Seneca's 8 Tips For Mastering Yourself

Seneca was a power broker, a playwright, and a Stoic philosopher. These 8 lessons will teach you to become a better master of yourself, just like Seneca was striving to do. Learn more about Seneca: https://dailystoic.com/seneca/→ Get Seneca's 'Letters from a Stoic'→ Get a signed copy of Lives of the StoicsSign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemailCheck 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 the weekend edition of The Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these Stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space, when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal,

• 0:46Ryan Holiday?

  and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring. I've talked about this many, many times, but Seneca remains ever fascinating to me. I think he was the most complicated and the most human of the Stoics. I've loved James Rahm's biography, "Dying Every Day", which is on the painted porch, you can check out. I had him on the podcast, not once, but twice, if I recall correctly. And I go back to Seneca because Seneca, I think, is the most accessible and personable as far as writing about the teachings of Stoicism. And then he also is the most simultaneously relatable and inscrutable, enigmatic of the Stoics, right?

• 1:30Ryan Holiday?

  He is considered one of the wisest men who ever lived, and then somehow he finds himself working for Nero. How does that happen? And so Stoicism, the philosophy, we might say, is very clear, very flawless. But the Stoics themselves were deeply flawed and deeply complicated individuals. And I think that's why Seneca is so important because he allows us to see reflected back in ourselves, maybe flaws, maybe weaknesses, maybe ambition that we have in ourselves that can be very dangerous, that we have to understand, we have to figure out how to channel, how to control. And so in today's episode, I want to talk about Seneca, and I want to talk about some tips for mastering yourself from Seneca

• 2:15Ryan Holiday?

  with the important caveat, as always, that Seneca...

• 2:19Ryan Holiday?

  Although he talked about it quite eloquently and perfectly struggled, as we all do, to get there himself. But here we are, eight tips for becoming a master of yourself from Seneca. Hope you're having a great weekend and enjoy.

• 2:39Ryan Holiday?

  There's a bunch of difficult things I try to do every day. I try to take a cold shower. I get up early. I intermittent fast. I try to do a really hard workout every day. I try to push myself physically so I can be better mentally. Seneca said, "We should treat the body rigorously so it's not disobedient to the mind." That's why a Stoic seeks out challenges. That's why you should go do hard things. Don't live an easy, soft life. Seek out challenges.

• 3:08Ryan Holiday?

  Three times in Seneca's life, he's devastated. He comes down with tuberculosis, just as his legal career is taking off and he has to spend 10 years convalescing. He comes back just as he begins to make it in politics. He's exiled by the emperor and in late in life, he's exiled by another emperor. Repeatedly, Seneca is tried. He says, "Fortune behaves as she pleases." But what does he do in each one of these circumstances? He focuses on how he can respond. He makes good out of it. The Stoics practice negative visualization. Seneca says, "The unexpected blow lands most heavily." Part of the reason Seneca is able to endure this is that it's not a surprise. He says, "The most unacceptable excuse is, 'I did not think it could happen.'" You must always think of what can happen and then you must always focus on how you're going

• 3:53Ryan Holiday?

  to respond to what's happened.

• 3:59Ryan Holiday?

  "You don't choose your parents," Seneca says. But the truth is, you do get to choose whose child you want to be. This is extra true because Seneca's brother chooses to be adopted and changes his name to Gaio. He actually appears in the Bible. But the idea for the Stoics was you decide whose descendant you're going to be, whose footsteps you're going to follow in. This is also true with your friends. I saw this great meme that says, "You can't change your friends, but you can change your friends." Who are you going to surround yourself? Who are going to be the influences in your life? Who are the role models that you put up? Who are the statues you put up? My office is filled with statues of people I admire, pictures of people that I admire, because they remind me who I want to be like, whose footsteps I'm following in,

• 4:43Ryan Holiday?

  whose example I'm trying to emulate. So your influences matter. The proximity effect is real. You become like your friends. You become the average of the five people you spend the most time with. This is all a way of saying that you choose whose children you're going to be. You choose what influences you're going to have in your life.

• 5:06Ryan Holiday?

  The purpose of philosophy, Seneca says, is to make you better. He says it's to scrub off your flaws, not to make you more judgmental or make you feel superior to other people. It's called self-discipline. Nobody else signed up for it. You signed up for it. Your learning and your study and your self-improvement. You have to be sure that you're applying this only to yourself. The purpose of all this is to make you a better master of yourself. It's not to make you condescending or patronizing or controlling of other people. It's called self-discipline for a reason. It's your discipline over yourself.

• 5:48Ryan Holiday?

  You leave everyone else and their mistakes and their way of doing things to them.

• 5:57Ryan Holiday?

  Being great at something requires concentration. It requires elimination. Seneca says, "He who is everywhere is nowhere." If you want to be great at whatever it is you're doing, it means focus. Everything you say yes to means saying no to something else. But conversely, when you say no to other things, when you say no to the inessential, the Stoics say, it allows you to say yes to double down on what truly is essential. So what are you saying no to so you can say yes to what matters?

• 6:29Ryan Holiday?

  Seneca said that the body must be treated rigorously so that it is not disobedient to the mind. The idea of training, I just did my sprints and my kettlebell workout for Sunday. The idea is who's in charge? The little voice in your head that's telling you to quit? Or the willpower that says, "I'm gonna finish this. I have more in me." In running, you train at your T pace to push your average threshold higher. You want to get to a point where what was once hard for you is now easy or average. And that's why we train physically, mentally, spiritually, so that when adversity does come, we're ready. When the voice in our head tells us to quit, we know we don't have to listen.

• 7:06Ryan Holiday?

  Seneca's an interesting philosopher, because again, he's not an academic. He's a playwright, he's a Roman senator, and he writes in this letter to a friend, one of his dear friends, he writes a letter about how he should think about death. And he says that the mistake is that we think of death as something in the future, something we're moving towards as time is passing. In fact, he says, "Death is happening right now. The time that's passed is owned by death." Instead of thinking that, for instance, I would be lucky enough to live into my late 70s, I should think instead that I've already died 32 years, right? Seneca says we are dying every day, we're dying every minute. You're dying sitting here listening to me talk, so I hope it's worth it.

• 7:48Ryan Holiday?

  But we have to get better at managing this precious resource, Seneca is saying, that we fritter away our time, meanwhile, we strongly and strictly guard our property and our money. But what's more renewable? You can always buy more property, you can always earn more money. What you can't ever do is find or create more time.

• 8:08Ryan Holiday?

  Seneca says, "Happy is he who makes others better." I think that's what a Stoic is also, not just a role model, but an inspiration. Someone who makes others better by the example that they set, by the work that they do, by the good they do for their community, right? That's what Stoicism is about. Epictetus says, "Don't talk about your philosophy, embody it." You make others better by being your best self, but this is the benefit, you also make yourself happy because you see the good that you're doing in the world, in the people around you. And this is why the Stoics are working so hard all the time.

• 8:51Ryan Holiday?

  Seneca, uno de los más sabios que jamás vivió, dijo: "Mira, no necesitas ir a la escuela, no necesitas ser un genio, no necesitas un tutor. Dijo, "Necesitas encontrar una cosa cada día que te haga mejor. Una historia, una cita, una idea, algo que te haga mejor. Así es como se camina el camino a la sabiduría. Cada día durante cinco años he escrito este correo diario stoico. Es totalmente gratis, pero se basa en esa idea. Solo una cita stoica, una historia, una idea cada día que te hará un poco mejor. Yo me mejoro por escribirlo, la gente mejora por leerlo. Espero que lo revisen.