Transcript
Speaker: The voice of growth, mastering the mind and market, timeless wisdom, proven strategies, and the deep work that creates lasting success. Like and subscribe to stay aligned with what truly drives results.
Speaker: This episode is sponsored by Hub International, protecting what matters most to you. Welcome to the Voice of Growth podcast, Mastering the Mind and Market.
Speaker: My name is Manny Turan, and I'm your host.
Speaker: So I've been asked multiple times, hey, Manny, how can you be a stoic when the world is surrounded by so much pain, suffering?
Speaker: You drive down the street, you see homeless people shooting up the side of the road, you see Just so much suffering and pain. You turn on the news, you see all the madness happening all across the world, whether it's wars or major catastrophes like the one that just happened in Nepal, which is very sad.
Speaker: You see issues at home with crime. You see the divide between the left and the right growing and becoming more polarized.
Speaker: You see pain and suffering in your backyard with communities trying to rebuild after tragic losses for whatever it might be. You turn on the TV or you look on online, you see the environment is falling apart.
Speaker: You see El Nino's doing this and the drought, and you see all this madness. And you ask me, why Stoicism? Aren't Stoics just, they don't care.
Speaker: kind of goes back a little bit to my libertarian roots too. Oh, you don't care. You don't want to pick a side. You want to not be left, not be right. You want to just kind of be in the middle.
Speaker: And the middle's where it's lukewarm and there's nothing happens there. It's like the number seven on a scale of one to 10. It's like blah. And the right answer is the answer for me. And you have your own right answer.
Speaker: The answer for me of why I practice stoicism is because of all that. It's because of all the madness and all the suffering and all the pain and all the things that are happening in this world that are unequal and unfair.
Speaker: Because if I would allow myself to react to all that suffering and pain in the world, I'd be a mess. I would. In my own life, I have endured a fair number of hardships, but nothing compared to what's happening around the world.
Speaker: Nothing compared to what I'm allowing myself to respond to. Something happens in the world and I'm in that world.
Speaker: i don't see it as it's happening to me. i literally see it's happening for me. And that shift hasn't been easy for me to embrace because that shift is where the magic really is.
Speaker: The sooner you can realize that you are almost like a passenger in this boat ride, you're not a driver, you're not a pilot.
Speaker: You don't have the ability to make a lot of things happen. around you, you can make a lot of things happen inside you.
Speaker: So how do we compare and contrast that to a hard-driving entrepreneur that wants to make big things? Well, you still make big things. You still work your ass off. You still strategize. You still bring your team together.
Speaker: You still look at making a big impact in the time you have in this world. You still do all of that. The subtle and important difference is you don't let these setbacks You don't let these hardships, you don't let the pain suffering bring you down.
Speaker: Because as a business person, as an entrepreneur, there are plenty of things that want to bring you down. Believe me. I have been faced with so many challenges in life and in business.
Speaker: And I mean this not to say like, woe is me. I mean this to say that I commiserate with you. I'm there alongside with you. And there's moments when I've wanted to give up, not by ending my life or anything like that, but for me, it was plugging back into the matrix, going back into the corporate world.
Speaker: Nothing wrong with the corporate world, but with my DNA, the way I'm wired, it would be difficult for me to plug back in to the corporate world. Now this day and age has so much to offer with AI, with the gig economy, with remote work, being a nomad in Bali or whatever, all these things, on amazing things.
Speaker: And then we're presented with the reality and all of the fakeness that happens in the world of social media. So your brain is 350,000 year old operating system that is used to living in a quote village or tribe with 150 members.
Speaker: And now you've got 5,000 friends on Instagram or whatever. it It boggles the mind and it in your software kind of goes haywire. And we're really recipients of the glorious algorithms that have been carefully curated by the social media giants to hook you and draw you in deeper and deeper and deeper down that rabbit hole.
Speaker: And all the while, we're trying to find peace. We're trying to find security. We're trying to find connection. And these things could be very hard to reach.
Speaker: In my podcasts before, I've talked about vulnerability. I've talked about stillness. I've talked about authenticity. I've talked about inspiration.
Speaker: I've talked about so many things. And I thought about What is a common thread that ties them all together? Is there anything common? And the answer is yes. The first of which is all of these are human conditions, human interactions, human experiences, human dynamics.
Speaker: And that is the foundation of even a some other few podcasts that I've done talking about how your strength and in the AI world is your humanness.
Speaker: So realize that you're on this earth with a almost 8 billion other people trying to figure this out. And none of us makes it out alive. Some of us are faced with that reality closer to home than others.
Speaker: Some of us, their whole life can turn upside down in a matter of a phone call. And i i do worry, I'm not a robot.
Speaker: I do occasionally have these flashes of worry about getting a phone call that'll change my life, but I don't dwell there very long. Just like the podcast I talked about, the swamp.
Speaker: You can visit it, just don't stay there. Back to that thing that ties us all together. So it's the humanness, but also intent and identity.
Speaker: The two eyes, the two eyes. Intent is tied deeply to desire. And desire is really the driver, the furnace that helps humans achieve.
Speaker: Because desire is what drives you to get up early. Desire is what drives you to step over your comfort or step into discomfort in order to take your career, your vision to the next level.
Speaker: So all that is ah tied to intent. Intent means you have a direction. Intent means you are going in a direction because you want to go there. And no matter what, you're going to make it happen.
Speaker: The other eye is identity. Identity goes down to who you are. And this can turn into some crazy philosophy, by the way. I'm not going to go down this rabbit hole, although i think I will one day because I've done some exploration and even i have to reread these things to put it straight in my mind because it's so complicated but elegantly simple.
Speaker: Identity. Who are you? Who are you when no one's looking? Who are you to other people? Who are you in the business world?
Speaker: Who do you want to be? Does the brain know the difference? We've touched on this a little bit, but your brain doesn't really know the difference between reality and things that are fake.
Speaker: So when you tell yourself something bad about yourself, the brain believes it. The brain also doesn't know the word N-O. and oh So whether you're, if you tell yourself, I want to stop smoking, your brain hears, I want to smoke, I want to smoke, I want to smoke. And it reinforces that same mantra.
Speaker: If you say to yourself, I want to be healthy, I want to breathe easier, I want to, whatever it might be that's in the positive, your brain sees that as a better thing if you want to get out of what you're trying to do.
Speaker: So intent, identity, those are the pistons that keep on trucking and help us to discover ourselves and grow and become better people and suffer and get up again and grit and all these things.
Speaker: those are the Those are the marching orders. But those are harder, not softer. The softer elements harder. are the reflections that come with the the wisdom, the stoicism elements, wisdom, of courage.
Speaker: You've got the elements of tolerance and justice.
Speaker: If you run a business, you know that growth comes with risk. And the bigger you get, the more there is to protect. That's why I trust Hub International. Hub is the insurance broker for my company, and they have helped me to look beyond simply just having insurance to making sure we're actually covered for the risks that we face.
Speaker: As a CEO, that really matters to me. Why? Because I want to spend my time growing the business, not wondering whether we're protected if something goes wrong. So they're not just a sponsor to the podcast.
Speaker: They're actually a company that I trust with my business. Hub International. What matters most to you, that's what Hub protects. If you're building something that matters to you, click the link in the description and see how Hub can help you protect it.
Speaker: I often reflect on certain things on the news and I look at leaders, true leaders and and supposed leaders, and and I look to see how they handle certain things.
Speaker: um I also have conversations behind closed doors or in rooms where, man, I admire these people because no matter what is happening in the world, they are true to their values.
Speaker: And that gives me joy that I'm surrounding myself by people like that. You know, we're surrounded by people all day long and we're in some ways the average of whatever, top five or 10.
Speaker: But it doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things because we can move between rooms. And we move between rooms not only in our current life, but in previous lives.
Speaker: I have friends all across the board and i and I love to entertain them and I love to call them and I would like to get their insights. their insights Because I've learned too that bias is a bitch.
Speaker: Bias will bring you down. but Bias will put rose colored or blue or black or whatever colored glasses and will really taint the way you see the world.
Speaker: I oftentimes catch myself in the middle of a bias situation. I'm listening to something and I'm already reacting. I'm not even like responding. I'm not even like letting it settle. And I feel that bubbling up.
Speaker: And it's the trigger mechanism that I've built with stoicism that alerts me and says, Manny, look, you are going into some bias domain here. Or, hey, listen, you are you're not just simply responding. You're reacting right now.
Speaker: And I have done a fair amount of reacting in my world, in my days, in my days and my experience. And that reacting has not served me well. Matter of fact, I would say that 99% of it has not served me well.
Speaker: But I'm here now. I'm not gonna dwell on the past. I'm not gonna dwell on the future. I'm gonna do my best to live right now with intent, with my identity, learning knowing that I came from someplace and I'm also going someplace, but I'm here right now experiencing the world as it is.
Speaker: I've had the distinct pleasure of meeting and interacting and in some senses being in in a relationship with with people that have shown me so much. Because the closest you the closer you get to a relationship, the more that you're exposed to yourself.
Speaker: Because there's some psychology here, by the way, that the people on the other side of that love that you're speaking with, the ones that we tend to hurt the most, are going to show you a mirror in a way that oftentimes you don't want to see.
Speaker: And so you react, you know, respond, you react. And these things are tied to some very subtle, but very powerful elements of human nature.
Speaker: They're tied to the ego. They're tied to some deep, when you were six years old stuff that that is hasn't healed yet. And it's a process.
Speaker: We think that healing, like if I get a ah cut in my arm and it's healed, that it's, we can't even see where it was anymore. but it doesn't work that way with the psyche. It doesn't work that way here because we may quote heal, but the wound is surface deep.
Speaker: It's right there. And certain things can rip that scar right off and you're bleeding again. And it takes a vigilance, a daily, hourly, by the minute, by the second vigilance of your identity which is produced to the world by behavior, that you need to really keep close grips on that if you want to advance.
Speaker: When I say advance is, don't we all want prosperity? Don't we all want joy? Don't we all want really good relationships and good health?
Speaker: Don't we all want meaning and don't we all want to build and create? That's what gets me about the left and the right and the polarization is we all want the same thing.
Speaker: but we have these people that latch onto one message, one this, pro-life, pro-choice. You got the gun people. You got not gun people. People vote on one thing and it draws this stark polarization between them and the other side.
Speaker: And the thing is social media and the culture we live in supports that. Because guess what? If I lean left or lean right,
Speaker: My social media feed is going to feed the side that i want to be fed. We don't want to go to the table. We don't want to sit across the table and discuss with somebody that is the opposite of what we believe in the quote unquote political domain.
Speaker: No. All we want to do is be louder than them. All we want to do is take what we know and push it down their throat. That's not collaboration.
Speaker: That's not meeting in the middle. And the thing is, this happens not only and politics, this happens in business, this happens in family dynamics. And we're all walking around like six-year-olds that have unhealed wounds.
Speaker: And we have all this built-up success and posturing and ego that makes us pretend like we're grand, but the emperor has no clothes. And the best we can do in life is to start every day with gratitude and with the self-reflection that we're able to constantly grow from because we all want the same thing.
Speaker: So going back to the original question of why stoicism, it's because the world is the way it is that I practice stoicism. Because i can look at a situation and rather than react, I can respond with compassion.
Speaker: I can respond with generosity. I can respond with love. Because if I let the world bring me down, the world will bring me down.
Speaker: We can't control very much at all in this world. And that realization gives me power. over emotion, over temper, over breaking points, over a lot of things.
Speaker: I believe that all entrepreneurs and business people should be studying Stoicism, should be embracing it. And Stoicism, by the way, is compatible with Christianity, with Judaism, Islam, primarily.
Speaker: It's compatible. Why? Because it goes back to what you allow in and out of your heart, your your brain, your psyche.
Speaker: I'm proud to practice Stoicism. I'm proud to also practice libertarianism with a small L in that I i believe that personal freedom is really important as well as personal responsibility.
Speaker: And that other shoe that drops needs to be also brought into the conversation. Because if you want personal responsibility, you have to be willing to do the hard stuff.
Speaker: It's just the way it is.
Speaker: Yeah, these are all moments that I reflect on. And I would intent spend time reflecting on them. Not only for this podcast,
Speaker: but also because I want to live a ah life of joy and i don't have very many regrets. I have things that I certainly would do differently, no doubt, but I don't let them bring me down very often.
Speaker: Every once a while I get this wind that blows in and makes me sad about certain things that have happened, certain things that I have done to create bad environments.
Speaker: And as much as I could i could just sit there in the in the swamp, I just let that wind come and go. And when it comes and goes, I don't just let it go. i actually feel it.
Speaker: ah sit with it. I sit with the yuck. And I learn from it. I use it as an opportunity to relearn and recommit myself to a life that is full of joy and prosperity
Speaker: at the cost of Vigilance, vigilance of myself, because I can control myself. I can control my tongue.
Speaker: I can't control my thoughts. Now that last piece has a caveat because controlling your thoughts is not like controlling your words, controlling words. You can just not talk.
Speaker: Controlling your thoughts is more like controlling a herd of goats sometimes. You can kind of keep it corralled a bit, but they're going to jump over the fence every once in a while and they're going to go in different places where you don't want to go.
Speaker: But it's that gentle bringing them back to the fold that makes all the difference. I learned from a very close person in my life, very respected that I didn't exactly treat the best that I could.
Speaker: I learned from her all about the way we control our thoughts. And i learned about going inward. I didn't really understand it. And I had to spend some time really learning what that really means.
Speaker: So we can say things, we can say things to get what we want. But when we sit with it, when we learn from it at a very deep level, changes everything.
Speaker: So why stoicism one last time? Because the world deserves the version of you that doesn't react, that responds with gratitude, with compassion, with love.
Speaker: And if you're an entrepreneur, which you likely are because you're on this podcast now, you can use that as your armor. You go out there to the market, you're gonna get beat up.
Speaker: You're gonna get naysayers. You're going to get competition trying to bring you down. And all you got to do is stay true to your identity and your intent and push forward.
Speaker: As an entrepreneur, as a stoic, as a human being, it's your duty to succeed. And do so with a smile, realizing that we all get the opportunity to do this every day.
Speaker: Thanks for listening. Cheers.
