- What does it mean to live intentionally?
I've been thinking about this question a lot recently
as I've been working out what I want to do with my life.
It's not an easy question to answer,
and I'm sure the answer is probably different
for each one of us,
but there's a framework based on stoic philosophy
that I found quite helpful
and hopefully it can help you too.
So according to the stoics,
living a good life is about finding the right combination
and balancing out the four different stoic virtues.
So in this video we're gonna go over
each one of those in turn
and I'll show you how it kind of fits into my life,
how I think about it
and maybe you'll get some ideas for how potentially
you can live more intentionally as well,
if that's the sort of thing that you're into.
The first stoic virtue is wisdom.
Now you might have come across this thing called
the serenity prayer, which goes something like,
God grant me the serenity to accept
that which I cannot change,
the courage to change what I can
and the wisdom to know the difference.
The way the stoics would talk about wisdom is that
wisdom is about recognising the difference between
the stuff that is good, the stuff that is not good
and the stuff that is indifferent.
Now the category of good and not good is all pretty obvious,
like stuff that is good is living virtuously
and being a nice person and not being a dick
and that kind of stuff.
And the stuff that is bad is obviously the bad things like
lying and greed and pride and you know,
seven deadly sins type stuff.
The thing I personally find most useful from the stoics
within this category of wisdom is this other category of
what are the things that are indifferent.
Like they're neither good nor bad,
they're completely indifferent to
the way we think about them.
And the things that should fall into
this category of indifference are things like
money and success and possessions
and number of subscribers on YouTube
and whether that girl likes me back.
All of these should be indifference,
but as Derren Brown writes in the book Happy,
the stoics called them preferred indifference.
So they weren't like, "Oh, you know, money is bad
"and having love in your life is bad
"and having a cool thing is bad."
Instead, all of these things are preferred indifference.
Like they prefer to have them than not,
but ultimately, like fundamentally,
they are indifferent to whether or not
they actually have them.
Now I'm not saying that I'm great at this,
like obviously I want to make more money,
I want more subscribers on YouTube,
I want that girl to text me back.
But any time I start like fixating on these things too much
I like to remind myself, you know,
the voice of Derren Brown is in my mind being like,
"This is a preferred indifferent,
"I am fundamentally indifferent to whether
"I have this thing or not,
"but it would be nice if I had the thing."
And I think a lot of us can get
this kind of stress in our life where we're
chasing these things thinking that they are good,
and not recognising that they're fundamentally indifferent
and those are not the things that make a good life
as the stoics would say.
The second stoic virtue is called temperance,
and basically this means moderation,
which is all things like you know,
self restraint and self discipline and self control,
and it's broadly about balancing short term pleasures with
the things that are good for us in the long term.
So if you're someone who doesn't show temperance,
then you know greed and gluttony and instant gratification
and these sorts of people will procrastinate a lot
as well apparently.
I think I do pretty well on the temperance front,
because I've sort of trained myself over time
to get more joy and meaning out of things
that are more long term beneficial
than short term pleasurable.
So for example, if I, I don't know, binge play
World of Warcraft for four hours
or watch a Netflix series for four hours,
I feel pretty good about it at the time,
but then afterwards I always have that nagging sense of,
"Mm, that wasn't really that satisfying."
Whereas if instead I learnt a new song on the guitar
and it takes me three hours to kind of get the chords right
and to stop my fingers from bleeding
because I've been trying to play too hard,
then I feel better about it,
even though it wasn't as fun in the moment.
But one way that I'm trying to improve on
the temperance front is I think sometimes I take this like
I have to be productive thing too far.
Like I'm going on a weekend trip to the Lake District
with some friends this evening
and already I'm kind of thinking that,
"Okay, cool, so if tomorrow I wake up early,
"a few hours earlier before anybody else does
"then I'll be able to spend those few hours writing
"or doing some stuff working on the business,
"and then we can go on the hike
"that we're planning to go on."
I think a big part of my mind is always racing to
try and do things that are productive
or that are creating economic value of some sort,
and I need to get better at recognising
the need to take a step back and take a break,
and I think that would come under
this temperance stuff as well.
Thirdly in terms of stoic virtues
we have the concept of courage.
This is something that Derren Brown and Ryan Holiday
and William Irvine talk a lot about as well in their books.
And the stoics would say that courage is not
the elimination of fear and desire and anxiety,
instead it's feeling fear, desire and anxiety
and acting in the right way anyway.
Thankfully I feel like I'm not
a particularly anxious person
and so it's not really something
I have to worry about day-to-day,
but I do sometimes feel fear about stuff,
and when I think about like the teachings of stoicism,
I always kind of remind myself that when I feel fear,
that's usually when I should lean into doing
the thing that I'm feeling scared of.
For example a few months ago
I was setting up an online course,
the Part-Time YouTuber Academy,
which has been going for a while now,
and before setting this up,
before like launching it to the public,
I had this deep sense of fear of like
what if no one signs up?
What if it's really bad?
What if I'm super out of my depth?
And having read all this stoicism stuff over the years,
as soon as I kind of felt that feeling of fear,
I was like, "Oh crap, now I basically have to do it,
"because I know I couldn't live with myself
"if I didn't do something because of the fear."
But on this note, one way in which I'm trying to improve
is that I think I often shy away from
difficult conversations because of this feeling of fear.
Like now that we've got a team of 10 people
in my business, I'm starting to get into the realm where
I know we're going to have conversations about like
salaries and about expectations and about targets
and about, are people really performing at the standard
that we want them to be performing at?
And this feels really, really, really, really scary
and I've historically kind of shied away from
those conversations thinking, "Oh, it's fine, you know,
"as long as the numbers are going up,
"as long as the business is doing well,
"who cares about any of this stuff?"
But every kind of good leader or mentor I've spoken to
who I think does a good job in running their business
and managing their team,
they've all said to me, "You're gonna feel the fear,
"and you have to lean into it
"and have those conversations anyway."
And you do a lot of preparation for them,
and so this is something I'm struggling with,
but it's an area which I'm trying to get over
the fear of being a not nice person
or the fear of being thought to be like
mean or something like that,
and instead acting in service of the business
or in service of the rest of the team members
or things like that.
And finally we have the stoic virtue of justice.
Now in stoicism justice is a bit broader than like,
you know, justice in our legal system and in our language,
instead they saw justice as being our duty to society,
our duty to our fellow man.
And broadly the way that I think of justice is that when I,
if I want to live intentionally,
I want to act in ways that are useful to other people.
And there's an interesting idea that I came across
in one of these books, I can't quite remember which one,
maybe it was this one.
It's the idea that like this difference between
happiness and meaning.
Where happiness is like, you know,
enjoyment of life in the short term,
whereas meaning is like, well, however you define meaning,
but meaning generally can be simplified to
being useful to other people.
So we're happy ourselves when we're having fun,
but we feel our lives are more meaningful
and more fulfilling if we are useful to other people,
and that ties in with the stoic concept of justice,
doing the right thing,
doing our duty to our fellow man
and benefiting our society overall.
There was one specific example from a few weeks ago
where for the last few months
we'd been running this paid membership,
like monthly membership community thing
as part of the alumni programme for our
Part-Time YouTuber Academy course,
and it was going all right.
We were holding events each week
and we were charging people around
$50 to $100 a month for it,
but over time we saw that the kind of
attendance at the events was dwindling,
and maybe people weren't getting as much value
from the community as we were hoping they would.
And so that was a choice of making a difficult decision
between do I act in service of myself
or do I act in service of kind of the community as a whole?
And so what we ended up doing was
cancelling this membership thing
and refunding about $100,000 of fees,
basically any money that anyone had ever paid for this.
And so they got the last six months of benefits
completely for free, and that felt pretty good.
Like you know, we lost $120,000 or something
from the top line revenue for the business,
but it was fine, because it was like doing the right thing
and it was like, you know,
tied in with the stoicism stuff.
And so I was genuinely thinking about
this concept of justice when I was thinking,
"This is probably the right decision to make."
So overall, I don't know.
I haven't figured out this concept of
how to live intentionally,
but I found over the years
that reading books specifically about stoicism
really have helped.
These are three that I would recommend in particular.
The first one I read was
William Irvine's Guide to the Good Life,
then I read Happy by Derren Brown,
and then I discovered The Obstacle is the Way
by Ryan Holiday.
The Obstacle is the Way is probably the most accessible,
easiest one to read.
Derren Brown is a little bit verbose
and is a very British academic style of writing,
but it's probably my favourite one out of the three.
They've got pretty good summaries of some of these books
on Shortform, which is my favourite way to
read summaries of books, that I do on a daily basis,
link in the video description.
And if you're interested in the stoicism stuff
and you want to hear more about how specifically
I apply the teachings of stoicism to my life,
I actually have a whole class on this on Skill Share,
who are very kindly sponsoring this video.
In this class me and my friend Sam
who is a philosophy graduate from Cambridge
and teaches philosophy at a secondary school,
we talk about the principles of stoicism
and we give you practical examples of exactly how we
use these different facets of stoicism into our life,
so we talk a lot about this thing called
the trichotomy of control,
we talk about negative visualisation
and all these other kind of stoic principles
that they talk about in the books.
If you want to check out the class then hit the link
in the video description,
and if you're one of the first 1,000 people to hit that link
you'll get a free one month trial of Skill Share Premium,
and in that one month trial
you can check out any of the 1,000s of classes
on Skill Share including,
I think I've got like nine or 10 classes on Skill Share now.
Three of them are themed around productivity,
two of them are around how to study for exams,
there's this one about stoicism.
So during your free trial you can watch all of these
to your heart's content,
and recently my friend and magic coach,
Matthew Le Mottee has released a Skill Share class about
how to handle cards like a pro.
He's a professional magician,
one of the best magicians in the UK
and he teaches you how to do fun, funky stuff
like springs and shuffles and all this cool stuff
with a deck of cards that I've been learning over the years
that you can try learning as well if you like.
So thank you Skill Share for sponsoring this video,
and if you like this one,
you'd might like to check out this video over here,
which is me and my friend Sam
talking about 10 ways in which stoicism
has made us happier.
Thank you so much for watching,
have a great time and I'll see you in the next video,
bye-bye.