You Can’t Turn Away From Things That Are Hard

One way to go through life is to turn away from the things that are hard. You can close your eyes and ears to what is unpleasant. You can take the easy way, forgoing difficulty whenever possible. The other way is the Stoic way—it entails not only not avoiding hardship, but actively seeking it out.✉️ 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.

• 0:03Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength, insight, and wisdom in everyday life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us, dailystoic.com.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  One way to go through life is to turn away from the things that are hard. You can close your eyes and ears to what is unpleasant. You can take the easy way, foregoing difficulty whenever possible. The other way is the Stoic way, which entails not only not avoiding hardship, but actively seeking it out. In the novel Memoirs of Hadrian, the author has Hadrian write to young Marcus Aurelius about his philosophy for learning and benefiting from all life's adversity and unpleasantness. "Whenever an object repelled me," the author has Hadrian say, "I made it a subject of study, ingeniously compelling myself to extract from it a motive for enjoyment.

• 1:14Speaker 01

  If faced with something unforeseen or near cause for despair, like an ambush or a storm at sea, after all measures for the safety of others had been taken, I strove to welcome this hazard, to rejoice in whatever it brought me of the new and unexpected, and thus, without shock, the ambush or the tempest was incorporated into my plans or my thoughts. Even in the throes of my worst disaster, I have seen a moment when sheer exhaustion reduced some part of the horror of the experience, and when I made the defeat a thing of my own in being willing to accept it." Of course, this is fiction, so Hadrian never said such a thing.

• 1:57Speaker 01

  But clearly, somebody, at some time, taught Marcus a lesson along those lines. Because Meditations is filled with similar passages. Marcus writes about how a fire turns everything that is thrown into it into flame. He says that obstacles are actually fuel. "The impediment to action advances action," he writes. "What stands in the way becomes the way." "It's a beautiful way to approach the world, and ultimately, the only one suited for our unpredictable and stressful times. To avoid difficulty would mean complete retreat from life. It would mean hiding in ignorance. Worse, this would actually make you dreadfully vulnerable to crisis if it ever did find you.

• 2:39Speaker 01

  Instead, we must strive," as Hadrian said, "to welcome hazard. We can rejoice in the unexpected, and even turn failure into something by deciding to own it. We can learn from unpleasantness and even soften our aversions. This will not be easy, but that's fitting, isn't it? We are not naturally attracted to obstacles, which is precisely why we must work on finding out how to live them. This is the way."