Can You Play Ball? | How To Read Books Effectively (7 Stoic Tips)

Life throws stuff at us. We have to figure out how to catch it and throw it back. That’s what Epictetus meant when he said we don’t control what happens, we control how we respond.✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and Facebook See 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.

• 0:02Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. On Tuesdays, we take a closer look at these Stoic ideas, how we can apply them in our actual lives. Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy.

• 0:31Ryan Holiday?

  Can you play ball?

• 0:36Ryan Holiday?

  Life throws stuff at us. We have to figure out how to catch it, throw it back. That's what Epictetus meant when he said, "We don't control what happens, we control how we respond." But he also liked that throwing metaphor, and clearly was way more than a casual fan of sports. Epictetus admired the way that skilled athletes caught a ball that was thrown to them and whipped it right back. They didn't complain, they didn't demand certain conditions be met before they dove for it. He admired their concentration, their coolness under pressure, their grace, their creativity. In his view, Socrates was such an athlete. "Only the ball, in his case," Epictetus said, "was life, imprisonment, exile, or execution, with the prospect of losing his wife and having his children reduced to the status

• 1:17Ryan Holiday?

  of orphans. Those were the stakes of the game, and still he played and handled the ball with aplomb." What about you? Are you such an athlete? Can you ball? Or do you make excuses? Do you prefer to sit in the stands and judge the people who play? Win or lose, what matters, the Stoics believed, was that we tried, that we did our best, that we dove for the ball, that we risked it all but played fair, that we held our head up high, that we didn't get intimidated or make excuses. Life is gonna throw you curveballs. Are you ready?

• 1:51Ryan Holiday?

  That's my Amor Fati coin, which I think is similar to what Epictetus is talking about. A great athlete loves to play. They love to play when it's easy. They love to play when it's hard. They love good conditions, bad conditions. They love diving for the ball. They love when the game is hard. They love everything that life throws at them. Certainly, Socrates did. And I just, I love this metaphor and image from Epictetus. It's brilliant. The image of Amor Fati, as we've done, and the coin is fire, right? Consumes, turns it into fuel. But that's what great athletes do. They turn adversity into opportunities, into a platform for performance that takes our breath away. You can check out this Amor

• 2:35Ryan Holiday?

  Fati medallion at dailystoic.com/AF. We have a cool pendant as well. Amor Fati, it's a motto for life. It's why I carry this reminder with me, and I think you'll like it.

• 2:52Ryan Holiday?

  Epictetus says, "It's not that you read, it's what you read." I'd add to that, "It's how you read, how you develop a reading practice." Reading isn't about impressing people or crossing things off the list. It's not mental gymnastics. It's about getting better. It's about filtering this information, retaining it, ultimately applying it, using it in the pursuit of what the Stoics would call the good life. That's what we're going to talk about today. Seven Stoic tips for being a better reader. I think you're really going to like these. This is a fun, breezy episode. And if you really want to invest in your reading practice, check out the Daily Stoic Read to Lead Challenge, which we just expanded and added a whole bunch of awesome stuff to. You can check that out at dailystoic.com/reading. And I'll link to that in today's episode show page.

• 3:39Ryan Holiday?

  My rule is, I want to read books that have changed people's lives, one. And two, those tend to be older books, right? Books that have stood the test of time. And I know this is crazy as someone who puts out new books, but I have a bias towards old books, books that have stood the test of time, that were relevant 100 years ago, 1,000 years ago. Books that have stood the test of time are likely going to hold up in the future, and you won't have wasted your time reading them. So that you want to read is great, but it matters what you read and how you read.

• 4:10Ryan Holiday?

  You say you don't have time to read, but you're watching this video. You do have time, you're just choosing not to make time. There are people way busier than you. Marcus Aurelius made time to read. Epictetus was a slave, he managed to read. You have time to read, you just have to make time to read. I read a lot, I promise, I'm almost certainly busier than you. I make time for it. If you want to read, you have to make time for it. It's not that we have a little bit of time, Seneca says, it's that we waste a lot of it. And you're wasting it right now. Put the phone down and go read. If you want to read, then do it, make the time. I've always seen reading as my job. And if something's going to be my job, I want to figure out how to get good at it.

• 4:54Ryan Holiday?

  I'm going to figure out how to improve it. And the Stoics obviously talk about this. Reading was a practice, it was something they tried to be very good at. And if you want to learn everything the Stoics can teach you about how to be a better reader, I recommend the Read to Lead Challenge that we built here at Daily Stoic. It's a guide to a Stoic reading practice, how to read like Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Epictetus, and yes, a little bit like me. You can sign up right now by going to dailystoic.com/reading. It's all the best Stoic practices for reading. It's live Q and A's with me and a bunch of other awesome stuff. I'd love for you to sign up. It's the most popular challenge we've done here at Daily Stoic, where 10,000 people have signed up since we launched it a couple of years ago. I'd love to have you join us, join me, we'll become better readers together.

• 5:39Ryan Holiday?

  You can sign up at dailystoic.com/reading or click the link below.

• 5:48Ryan Holiday?

  In Meditations, Marcus Aurelius says that "just as reading and writing require a master, so does life." Now, that's obviously true, but let's go to the first part. He's saying that to be a great reader, you have to have a master, someone who tutors you, who advises you. For Eisenhower, as a young military officer, Fox Connor, his mentor, begins to pick out and direct a course of reading that shapes his life, that makes him one of the great generals and presidents of all time. Marcus Aurelius himself is introduced to the works of Epictetus through His life is changed by this reading master, this person who's instructing him in reading. And actually, some of the only letters we have from Marcus Aurelius come from his rhetoric teacher, Fronto, who also directs the course of reading.

• 6:32Ryan Holiday?

  So the question is, who is leading you? Who is teaching you? Who is introducing you to new books? Who is your master in reading and writing? If you don't have one, you should get one.

• 6:45Ryan Holiday?

  General James Mattis says that if you haven't read hundreds of books, you're functionally illiterate, which I think is a great way to think about. It's not just that you've read some stuff. It's not just that you can read, but have you read very, very deeply about what it is that you do for a living, about who it is that you're trying to be? It's not one book. It's not two books. It's not 10 books. It's hundreds of books. If you haven't read hundreds of books, you may well be literate, but you are functionally illiterate, and that's what really matters.

• 7:19Ryan Holiday?

  You shouldn't just read. You should always be rereading. The Stoics say we never step in the same river twice because we change and the river is always changing. But this is true for books, too. Yes, the words on the page are the same, but the circumstances in which you are reading them, who you are when you're reading them, that's changed. So don't just read, reread and reread again. Seneca says that we linger on the works of the master thinkers. We read them over and over and over again, and we get something new out of it every time, especially when you reread Meditations, Seneca, Epictetus. Don't just read the Stoics, but reread the Stoics and grow each time you do.

• 7:57Ryan Holiday?

  Maybe you're reading too much. I know that sounds crazy. Obviously, one of the virtues of Stoicism is the virtue of wisdom. But multiple times in Meditations, Marcus tells himself to throw away his books, get active in life's purpose while he can. And I think that's advice I try to give myself. I love reading. I love retreating to the world of ideas. But Marcus Aurelius' mentor, Fronto, he says, "Against your will, you must put on the purple cloak of the emperor," meaning you can't stay here with your books. You can't retreat to the ivory tower. You have to go out in the world and live these ideas, apply these ideas, struggle with difficult people, struggle with difficult challenges, apply this stuff in the imperfect world.

• 8:40Ryan Holiday?

  Marcus says, "Don't go around expecting Plato's Republic because you live here in the real world, and that's where we apply the philosophy." We stop arguing about what good people are, and we try to be one. We try to apply the philosopher in real life where it belongs.

• 8:56Speaker 01

  One of the things that's actually tied into what I wanted to ask you next is that Truman was a huge reader. You know, he was obsessed with Marcus Aurelius. He writes in one of his letters, you know, the sort of virtues of wisdom and courage and justice and temperance. You know, he learned that from the sort of the education that he gave himself. He's one of the last presidents to not go to college. And so I wondered what you thought of that famous quote from Truman. You know, he said, "Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers." And that strikes me as something very true about your life as well.

• 9:29Speaker 02

  The valued quotient of reading for me was probably different than Truman's. But in the moments of quiet during the day when I think back about my life and reading and so forth, I find the early origin about reading came from my grandma. When I was a little boy, my grandma used to make me sit and watch her cook in the kitchen. My grandma never got past eighth grade, but she had common sense. So she would make me sit there and watch her cook. And so it turned out, as I realized in my adult life, it was a classroom. She was teaching me how to cook by observation,

• 10:10Speaker 02

  and then she would have conversations with me while I was sitting there. And so one time she said to me, she said, "George," she said, "You know, back in the days of slavery, the plantation owners used to hide their money in books."

• 10:30Speaker 02

  And I said, Grandma, why'd they do that? She said, because they knew the slaves couldn't read, so they would never take the books down. To me, the moral of that story was, as long as someone can control your mind, they can control your body. And so, I think that was the early revelation to me, books had to be more relevant in my life. And then I started to realize, you've got a moral obligation to read, that people die to get you the right to read.

• 11:13Speaker 02

  If you remember your history, George, there was a time in America when it was illegal for a person to teach a black person how to read. There was a time in America when a black person could not get a library card. The libraries were segregated. People died to get me the right to read. Am I going to dishonor their deaths by not reading? I see it in a broader context than just reading to learn or reading for entertainment. I feel personally, I have an obligation to honor those people's deaths. They died so that I could have the opportunity to read.

• 11:58Speaker 02

  And people ask me, when you were growing up, did you read a lot? Hell, no. The only books I saw in my young life were school books. That were the only books I knew. When I was growing up as a young kid in Washington DC, seven, eight, nine, 10 years old, every day was about survival. When you got up in the morning, you were happy that you survived for another day. So you get up in the morning and you look out the window in a tiptoe stance and you say, I made it, I made it another day. But it's all about survival. And so along

• 12:36Speaker 02

  the way, I continued to progress to where I finally get a basketball scholarship to going over. It really wasn't until I got to going over that I started to realize the wonder of reading it and how it could separate you from other people.

• 12:55Ryan Holiday?

  I hope you like this video. I hope you subscribe. But what I really want you to subscribe to is our Daily Stoic email. One bit of Stoic wisdom, totally for free to the largest community of Stoics ever in existence. You can sign up at dailystoic.com/email. There's no spam. You can unsubscribe at any time. I love sending it. I've sent it every day for the last six years, and I hope to see you there at dailystoic.com/email.