They Still Hide Money In Books

"As a young boy, the famed basketball coach George Raveling learned an invaluable lesson about the power of both knowledge and ignorance from his grandmother, who raised him. 'Why did the slave masters hide their money in books, George?' she asked the young boy, standing together in her kitchen.'I don’t know, grandma,' he said.'Because they knew the slaves wouldn’t open them,' she said. Learn more about George's story, and the importance of reading, in today's Daily Stoic Podcast.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/ryanholidayInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/ryanholiday/Facebook: http://facebook.com/ryanholidayYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

• 0:06Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to The Daily Stoic, where each day we read a short passage designed to help you cultivate the strength, insight, wisdom necessary for living the good 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 at dailystoic.com.

• 0:29Ryan Holiday?

  They still hide money in books. When George Raveling was a young boy, he was in the kitchen of his grandmother who raised him. "Why did the slave masters hide their money in books, George?" she asked him. "I don't know, Grandma," he said. Her answer: "Because they knew the slaves wouldn't open them. There's a reason it was illegal to teach slaves to read. There is a reason that every totalitarian regime has burned and banned books." The answer sounds like a cliche, but it's true: knowledge is power. The converse is even more true: a lack of knowledge is weakness. It engenders supplication, and it makes resistance harder. From this early lesson, George Raveling came to see that

• 1:11Ryan Holiday?

  reading was actually a moral duty. To not read, to remain in ignorance, was not only to be weak, it was to ignore the people who had fought so hard, who had struggled at such great costs to read and to provide for future generations the right, the ability to do so. It was to spit in the face of Frederick Douglass, of Booker T. Washington, and of course, of Martin Luther King Jr., who Raveling had gotten to know. But it is worth pointing out today that money is still hidden in the pages of books, though for slightly less nefarious reasons. How many people want to get better? How many people want to be successful? How many people wish they could get out of the cycle of mediocrity that they are in? Well, the solution, the secret to doing that, is there, on the shelf.

• 1:54Ryan Holiday?

  But how many people bother to take it down and look at it? Marcus Aurelius talks about going straight to the seat of intelligence. Well, that's what books are. Epictetus found freedom from slavery long before he was legally free. How? In the writings of the Stoics, in the words of Musonius Rufus, "We read because it makes us powerful. When we don't read, we are weak, easy to manipulate, less than what we are capable of being. It's in our self-interest to read. There's money in it, but it is also our moral duty."

• 2:27Speaker 01

  One of the things that's actually tied into what I wanted to ask you next is that Truman was a huge reader. You know, he was obsessed with Marcus Aurelius. He writes in one of his letters, you know, the sort of virtues of wisdom and courage and justice and temperance. You know, he learned that from the sort of the education that he gave himself. He's one of the last presidents to not go to college. And so I wondered what you thought of that famous quote from Truman. You know, he said, "Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers." And that strikes me as something very true about your life as well.

• 3:00Speaker 02

  The valued quotient of reading for me was probably different than Truman's, but in the moments of quiet during the day when I think back about my life and reading and so forth, I find the early origin about reading came from my grandma. When I was a little boy, my grandma used to make me sit and watch her cook in the kitchen. My grandma never got past eighth grade, but she had common sense. And so she would make me sit there and watch her cook. And so it turned out, as I realized in my adult life, it was a classroom. She was teaching me how to cook by observation, and then she would have conversations

• 3:43Speaker 02

  with me while I was sitting there. And so one time she said to me, she said, "George, she said, "You know, back in the days of slavery, the plantation owners used to hide their money in books." And I said, "Grandma, why'd they do that?" She said, "Because they knew the slaves couldn't read, so they would never take the books down." To me, the moral of that story was, as long as someone can control your mind, they can control your

• 4:22Speaker 02

  body. And so I think that was the early revelation to me. Books had to be more relevant in my life. And then I started to realize, you've got a moral obligation to read, that people die to get you the right to read. If you remember your history, George, there was a time in America when it was illegal for a person to teach a black person how to read. There was a time in America when a black person could not get a library card. The libraries were segregated. People died

• 5:07Speaker 02

  to give me the right to read. Am I going to dishonor their deaths by not reading? I see it in a broader context than just reading to learn or reading for entertainment. I feel personally, I have an obligation to honor those people's death. They died so that I could have the opportunity to read. And people ask me, when you were growing up, did you read a lot? Hell, no. The only books I saw in my young life were school books. That were the only books I knew. When I was growing up as a young kid in Washington, DC, seven, eight, nine, 10 years old, every day was about survival. When you got up in

• 5:52Speaker 02

  the morning, you were happy that you survived for another day. And so you get up in the morning and you look out the window in a tiptoe stance and you say, I made it, I made it another day. But it's all about survival. And so along the way, I continued to progress to where I finally get a basketball scholarship to Villanova. It really wasn't until I got to Villanova that I started to realize the wonder of reading it and how it could separate you from other people.

• 6:26Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, everyone, if you're stuck inside during this pandemic, there's no better way to spend your time than getting caught up on all that reading you've been meaning to do. And if you want to change the way you read so that you get as much out of the books that you do read as possible, check out our Daily Stoic Read to Lead Challenge. It's 13 days of amazing challenges designed to rekindle your connection with books, to help you rebuild your library and even more. You can check it out today. Just go to dailystoic.com/reading.