It’s Time To Quit | Stake Your Own Claim

Dwight Eisenhower gave himself the order. Quit smoking. It had been a 38-year habit, and he knew it was time. His health was on the line. His ability to be of service was in jeopardy. So he quit. After 38 years of smoking, he quit—cold turkey.“The only way to stop is to stop,” Eisenhower would tell an aide, “and I stopped.”🎓 Sign up for the Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge to create better habits in 2023: https://dailystoic.com/challenge✉️ 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 another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Thursdays, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from the book The Daily Stoic, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful co-author and collaborator, Stephen Hanselman. And so today, we'll give you a quick meditation from one of the Stoics, from Epictetus, Marcus really, Seneca, then some analysis from me. And then we send you out into the world to do your best to turn these words into works.

• 0:48Ryan Holiday?

  It's time to quit. Dwight Eisenhower gave himself the order, quit smoking. It had been a 38-year habit, and he knew it was time. His health was on the line, his ability to be of service was in jeopardy, so he quit. "After 38 years of smoking, he quit. Cold turkey. 'The only way to stop is to stop,' he would tell an aide, and I stopped." This story is in Discipline is Destiny. It's also the basis of one of the best days in the Daily Stoic New Year, New Year Challenge, which is coming up here very, very soon. And it's there because the Stoics were big on this idea of quitting cold turkey, of quitting anything that has a pull over us.

• 1:29Ryan Holiday?

  "No man is free who is not master of himself," Epictetus tells us. That's why Seneca talked about how everyone was a slave to something. Even slave owners were slaves to the institution of slavery. He said some people were slaves to a mistress, to ambition, to attention. Could be to anything. But self-mastery is the only true form of freedom. Being able to control your thoughts, your actions, your emotions, that is liberty. And that's what we're after. And the break of a new year is the perfect time to make a clean break towards freedom. What are you hooked on? What do you have trouble doing without? What has gained control over you? At the core of Stoicism, at the core of self-mastery,

• 2:13Ryan Holiday?

  is an instinctive aversion, anything that masters us. We must be the boss. We must be able to quit. Cold turkey. And if you're ready to make clean break, we created the 2023 New Year, New You Challenge for you. For me, I'm going to be doing it there alongside you. The 2023 New Year, New You Challenge is 21 actionable challenges, one per day over the first three weeks of the year, built around the theme of assenting to what's beyond our control and getting to work and seizing control of what is in our control. And it's built not only around the best of Stoic wisdom, but my experience is the experiences of thousands of Stoics who've done the challenges over the year, plus psychology and a bunch of other awesome experts we consulted.

• 2:58Ryan Holiday?

  You're going to learn a bunch of new stuff in here, new skills, how to be more disciplined, build relationships, break destructive thought patterns, gain clarity, make progress and much, much more. I'd love to see you in the live Q and As we do throughout the challenge. I'd love to see you checking off boxes in the calendar as we go. Love to see you in the group Discord channel, where we have accountability partners and, you know, we make new friends, all this stuff. To learn more and reserve a spot in the 2023 New Year, New You Challenge, head over to dailystoic.com/challenge. Join me, a bunch of other Stoics, getting better this year, challenging ourselves from the outset, and I can't wait to see you there.

• 3:41Ryan Holiday?

  Stake your own claim. This is the December 22 entry in the Daily Stoic. 366 Days of Writing and Reflection on the Art of Living by yours truly and my co-writer and translator, Stephen Hanselman. I actually do this journal every single day. There's a question in the morning, a question in the afternoon. Then there's these sort of weekly meditations. As Epictetus says, "Every day and night, we keep thoughts like this at hand. Write them, read them aloud and talk to yourself and others about them." You can check out the Daily Stoic Journal anywhere books are sold and also get a signed personalized copy from me in the Daily Stoic store at store.dailystoic.com. And our quote today comes to us from Seneca Moral Letters 33.

• 4:25Ryan Holiday?

  "For it's disgraceful for an old person or one in sight of old age to have only the knowledge carried in their notebooks. Xeno said this, but what do you say? Klianthe said this, what do you say? How long will you be compelled by the claims of another? Take charge and stake your own claim, something posterity will carry in its notebook." Musing in his own notebook about the topic of immortality, Emerson complained about how writers dance around a difficult topic by relying on quotes. "I hate quotation," he wrote. "Tell me what you know." And I'm gonna tell you a little backstory about that in a second. Seneca was throwing down the same gauntlet some 20 centuries before.

• 5:06Ryan Holiday?

  "It's easier to quote to rely on the wise words of others, especially when people you're deferring to are such towering figures. It's harder and more intimidating to venture out on your own to express your own thoughts. But how do you think those wise and true quotes from those towering figures were created in the first place? Your own experiences have value. You have accumulated your own wisdom too. Stake your claim. Put something down for the ages in words and also in example." So I was maybe like 20, 21 years old. I was writing for the college newspaper and I'd written this review and I published it and did okay. And then I actually heard from the person I was reviewing in it. And they were like, you know, they gave me some feedback.

• 5:49Ryan Holiday?

  And I said, hey, could we like get on the phone? I would really, I just want to grow as a writer. Can you give me some feedback? And they're going through it and he was pointing out all the quotes in it. And he gave me that Emerson quotation for the first time. He said, well, he said, Emerson said something like, "I hate quotation. Tell me what you know." And that lesson has stuck with me in all of my writings. Yes, I talk about the Stoics. My writing is influenced and is in many ways, an attempt to introduce the Stoics people. But one of the passes that I do on my own books as I go through them... I write them just, what do I want to say? What's my, what, you know, what's my supporting arguments? Like, how do I want to illustrate it? And then I go through and I go, where am I over relying on quotes here?

• 6:33Ryan Holiday?

  Where can I get rid of them? Where am I over arguing things where not telling you what I know, but telling you what someone else knows? Speaking of quotes, there's a rule I heard from Nassim Taleb, where he actually said, you should only quote people when you disagree with them. The point is make your own arguments on your own merits. But I think this is a really important part of the Stoic practice. If you think about what Meditations was for Marcus, right? It's not him arguing Stoicism to the public. It's him arguing the Stoics to himself. So he does use quotes from time to time, but he's not really having to think that much about attribution. And he's not really trying to think about publication or the audience at all. He's just thinking about what does he need to hear? What does he know to be true?

• 7:17Ryan Holiday?

  And what needs to be said? What does he need to be reminded of? And I think it's important that we understand that Stoicism, the study of Stoicism is not a one-way street. It's not just downloading the information from the originals, from me, from other people. It's also putting your own spin on it. It's disagreeing with them. It's adding your own view. Stoicism should be better, different, added to as a result of you having studied and learned about it. That doesn't mean you're all going to publish bestselling books or articles or videos. It's all going to be well-known. But make your own contributions. Put your own spin on it. Feel free to disagree. Feel free to argue. Feel free to push back. Feel free to add.

• 8:01Ryan Holiday?

  I feel like one of my weird contributions to Stoicism was the connection between Stoicism and Nietzsche, the idea of amor fati. I brought that in to, also with the help of Robert Greene, but I bought, brought that together. And I, that's a practice of Stoicism that, you know, did not exist before, or an explicit connection that did not fully exist before. In Lives of the Stoics, I put all the Stoics, their biographies in one place. In the Daily Stoic itself, I combined the Stoics in a way that they'd never been combined before. And I made arguments that some people disagree with. I made statements that I think are true, but not, again, not everyone agrees with. But they didn't exist before.

• 8:46Ryan Holiday?

  I put my own spin on it. I put my own stamp on it, which is what you and everyone listening needs to do, not just with words. In fact, with words least of all, most of all, with our actions, with what we do, with who we are. So that's today's message from the Daily Stoic. I hope you enjoy it. Just a reminder, we're getting close to the end of the year. The Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge is almost ready to start. Don't wait till the last minute. Don't procrastinate. I'd love for you to sign up now, dailystoic.com/challenge. I'm going to be in there. Thousands of Stoics from all over the world are going to be in there. I think this is our best one yet. We've done it for five years now. This is our fifth one. It's going to be awesome. I'd love to see you in there.

• 9:31Ryan Holiday?

  Sign up, dailystoic.com/challenge. Remember also, if you sign up for Daily Stoic Life at dailystoiclife.com, you get this challenge and all the challenges totally for free. So I'll see you on Jan 1 when we get rolling into this thing.

• 9:53Ryan Holiday?

  Thanks for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Just a reminder, we've got signed copies of all my books in the Daily Stoic store. You can get them personalized, you can get them sent to a friend. The Obstacle is the Way, Ego is the Enemy, Stillness is the Key, the leather-bound edition of the Daily Stoic. We have them all in the Daily Stoic store, which you can check out at store.dailystoic.com.