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The World Is on Fire: A Stoic Playbook for Mastery
12 Plays2 months ago
If you pay attention to the news long enough, it feels like the world is ending every 24 hours.
Wars, disease, AI disruption, political division, economic uncertainty—modern media thrives on amplifying fear, outrage, and tribalism. In this solo episode of The Voice of Growth, Manny Teran lays out a third path between obsession and ignorance: being informed without being emotionally hijacked.
Drawing on Stoic principles such as the dichotomy of control, memento mori, and amor fati, Manny explains how leaders can remain calm, clear, and decisive while others spiral into anxiety or apathy. This is not about toxic optimism or disengagement—it’s about building the internal operating system required to see opportunity inside volatility.
Through real-world examples—from supply chain chaos to AI disruption and geopolitical instability—this episode provides a practical framework for transforming fear into focus, outrage into pattern recognition, and uncertainty into strategic advantage.
If you want to master the mind so the market becomes navigable, this episode is your starting point.
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Voice of Growth'
00:00:04
Speaker
The Voice of Growth, Mastering the Mind and Market. Welcome back to the Voice of Growth podcast, Mastering the Mind and Market.
00:00:14
Speaker
My name is Manny Turan, and I'm your host. The world is on fire. If you pay attention to the news long enough, you will think that the world's going to end every 24 hours.
Media Influence on Perception
00:00:29
Speaker
Between the disease and the AI and the wars and the sanctions and the Fed, all these things are being served up to you by the industrial media complex to drum up clicks, to get advertiser dollars.
00:00:47
Speaker
And you can either choose to propagate and perpetuate and react and incite violence with your words and stand atop your righteous pulpit, which by the way, both sides do.
00:01:02
Speaker
Both sides believe that their way is right and the other way is wrong. Or you can choose to bury your head in the sand like an ostrich and ignore it and miss opportunities and get your news third-hand, fourth-hand by people you talk to at work or at your gym.
00:01:23
Speaker
And truth be told, both sides present substantial danger.
Balancing News Consumption
00:01:30
Speaker
I myself ascribed to both of those camps at one time in my life.
00:01:35
Speaker
At one time in my life, I was a massive news hound. I was on all the sites, and MSNBC, Fox News, Reddit, Snopes, I was al Jazeera, I was BBC, I was consuming all this news trying to decipher and find out what the quote truth was.
00:01:55
Speaker
What I soon recognized is it was all-consuming. It was drivinging dragging me down. And so I recognized also that the truth was not some piece of granite immovable, but more like a muddy bog or a swamp.
00:02:13
Speaker
And it led me down a path that I was not happy about. So then I decided to swing the other direction, that of ignoring the news and not being part of the news and not paying attention to the news.
00:02:27
Speaker
But I soon recognized that I missed opportunities. I was not in the game. I was not doing trend casting. I was not successfully running my business in full command of all what was happening in the market, in the industry.
00:02:42
Speaker
And that was, of course, wrong. But there is a third path. The path is being informed without being entangled in the madness.
00:02:53
Speaker
It's about being calm without being naive. You know, you can turn that volatility into advantage. And this is not toxic optimism.
00:03:05
Speaker
This is stoic clarity. The idea here is that volatility is not the enemy. It is uncontrolled emotion that is.
Stoic Principles for Personal Agency
00:03:16
Speaker
So this third path is really derived from a stoic principle called the dichotomy of control.
00:03:23
Speaker
The dichotomy of control is the fact that we can control very few things in our lives. And there's so many more things that we cannot control.
00:03:35
Speaker
You can't control the Fed. You can't control the wars. You can't control the disease. You can't control the global madness that ensues and trickles down to your neighborhood.
00:03:47
Speaker
You can't control any of that. But what you can control is only very few things, starting with what's in between your ears.
00:03:58
Speaker
You can control how you react to things. You can control what you say. You can control what you write and what you do. That's pretty much it. Nothing else. So the elections, the wars, the interest rates, all that stuff is something that people fret over and there is a form of punishment that they punish themselves for these things that they cannot control.
00:04:24
Speaker
but you can control your attention. You can control your interpretation of things. You can control your processes of what you put in place to move your life, your family's lives forwards.
Practicing Stoicism for Joy and Abundance
00:04:36
Speaker
People suffer not because the events are bad, but because they emotionally invest in what they cannot influence. So if we were to reframe this in the stoic landscape, understand that world events are like the weather,
00:04:52
Speaker
And your mental fortitude, your strategy is how to dress and what kind of but shelter to build. Sounds kind of crazy, but that's what it is.
00:05:05
Speaker
Now, it's obviously a lot easier to say than to do. And part of the stoic practice is that bringing yourself back to that center And you will be blown off course like a leaf in the wind, but recognizing that with enough time, with enough experience, you'll form yourself into that stoic oak tree tied deeply into the earth so that when the winds blow, you're standing strong.
00:05:36
Speaker
The other stoic principle that we use and we talk about a lot is memento mori. The idea that time is a very scarce asset. And the idea of memento mori is that remember you will die.
00:05:50
Speaker
And it sounds every time I say that to folks, they believe it has some sort of morbid slant to it. But in fact, it really means that we have a limited amount of time on this earth.
00:06:04
Speaker
Let's create joy. Let's create success. Let's create abundance so that we are able to enjoy our time here rather than worrying about it, rather than losing sleep, rather than pulling our hair, wringing our hands in these situations that that can create a substantial amount of stress,
00:06:25
Speaker
but instead give you calm and peace. And I have to go back to the idea that this is not this toxic optimism where everything's la-di-da.
00:06:36
Speaker
No, this is a true formed, inherent operating system change that needs to occur so that you can live your life in peace and not be fretting over all these things.
Building Relationships Over News
00:06:53
Speaker
And so if we reframe this idea with Momentum Mori as really we have a scarce asset of time, think about the idea of doom scrolling and giving your attention to all of these issues that come up.
00:07:09
Speaker
Because I too am part of that situation. I too doom scroll and I catch myself going down these rabbit holes and And I catch myself wanting to turn it off and I start to look away and something catches my eye and I go down that rabbit hole even deeper.
00:07:29
Speaker
over and over and over again. So instead of taking the time to doom scroll, how about we spend our time building leverage? How about we spend our time strengthening relationships? How about we spend our time creating options for ourselves and our family? How about we spend our time creating systems to give ourselves and our family freedom, financial freedom, freedom for all sorts of things.
00:07:54
Speaker
We need to figure out how to use our time to build resilient systems, which held back to what I've talked about in the past regarding atomic habits, which will eventually unfold and redefine your identity as someone who lives their life to the fullest, who lives their life with joy and prosperity, and not those that live in panic and lack and ultimately is blown in the wind like that leaf I mentioned earlier.
Opportunities in Disruptions
00:08:27
Speaker
So the insight here is that markets reward people who act rather than those who panic. And this attention can collapse into fear, into tribulation, into making short-term decisions with really long-term implications.
00:08:48
Speaker
But instead, your fear can be transformed into focus, which which can basically become your competitive advantage.
00:09:00
Speaker
And... You know, these stoic principles, they come from a time where there was lots of tumultuous news happening. Governments were failing, were falling. There was wars, there was famine. There's lots of things that were at play back when these were first drawn up.
00:09:19
Speaker
And as time has evolved and we as a human species has evolved in our more sense of purpose, These stoic principles have become even more relevant now than any other time in life. This is probably why the stoic principles have had a resurgence in the past 25 years, especially the past two and a half years, where you see all this social media stuff talking about stoicism. And certainly this is something that I am ascribed to through my own trials and tribulations, through my own issues in my life.
Embracing Challenges as Inspiration
00:09:57
Speaker
The other stoic principle, which is the bedrock of what I talk about, is amor fati. Amor fati is love your fate. Love the chaos.
00:10:09
Speaker
Don't resist it. Amor fati does not mean to just tolerate your fate. It means to cope with it in a way that you can leverage and have it produce more and more fruit in your life, to love it.
00:10:28
Speaker
How can you really love your fate? How can you love your fate when you're suffering, when you lost your job, when you realize and just have been diagnosed with some crazy disease?
00:10:39
Speaker
How can you love your fate? It is one of the hardest things that people have to deal with. And i know you've met people that are seemingly from the outside and drawing all these bad cards, but they themselves present themselves as loving life.
00:11:01
Speaker
When you meet those people, they move you. They've moved me. When I've met met people that have had major issues in their lives, and they still maintain a smile. They still maintain laughter and happiness and joy. And throughout the madness that they're dealing with, they they see the lighthouse through the fog and they move forward.
00:11:27
Speaker
Man, those people are so inspirational. You know, world disruptions create new constraints, new demands, and new winners by understanding and being part of the news cycle, but having that buffer so you don't react, you instead respond.
Strategic News Analysis
00:11:50
Speaker
You take the information you learn from the news without going down in the deep, dark rabbit holes, and you're able then to understand how you can win from the the chaos.
00:12:03
Speaker
So let's talk about a a few examples, what I mean by that. Supply chain madness. You remember a year ago, year and a half ago, two years ago, we had this major supply chain issues.
00:12:14
Speaker
And so the winners in that domain could be reshoring, could be redundancy, could be bringing manufacturing locally. If you caught wind of that early and you made decisions early, you could actually capitalize on that major shift.
00:12:32
Speaker
Another one, ai disruption. By recognizing that AI would disrupt your industry, if you're one of the first movers, then you'll be the ones who capitalize on that disruption.
00:12:46
Speaker
One last one is geopolitical instability. How the hell are we going figure that one out? Well, security, infrastructure, energy, How can you align your business so that the geopolitical madness that is ensuing in the world can actually bring you more success?
00:13:05
Speaker
And that really has to do with understanding how you can be part of the solution. We've talked about trends ad nauseum. My former background with Adam Hartung at Spark Partners was all about trends and how can you figure out how to use trends to your advantage?
00:13:21
Speaker
Certainly, These things present themselves as giant, I use the the term of fly swatter, just squashing us down.
00:13:34
Speaker
But instead, think about these opportunities as ways to move your family, your future, your success forward. Now, the obstacle is the way is one of the very powerful stoic principles out there. And really it asks you to to ask better questions. So what does that environment reward? What behaviors are being punished?
00:13:59
Speaker
What are the demands that I can fulfill? Where are the demands moving slowly? Where are the weak signals? And we've talked about a lot of these things in the and different podcasts, but there is a whole bevy of opportunities that come from chaos.
00:14:15
Speaker
The real magic here is creating that distance. And so I'm going to go into some detail on what you can do tactically and strategically in order to capitalize on the news without letting it drag you down.
Analytical News Consumption for Leaders
00:14:33
Speaker
So the idea here is stop the emotional consumption. Stop it. And instead, create strategic perspective. So most people consume news emotionally.
00:14:46
Speaker
They see something on the news, Recent events in Minnesota is a great example. The internet is on fire right now on both sides of the aisle with those that believe that it was justified and those that believe that it was not justified.
00:15:01
Speaker
I'm not going to talk about my own politics at this time regarding that because I want to focus on this content, but recognize that both sides think so clearly and defiantly that their side is correct.
00:15:18
Speaker
that they will stop at nothing to get their point across. You know what I'm talking about. These social media influencers on both sides of the aisle, the news media on both sides of the aisle, it's just feeding into that same rhetoric.
00:15:31
Speaker
And at the end of the day, who wins and who loses, clear as day. Who wins is the media companies. They're serving up.
00:15:42
Speaker
They're getting clicks. And the influencers, they're serving up. They're getting clicks. Who loses? The families. The family of that poor woman who got shot and the family of that poor man who shot her.
00:15:56
Speaker
it's not easy. These are the times we live in. So instead of reacting emotionally, think about the a concept of looking at things with a strategic perspective.
00:16:10
Speaker
Leaders consume things analytically and applying a very simple filter. The filter is We'll kind of do a comparison here. The emotional person says, how do i feel about this?
00:16:26
Speaker
How do I feel about what just happened? And they make it about the emotion. The strategic perspective asks, what is changing because of this? See that difference?
00:16:39
Speaker
Now, we're human beings. Of course, we're going to be affected by what we see, what we hear, what we learn about. But the stoic leader will take that full step backwards and say, what is changing because of this?
00:16:54
Speaker
What is the result of this down the the road? And how can I be a better leader and steward of my company, my family to prepare myself and to be at that point like Wayne Gretzky skating to the where the puck is going to be so that when the time is right, I can execute.
00:17:16
Speaker
And replacing the outrage with pattern recognition and providing a very practical framework of doing the following.
Scenario Planning and Calmness
00:17:26
Speaker
The first of which is limit your inputs. That means create time in your day when you're going to spend a specified amount of time looking on social media, looking at the news, whatever.
00:17:41
Speaker
I know folks that make it during a particular time of the day. 8.30 in the morning, they spend 20, 30 minutes on the news, they do their consumption, and then they're done for the day. Have other friends that believe it's more like a currency system where you've got 45 minutes during the day and you can feel to use it feel free to use it however you want.
00:18:02
Speaker
I'm not going to tell you whatever um it might be best for you, but for me, I tend to consume it in bits and pieces during the day because as you know, a lot of things happen during the day.
00:18:15
Speaker
That's the first thing. The second thing is separate the signal from the narrative. Okay. What is the story being told and what is the story to be told?
00:18:29
Speaker
Now, it's a little bit of a distinction. The story being told is what's being spun up by social media, what's being spun up by the news outlets, what's being spun up by the influencers.
00:18:40
Speaker
But what is the story to be told? What's the story behind the story? In the case of that Minnesota situation, What is the story being told is clear as day. There's two stories, but the story to be told is the profound sadness on both sides of the aisle. Yes, there's one person that's dead and there's one person that is forever changed and their family's forever changed. And there's lots of things that go beyond what we see as issues from that situation that happened.
00:19:14
Speaker
And then what's the greater conversation? What's going to happen with additional ICE raids? And and is there going to be additional violence? And there's there's a lot of things beyond that that need to be looked at.
00:19:28
Speaker
the The third thing to do is to map second, third, fourth order effects. This is very much what I'm talking about now. By having something happen, like maybe we'll talk about what's happening right now in Iran.
00:19:43
Speaker
The whole idea with this revolution And what the first order is what's happening right now. There's violence, there's death.
00:19:54
Speaker
The government is cracking down. The people on the streets are are not stopping. And that's what's happening right now. The second, third, fourth order effects.
00:20:04
Speaker
What'll happen next? in a week? What'll happen in a month? What'll happen in six months? What'll happen in a year? Play it out and do scenario planning to understand how that might play in to your life.
00:20:20
Speaker
Maybe you have friends that have family in Iran. I've got friends that are from Iran and that they are now in the States. And I wondered to myself, What's going to happen with that?
00:20:32
Speaker
So guess what? I'm reaching out. I'm asking how they're doing. And from a business perspective, i'm i'm taking it's taking a back seat because I want to understand how they're doing personally.
00:20:44
Speaker
But when the time is right, there's going to be opportunities potentially for business if the revolution is able to take hold and overthrow the Islamic regime.
00:20:55
Speaker
for instance. um And third, fourth order, there might be opportunities. There's lots of resources there at play. And there's ah an entire beautiful culture at play as well. What's going to happen to that? So these are all things you can put into perspective. And if you need, write them down and be very intentional on creating that framework. I have a notes app that I use on my phone and on my computer. And I do that on my Moleskine. And I spend time actually writing things down because it matters to me.
00:21:26
Speaker
And then the last thing you want to do, there's two more things. The last thing you want to do is you want to translate change into the opportunity zones.
00:21:37
Speaker
So I mentioned the second, third, fourth order effects. Now translate what you're going to do about that. Could be you just hold, could be used you need more information. Your your need that draw that comes from those second, third order effects might be that you need more information.
00:21:54
Speaker
But the other side is, okay, base you can do your scenario planning. If this happens, then i will do this. So what you're doing is you're moving pieces on the chessboard on various scenarios. And as time unfolds, you can make adjustments to those scenarios.
00:22:11
Speaker
Now, I'm using geopolitical um conversations here at play, but in business, things like the Fed decreasing the interest rates can have downstream effects. How are you going to do that in your business? If you are selling capital equipment, some of the new laws coming out regarding how you can actually take deductions on these pieces of equipment, and you know that could be a huge thing for you on how you do your marketing. So,
00:22:40
Speaker
The idea of looking into the future is sometimes they they would say it's a fool's errand, right? It's something that is that is not possible. But after spending time with with ah Adam Hartung and Spark Partners, I recognize that what you're doing is you're creating choose-your-own-adventure book here with different opportunities, and you're laying foundations, you're sowing seeds, you're preparing the the earth to be cultivated beforehand, right?
00:23:08
Speaker
in certain areas so that if your scenario does come true, then you're ready rather than not doing anything, which is what most people do. And all they're doing is they're being blown in the wind and they're just reacting to everything. And you don't want that.
Personal Growth Through Stoicism
00:23:26
Speaker
The last thing I'll say is that remain calm. Calm mind see farther. By remaining calm in this chaos of what you see after having done all the things you've done to look in the future, then you're able to, and if you're able to remain calm, can make better decisions.
00:23:47
Speaker
Let me give you an example of where I went from anxiety to agency. This is a personal um reframing in my mind. I was part of a startup and we raised money. we were at a very tumultuous time in the world. this is during COVID.
00:24:06
Speaker
And we brought together scientists, doctors to create this amazing technology. And all the while the world is collapsing inside, right? the Whole mandate for mask is full effect. Everybody's at home, quarantine. All these things are at play. My relationship, my young relationship with with my former fiance was put to the stress test.
00:24:35
Speaker
We were going about our day with my two kids, her two kids, to going to school. And in a matter of a month, it became a pressure cooker because all the kids were at home.
00:24:45
Speaker
And she was basically the... um I don't know, the operator of the house, the teacher, the everything. And I was running this startup and there was a lot of pressure that was happening. And the news was crazy. Everybody thought there was going bodies piled up on the street corners. And there was all this fear. And I won't go into whether or not the government overreacted. Maybe they did.
00:25:11
Speaker
And the whole Fauci thing and the You know, all these things were at play and the industrial meter complex was swinging for the fences. And in this moment,
00:25:24
Speaker
I really began my stoic journey at that time. It was a lot to handle. There's a lot going on. And I was sort of in the weeds and I didn't know what I didn't know. And I was doing my best and we were doing our best to move the ball forward. But ultimately we couldn't ah resolve a lot of things. And here I am fast forward five, six years later, right? That was in the past.
00:25:51
Speaker
And so Why this is important is because that madness, being consumed by it, is what led me to where I am today.
00:26:04
Speaker
It led me, it forced in me a sense of being adaptable to many futures and being aware that although we cannot predict a single future, we can be adaptable to many futures.
00:26:20
Speaker
And look, the world will present changes, disruptions. The noise is going to take that and elevate it. But most people react.
00:26:32
Speaker
Your job as a stoic leader is, and really your edge, is to take that, pause, go through the framework with composure, with curiosity, with courage, with and lay you the foundation for the many futures and with calm, with joy, begin to execute and adjust as the world unfolds.
00:27:04
Speaker
Sounds kind of simple. It kind of is. It is a process that takes time. There are so many Stoic writings out there. You can read the originals, the Marcus Realist books and so forth, or there's lots of newer books that help to reframe what was said in a more modern context.
00:27:26
Speaker
Stoicism doesn't make you passive. It makes you strategically assertive so that you're calm enough to see opportunity where others might flinch.
00:27:40
Speaker
You don't ask for a lighter burden. You ask for broader shoulders. The idea here is that if you master your mind, the market becomes more navigable and certainly your decisions will be based on feel the truth what feel the truth.
Creating Guiding Principles
00:28:01
Speaker
of what's out there, but more importantly, the truth that is with inside you. With this vision we've talked about, um being able to create a vision for yourself, to to create an operating principles for yourself.
00:28:15
Speaker
it The backdrop for me at least are the stoic principles. I created something which I'll share in a future podcast called Polaris. Polaris is the North Star.
00:28:28
Speaker
And Polaris is was used and is used for navigation ah for tens of thousands of years. It's the one star that doesn't move position because the entire world ah rotates around the sun and the constellations rotate, but the North Star remains the same.
00:28:47
Speaker
And that North Star, for me, are five principles that i ascribe to and live by that are sort of evolving because when I first did that was the pro pre-Stoic timeframe. So they're now evolving to embark and be part of the Stoic principles as well.
00:29:09
Speaker
The courage, wisdom, justice, and temperance. And I'm going to spend a whole podcast, maybe the next one I do, the monologue, where i'll I'll unfold and talk about my Polaris, my lighthouse, my guide to living a life that is full of joy, full of calm.
00:29:32
Speaker
um And that to me is success. Freedom is success. Monetary wealth, although it does present itself to me and I have been part of it, I don't ascribe the same kind of importance at at one time that I did. What's more important is what it can buy me, which is freedom.
00:29:52
Speaker
And there's so much to this freedom that I can probably dedicate an entire and another podcast regarding why freedom is so important. And it's one thing we all really strive to get.
00:30:04
Speaker
And um very few of us are able to actually achieve the level of freedom that we really want.
Conclusion and Gratitude
00:30:11
Speaker
thank Thank you for your time. Thank you for this opportunity for me to share my thoughts on how you can actually create momentum in your life by being a buffer zone away from the news, taking from what you can from it without sinking by it.
00:30:32
Speaker
And we'll welcome any conversations or feedback from this. Thank you very much. Cheers.