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Chapter 1: What are the four Stoic virtues and how do they apply to business?
Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. I think people think that like having your own business or being an entrepreneur, being your own boss is a way to freedom, maybe even like a shortcut to freedom. You're sort of breaking off the shackles of employment or corporate life.
And now you're truly free. You can do anything you want. And there's some truth to that. It is nice to be your own boss. It is nice to have your own business. It's nice to be successful. But one of the things you find is that actually this presents you with a lot of choices. a lot of responsibilities, unless you're a sociopath, some obligations and duties.
That's been one of the challenges of having Daily Stoic over the years, right? Like suddenly these choices are mine. It's not what the board decides. It's not what standard practices decides.
Chapter 2: How can entrepreneurship be seen as a path to freedom?
It's not what tradition decides. It's not what my manager or his manager or her manager decides. or the manager above there, it's not what they decide. It's not even some like industry association or regulatory body. Like these are all my choices. And that's really empowering and fun in a lot of ways. And it's also challenging and exhausting in a lot of ways.
And that's one of the things I wanted to talk about in today's episode, like how we think about business and entrepreneurship in an ethical framework And how we think about it as far as an opportunity to practice virtue. I think the Stoics would have found business really interesting.
I mean, Zeno was a merchant, but I think they would have found our business world, our economic system really interesting. Certainly, they wouldn't have thought it as some special sphere outside business. of the four virtues, courage, discipline, justice, wisdom.
They thought that those virtues were designed to be applied to whatever it is that you did, whether you were a soldier or an emperor or an olive oil merchant. That's what we're going to talk about in today's episode.
Chapter 3: What role does courage play in making business decisions?
Cody Sanchez, who lives here in Austin, she's an entrepreneur and an investor. She wrote a book actually with my same publisher called Main Street Millionaire. And she built this really interesting career and platform around buying businesses, usually kind of like small businesses, Main Street businesses.
Not like private equity in the let's buy a big company and sell it for parts, but actually let's buy a bunch of little businesses in a town and turn them into something. Build a portfolio of businesses that do real things for real people. And that's what we talked about today. We actually just go through all that. the four virtues and how they apply.
As I said, Cody is a entrepreneur, an investor. You've probably seen her YouTube videos, Cody Sanchez CT, maybe on TikTok, Cody underscore Sanchez, or on Instagram at Cody Sanchez. She previously worked at Goldman Sachs and Vanguard. And now she buys and sells and invests in businesses and makes a lot of really interesting content. I was on her podcast a couple of months back.
You can listen to that. But here's Cody and I talking about courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. Okay. So what I thought we could talk about, so the four virtues of Stoicism are courage, discipline, or self-discipline, justice, and wisdom. It strikes me that those are also good business virtues. You could say it's a cheat code for being an entrepreneur or a leader or a business person.
So I thought we could maybe sort of run through how you think each one applies and how you understand them or what you understand them to mean. So let's start with Because you said you said you didn't know if you could do some of this stuff earlier that that is this the scary part of walking away from something safe or diverging from the conventional path.
It's not physical courage normally, but it is what we would call moral courage.
Yeah, well, I think entrepreneurship is probably one of the scariest things a human can do because you wrap your identity in who you are as a business person, as an entrepreneur, an author. And so when that gets rejected, you feel like you are rejected yourself, at least if you're not totally self-realized and your ego's completely eviscerated.
And so I think that business is a really beautiful way to get better at life. I probably would not be as good of a person as I am today, although I'm still on the climb. But like in any way, shape or form, I wouldn't be where I am if I hadn't done really hard things in business, because it teaches you to keep doing hard things, that you get rewarded for it.
That you're a person who does hard things.
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Chapter 4: How can one stop undervaluing their work?
You know, maybe a one-way door to decide to go swim with great white sharks without a cage. One-way door, right? Everything we do in business, mostly two-way doors. And so a lot of times in our meetings, like you'll sit down and go, this is a one-way door or a two-way door. Could this kill us? And by kill us in business, make us go bankrupt, lose all our money, lose our reputational risk.
That would be bad. But I think you're right. I mean, one of the things that breaks my heart for young people today, that for some reason, we got lucky, I got lucky, and we realized. But for young people today, I think that they have, they have like contextual risk that they don't fully understand. Meaning, When you're young, you're like, well, I went to this school. They went to this school.
We're on the same level. I got a job paying 100K. They got a job paying 100K. We're on the same level. All my friends have jobs paying 100K. So we're on the same level. Now, if I go and do a startup, that's still at the same level because it's perceived as cool right now.
But if I fail and lose all my money and raise no capital and have to go bag groceries or become a barista, I have lost my contextual success versus my friends. Right. And so now I'm a worse person and I'm spiraling and I've lost my place in the world. In reality, you know, we just hired a guy. He's my new chief of staff and he's incredible. His name is Mikey.
And Mikey had to come from Iraq, where he was a translator, to the U.S., He worked with Chris. So when Chris got him out of Iraq, he came to the U.S. He bagged groceries and went to Starbucks, although he speaks like five languages. He's an engineer. He's a young man. And then the second that he got his citizenship, he went and signed up for the Marines, became first in his class.
Then he went and got his grad school degree, whatever. But when I asked him, I said, you know, you're an engineer. Now you're going to come be a chief of staff. How do you feel about that change? Do you feel like there will be contextual change? And he said... No. He's like, I bagged groceries because it would help me. My ego doesn't care about that as long as I'm progressing.
And I think we've lost that a little bit. Like young people today, I wish they could remember that like none of that matters in the early stages of the race.
Yes.
You know, maybe later it could be real risk.
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Chapter 5: What is the significance of discipline in achieving success?
They go like, okay, the worst thing that can happen is I'm losing the money that I put in, right? Like there are some sort of forms of investing that are really scary where you can lose like effectively an infinite amount of money. But like if you put in $50,000 to do X, Y, or Z, yes, $50,000 is a lot of money and it can be painful for that to go away. Right.
But you you can't lose more than you put in. So you go, oh, actually, the downside risk here is capped at what I'm doing. I'm betting a year of my life on this thing. Yes, it could end up being a total waste of time. But so I just a year behind my peers. Is that so bad? I remember when I was thinking about dropping out of college, my boss, who I was going to go work for, was like, yeah.
I was like, yeah, what if this doesn't work out and I have to go back to school? And he was like, I spent a year in the hospital. Basically, I missed a year of school being sick. And he was like, it has never once come up. Like no one has ever once said, hey, I noticed that it took five years for you to get your degree. They're not even doing the math.
And he's like, by the way, I haven't given anyone a resume in two decades. Like nobody knows. They might ask where I went to school because it's crazy. Cool for us to talk about. Turns out we both went to this college or that college. But like no one is no one is concerned that you are one year behind someone else because you took a risk on something.
And by the way, we're not even getting into the upside of you took that risk in the whole trajectory of your life when in an awesome direction.
Yeah. I mean, I've always found that when you are obsessing on the things that are going to hold you back in life, you just go back to the spotlight theory. Right. And realize that we all imagine that we're on this stage and there's a spotlight on top of us and every single thing that we do, everyone else is watching and judging.
Yeah.
None of them are clapping ever, but they're all thinking bad things mostly. And then you realize, in fact, you know, it's more like everybody in the world has their own spotlight. So they literally can't even see you because they're so busy looking at themselves. And that helps me a lot when I think people care about me. And I remember they don't.
Well, that's the problem with imposter syndrome, right? It is presuming way too much interest in you. Like, no one is concerned that you're an imposter. They're quite concerned that they are an imposter. And all the people that you admire had the same thoughts. There's a famous story of Marcus Aurelius right before he becomes the emperor of Rome.
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Chapter 6: How can justice influence ethical business practices?
And I was like, oh, I didn't even think that that was possible. So oftentimes we think like it's incompatible in entrepreneurial life and then a corporate life or a salaried life. And actually, if you're really good at what you do, oftentimes you'll have enough leverage or... You can work out a compromise and you can do both.
And I wrote my first three books while I was also collecting a paycheck. And what that allowed me to do actually was take much more risks creatively. So when I went to my my first book was about marketing. So there was a sort of an overlap between my corporate life and my my writing.
But then when I went to my publisher and I said, hey, I want to write about an obscure school of ancient philosophy, they were like. Well, that's not really worth very much to us. And so they were like, here's the most we would pay. And I was like, cool, I don't care. This book money is like a side hustle for me. I just want to do this.
And so oftentimes, not only should you not jump off the cliff and try to figure out the airplane on the way down, people might help you subsidize that. That thing. Right. Like you can go to your boss and go, hey, I want to get a degree in X, Y or Z. What do you think about this? And they might be so afraid to lose you that they'll support you.
Now, sometimes that can be a form of golden handcuffs and eventually you do have to walk away. But again, it only seems scary until you start moving in the direction of the risk. And then it turns out it's it's less scary.
Yeah. You know, it's also funny because I think like a lot of people these days that hate bosses and hate corporate culture for many understandable reasons. Yes. Simultaneously, if you're the best performer in the place that you are, you're an A player and you keep crushing it. The allowances you get are wild. Right.
Now, if you're a mid to low performer and your performance starts to dip, you got no allowances. You got nobody helping you buy the plane. And one of my great gifts in finance was I saw this all the time. It's very normal in finance. People will fund your next fund like they'll give you money to compete with them in an investment structure. That's like normal.
It's normal to have somebody go fund your startup, you know, if you are a high performer and you leave. And so, yeah, if I was a young person, I'm like, go work for like the smartest, hardest working people you can find in the world that take a bunch of risk so you can coattail their risk.
Or make them dependent on you in some way. If you are a part of their operations and it is expensive for them to replace you, you suddenly have leverage. And and then you have that leverage becomes a powerful ally when you want to do your next thing.
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Chapter 7: What is the importance of wisdom in entrepreneurship?
The courage to charge what you're worth doesn't seem like that would require much bravery, but it does because it requires awkward conversations. It requires hearing no, right? It requires getting out there a little bit. Like if everyone is charging $5 for something and you go to no minus $500, people are like, whoa, what's with this guy? So now you're standing alone, which requires courage.
And then, yeah, the risk of taking the certain way for the uncertain path. Again, this doesn't feel like courage. It's not the same as running into a burning building, but it does require a certain amount of confidence. It requires a certain amount of risk.
We'll get to justice as the other virtue, but it's like you're not doing anyone any favors, yourself included, by charging less than your worth, like accepting less than market rate or leaving money on the table. You're not helping anyone. This isn't like, oh, hey, I keep the price of this low so schoolchildren can afford it.
These are rounding errors for huge companies, and you're just refusing to charge what you're worth.
I think it comes down like, you know, you were just like the rest of us. You were all indoctrinated. We were all indoctrinated, I think, from a very young age to believe in institutions telling us what to do, to believe that charging for things is somehow wrong. You know, what is the root of all evil? Money. We just have these weird programmings.
And I think you're just you're exactly as successful as you programmed yourself to be. And you will only program yourself to be successful by reading all the things you were probably typically not told to read in school and by doing things that allow you to continue to grow and succeed.
You can't win in business if you're the cheapest one continuously over time, unless you're the best operator in your area. Like unless you're Sam Walton of Walmart level good, you should not be the low cost provider. He was a psychopath. That's why he was so good at this.
You know, the man would fly his airplane over parking lots to see which stores were full, then land in the parking lot and go yell at everybody about why nobody was there. I mean, he was unhinged. They would find him laying on the ground with a tape measure in between aisles to see if the aisles were too far apart because he needed everything really close together in order to have massive volume.
If you're that intense of an operator, you can be cheap. If you're not, you can't. You've got to charge more.
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Chapter 8: How do personal values shape professional ambitions?
You know, this isn't just a why song glass door. The range is here to here because your boss also knows their shit. Right. And they go, nobody. I could walk across the street and verify in two seconds that this is not actually what here and here. Right. If you can get that over there, by all means, I'll give you a recommendation. Right.
So you have to know your real shit from real work, not just, you know, what your value is.
I mean, I think a lot of getting what you're worth is figuring out what do you drive? And honestly, it shocks me how few people realize what their value is to the company or what the company needs and how it makes more money. I'm like, aren't you curious at all?
Because if you knew that, you could ask for more because you'd say, hey, I know this month we actually want to, I don't know, we want to bring more people into contrarian thinking. We want more people to sign up for our workshops in our boardroom. Okay, great. Well, what would that mean? Well, if I drive some additional above and beyond, could I get a cut of that? Yeah, sure.
Sure.
No problem. It's not that difficult. The problem is most people just want to say, I want a salary increase, which is a very quick way to say, I just want you to pay me more and me to have zero risk.
Yeah, I would like to keep doing the same work for more money, which is, of course, the deal everyone wants.
Yeah, me too. Some days, you know, find me on the right Tuesday. I want to go back to it.
OK, so the next virtue for the Stoics is this idea. Sometimes it's rendered as temperance, which is moderation. I prefer to see it as self-discipline or self sort of ownership in the sense of being in command of your emotions, your desires, your urges, your desires. Your envy, all of these things. So talk to me about why that's an important skill as a business owner.
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