Why You Must Return Again and Again

"You were in high school when you read The Great Gatsby for the first time. You were just a kid when you read The Count of Monte Cristo or had someone tell you the story of Odysseus. Maybe it’s been many years now since you first picked up the Stoics, whether it was Marcus Aurelius or Seneca. The point is: You got it right? You read them. You’re done, right?"Ryan discusses a better way to re-engage with books you've read before in today's Daily Stoic Podcast. Sign up for the Daily Stoic Read to Lead challenge: https://dailystoic.com/read***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/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: 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. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

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. Why You Must Return Again and Again. You were in high school when you read The Great Gatsby for the first time. You were a kid when you read The Count of Monte Cristo, or someone told you the story of Odysseus. Maybe it's been a few years now since you first picked up the Stoics, whether it was Marcus Aurelius or Seneca. The point is,

• 0:49Ryan Holiday?

  you got it, right? You read them. You're done, right? No. "There is a select group of writers," Stefan Zweig once wrote, "who are accessible to anyone at whatever age or stage of life: Homer, Shakespeare, Goethe, Balzac, Tolstoy. And then there are those whose significance is not properly revealed into a particular moment," he said. Specifically, Zweig was talking about Montaigne, a fellow traveler of the Stoics and one of the great essayists of all time. When Zweig had read Montaigne for the first time in his early twenties, it didn't quite land. "His wisdom, so gentle and tempered," Zweig wrote, "remained foreign to me. It had arrived prematurely." It wasn't until Hitler sent Zweig into exile,

• 1:34Ryan Holiday?

  it wasn't until his books were burned in the streets and he was living as a refugee in Brazil that Zweig happened to bump back into Montaigne. But when he did, it was magical. The reconnection was instant. The wisdom that had been foreign and premature was suddenly relevant and perfectly molded for the moment. It was an awakening that would comfort Zweig for the remainder of his short time on the planet and inspire possibly his greatest piece of writing, a short book titled, fittingly, Montaigne. This is why we cannot be content to simply pick up a book once and judge it by that experience. It's why we have to read and reread. It's why we must linger on a number of master thinkers, as Seneca said, because the world is constantly changing.

• 2:19Ryan Holiday?

  We are changing, and therefore what we get out of those books can change. It's not enough to read the Stoics once, you have to read them at every age, every era of your life. So too for Shakespeare and other great pieces of literature. We never step in the same river twice, Marcus Aurelius said, and that's why we must return again and again and again to the great works of history. If you're looking to be a better reader, to make reading an active practice in your life, specifically if you're looking to get better at rereading, which is a journey I've been on the last year or so, strongly suggest you check out our Daily Stoic Reading Challenge. We're calling it Read to Lead, and it's all sorts of great lessons from the Stoics and

• 3:01Ryan Holiday?

  some of the wisest people in history about how to read better, how to retain more of what you read, how to find really great books, how to challenge yourself, how to grow as a reader. So check that out at DailyStoic.com/reading.