Hi, you're listening to Ted Talks Daily Amelie's Hugh, if you want to thrive in high stress environments and make better decisions and ancient philosophy might be the answer. That's according to today's archive talk from TED 2017 from Tech Investor and podcast for Tim Ferriss. If you like the talk, you might enjoy Tim's podcast, The Tim Various Show. Each episode, he interviews world class performers from eclectic areas like investing, sports, business, art and more to tease out the life lessons, habits and tools that listeners can use.

He's had more than 400 guests on, including Hugh Jackman and many TED speakers like Dr. Jane Goodall and Adam Grant. You can find the Tim Ferriss show on Tim Blogs podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.

1999, a senior in college, and it was right after dance practice, I was really, really happy and I remember exactly where I was. About a week and a half later, I'm sitting in the back of my used minivan in a campus parking lot when I decided that I was going to commit suicide. And I went from deciding to a full-blown planning very quickly, it's the closest I've ever come to the edge of the precipice, and the only reason I took my finger off the trigger was thanks to a few lucky coincidences.

And after the fact, that's what scared me the most, the element of chance. So I became very methodical about testing different ways that I could manage my ups and downs, which has proven to be a good investment. Many normal people might have, say, six to 10 major depressive episodes in their lives.

I have bipolar depression runs in my family. I've had 50 plus at this point and I've learned a lot. I've had a lot of at bats, many rounds in the ring with darkness taking good notes. So I thought rather than get up and give any type of recipe for success or highlight reel, I would share my recipe for avoiding self-destruction and certainly self paralysis. And the tool I found, which has proven to be the most reliable safety net for emotional freefall, is actually the same tool that has helped me to make my best business decisions.

But that is secondary.

And it is. Stoicism, that sounds boring, might think of Spock or might conjure an image like this, a cow standing in the rain.

It's not sad, it's not particularly happy. It's just an impassive creature taking whatever life sends its way.

You might not think of the ultimate competitor, say Bill Belichick, head coach of the New England Patriots is the all time NFL record for Super Bowl titles. And Stoicism has spread like wildfire in the top of the NFL ranks as a means of mental toughness training. In the last few years, you might not think of the founding fathers Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, George Washington to name but three students of stoicism.

George Washington actually had a play about a stoic. This was Kaito, a tragedy performed for his troops at Valley Forge to keep them motivated.

So why would people of action focus so much on an ancient philosophy? That seems very academic. And I would encourage you to think about stoicism a little bit differently as an operating system for thriving and high stress environments for making better decisions. And it all started on a porch.

So around three hundred B.C. in Athens, someone named Zino of City him taught many lectures, walking around a painted porch, a Steaua that later became stoicism. And in the Roman worlds, people use stoicism as a comprehensive system for doing many, many things.

But for our purposes, chief among them was training yourself to separate what you can control from what you cannot control, and then doing exercises to focus exclusively on the former. This decreases emotional reactivity, which can be a superpower. Conversely, let's say you're a quarterback, you miss a pass, you get furious with yourself.

That could cost you a game.

If you're a CEO and you fly off the handle at a very valued employee because of a minor infraction that could cost you the employee.

If you're a college student who say is in a downward spiral and you feel helpless and hopeless unabated, that could cost you your life.

So the stakes are very, very high and there are many tools in the toolkit to get you there. I'm going to focus on one that completely changed my life in 2004. And it found me then because of two things. A very close friend, young guy my age died of pancreatic cancer unexpectedly. And then my girlfriend, who I thought I was going to marry, walked out. She'd had enough. And she didn't give me a Dear John letter, but she did give me a dear John Plack not making this up.

I've kept it. Business hours are over at five o'clock.

She gave this to me to put on my desk for personal health because at the time I was working on my first real business, I had no idea what I was doing. I was working 14 plus hour days, seven days a week. I was using stimulants to get going.

I was using depressants to wind down and go to sleep.

It was a disaster, felt completely trapped. And I bought a book on simplicity to try to find answers.

And I did find a quote that made a big difference in my life, which was we suffer more often in imagination than in reality by Seneca the Younger.

It was a famous stoic writer that took me to his letters, which took me to the exercise Premeditative Milgrom, which means the premeditation of evils.

And in simple terms, this is visualizing the worst case scenarios and detail that you fear, preventing you from taking action so that you can take action to overcome that paralysis. My problem was monkey mind. Super loud, very incessant. Just thinking my way through problems doesn't work. I needed to capture my thoughts on paper, so I created a written exercise that I called fear setting my goal setting for myself. And it consists of three pages, super simple.

The first page.

What if I dot, dot, dot, questionmark. This is whatever you fear. Whatever is causing you anxiety, whatever you're putting off could be asking someone out. Ending a relationship, asking for promotion, quitting a job, starting a company could be anything for me.

It was taking my first vacation in four years and stepping away from my business for a month to go to London, where I could stay in a friend's room for free to either remove myself as a bottleneck in the business or shut it down.

In the first column, define your writing down all of the worst things you can imagine happening if you take that step and you want 10 to 20, I'm not going to go through all of them, but I'll give you two examples.

So one was, I'll go to London, it'll be rainy, I'll get depressed. The whole thing will be a huge waste of time. Number two, I'll miss a letter from the IRS and I'll get audited or raided or shut down or some such. And then you go to the Prevent column.

In that column, you write down the answer to what could I do to prevent each of these bullets from happening or at the very least decrease the likelihood even a little bit.

So for getting depressed in London, I could take a portable blue light with me, use it for 15 minutes in the morning.

I knew that helped to stave off depressive episodes for the IRS, but I could change the mailing address on file with the IRS so the paperwork would go to my accountant instead of to my upstairs. Easy peasy.

Then we go to repair. So if the worst case scenario has happened, what could you do to repair the damage even a little bit, or who could you ask for help?

So the first case, London, well, I could fork over some money, fly to Spain, get some sun, undo the damage if I got into a funk. In the case of missing letter from the IRS, I could call a friend who is a lawyer or ask, say, a professor of law, what they would recommend, who I should talk to, how had people handled this in the past. So one question to keep in mind as you're doing this first page is, has anyone else in the history of time less intelligent or less driven figured this out?

Chances are the answer is yes. The second page.

It's simple what might be the benefits of an attempt or a partial success? You can see we're playing up the fears and really taking a conservative look at the upside.

So if you attempted whatever you're considering, might you build confidence, develop skills emotionally, financially, otherwise, what might be the benefits of, say, a base hit? Spend 10 to 15 minutes on this page three. This might be the most important, so don't skip it. The cost of inaction. Humans are very good at considering what might go wrong.

If we try something new, say, ask for a raise we don't often consider is the atrocious cost of the status quo not changing anything. So you should ask yourself, if I avoid this action or decision and actions and decisions like it, what might my life look like in, say, six months, 12 months, three years any further out? It starts to seem intangible and really get detailed again, emotionally, financially, physically, whatever. And when I did this, it painted a terrifying picture.

I was self medicating. My business was going to implode at any moment, at all times. I didn't step away. My relationships were fraying or failing. And I realized that inaction was no longer an option for me. Those are the three pages, that's it, that's for your setting. And after this, I realized that on a scale of one to 10, one being minimal impact, 10 being maximal impact, if I took the trip as risking a one to three, if temporary and reversible pain for an eight to 10 of positive life changing impact, it could be semi-permanent.

So I took the trip. None of the disasters came to pass. There were some hiccups. Sure, I was able to extricate myself from the business. I ended up extending that trip for a year and a half around the world and that became the basis for my first book. That leads me here today and I can trace all of my biggest wins and all of my biggest disasters averted back to doing fear setting at least once a quarter. It's not a panacea.

You'll find that some of your fears are very well-founded, but you shouldn't conclude that without first putting them under a microscope.

And it doesn't make all the hard times the hard choices easy, but it can make a lot of them easier.

So I'd like to close with a profile of one of my favorite modern day Stoics, Jersey Gregory Peck.

He is a four time world champion and Olympic weightlifting political refugee, published poet, 62 years old.

He can still kick my ass. And probably most asses in this room is an impressive guy.

I spend a lot of time on his Steaua his porch asking life and training advice. He was part of the solidarity in Poland, which was a non-violent movement for social change that was violently suppressed by the government. He lost his career as a firefighter. Then his mentor, a priest, was kidnapped, tortured, killed and thrown into a river. He was then threatened. He and his wife had to flee. Poland bounced from country to country until they landed in the US with next to nothing sleeping on floors.

He now lives in Woodside, California, in a very nice place. And of the 10000 plus people I've met in my life, I would put him in the top 10 in terms of success and happiness. And there's a punch line coming to pay attention. I sent him a text a few weeks ago asking him, had you ever read any stock philosophy?

And he replied with two pages of text. This is very unlike him. He is a terse dude.

And not only was he familiar with Stoicism, but he pointed out for all of his most important decisions, his inflection points when he stood up for his principles and ethics, how he had used stoicism and something akin to fear setting, which blew my mind. And he closed with two things. No. One, he couldn't imagine any life more beautiful than that in a stoic.

And the last was his mantra, which he applies to everything, and you can apply to everything, easy choices, hard life, hard choices, easy life. The hard choices, what we most fear doing, asking, saying these are very often exactly what we most need to do. And the biggest challenges and problems we face will never be solved with comfortable conversations, whether it's in your own head or with other people. So I encourage you to ask yourselves, where in your lives right now might defining your fears be more important than defining your goals?

Keeping in mind all the while, the words of Seneca, we suffer more often in imagination than in reality.

Thank you very much. PR ex.