You Have To Know Where You’re Going | No Blame, Just Focus

We know we want to go somewhere. We want to do something. We want to be successful. We want to win. We know we want to start something–a company, a creative project, a movement. Or perhaps we want justice, we want someone to make things right, we want to change and grow. We want to prove people wrong about us. We want to be happy. But what exactly? How? What does that success actually look like? What is this happiness we speak of? Well there, we have a lot less clarity. Law 29 of The 48 Laws of Power is: Plan All The Way To The End.---And with today's Daily Stoic reading, Ryan shares why it can be life-changing for you to eradicate blame from your mindset.🗣 You can catch Robert Greene and Ryan Holiday at two live events this fall: Strategy And Philosophy For Turbulent Times. Together the best-selling author’s videos have received millions of views touching on a wide-range of topics–from apprenticeships to cutting-edge technologies, to productivity habits, to happiness. Listen to them discuss big ideas and take your questions from the stage in two LIVE conversations in Los Angeles on September 18, and Seattle on September 21. There are a limited number of VIP meet-and-greet tickets available, so grab yours before they sell out!✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, 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.

• 0:03Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Friday, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from The Daily Stoic, my book, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful collaborator, translator, and literary agent, Stephen Hanselman. So today, we'll give you a quick meditation from the Stoics with some analysis from me, and then we'll send you out into the world to turn these words into works.

• 0:44Ryan Holiday?

  You have to know where you're going. We know we want to go somewhere. We want to do something. We want to be successful. We want to win. We know we want to start something, whether it's a company, or a creative project, or a movement. Perhaps we want justice. We want someone to make things right. We want to change. We want to grow. We want to prove people wrong about us. We want to be happy. But what exactly, or how, what exactly does that success look like? What is this happiness we speak of? Well, there, we have a lot less clarity. Law 29 of the 48 Laws of Power, from the great Robert Greene, is "Plan all the way to the end." By the way, he and I are doing some talks together. I'll tell

• 1:24Ryan Holiday?

  you about that at the end. In the law, he says, "By planning all the way to the end, you will not be overwhelmed by circumstances, and you will know when to stop. Gently guide fortune and help determine the future by thinking far ahead." Seneca actually said something similar many centuries earlier. He said, "If you don't know what port you're sailing to, no wind is favorable." Having an end in mind is no guarantee that you'll reach it. No Stoic would pretend otherwise, but not having an end in mind is a guarantee that you won't reach it. Having conflicting goals, vague hopes, half-baked schemes, this is to set yourself up for failure, for overreach, for getting lost. To the Stoics, our false conceptions are responsible not just for disturbances in the soul,

• 2:09Ryan Holiday?

  but for chaotic and dysfunctional lives and operations. When our efforts are not directed at a cause or purpose, how can we know what to do day in and day out? When you haven't gotten really specific and clear about what you want and why, what it looks like, how could you possibly achieve it? How will you know what to say no to and what to say yes to? How will you know when you've had enough? When you've reached your goal? When you've gotten off track? If you've never defined what these things are? Just as the four virtues are the compass for a good life, so is good judgment and clear thinking the first step of getting from here to there. The reason that the Stoics were trained in logic and rhetoric and critical thinking, why they trained themselves to master their emotions, was so they would not fall into the trap of poor assumptions,

• 2:52Ryan Holiday?

  impulsive decisions, and impossible goals. I feel like Robert trained me in that. That was my apprenticeship under him. So I'm really excited to announce that he and I are going to be live onstage together, September 19th in LA, September 21st in Seattle, at the Ebel Theater in LA, at the Moore Theater in Seattle. It's gonna be awesome. There's some VIP meet and greet tickets if you want us to sign your books. You can ask us questions. We'll do an audience Q and A for sure. He and I are gonna be going back and forth, like we have many, many times, but it's gonna be live in awesome venues. I'm really excited about. We were supposed to do it in San Francisco. Plans got messed up. We're rescheduling

• 3:36Ryan Holiday?

  the show in Seattle. So if you bought tickets, it'll be good for that show. You can grab tickets at RyanHoliday.net, or just pull it up on Ticketmaster. I'll link to it in today's show notes. I'm really excited. Me and Robert Greene onstage together, and then you in the audience. Hopefully, people flew in. People are flying in from all over. I've gotten a bunch of emails about it. Should be really, really exciting. I will see you and Robert Greene in Seattle or Los Angeles, the 19th and the 21st of September. Talk soon.

• 4:20Ryan Holiday?

  No blame, just focus. This is today's entry, August 4th, in the Daily Stoic. "You must stop blaming God and not blame any person. You must completely control your desire and shift your avoidance to what lies within you, your reasoned choice. You must no longer feel anger, resentment, envy, or regret." Epictetus's Discourses 3:22. Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for resistance to the brutal apartheid regime in South Africa for 27 years. For 18 of those years, he had a bucket for a toilet, a hard cot in a small cell, and once a year, he was allowed a single visitor for 30 minutes. It was vicious treatment meant to isolate and break down the prisoners.

• 5:05Ryan Holiday?

  And yet, in spite of that, Mandela became a figure of dignity within the prison. Though he was deprived of many things, he still found creative ways to assert his will. As one of his fellow prisoners, Neville Alexander explained to Frontline, "Mandela always made the point, if they say you must run, insist on walking. If they say you must walk fast, insist on walking slowly. That was the whole point. We are going to set the terms." He pretended to jump rope and shadow box to stay in shape. He held his head higher than the other prisoners, encouraged them when times were tough, and always retained his sense of self-assurance. And that self-assurance is yours to claim as well. No matter what happens today, no matter where you find yourself, shift to what lies within your reasoned choice.

• 5:47Ryan Holiday?

  Ignore as best you can the emotions that pop up, which would be so easy to distract yourself with. Don't get emotional, get focused. What I always find so amazing about the stories of Nelson Mandela, Reuben Hurricane Carter, a Epictetus, James Stockdale, is not only how they managed to comport themselves, the dignity and poise and resistance and fortitude they underwent in the prison, which was incredible and a feat of human survival. But as I get older and I've experienced things and I've been slighted or wronged, frustrated... I'm even more impressed with how they behaved after.

• 6:32Ryan Holiday?

  The forgiveness that they offered, the lack of resentment or bitterness that they carried, the way they brought people together. They could have come out of the prison like Bane in Batman, right? It could have been the origin of a villain story, right? But it was the opposite of that. You think even Martin Luther King, you think of the horrible things, you know, when you think of Gandhi, you think of how unjustly they were treated, how people took things from them. Years that they would never get back, time with their family, they would never get back. Broke down their bodies in the way that Epictetus experienced under torture, or Stockdale experienced under torture.

• 7:14Ryan Holiday?

  You think of John McCain not being able to lift his arm a certain way for the rest of his life. They were deprived of so much, but they, they chose not to see it that way. Hurricane Carter famously doesn't ask for reparations after he leaves prison. He doesn't even want to admit that that had been taken from him. He was in control. And I just think of the incredible poise and strength and pride and all the stoic virtues. And I'm putting pride in there deliberately, like their, their carriage, their, this is who I am. You cannot break me. I decide. That to me is just the essence of Stoicism. I hope none of us are ever tested in such a way.

• 7:54Ryan Holiday?

  And I hope Stockdale's the only one who tests Epictetus's theories in the modern world, in the laboratory, so to speak, at that level. But each of us, we have a period in a, in a marriage, or we have a bad boss, or we have these periods of our life where we were subjected to something that we didn't like. And we could be angry about it. We could sow division afterwards about it. We could get even for it. But instead, we focus on our reasoned choice. We focus on being good and decent. We don't hang on to anger, or resentment, or envy, or regret, as Epictetus says. But we maintain that dignity. We don't perpetuate the same injustices that were perpetuated upon us.

• 8:40Ryan Holiday?

  And we show, as Mark Striuli says, that the best revenge is to not be like that, to be better, to make a better world where hopefully something like what we just went through doesn't happen again, or at the very least doesn't happen because of anything that we say or do.