It’s Good That Things Have Been Hard

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

• 0:03Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength, insight, and wisdom in everyday 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, dailystoic.com.

• 0:38Ryan Holiday?

  It's good that things have been hard.

• 0:43Ryan Holiday?

  Maybe you've had a hard time of it recently. That business project is three months over projections. Your book isn't really selling. The comments in your performance review were brutal. Life can be like that. It kicks us around. The stuff we expected to be simple turns out to be tough. The people we thought were friends let us down. A couple storms or unexpected weather patterns just add a whole bunch of difficulty on top of whatever we've been doing. How could that possibly be a good thing? You have to squint a bit to see it, but there is one way. You can see what's been happening as practice, as training. Seneca wrote that "only the prizefighter who has been bloodied and bruised in training

• 1:27Ryan Holiday?

  and in previous matches can go into the ring confident of his chances of winning." The one who has never been touched before, never had a hard fight, that's a fighter who is scared. And if they aren't, they should be, because they have no actual idea how they're going to hold up. His point was that the boxer who has seen his own blood, who has felt his teeth rattle beneath his opponent's fist, who's been downed in body but not in spirit, they know what they can take. They know what the darkness before the proverbial dawn feels like. Only they have a true and accurate sense of rhythms of a fight and what winning is going to require them to do. That sense comes

• 2:10Ryan Holiday?

  From getting knocked around, that sense is only possible because of the hard times, the hard knocks they've experienced before. So yeah, things might not be great right now. Obviously, it would be nice if they were better. But if they were, you'd also be weaker for it, less informed, less in touch with yourself in the fight you're in. So squint and see that, because it's an essential perspective.

• 2:41Ryan Holiday?

  Being able to control your anger is a difficult but worthwhile goal. It'll take time and effort, it won't be free. But by changing your perspective and developing techniques to control your temper, it will ultimately be achievable and life-changing. So take the first step on the path to a calmer and more fulfilling future. Check out Taming Your Temper: The 10-Day Stoic Guide to Controlling Your Anger. You can just go to dailystoic.com/anger.