This Is What To Surprise Them With | No Time For Theories, Just Results

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

• 0:05Ryan Holiday?

  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.

• 0:57Ryan Holiday?

  This is what to surprise them with. In the year 161 AD, Marcus Aurelius did something that shocked the world. Upon inheriting the throne from Antoninus, he did what almost no one who has ever held absolute power before has ever done. He gave half of it away by naming his stepbrother Lucius Verus co-Emperor. Rome had once been run by two elected consuls, but after 15 emperors, there was hundreds of years of precedent, which Marcus was shockingly and selflessly throwing aside. It's like that line in Hamilton when King George finds out that George Washington was handing over his power and returning to his farm.

• 1:39Ryan Holiday?

  "I wasn't aware that was something a person could do." But of course it is. We can always choose not to be imperialized or stained purple, as Marcus Aurelius put it in Meditations. We don't have to be changed by power or selfishly cling to it. We can do what's best for our country, or our team, or our family. We can share, we can lift others up. And many people have done this throughout history. There's a whole chapter in Discipline is Destiny about it. It's easy to think that success means having it all, holding on tightly, standing alone at the top. But Marcus reminds us that real greatness lies in what we're willing to give away, our ego, our need for control, our fear of being overshadowed.

• 2:22Ryan Holiday?

  The mark of a strong leader, of a strong person, is not how much power they keep for themselves, but how much they empower others. So ask yourself today, where can I be less possessive? Where can you share the load, elevate someone else, or choose principle over pride or power? Because Marcus showed us that the most powerful thing you can do with power is to let it go.

• 2:56Ryan Holiday?

  No time for theories, just results. This is the August 11th entry in the Daily Stoic. I hope everyone is doing well. When the problem arose for us, whether habit or theory was better for getting virtue, if by theory is meant what teaches us correct conduct, and by habit, we mean being accustomed to acting according to this theory, Musonius thought habit to be more effective. That's an excerpt relayed to us from Musonius Rufus, listed in his lectures. But I prefer the quote from Hamlet. "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." There is no time to chop logic over whether our theories are correct. We are dealing with the real world here.

• 3:40Ryan Holiday?

  What matters is how you're going to deal with the situation in front of you, whether you're going to be able to move past it and on to the next one. That's not saying that anything goes, but we can't forget that although the theories are clean and simple, the situations rarely are. Marx realist says a version of this, waste no more time arguing what a good man should be be one. He says, "Don't go around expecting Plato's Republic. You don't live there, right? We live in reality. It's much more practical, life and Stoicism. Like, you get accidentally CC'd on an email and one of your coworkers says something not nice about you. Are you going to let that go or are you going to blow it up?" Right? Your order is messed up at a restaurant.

• 4:23Ryan Holiday?

  Are you going to try to think about the person who did that? What their life is like? Or are you going to go full Karen? Right? You're tired and exhausted and your kids are being a nightmare. How do you respond? Right? That's what Stoicism is to me. There is an element of physics to the Stoics. And there's logic too. But the Stoics tried to apply the philosophy to what they actually did to their lives as people, which is what we're trying to do. I've talked about this before too. You know, you watch what's happening in the news and you go, oh, why isn't this person voting this way? They're just trying to keep their job, blah, blah, blah. And then it's like, when was the last time you ever risked your job? Right? How often do you do things that are in your financial best interest,

• 5:07Ryan Holiday?

  but maybe not in the interest of the world? It's there that Stoicism is supposed to be applied. Right? Stoicism is not a standard we hold other people to. It's not a game. It's not a lens through which we debate things. This is not like a sports show where they go, who's the best? Is it LeBron James? Is Kevin Durant good because he only won a championship with Golden State? And hasn't anywhere else? No, it's how are you as a teammate? Right? Are you achieving and doing your best? Are you a team player? Right? It's about you. It's you can spend all your time thinking and debating and questioning. You can waste your whole life doing that, but who cares?

• 5:50Ryan Holiday?

  You have enough problems in your own life. You have things you should be dealing with. That to me is what Stoicism is. Right? That's what we're trying to do. That's what I want this podcast to be about. That's why I pick up meditations by my side of my bed. Oh yeah, I was doing that today. I don't want to do that anymore. When I'm writing, I'm not only writing to accomplish that, hopefully for other people, but that's what I'm looking for as a writer. That's what I'm trying to do. And I hope that's what you take from this podcast too. No time for theories, just results. Is habit or theory better? Habit is better, man. Habit. Make the stuff a habit. That's what we're trying to do.

• 6:34Ryan Holiday?

  Make it a practice, build it into the muscle memory.

• 6:38Ryan Holiday?

  Make it part of who you are. Try to get to a point ideally where nobody even knows that you study philosophy. But when they look at your actions and go, that lines up, right? That lines up with the code. And I think if you look at Marcus Aurelius's life, you don't have to know he studied philosophy to get the sense he was a philosophical guy, that he lived according to those four virtues. That's the most powerful thing he said about courage, temperance, justice, wisdom, was how he lived. And so it goes for you. And so I tried to make it go for me. None of us are perfect at it. The theory is much more interesting. The theory is easy, but at the end of the day, it doesn't matter one bit compared to the actions. Hey, it's Ryan.

• 7:22Ryan Holiday?

  Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. I just wanted to say we so appreciate it. We love serving you. It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple of years we've been doing it. It's an honor. Please spread the word, tell people about it. And this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say thank you.