You Don’t Love Yourself Enough | Ask Daily Stoic

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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.

• 0:43Ryan Holiday?

  You don't love yourself enough. Each morning, you wake up and life presents you with an opportunity. It's an opportunity to show up, to make a difference, to become the best version of yourself. But then, what do you do? You hit the snooze button. You stay under the covers a while longer. You get a late start on the day, and suddenly, all your plans get pushed back. You chastise and berate yourself. You start to feel like you'll never catch up, like the potential life you envisioned for yourself will remain elusive, out of reach. Almost 2,000 years ago, Marcus Aurelius was the emperor of Rome, the most powerful man on the planet, and he faced this exact dilemma. He found himself making excuses

• 1:25Ryan Holiday?

  that it was nice and warm under the covers, as he told himself. So you were born to feel nice, he writes in Meditations, instead of doing things and experiencing them? He looked outside himself to the birds, the plants, the ants, all of which were going about their individual tasks, putting the world in order as best they can. So what was his problem? Why couldn't he get out of bed in the morning and do the same? You don't love yourself enough, he said, or you'd love your nature too, and what it demands of you. And you could say that each year presents the same opportunity, right? A chance to show up, to make a difference, to become the best version of yourself, to do what you need to do.

• 2:10Ryan Holiday?

  The world needed Marcus Aurelius to become the person we admire and study today. It required conscious and consistent effort on his part. It required him to challenge himself, demanded that he woke up each morning and got to work on his individual tasks, putting the world in order as best he could. You are no different and you know it. You have the ideas, you've made the plans, but you haven't acted. So let's do it now. Now is the best time to start, not Monday, not 2026, not when life feels easier or more convenient. If you wait for the perfect moment, it'll never come. Someone has to take control, someone, and that someone is you. The question remains, how? Well, we created the Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge to answer just that, to

• 2:53Ryan Holiday?

  help you create a better life, a better you in 2025, to help you show up and challenge yourself today. Since August, me and the Daily Stoic team have been developing these challenges, one per day, built around the best, most timeless Stoic wisdom. It's 21 challenges in a row to kick off a new you in a new year. And this year's challenge is new stuff designed to help you stop procrastinating, learn new skills, conquer insecurities, be more generous, appreciate the world around you, become the best version of yourself. And these aren't pie in the sky theoretical discussions, which the Stoics loathe, but clear, immediate exercises and methods you can start right now. We'll tell you exactly what to do, how to do it, why it works. We'll give you strategies for maintaining this way of living, not just for the rest

• 3:38Ryan Holiday?

  of the year, but hopefully for your whole life. Because this version of you, the one that you know is there, is what the world needs right now. Just like the dancer was born to dance, the social climber for status, the miser for money, you were born for something too. Is helping others less valuable to you, Marcus? Right? It's not worth your effort? You know the answer. You know what you're capable of. You know you weren't born under the covers to stay nice, to let another year pass by not being what you're capable of being. And the Daily Stoic 2025 New Year, New You Challenge starts on January 1st. Don't procrastinate, don't put it off. I want to see you in there. I'm going to be in there with you. You can sign up right now at dailystoic.com/challenge.

• 4:22Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another Thursday episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. You know, we do Q and As and and one of my favorite parts of the New Year, New You Challenge is the Q and As. We do a bunch of live sessions. We're all, you know, trying to kick the new year off right. We're doing it together. So thousands of Stoics all over the world do the New Year, New You Challenge. It's going to start on January 1st, but we've been doing it now for like seven years. So we have lots of those sessions recorded. And so for today's Q and A, I thought I'd bring you some questions that popped up in the 2022 session from the Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge. These are some awesome questions from some folks and we'll just get into it. And if you want to join us

• 5:06Ryan Holiday?

  in the Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge, you can sign up right now at dailystoic.com/challenge and maybe ask me a question as well. I'll talk to you soon.

• 5:20Speaker 01

  So I wanted to ask you, I remember yours is presence, your word for the year, which is awesome. I wanted to ask who you were, what leader you were going to study this year.

• 5:28Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I've been going back and forth on that. And that was the question I was going to ask everyone. I was going to ask what you're, what you're, what you chose for that day. I would, I would, important caveat, because I think hero is important, and that is a big part of it. But it's also, it's not just like, who are you worshiping? But how are you studying that person? Right? So what I see that is as, as being the imperative this year is studying that person, warts and all, really sort of going in depth on those people. So, so the book that I'm going to write next, I'm just finishing the, the Discipline book, which is the second in the Four Virtues series, is going to be on Justice.

• 6:12Ryan Holiday?

  So I'm thinking about justice a lot. And so I haven't quite, I read the Taylor Brand series on Martin Luther King over the last sort of two years. And now I'm reading the David Halberstram bio on the, it's called The Children, and it's about the

• 6:30Ryan Holiday?

  The men and women who orchestrated the first sit-ins and freedom rides. So I think I'm going to do some civil rights figure. I'm sort of going back and forth as to who that might be. I might be more of a sort of a general bucket of that. But that's sort of what I'm going to build the book around. It's a little different for me because I sort of have my personal heroes. And then I have like, well, who am I needing to really focus on for the specific thing that I'm thinking about or writing about? But I was just reading about John Lewis this morning as part of it. And I know there's a new biography of John Lewis coming out. So I'll probably do something in that space. Yeah, I haven't exactly nailed down the figure, but I have the sort of bucket. And I'm sort of reading generally in that space right now.

• 7:15Ryan Holiday?

  But thank you for prompting me on that. Let's, if anyone wants to share as they go through, we'll do more of that. And Nick, thank you very much for the kind words and for starting us off.

• 7:25Speaker 02

  The thing that I want to ask you, like, you know, Stoicism is a path which requires immense discipline. But I'm just 25 years old and I have a lot of, you know, social circle. But still, you know, I have seen people calling me indifferent, like indifferent. I don't feel anything or like, you know, I've been doing the path. And there are a lot of disbeliefs for my beliefs out there. So how do I, you know, cope up with that, staying positive and, you know, maintaining that positive aura around me?

• 7:54Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. So indifferent is a tricky word, right? Because I think a lot of people think indifferent means that you are apathetic or that you're somehow resigned. I think for the Stoics, indifference was more, I think the word has more a connotation of resilience or flexibility. So actually, when I interviewed Shaka Smart, who was the head basketball coach at University of Texas, and then he's now the head coach at Marquette. I was asking him how he, this is part of the Daily Stoic Leadership Challenge, which I recommend if people want to check it out. You can, you can listen to the whole interview. But anyways, I was asking him how he was adjusting to the cold because I remember.

• 8:40Ryan Holiday?

  When when I met him a few times while he was down here, he was talking about how much he enjoyed, you know, the the hot Texas weather is is very different than where he was from. And I said, how are you adjusting to the cold, you know? And he said, I said, are you a warm weather guy or a cold weather guy? And he said, you know what, I'm a dress for the weather guy. Right, which to me, that's what indifference is, right? So indifference isn't like, I I I I have no emotions, I have no thoughts, no opinions. Indifference to me is I make whatever it is work, right? And so often, to me, I I see that as a very optimistic attitude, right? A pessimistic person would be like, oh, I hate the weather here. Or like, oh, I wish I was somewhere else. To me, the the Stoic idea of indifference is like, this is nice.

• 9:25Ryan Holiday?

  I like this, right? It's finding what you like in that thing. So to me, that's what it's about. So there's there, there is, yes, kind of this little bit of resignation and this little bit of passivity or acceptance to it. But there's also a kind of an optimism and a resilience to it that that I try to cultivate in my life. I'm not perfect at it. I don't think Marcus Aurelius was perfect at it. He reminds himself many times in meditations not to complain, not to be depressed, etc. But to me, that's the idea. Someone saying they have a question about humor, but then they don't actually give the question about humor. So I will bring up a funny story about the Stoics and humor, which I have talked about on a couple of Daily Stoic podcasts that are coming up.

• 10:07Ryan Holiday?

  But there is this, again, tendency that the stereotype that the Stoics don't have any emotion and don't have a sense of humor. But it's important to remember that Chrysippus, one of the early Stoics, dies of laughter. He enjoys it so he's laughing at one of his own jokes so hard that he peels over and dies. And I've always taken that as a reminder of, you know, the Stoic can have a good time and laugh of it.

• 10:40Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. 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.