Did You Get Your Bonus? | Ask DS

Here’s a way to feel good every single day, no matter what happens. A way to appreciate even a day stuck in the airport or putting out fires. It’s an exercise from Seneca. A person who wraps up each day as if it were the end of their life, who meditates on their mortality in the evening, Seneca believed, has a super power when they wake up.---And in today's Ask Daily Stoic, Ryan answers questions during a Q&A sessions after his Stoicism 101 lecture. Topics covered include how Marcus could overlook Commodus's derangement, why the Stoics were ahead on some social issues but behind on others, and how the Stoics quantify the progress of their work.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. Well, on Thursdays, we not only read the daily meditation, but we answer some questions from listeners and fellow Stoics who are trying to apply this philosophy, just as you are. Some of these come from my talks. Some of these come from Zoom sessions that we do with Daily Stoic Life members or as part of the challenges. Some of them are from interactions I have on the street when there happened to be someone there recording. But thank you for listening, and we hope this is of use to you.

• 0:45Speaker 01

  Here's a good way to feel good every single day, no matter what happens. A way to appreciate a day stuck in the airport or putting out fires. It's an exercise from Seneca. He said that a person who wraps up each day as if it was the end of their life, who meditates on their mortality in the evening, has a superpower when they wake up. "When a man has said, 'I have lived,'" Seneca wrote, "then every morning he arises," is a bonus. And you know how it feels when you're playing with house money or when your vacation is extended? In a word, better. You feel lighter, nicer. You appreciate everything. You are present. All the trivial concerns and short-term anxieties go away

• 1:28Speaker 01

  because for a second, you realize how little they matter. Well, that's how you ought to live. Going to bed, having lived a full day, appreciating that you may not make it. Appreciating that you may not get the privilege of waking up tomorrow. And if you do wake up, which we hope for all of you, it will be impossible not to see every second of the next 24 hours as a bonus, because they are.

• 2:06Ryan Holiday?

  Let's do some of these questions that have come in. What should we do first?

• 2:10Speaker 02

  All right, there's one from Maureen about Marcus overlooking Commodus's derangement, and sort of the complexity of that question.

• 2:21Ryan Holiday?

  It is very complex, right? Because on the one hand, almost all the emperors before Marcus, like five in a row, do not have a male heir. So they're able to, they're able to choose their heir. They're able to choose who succeeds them. And that was something that Marcus didn't have the luxury of doing. That's one way to think about it, and to make some sort of excuse for it.

• 2:58Ryan Holiday?

  It doesn't fully excuse him, though, because, you know, Commodus is clearly unfit, right? At least from what we know historically. And the way he's portrayed in Gladiator probably understates how awful he actually was. If you can read some of the pages in Gibbons' Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and you just see that Commodus is just unimaginably bad.

• 3:26Ryan Holiday?

  To Marcus's defense, I'd offer a couple of things. So number one, he doesn't choose Commodus. Marcus loses something like six children before adulthood. So imagine you're in this difficult position where you have to give a job, if to give a job to your son, and it's the most difficult job in the world. So, and millions of lives are dependent on it. So you try to pick which son is ripe for it. And so you pick a son and you're grooming him for it, and then he dies. And then you have twin boys, and you think, oh, maybe you'll have two emperors take my place, just as Hadrian set up for me and Lucius Verus. And then both of them die.

• 4:11Ryan Holiday?

  And then you think, well, maybe my son and Lucius Verus's son can rule together. And then again, one of them dies. So imagine just all this horrendous death and what that would do to your own judgment and what that would do to your own family. I, I think that part of it has never fully been explored. It's not like Marcus Aurelius had one kid and that kid turned out to be a real shithead. It's more complicated than that, right? And, and, and I think I, I just, as I was writing Lives of the Stoics, I just really tried to wrap my head around how devastatingly, devastatingly difficult that would be. And there's this, um, let me see if I can find this really fast.

• 4:52Ryan Holiday?

  There's a really crazy passage in, oh, here it is. Okay. So Notebook 11, 33 and 34. Okay. So this is 30, this is Notebook 11, 33. He says, "It's crazy to look for figs in winter, and it's no less crazy for someone to look for his child when it's no longer possible." And then Notebook 11, 34, he says, "Epictetus used to say that when you kiss your child, you should silently tell it, 'Tomorrow you will die,' but that's an inauspicious thing to say." No, he says, "It's not at all inauspicious, but it expresses a natural process. Otherwise, it would be inauspicious to talk of wheat being harvested."

• 5:37Ryan Holiday?

  So the point is here, Marcus is, is meditating on the unimaginable reality of losing children. Like he's probably writing that fresh off of a funeral, you can imagine. The idea being that, that, that Marcus is devastated by this loss. And I would, I would suspect that this both clouds his judgment and puts him in an utterly impossible.

• 6:04Ryan Holiday?

  Impossible situation as a parent and leader. Jeff Belton wrote, "My goal was not just to attend this great Zoom lecture, but also to maintain my tranquility when people forget to mute themselves." Very true. So yeah, I just, to me, that's one of the few sort of where all Marcus's sort of defenses are dropped and you really see the real human being struggling with something. And I think that's where, I think that's where Marcus probably was when it came to Commodus. There was another question I saw that was good, Billy. What was it?

• 6:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, Kyle, Kyle had one about how the Stoics were sort of ahead of their time in some aspects, like they're thinking about women studying philosophy, but other issues like slavery, they're assumed to be behind.

• 6:57Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, to me, the lesson here that the Stoics believe that, you know, both men and women should be taught philosophy is an indication of how progressive and ahead of their time they were. At the same time, almost none of the Stoics, including Epictetus, say anything about whether a human should be able to own another human being. So they were very much a product of their times, or, you know, sort of barbaric, even according to their times. To me, the lesson there is not, oh, were the Stoics hypocritical, how,

• 7:36Ryan Holiday?

  where does this invalidate what they have to say? I think it's, I think it's different. I think it's that we are exactly the same. There are some things that our children and grandchildren will look at us and go, wow, they really got that right. They really helped move the ball forward. And then they'll look at other things that we accepted or declined to question and wonder.

• 8:07Ryan Holiday?

  How we could have possibly gotten it so wrong? And how we could ever possibly defend such an indefensible status quo? Whether that's, you know, income inequality, whether that's sweatshops, perhaps that's our relationship with meat and factory farming. There's going to be so many things that the future is going to find that we were just totally off about. But I think we want to be careful at how high we get on our horses about judging the past. To me, we should look at these figures as tragic figures who fell short in a lot of ways that we can then learn from. All right, what else have we got here?

• 8:52Ryan Holiday?

  Is that Tanya?

• 8:54Speaker 03

  Hi, I'm really new to all this, but I'm a longtime yogi, teaching yoga here in Austin.

• 9:03Ryan Holiday?

  Oh, wonderful.

• 9:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. I was reading about creative output and they had it quantified into 20 to 70, 2010. So 70% of what you do is going to be okay. 20% is going to be really good. And then the 10% is going to be really great, which of course corresponds with Coach Pop in San Antonio talking about passing the ball to get a good, better, and then the best shot to really be successful. So I was wondering if the Stoics have some kind of guideline like that

• 9:45Speaker 03

  for quantifying our efforts, quantifying our output? As we write in our journals and have our self-conversation, well, how good was my day? Or did I miss the mark?

• 10:05Ryan Holiday?

  I think one of the things I think about is this sort of pivoting from your question a little bit, but I think like, when am I most effective? And do I line up that time with the work that most needs to be done? Right? So for me, I'm clearest in the morning and I'm most locked in in the morning and I've been least sort of distracted or jarred by interruptions in the morning. So that's when I try to spend time with my kids and when I try to do my writing. Then everything else, if I like, I want to focus on the stuff that I don't like doing, the stuff that doesn't really matter, where quality control is less important.

• 10:46Ryan Holiday?

  I want to do that later in the day when fatigue has set in or the stakes are lower or you know, I'm, I've, I've already completed my important tasks. So when I think about, I don't, I don't think it's just about, you know, sort of, you know, outsourcing or delegating. It's also about how do you prioritize and organize stuff in your own life? I think there's a reason that a lot of CEOs, for instance, work out early in the morning. It's because that's when they have time to do it and they have the most control over their time and schedule and they don't want to miss that opportunity. But this is a great question. I appreciate this.

• 11:24Speaker 03

  How do you rectify the 70% that's just average? Or not even average?

• 11:31Ryan Holiday?

  I, I think, uh, I, that's probably just the, the reality of, of life. I mean, I guess you could spend some time focusing on, you know, if you can get it to from 10% to 12%, you have a huge advantage over other people. Um, if you can, you know, if you can, uh, you know, get the, uh, the 20% from 20 to 25%. I mean, maybe that's a place to think about is just sort of chipping away at the margins. But I might just sort of take the ratio for granted and then focus on how I, uh, uh, assign tasks to those different buckets.

• 12:07Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 12:08Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 12:09Speaker 03

  Thank you.