's great. And actually, you know, here this is I mean, this is one of the reasons I love your project and the book that we're writing, because your project has this kind of hands on, step by step way of doing what Aristotle says you're supposed to do, which is to master domesticate, train, tame those emotions.

00:27:12:19 - 00:27:50:03
William Jaworski
And it and it has to do with, you know, like, like, like it's like a training regiment. It's the same the same way that you would engineer your own training for some sort of event, some sort of sports, say you can engineer training for your emotional states in order to achieve the results that you want to achieve. And you know what I love about your own your own program is that it actually gives you these very concrete and measurable steps to do that, because that's exactly the kind of thing that that that Aristotle, Aristotle would love.

00:27:50:05 - 00:28:17:03
William Jaworski
So self-denial versus self-discipline, self-denial is the kind of thing that you describe where I'm just going to shove these emotions away or I'm going to shove this away. Even though you have this deep desire for this deep drive for it because you're a biological being. So what self-denial is Self-denial is actually a kind of pretending. It's pretending that you don't have emotions.

00:28:17:06 - 00:28:40:21
William Jaworski
You do have emotions. Bottom line, you're a biological being. You have emotions. Can't change that. Sorry. Can't change it. Not my fault. So to claim you don't or to claim that you can get rid of those things, that's just pretending it's playing a game. All right? So pretend all you want. That doesn't change the reality. The reality is you have these things now.

00:28:40:22 - 00:29:21:11
William Jaworski
Aristotle is live to the challenges of being an emotional being like this. He knows that people make all sorts of bad decisions because of emotion. People people know. He has seen people witness people, as we all have, whose lives are, you know, ruined in some way or other because they make decisions impulsively, irrationally emotional league, that they do things out of anger, they do things out of fear, They do things out of some sort of, you know, envy or some sort of other emotional, you know, motivation that ends up taking their life off the rails.

00:29:21:13 - 00:29:55:22
William Jaworski
The key is not to pretend that you don't have those emotions. The key is instead to say, you know what? These emotions are going nuts. I've got to rein them in. I've got to get them so that they're not going crazy anymore so that I master them. And that's that's actually the term that the Greeks, Aristotle included, used and creatio, which means mastery in a state of command and the counter concept is across here, which is lack of command, lack of mastery.

00:29:56:00 - 00:30:11:08
William Jaworski
So we are we translate that term across as weakness of will, where it's like, Oh man, I just you're carried away by these emotions. And if you're lucky, you can see that they're ruining your life, but you just kind of can't do anything about it. So the idea is you've got to get mastery of that, You have to discipline.

00:30:11:10 - 00:30:29:04
William Jaworski
So it's not a matter of denying of doing that, pretending. It's a matter of getting to the hard work of disciplining. You can say that stoicism, the mindset that says, I'm just going to deny this pretending is easy. I, like you, can say, good.

00:30:29:06 - 00:30:35:22
Itamar Marani
It's alluring. It's a lose situation that the guy can just not have this. And then life is easy.

00:30:36:00 - 00:31:00:05
William Jaworski
That's it. It's easy to think that. It's easy to say that. It's easy to imagine it. It's easy to pretend Pretending is always easy. Imagining is always easy Talk Talking is always easy. What's hard is training. What's hard is disciplining yourself. What's hard is putting systems in place to counteract your own tendencies. And Aristotle was quite clear about this.

00:31:00:05 - 00:31:28:20
William Jaworski
He says, You know, when it comes to the things that are enjoyable or pleasurable, those are always the hardest things to master because we've got to drive to go do them. And so with those things, you have to have systems in place to keep yourself in check. If you train yourself very much like the kinds of systems that you describe and that you use in your in your program that we're writing about in this book, it's a matter of doing the hard work that's involved the discipline, not taking the easy route of just pretending.

00:31:28:22 - 00:31:48:19
William Jaworski
So you can think about self-denial as that easy route of, Oh, I don't have that. I can do with that. The real work is to say I'm stuck with these emotions, damn it, To make life livable, we've got to have some rules here. We've got to set some house rules. We've got to do some discipline. We've got to get some hard work.

00:31:48:19 - 00:32:01:00
William Jaworski
And you're like, That's going to be very uncomfortable for you as you discipline yourself against doing this or that. Yeah, it's going to be uncomfortable. But you know what? I got no choice but to live with these things. We better get this training done now.

00:32:01:02 - 00:32:24:00
Itamar Marani
Yeah, I want to add something that kind of drive a point home, so I really enjoy reading. What's it like philosophy from war or from these people that have encountered a lot of real life challenges when it comes to worship? And Miyamoto Musashi was a famous samurai back in the Empire Times in Japan.

00:32:24:02 - 00:32:26:17
William Jaworski
His book of five Rings exactly.

00:32:26:19 - 00:32:44:08
Itamar Marani
And he was for the audience at home is a very legendary samurai. He had a ton of fights. You won all of them. It was very impressive. And then in his old age, you basically went to the mountains and you decided to write a book about his life, his success, his philosophy. And there was a quote of his that always stuck to me and said, The truth is what it is.

00:32:44:10 - 00:33:02:17
Itamar Marani
You must vent its power or live a lie. And it was very simple. It was very to the point like, you can't bullshit this stuff, this is what it is. And I think a lot of times life gives us an opportunity to bullshit ourselves because there aren't consequences that are as severe as life or death in war. But people come out on the other side of that.

00:33:02:17 - 00:33:34:16
Itamar Marani
They recognize, You know what? I can't kill myself. Permission to not see reality for what it is. Otherwise people die. There's no cultural background to defend me here. There's nothing to protect me against. The truth of reality. And I think that's a big part here that a lot of times philosophies that don't work but are appealing, they give us something pleasant to feel, but they don't actually help us and what actually works in life and doesn't work.

00:33:34:18 - 00:33:54:15
Itamar Marani
And that's why when you talk about Stoicism for the first time, it's very interesting to me because my initial impression, I mean, someone who was not a philosophy professor was that, oh, this is what was effective for the Greeks back then, and there are some positives in it. Like you said, there's marginal results. And also it did help me think about emotions in a certain way because of the recognition.

00:33:54:15 - 00:34:16:06
Itamar Marani
That's a thing. You're not just a being where your emotions is a different thing. So what I wanted to kind of keep going with this thread is can you talk about the difference between how you said in the book and however subtle thought about between being wise and really being clever to her?

00:34:16:08 - 00:34:46:03
William Jaworski
Cleverness is the kind of thing that I mean, we associate with smartness. You can so a clever person is able to find means to achieve an end that are slick, that that sort of balanced demands that are that are innovative. Maybe So somebody who's clever, for instance, you know, a lot of these optimization things, all these optimization fads, you know, a lot of them find clever ways of achieving some goal.

00:34:46:05 - 00:35:14:11
William Jaworski
You know, here's this quick hack, here's this that's clever in some cases, some some of it's bullshit, but some of it's genuinely clever. It's like, Oh, that is a cool way of doing that. I never would have thought of that clever a clever me into an end. The thing is, the wisdom involves more than just being clever because you can be clever and find very efficient ways of achieving something that is idiotic or stupid.

00:35:14:13 - 00:35:38:02
William Jaworski
So it's like you, you know. Exactly. You can be, you know, So it's like I'd spend all this time I spend all this time optimizing, you know, the engine of my car, getting exhausted and optimizing optimizing be so efficient, man. And I floor it and I get from where I am to where I'm going to that much faster.

00:35:38:02 - 00:36:02:14
William Jaworski
But where I'm going to is off a cliff. It's like, did you didn't you think about where you were going? You know, like, so wisdom has to do with what you're aiming at, not just how you're getting there. And it's not to say that it ignores how you get there. You know, you can and there are people who are ironically, there are there are people who aren't clever but who are wise.

00:36:02:16 - 00:36:20:18
William Jaworski
That is, they know what really matters in life. So when it comes to the correct ends, you've got all sorts of ends that you can be trying to achieve all sorts of goals that you can be going for. Some of them are genuinely good for you and for others, and some aren't. And then among the ones that are genuinely good, there's a priority among them.

00:36:20:22 - 00:36:53:21
William Jaworski
Some are more important than others. So you might think the common one that people talk about, it's like, all right, money is a good thing, family is a good thing, but family is more important than money. So they're both good. But, you know, one is just more important than others. Knowing which things are are genuinely valuable, which are genuinely good, which ends are genuinely worthwhile, and knowing which ends are more important or less important than others.

00:36:53:21 - 00:37:13:16
William Jaworski
And then pursuing in their order of priority. That's what is required for wisdom, not just finding the efficient means of getting those things, but knowing which things are worth pursuing to greater or lesser degrees.

00:37:13:18 - 00:37:35:04
Itamar Marani
And so that was my biggest takeaway from from your book about Aristotle, Aristotle and School of Philosophy was that while stoicism helps people be or it tries, it aims to help people be efficient by saying, okay, you're already going to do what you want to do. So here's a way to shut off your emotions, both to the works or not.

00:37:35:06 - 00:37:56:00
Itamar Marani
It's a way to help people be more efficient. The Aristotle. His whole perspective of understanding virtue was how to be more effective overall. And from there, that's the most important thing to first be effective, then actually be efficient. And being effective at the right thing is not kind of accurate in what I've understood it as.

00:37:56:02 - 00:38:31:18
William Jaworski
So fair for Aristotle. Let me think here. You want you want to aim at the correct ends, you know, so if if you have prioritized, I suppose that there was there was some sort of a conflict between you making money and you caring for your your son, if you were to prioritize the money thing over your over your son, we'd said there's some sort of there's something wrong with you.

00:38:31:19 - 00:39:01:18
William Jaworski
So whatever led you to make that judgment is not virtue. That's not that's not wisdom. So you have to aim at the right ends when it comes to achieving those ends. There are all sorts of means that can achieve them. If you are smart, that is, if you are clever, you'll find the better means of achieving those efficiency.

00:39:01:20 - 00:39:13:11
William Jaworski
That might be one trait of the better means of achieving those I'm trying to map on to your terms are sorts of effective efficiency. So if you could come at me again.

00:39:13:13 - 00:39:36:08
Itamar Marani
Do anything from a business perspective. Yeah, it's very efficient and doing the wrong thing. It's wrong. You shouldn't even be doing marketing right now. That's not your bottleneck and be very efficient in solving your problem. And even if you were to solve the thing that was effective to solve the actual bottleneck, so you didn't do a phenomenal job at it, but you just did an okay job with it because it was the more important issue to actually resolve.

00:39:36:10 - 00:40:11:03
Itamar Marani
So create a bigger overall impact. And that's what I'm saying, that I feel that Aristotle, his whole perspective was like, first figure out what's going to make the biggest overall impact on you living a life. Well, basically, like an ability to decide what in life is worth pursuing. And that was his primary focus, he said. Because as long as you mail that in afterwards, even if the way you go about it isn't the best, isn't the most effective or more clever, like in the words you use in the book, you'd still be a lot more successful than someone who's doing something extremely well.

00:40:11:03 - 00:40:15:19
Itamar Marani
But the wrong thing. Is that accurate?

00:40:15:21 - 00:40:32:22
William Jaworski
Absolutely accurate. No. I love the way you you talk about it. There were you you're very clear like let's talk about in the business setting laid it out. Yeah that that is beautifully said yeah that's exactly it If you are pursuing stupid ends, it doesn't matter how efficiently you do it doesn't matter how quickly you drive off a cliff.

00:40:32:22 - 00:40:58:12
William Jaworski
You're still going off a cliff. You you know, the person who is going more slowly toward in the right direction is doing better than you are. And yeah, from the business perspective, you figure out the things that are most important and you focus on those. And even if you do only a little bit well on those, you might still be better than somebody is doing really well, taking things in the wrong direction.

00:40:58:14 - 00:41:03:21
William Jaworski
Yeah. So that, that I think is a, that's a great way of thinking about the general view.

00:41:03:23 - 00:41:23:01
Itamar Marani
Yeah, of course it's kind of where I want to leave off. So kind of summarize a couple of key lessons. First off, classic Stoics, the real Stoics. The issue with that is that they're not living in line with reality. They're saying you should just be able to get rid of your emotions. And here's a way to do that when that's just not a possibility.

00:41:23:06 - 00:41:42:05
Itamar Marani
That would be amazing. If that was a possibility. And that's why it's so tempting to fall into that, so to speak, or be tempted by that. But it's just not a possibility. And it's important to recognize that because if you don't, when something bad actually does happen and you do have an emotion first off, then end up preparing you for it.

00:41:42:05 - 00:42:05:16
Itamar Marani
So you wasted a lot of time, but more importantly it's going to leave you even more devastated because you'll start to doubt yourself. You're going to say people should just be able to put their emotions to bed and not have them, but I'm not able to do that. So what's wrong with me? And it can actually cause this kind of double effect of the compounding effect, Sorry, where you feel even more despair is that I first point.

00:42:05:16 - 00:42:31:20
William Jaworski
Yeah. I think that that's that's right. One one thing I would quibble with a little bit when you said if we could if we could if we could eliminate emotion, that would be amazing. So there are even though we can't eliminate emotion, there are people who have very low emotional affect, we call them sociopaths. And, you know, so that's one of the things that that that characterizes them is that this this kind of emotional flatness.

00:42:31:22 - 00:42:52:02
William Jaworski
And I, you know, there are sociopaths that you might want for certain jobs, but in general, I don't know that I would want to be a sociopath or that we necessarily like one, have an abundance of them around because they're in some ways kind of scary. So that that's that's the only thing I would mention is that I have no fondness.

00:42:52:02 - 00:42:52:14
Itamar Marani
There was a.

00:42:52:14 - 00:42:53:23
William Jaworski
Human emotion.

00:42:54:01 - 00:43:11:06
Itamar Marani
I saw in my perspective. There's a time and a place. I think it's very important to be able to cage your emotions at a certain point in time so they don't take you from doing something that's really, really important. And this doesn't mean you that forever. But let's say if the house is on fire and you got to grow up, grandma, forget about how you feel right now about the house.

00:43:11:08 - 00:43:31:21
Itamar Marani
You got to put that aside. And actually this is something I took part from the book that I was considering reading, and I think it would fit in right now. So kind of a passage to encapsulate that. I said that emotions, the desires are powerful in human life because we're biological beings for that reason, and we need to train them and carefully monitor their influence on us so they don't have a destructive effect on the fabric of our lives.

00:43:31:23 - 00:43:57:01
Itamar Marani
That's different from trying to eliminate them. Think of it this way Imagine you're running a zoo with wild animals. You need to ensure they're healthy and well-maintained, but you also need to ensure there will contain some are dangerous to themselves. You can't just let them roam free. You think of them within bounds. So that's different from starving or mistreating them to nourish and care for them and give them scope to be what they are and what I added to that or otherwise they'll pop out and lash out it.

00:43:57:03 - 00:44:16:13
Itamar Marani
That's what I've seen a lot of times. People try to ignore their emotions or stuff them down. It ends up creating a pressure cooker and then things pop off at a certain point. So that's the first point about the whole stoicism argument to what I think is a really big thing, because the initial objection most people have about that, they'll say, Well, Marcus Aurelius did it and he's amazing.

00:44:16:15 - 00:44:40:13
Itamar Marani
He's this legendary individual. And without getting into if he was good or bad, it's just the understanding of there's a difference between what someone says they did, even if they genuinely believed it and what they actually did. And he perhaps thought he was applying stoic philosophy, but his actions showed that he had deeper intentions or he actually said what was effective or not effective.

00:44:40:13 - 00:44:58:16
Itamar Marani
What was clever was what was what. And it was a bit of a difference there that he might have seen himself as a stoic, but he didn't follow stoic philosophy to this. He sort of said, So therefore, if you want to emulate his results, you shouldn't follow to teach. That's not actually what he was doing. Is that accurate?

00:44:58:18 - 00:45:17:07
William Jaworski
Yeah, that that is that can often be the case. You know, like you ask the great athlete, how did you do this? And they say something and it turns out that what they say is not what they actually did. They just don't know it. You're better off imitating their actual practice as opposed to imitating what they say their practice is.

00:45:17:09 - 00:45:20:03
William Jaworski
Yeah. So these these are these are great observational.

00:45:20:05 - 00:45:40:12
Itamar Marani
Yeah. And the last one, that's the big thing. And why I think people should pick up the book to really get into is being able to understand the difference between being wise and being clever. How what I took from the book is that you define wisdom as excellence in decision making and ability to decide what in life is worth pursuing.

00:45:40:14 - 00:46:02:04
Itamar Marani
Because if you are able to just do that and figure out what is the right thing to pursue is even if you don't pursue it the best way possible, it's still going to give you a better result than pursuing something that was the wrong thing in the best way possible. You're just actually focused on the right thing. So that creates a better general outcome and I would say on a personal level, I've really, really enjoyed working with you both.

00:46:02:04 - 00:46:18:03
Itamar Marani
I guess as soon as we started talking, I didn't know your background, but I was like, This guy knows a lot about philosophy in a very practical way, which is rare. I'd actually apply some of these lessons into life and actually put everything together. And then when he told me, you wrote this book and you were like, Stoicism is not really a thing.

00:46:18:03 - 00:46:27:18
Itamar Marani
And I was like, Huh? I figured I'd pick it up and I really enjoyed it. I really recommend everybody out there go get it built. Working people get the guy.

00:46:27:20 - 00:47:20:13
William Jaworski
You can get it from the Altamira Altamira dot studio. You can get it from there. You can get it from Amazon. So and so. So thank you for the kind words, Itamar, Because I have really enjoyed working with you, and not least because the entire program that you've that you've sort of worked through, that you've thought about with just such meticulous care is just a very beautiful and effective way of learning self-discipline and of approaching the master emotions in the right kind of way, a way that doesn't pretend that they don't exist, but that does the hard work and the smart work of actually disciplining and and especially this and we've talked about self-deception.

00:47:20:13 - 00:47:42:21
William Jaworski
We've talked about how you can say that this is what you're doing, but you're wrong. That's actually not what you're doing. In fact, that you would have a program that has a system in place to detect and eliminate bullshit from your own evaluation of yourself so that you can get past that to see what really is the case.

00:47:42:23 - 00:48:13:16
William Jaworski
You can tell yourself, I'm making progress that doesn't mean that you really are. You have a way of being able to sort of systematize it where you're like, Well, you say that you're making progress, but according to the trackers, you're not. You're just fooling yourself and that you've got this way of self-correcting self monitoring just right, right from the beginning, as we started looking at it, it was I was like, this is this is a fantastic program and it's a fantastic project.

00:48:13:17 - 00:48:29:08
William Jaworski
Every time we would have a meeting, you know, I'd be like, I'd be thinking about it. I'm like, Oh yeah. And I'd be like, thinking it through. I'd be applying it to my own situation is like, Man, that's what I got to do. And I got to start doing this because I've this will this way I will do better.

00:48:29:08 - 00:48:53:19
William Jaworski
I was like, I'm probably bullshitting myself and that's why I'm not getting this result. I've got to do it. I to do it, Itamar says. And then I'll have the self-correction that I need. So everything about your project is just crystallized as just something that is tremendously valuable and that, you know, there's just a big takeaway from it for me, just, just sort of listening to you rehearse the points that we're that we're writing about.

00:48:53:21 - 00:49:11:19
William Jaworski
So it's great. I hope. I hope that when we finally get that, when that finally comes out that people just take that, that they use it, that they that they sort of seek you out. Because I think that that that's just a great way of of mastering these different these different emotional facets of your life.

00:49:11:21 - 00:49:25:12
Itamar Marani
I appreciate it very much. Just and for everyone out there, we'll put the links in the show notes where you can find the book. Again, I highly recommend it. Very much worth checking out for safe. Thank you again for coming on and we'll see you guys in the next episode.