This Is The Year! | Give Thanks

We all have vices. We all have flaws. We all have things we know we want to change. Make this the year. This is the year you drive the bad habits out. This is the year you follow through. This is the year you demand the best of and for yourself.🎓 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.

• 0:47Ryan Holiday?

  We all have vices. We all have flaws. We have things we know we want to change. What happens? Nothing happens. This is true for everyone, even Martin Luther King Jr. One day, King said, "We tell ourselves, 'I'm going to rise up and drive this evil out. I know it's wrong. It's destroying my character and embarrassing my family.'" But then, he said, "At last, the day came, and you made a New Year's resolution that you would get rid of that whole base evil. Then the next year came around, and you were still doing that same old evil thing. Can you remember the surprise and disappointment that gripped you when you discovered that?" He said, "After all that you had done through your resolutions to get rid of it,

• 1:28Ryan Holiday?

  the old habit was still there, and out of amazement, you found yourself asking, 'Why could I not cast it out?'" Martin Luther King Jr. accomplished so much because of his ability to rise up and drive evil out. But how much greater would he have been if he'd been able to purge some of his own evil habits? He was too busy. He had trouble delegating. He ate poorly. He was disorganized. He had affairs. Seneca reminds us that all fools have one thing in common. They're always getting ready to start. They're always getting ready to change. They're always getting ready to start the diet and the exercise program. And then, and then, and then, they never do. They don't do the work. Is that who you want to be? Is that who we're meant to be?

• 2:10Ryan Holiday?

  Of course not. Let's make this the year. This is the year that you drive it out. This is the year that you follow through. This is the year that you demand the best of and for yourself.

• 2:23Ryan Holiday?

  That's what I try to do in the Daily Stoic New Year New Challenge, which there's seriously just like two days left to sign up for. Maybe procrastination is something you're struggling with, and here you are wrestling with it still. The whole point is we're trying to rise up, drive out the bad, take action, take a step towards being the person we're meant to be. And these don't have to be pie in the sky, you know, super ambitious things. They can be small, they can be little, but we should take that step now. We should cast the bad stuff out, make room for the good stuff. That's what we've been doing now. This is our fifth year of doing the Daily Stoic New Year New Challenge. Thousands of people all over the world have done it. It'll be my fifth time doing it. I've gotten so much from this challenge, all the challenges we've done. I'd love to have you join us.

• 3:06Ryan Holiday?

  You can sign up at dailystoic.com/challenge. If you sign up for Daily Stoic Life, you get this challenge, all the challenges for free. But I'd love to see you join us, ask some friends to join with you, do it with a spouse, whatever. I'd love to see it. And I'll see you in the group Discord channel and all the other ways that we participate and engage. We're going to do a bunch of live chats with me, video chats, Q and As during, as part of the challenge, a bunch of other awesome stuff. So I will see you soon, but don't delay. Sign up now at dailystoic.com/challenge. And I'll see you in a couple of days. Let's get to it.

• 3:45Ryan Holiday?

  Give thanks. This is the December 29th 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. In all things, we should try to make ourselves as grateful as possible,

• 4:28Ryan Holiday?

  Seneca says in Moral Letters 81. For gratitude is a good thing for ourselves in a manner in which justice, commonly held to belong to others, is not. Gratitude pays itself back in large measure. Guess what you could say is that gratitude is a gift you give yourself, even though you are expressing your gratefulness to other people. But think of all the things that you could be grateful for today, that you are alive, that you live primarily in a time of peace, that you have enough health and leisure to read a book or listen to this podcast. But what of the little things? The person who smiled at you? The woman who held the door open? The song you liked on the radio? Pleasant weather? Gratitude is infectious. Its positivity is radiant.

• 5:11Ryan Holiday?

  Even if today was your last day on earth, even if you knew in advance that it was going to end in a few short hours, would there not still be plenty of things to be grateful for? How much better would your life be if you kicked off every morning like that? If you let it carry through from morning to night and touch every single part of your life? I think about gratitude a lot. Obviously, we did our Thanksgiving message a month ago, where we're talking about gratitude. I have a gratitude journal. Actually, Mona Catan, the makeup artist and online influencer, sent it to me as a gift a couple of years ago. And I write like one or two things that I'm grateful for a day. You know, my family, my friends, my success, you know,

• 5:56Ryan Holiday?

  the obvious things. But I try on a really consistent basis to take the time to express gratitude for things that maybe on the surface I'm not grateful for. The pandemic, political polarization, Trump, you know, critics, problems I have with my parents, pain that I feel, an argument that I just had, that I'm sick. You know, I try to express. Explicitly there on those pages, gratitude for things that, again, I'm not feeling grateful for, but in taking a moment to write why I am grateful for them, I become grateful for

• 6:38Ryan Holiday?

  them. I force myself to see something good in them. I force myself to find a positive in it. I force a way to see that actually I'm quite lucky, even if this thing is itself an unlucky thing, right? In the perspective of all the things that I am lucky for, this little bit of bad luck isn't so bad. And so forcing myself to write that down to think about is really great. My friend Pete Holmes, a comedian, talked about how when he, ever he thinks of his parents, he says to himself, I forgive them, right? He's actively practicing, like, what he wants to feel, even though he doesn't actually feel that. And it becomes

• 7:18Ryan Holiday?

  true over time. And I think this is an exercise we can apply to gratitude. And, you know, Marcus says, convince yourself that everything is a gift from the gods, that it's all a gift, that you're grateful for all of it, that it's great, even though it doesn't always feel that way. That's the kind of gratitude we're expressing. And that's the kind of gratitude, you know, this month in the book is about death. When you go, hey, I could die at any moment, or people all around me are dying at any moment, right? It does force a little bit of a different perspective where you can find some stuff to be grateful for. So that's today's message. A reminder here, because it's two days from the end of the year. The Daily Stoic New Year, New Year Challenge, it's just about to start.

• 8:02Ryan Holiday?

  You've clearly already procrastinated quite a bit if you haven't already signed up, but I would love for you to pull the trigger on starting the year right. 21 days of Stoic inspired challenges that will make you better. They are challenges. It's not going to be easy, but that's the whole point. You know, we really push ourselves in the challenge. It's one of my absolute favorite things to do as a participant and as a writer. We've been working hard on it. The last three or four months, the Daily Stoic team has, I think it's our best year yet. Been doing it for five years now. Thousands of people all over the world have done it, are gonna do it together this year. All new stuff. Check out the Daily Stoic New Year, New Year Challenge, dailystoic.com/challenge. I'd love to see it in there. And let's, uh, let's blow out 2023.

• 8:45Ryan Holiday?

  Let's start it with a bang. Let's start it with some gratitude. And then let's make some stuff to be grateful for with the changes and challenges we're gonna accept and push for. I'll see you soon. Dailystoic.com/challenge.

• 9:05Ryan 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. He goes, the enemy's 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.