Do You Think They Liked It?

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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.

• 0:14Ryan Holiday?

  Do you think they liked it? Do you think Marcus Aurelius liked getting up early? Do you think he liked being patient with people? Do you think he liked the strict standards, physical and moral and intellectual, that he held himself to? Of course not. We know that he struggled to get out of bed early. He writes about it in meditations. We know there were things that he would have liked to say to the people who were bothering him. Obviously, it would have been easier in many ways to be more like his predecessors, who used their title and office to get away with whatever they wanted. It didn't matter who he was. It didn't matter how much money or power he had, how well he was steeped in the philosophy, or how long he practiced the habit. It was still hard.

• 0:58Ryan Holiday?

  Because that's what philosophy is about. What discipline is, is a virtue. It's doing things you don't want to do. It's doing things because they're hard. It's doing the harder thing instead of the easy thing. It's sticking with it when you don't want to quit. It's pushing through the resistance. It's not giving in to the excuses. It's fighting, as Marcus Aurelius tried to do, to be what philosophy hoped you would be, not what your tired or exhausted or entitled self would like to be. Discipline, as we said, is doing it anyway. It's not doing what you ought not to do. And this isn't always going to be fun, and it's not always going to be easy. But that's what makes it a virtue. I don't know where you are in your year,

• 1:41Ryan Holiday?

  but mine got off to a little bit of a rough start. And it would be easy to sort of throw in the towel and be like, ugh, bad start, and just continue to get worse from there. But one of the things I'm trying to do is go, no, okay, I didn't control that we all got sick, that there were plans. Now there's this big storm here in Texas. I don't control any of that, but I do control whether I get myself back on track. And that's what I'm doing. And that's what we're doing with the 2026 Daily Stoic New Year, New Year Challenge. We ran it the first three weeks of the year. We had thousands of Stoics all over the world doing it together. It was awesome. But not everyone made it all the way through. Some people fell off, some people... Wish they'd done it, but they missed out. And if you are one of those people, well, it's not too late.

• 2:25Ryan Holiday?

  We're going to give it another go and we'd love to have you with us. You can sign up right now at dailystoic.com/challenge. It's going to be three weeks of Stoic-inspired challenges designed to make you better, designed to make you do some things that maybe you're not going to like doing, but you're going to like having done. That's what Stoicism is. That's what virtue is. It's about how you feel after, not how you feel in the moment, but what it gets you after. That's what Stoicism is about. That's what the Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge is all about. And I'd love to have you join us. Thousands of Stoics all over the world just spent the last 21 days, the first 21 days of the year, tackling one Stoic challenge after another. We all did it as a team. As I said, not much time left. You can join us right now at dailystoic.com/challenge,

• 3:10Ryan Holiday?

  while you still can. You could start this very minute and I'd love to see you in there.