Always Give Credit to Something Greater

“It’s almost a cliché at this point. A reporter walks into the locker room of a victorious team and gets some version of the following quotes from the athlete who has pulled it off: ‘It was a team effort.’ ‘We worked hard and got lucky out there.’ ‘I trusted in God and did my best.’”Ryan discusses the importance of cultivating humility, and keeping your ego at bay, on today’s Daily Stoic Podcast.***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 Daily Stoic: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.

• 0:04Ryan 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.

• 0:27Ryan Holiday?

  Always give credit to something greater. It's almost a cliche at this point. A reporter walks into the locker room of a victorious team and gets some version of the following quotes from the athletes who pulled it off. "It was a team effort. We worked hard and got lucky out there. I trusted in God and did my best." It's always a surprise to see someone so clearly talented and so obviously responsible for what happened giving credit for success to someone else. What's interesting also is how far back this tradition goes. Around the first century AD, Plutarch wrote about how accomplished people give some credit for their success to the gods and to luck. As when Timolean dedicated a temple to the goddess of chance after destroying the tyrannies in Sicily, Python, when the Athenians were

• 1:12Ryan Holiday?

  marveling at him and honoring him for killing COTUS, said, "God did it through the agency of my hand." One reason these conquerors did this was to avoid envy, and that's likely true for athletes today. Make yourself too conspicuous and you attract enemies and unnecessary attention. But almost certainly, the real reason is to keep ego at bay, to stay humble. Marcus Aurelius talked about avoiding imperialization, being stained by the power and success of what he had been given. The ancient world, not unlike the history of sports, is filled with examples of people who took undue credit, who believed all the hype and cheers and became worse for it. The real pros focus on the things other people did right. They

• 1:57Ryan Holiday?

  focus on where they themselves fell short because this attitude makes them better. They knew that ego was the enemy. Did the Stoics really believe that sacrifices made a difference? Maybe it probably also didn't hurt to actively practice crediting omens and rituals for success. It was an easy way of giving credit to something bigger than them, to remind themselves that they weren't totally in control, and how big a role chance played in things. That athletes are still considering this tradition thousands of years later is a sign that the practice works and that we should develop our own.

• 2:35Ryan Holiday?

  Most of you already know this, but this daily podcast is based on the email we send out every day for Daily Stoic. If you aren't already subscribed and want to check it out, go to dailystoic.com/email. Emails can be a longer, more in-depth ways to tackle the things that we talk about in this podcast, along obviously with links, article, ideas, images, stuff like that. So check it out. You can learn more at dailystoic.com/email.