Helping Others Helps You | Three Areas of Training

Ryan talks about the recent passing of Thich Nhat Hanh, about how everything we do for others comes back to us, and reads The Daily Stoic’s entry of the day. Blinkist takes top nonfiction titles, pulls out the key takeaways and puts them into text and audio explainers called Blinks that give you the most important information in just 15 minutes. Go to Blinkist.com/STOIC to start your free 7 day trial and get 25% off of a Blinkist Premium membership. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/emailFollow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and 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.

• 0:04Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Thursdays, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from the book, The Daily Stoic, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful co-author and collaborator, Stephen Hanselman. And so today, we'll give you a quick meditation from one of the Stoics, from Epictetus Marcus Aurelius Seneca, then some analysis from me, and then we send you out into the world to do your best to turn these words into works.

• 0:41Ryan Holiday?

  Helping others helps you. Someone wounds you, and so you want to wound them back with a harsh remark by cutting them out of the next project, by putting the word out about them. Maybe they hold an abhorrent political view and have done something selfish or mean, so you want to punish them, you want to shame them, you want to draw attention to their awfulness, to send a message. But anyone who's actually done this, you feel there's something that feels wrong afterwards. You feel dirty, you feel unpleasant, you feel somehow associated, you feel implicated in, like you've been dragged down to their level. The Vietnamese and Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, who just recently passed away, he cautions us.

• 1:21Ryan Holiday?

  He says, punishing the other person is self-punishment, and that is true in every circumstance. And that's why he was a peace activist. That's why he was a non-violent civil rights activist. And he also found something out in pursuit of those causes and in his journey to enlightenment, that helping others is self-help. His life and his legacy bears this out. Thich Nhat Hanh, who died this past Saturday, was exiled from Vietnam after he published an anti-war poem in 1964. So how did he respond? He started an organization that rebuilt war-torn villages and reunited war-torn families. He toured the world to speak out about the people's suffering in his country.

• 2:04Ryan Holiday?

  He became one of the great stewards of Buddhism, making the principles more accessible and applicable to millions of readers worldwide, including myself. And words of his brave and selfless efforts spread to the likes of Martin Luther King Jr., who would apply what he learned to his own peace movements. And Marcus Aurelius, indeed, all the Stoics believed that we were part of this large, interconnected organism.

• 2:27Ryan Holiday?

  That you couldn't help another person without helping yourself, and you couldn't hurt another person without hurting yourself. "We are all bees of the same hive," he said. "Have I done something for the common good? Then I share in the benefits." Just as the converse is true. And that is why the Stoics believed that a good life hinges on justice, on helping others, on being a good steward of the hive and of the common good. And this was true for Marcus. It was true for Tit, Mount Hahn, may he rest in peace. And it will be true for you. If you want to help yourself, you have to help others. Indeed, this is true in every circumstance.

• 3:08Ryan Holiday?

  Three Areas of Training. And I'm reading to you today from the Daily Stoic, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living by yours truly and my co-author and translator, Stephen Hanselman. You can get signed copies, by the way, in the Daily Stoic store. Over a million copies of the Daily Stoic in print now. It's been just such a lovely experience to watch it. It's been more than 250 weeks, consecutive weeks, on the Bestsellers. It's just an awesome experience. But I hope you check it out. We have a premium leather edition at store.dailystoic.com as well. But let's get on with today's reading. There are three areas in which the person who would be wise and good must be trained, Epictetus tells us. The first has to do with desires and aversions,

• 3:52Ryan Holiday?

  that a person may never miss the mark in desires or fall into what repels them. The second has to do with impulses to act and not to act, and more broadly with duty, that a person may not deliberately act for good reasons and not carelessly. The third has to do with freedom from deception and composure and our whole area of judgment, the ascent of our mind that gives it its perceptions. Of these areas, the chief and most urgent has to do with the passions, for strong emotions arise only when we fail in our desires and aversions. That's Epictetus's Discourses 3:2.

• 4:32Ryan Holiday?

  So today, let's focus on those three areas of training that Epictetus laid out. First, we must consider what we should desire and what we should be averse to, so that we want what is good and avoid what is bad. It's not just enough to listen to your body because our attractions can often lead us astray. Next, we must examine our impulses to act, that is, our motivations. Are we doing things for the right reasons? Or do we act because we haven't stopped to think? Or do we believe that we have to do something? And finally, there is our judgment, our ability to see things clearly and properly when we use that great gift we've gotten from nature, our reason.

• 5:16Ryan Holiday?

  These are three distinct areas of training, but in practice, they are inextricably intertwined. Our judgment affects what we desire. Our desires affect how we act, just as our judgment determines how we act. But we can't just expect that to happen. We must put real thought and energy into each area of our lives. And if we do, we'll find clarity and hopefully, success. You know, it's funny, people talk a lot about trusting themselves. They say, "I trust in my gut," or "I trust myself," or "I believe myself." One of the things I've come to... I took this from somewhere, I'm borrowing it from someone.

• 6:00Ryan Holiday?

  The idea is, that's something you have to earn. That's something that comes with time, that comes from doing the work, developing the training. You don't just magically know what to desire and what to avoid. You don't just magically have the right impulses. You don't magically have good judgment. This is something you cultivate, right? Like, even me, as a writer, my sense of what is good on the page is not some gift from the muses. It comes from a couple of things. It comes from having read very widely. It comes from having interacted with the audience and editors over time. We've got lots of feedback.

• 6:46Ryan Holiday?

  And then it also comes from having written a lot. I've spent a lot of time with the pages, with writing. So what I would have thought was good, or what I was capable of on my first book, is not where I am with my 10th book, or my 11th book, or whatever number I'm on now. So the idea, you have to see this as a thing you are training at. It's a skill, it's something you cultivate. Aristotle says this about virtue. You know, virtue is something you do. It's not something you have. You become a builder by building, become a craftsman by practicing the craft. You become good at judgment, controlling the passions, knowing what is right and not right, what you should have and what you should avoid.

• 7:30Ryan Holiday?

  By being out there in the battlefield of life, by testing yourself, by challenging yourself, by reflecting, by thinking, by reading, by doing stuff like listening to this podcast right now, by sitting down with a journal, having conversations with wise people, having a mentor, reflecting on your day. All of that is training, right? Stoicism isn't this philosophy you magically pick up. Or, that's not the right word. It's not a philosophy that you magically just understand by reading. And it's something you practice, you study, you work at over the course of a lifetime, the way that you would learn a dance, or learn a martial art,

• 8:15Ryan Holiday?

  or learn any craft. So I'd like to think I'm getting better at it as I go. If I was looking at myself objectively from the outside, progress is probably slower than I would like, probably does not begin to come close to the standards that I set with even my own writing. But then, even then, when I see my own progress as a writer, I know that progress in these other domains is possible. And I know it's possible for you. And so that's today's message. I hope that lands with you, and I'll talk to you soon.