In The Resolute Urgency of Now | Finding The Right Mentors

We could do it later. We could get serious later. But why? Why not do it while we have the chance? 🎟️ DAILY STOIC LIVE https://www.dailystoiclive.com/| Ryan Holiday is coming to a city near you https://www.dailystoiclive.com/! Grab tickets here https://www.dailystoiclive.com/ | https://www.dailystoiclive.com/ 🎙️ AD-FREE https://dailystoic.supercast.com/| Support the podcast and go deeper into Stoicism by subscribing to The Daily Stoic Premium https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ - unlock ad-free listening, early access, and bonus content: https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ 🎥 VIDEO EPISODES https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos| Watch the video episodes on The Daily Stoic YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos: https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos ✉️ FREE STOIC WISDOM https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail | Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail See 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.

• 0:00Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

• 0:15Ryan Holiday?

  In the resolute urgency of now, we could do it later, we could get serious later, we could wait for things to settle down, we could wait for better terms, we could wait until we feel better.

• 0:28Ryan Holiday?

  But why? Why not do it while we have the chance? Why not get it started? Why not get it over with? The Smashing Pumpkins famously sang about "the resolute urgency of now." And that is what we face. That is what is slipping away from us. "The future lies in uncertainty," Seneca said, "so we must live immediately. We have to match the swiftness of time," he believed, "with the quickness of our own action and our own choice. We do not have the luxury of dragging our feet or putting things off, or we will be passed by and miss our opportunity. Today is for certain. Today is before you. Things are settled enough. You must be serious now. This is your chance."

• 1:25Ryan Holiday?

  Finding the right mentors. Today's entry is a quote from Seneca in his essay on the shortness of life, which is one of my all time favorite quotes from Seneca. He says, "We like to say that we don't get to choose our parents, that they were given to us by chance, yet we can truly choose whose children we would like to be." I just love that quote so much. Because to me, that's what I've done in my life. I've picked who my ancestors are, who my parents are. I'll get into more of that in a minute. Let me give you, let me give you the meditation today. "We are fortunate enough that some of the greatest men and women in history have recorded their wisdom and folly in books and journals. Many others have had their lives chronicled by careful biographers." From Plutarch to Boswell to Robert Carroll,

• 2:09Ryan Holiday?

  the literature available at your average library amounts to millions of pages and thousands of years of knowledge, insight and experience. Maybe your parents were poor role models or you lacked a great mentor. Yet if we choose to, we can easily access the wisdom of those who came before us, those whom we aspire to be like. We not only owe it to ourselves to seek out this hard-won knowledge, we owe it to the people who took the time to record their experiences to try to carry on the traditions and follow their examples, to be the promising children of these noble parents. We all have positive ancestors and negative ancestors. We have who from our family line we're going to choose. I think we have a story about this in The Daily Dad.

• 2:52Ryan Holiday?

  I noticed it when I was researching Florence Nightingale for Courage is Calling. You know, her parents were sort of these spoiled, sensitive, rich people who didn't really do anything. So it might seem out of step or the apple falling far from the tree that Florence Nightingale became this powerhouse in nursing, does all this charitable work. But actually, when you look at her grandfather and great-grandfather and many other relatives, it's actually, it was her parents who were not the norm. It was a family of giving and service, actually courage and all these other wonderful traits. And so we all have that in our family. We get to choose. I'm just reading this biography of Ben Franklin right now.

• 3:34Ryan Holiday?

  And Ben Franklin has this incredible experience where he just never felt like his father's son. He was so different than his dad. And then he goes to England and he visits where his family is from. And he learns that his uncle died on the very day that Franklin was born, separated by a couple of years, but they shared, it was like four years. But his family saw how similar Franklin was to his late uncle. And they came to think that he was the reincarnation of that spirit. The idea being like, we get to choose whose spirit we're going to carry. You're not actually related to Seneca. You're not actually related to Marcus Aurelius or any of your heroes, probably, right? Not all of us come from really impressive families. Maybe everyone we're related to is

• 4:19Ryan Holiday?

  normal. Maybe everyone we are related to is meh. But we can choose whose children we would like to be. We could be the descendants of the Stoics. We can walk in the tradition, the footsteps of these great people. Martin Luther King has no relationship to Gandhi, but he is, in a way, Gandhi's protege, the culmination of what Gandhi pioneered. And we can be that. We can choose whose children we're going to be, and that's what Seneca is saying. And in fact, Seneca's brother embodies this. In Roman times, it was very common for adults to be adopted by other adults if a family didn't have an heir. This is Marcus Aurelius and Antoninus and Hadrian. Marcus is very similar to Antoninus, not

• 5:03Ryan Holiday?

  like Hadrian at all. He chooses to embrace the stepfather-ness, right? And Seneca's brother is in the Bible as Gaius. He changes his name when he's adopted by this family, and he was a great man. So the idea, who are we going to choose to be descended from? Whose example are we going to follow? Whose blood are we going to have running through our veins? Not literally, but figuratively, because that's what matters. And it matters what we do with it. It matters if we live up to that example. It matters if we make them proud, not whether they actually know that we exist or not, not whether they anoint us their legal heirs. What matters is if we act as if, and that's what today's entry is about. Hey there. Just a heads up, I'm going to be on tour this summer and fall. You can come

• 5:48Ryan Holiday?

  see me in San Francisco and Portland in June. You can see me in Australia and New Zealand in October. In August, I'm mixing my months up here, but in August, you can see me in Chicago and Minneapolis and Detroit. Then I'll be on the East Coast sometime in November and December. Anyways, grab tickets to that, dailystoiclive.com. I hope to see you there.