It’s For The Young and Old

“As long as you live,” Seneca said, “keep learning how to live.” As long as we’re alive, we must keep learning and wrestling with these ideas.📚 The Four Stoic Virtues: Justice, Temperance, Wisdom, Courage, are timeless keys to living your best life. The Daily Stoic is releasing a limited collector’s edition set of all four books signed and numbered, with a title page identifying these books as part of the only printing of this series. PLUS we're including one of the notecards Ryan used while writing the series. Pre-order the Limited Edition Stoic Virtues Series Today! | https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/stoic-virtues📖 Preorder the final book in Ryan Holiday's The Stoic Virtues Series: "Wisdom Takes Work": https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/wisdom-takes-work🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast🎥 Watch top moments from The Daily Stoic Podcast on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and Facebook 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

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

• 0:05Speaker 00

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a Stoic-inspired meditation, designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life. Each one of these episodes is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women, help you learn from them, to follow in their example, and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. For more, visit DailyStoic.com.

• 0:56Ryan Holiday?

  It's for the young and the old. Some of the Stoics found philosophy when they were young. Some were steeped in it from an early age, equipped with the best tutors that their parents' money could buy. And plenty of them found Stoicism when they were older. Zeno himself had a whole other life as a merchant before that fateful shipwreck led him to a bookstore in Athens. Epictetus wasn't freed until slavery, able to dedicate himself fully to philosophy till his 30s. And Admiral James Stockdale, he didn't even hear about the Stoics till the Navy sent him to grad school at age 35. President Bill Clinton, who famously once said he reads Meditations once a year,

• 1:38Ryan Holiday?

  said he didn't even know about it until his 50s. As we've said before of Seneca, a man who lost his 20s to illness, a decade to exile, and whose most productive years came during a painful retirement.

• 1:53Ryan Holiday?

  We should remember what Seneca said, "A man who lost his twenties to illness, a decade to exile, whose most productive years came during a painful retirement, said that it's never too late." That's actually why the epigraph in my new book, Wisdom Takes Work, which is the final book in the Virtue Series, comes with a quote from Seneca's favorite philosopher, Epicurus. "Let no one be slow to seek wisdom when they are young," Epicurus said, "nor weary in the search thereof when they have grown old. For no age is too early or too late for the health of the soul. And to say that the season for studying philosophy has not yet come, or that it is past and gone, is like saying that the season for happiness is not yet,

• 2:38Ryan Holiday?

  or that it is now no more." It doesn't matter when you come to philosophy. No age is too early or too late. If you're asking if it's too early to introduce your kids to Stoicism or the wisdom of the ancients, it's not. If you're worried it's too late for you to pick up this book or that book, it's not. If you're wondering whether the time has passed for philosophy to make a difference in your life, it hasn't. "As long as you live," Seneca said, "keep learning how to live." As long as we're alive, we must keep learning and wrestling with new ideas. We must ask questions when we are young, and we must also remain humble enough to ask them when we're old, powerful, or well-informed. No matter our age, no matter our lot in life,

• 3:21Ryan Holiday?

  we must keep doing the work that wisdom requires. That's why the new book is called Wisdom Takes Work, and it's the fourth and final book in the Virtue Series. My argument is that there's no easy way to wisdom. No app, no shortcut, no secret formula. It can't be hacked, or downloaded, or handed to you. It has to be earned, right? Through the same hard work that people have been doing for thousands of years, reading and thinking and living and reflecting. And that's what the book is about. And I look at great thinkers like Montaigne, and Seneca, and Lincoln, and Joan Didion, and many others. I'm really excited about this book. It would mean a lot to me if you could preorder it. Preordering is the most important thing you can do to help an author that you want to support. It's how publishers decide how many Copies to print, bookstores decide how many copies to order.

• 4:06Ryan Holiday?

  It determines whether it hits the bestseller list or not. If you've gotten anything out of these emails, out of this podcast over the years, it would mean a lot to me if you could grab it. You can grab Wisdom Takes Work. We've got signed and numbered first editions at dailystoic.com/preorder. And you can actually get a signed and numbered set of all four books in the series. That's Courage is Calling, Discipline is Destiny, Right Thing Right Now, and Wisdom Takes Work. We only did 1,500 of those. They're almost sold out. You can grab those, that collector set, at dailystoic.com/stoicvirtues. I'll link to that in today's show notes as well. And I'd really appreciate it. Enjoy and keep doing the work, folks.