This is the Main Thing | Ask Daily Stoic

The Stoics appreciated success, but it wasn’t something they coveted. It may have impressed others, but it wasn’t how they defined themselves. Ryan Holiday is coming to a city near you! Grab tickets here | https://www.dailystoiclive.com/🇺🇸 USA dates:Portland, Oregon - June 8 San Francisco, California - June 11Minneapolis, Minnesota - August 18 Chicago, Illinois - August 19 Detroit, Michigan - August 20 🇳🇿 NEW ZEALAND:Auckland, New Zealand - October 13 🇦🇺 AUSTRALIA dates:Sydney, Australia - October 16 Melbourne, Australia - October 18 Brisbane, Australia - October 20Perth, Australia - October 21 🎥 VIDEO EPISODES | Watch the video episodes on The Daily Stoic YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos✉️ FREE STOIC WISDOM | Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

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?

  This is the main thing. There's nothing wrong with success. There's nothing wrong with power. There's nothing wrong with living a nice life with achievement or admiration. Certainly, many Stoics did precisely that. Seneca, Cato, Marcus Aurelius, they were important and well-known. They were admired. They were influential. But you know what? They would have shrugged all that off. They appreciated the success, but it wasn't something they coveted. It may have impressed others, but it wasn't how they defined themselves. "The main thing," Walter Wade says in Walker Percy's Stoicism-inspired novel, "The Moviegoer," "the main thing, Binks, is to be humble,

• 0:56Ryan Holiday?

  to make golden fleece and be humble about it. It might have meant a lot to others," he was saying, "but it didn't mean anything to him." That's how we might assume that Marcus Aurelius felt about a lot of what was thrown at him. In fact, one of the lines in Meditations suggests as much, where he says that he measures himself not by how many honors he's received, but how many he's turned down. "He didn't make golden fleece, but he did remind himself that the purple cloak of the emperor was nothing more than an ordinary one dyed by shellfish blood." Clearly, he still tried to do things. Clearly, he was still active in the world. He just measured himself by his humility, by his indifference, more than he did by his achievement or status. And so must we.

• 1:40Ryan Holiday?

  We can still try to climb the ladder of success. We can be powerful. We can live a nice life. The main thing, though, is to do this and be humble even so, humble even if you have achieved an impressive amount, even if you have done many impressive things.

• 2:08Ryan Holiday?

  I had a crazy 36 hours or so back in February. Took my kids to school, went for a nice run around Town Lake, took a shower, went to the airport, flew to Las Vegas, drove about 45 minutes outside Las Vegas, gave a talk at a hotel at, I don't know, 7 o'clock, finished at 8, went straight to the hotel room, changed into some slightly more comfortable clothes. And then I drove. I drove from Vegas to Phoenix. They told me it would be like four hours. It was like five hours and there was also a time change in there. So I got in at like 2:00 in the morning. I crashed and then I had to get up at, I don't know, 7:00 a.m. I gave a talk to the Chicago Cubs, then a talk to the Arizona Diamondbacks. Then I had a talk to you guys, to Daily Stoic fans,

• 2:53Ryan Holiday?

  at a theater in Phoenix. Actually, my parents came and then we had dinner after I crashed, woke up at like 5:00 a.m., flew home in time to take my kids to see a Harry Potter live orchestra thing. That was more than 36 hours, I think. I don't know. I can't keep track. I couldn't keep track of it at the time. It was crazy, but it was lovely. I got to do basically four talks in 24 hours. Got to see a bunch of you. And it was also prep for a busy summer and fall that I have coming up. I'm going to be in Portland and San Francisco in June, Minneapolis, Chicago and Detroit in August. And then in October, I'm going to be all over Australia and New Zealand.

• 3:34Ryan Holiday?

  You can come see me, dailystoiclive.com. But in today's episode, I wanted to bring you some of the Q and A that the people in Phoenix asked me. I think you'll like that. And hopefully it's a nice little preview of a conversation we might be able to have there in Australia, or California, or Oregon, or Illinois, or Minnesota, or Michigan, wherever you want to come see me. I will see you there soon. All right, let's get into it.

• 4:12Speaker 01

  How will Stoics confront something like grief? Like this very big, all-consuming thing? It doesn't pass, it comes back.

• 4:23Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. Well, it sounds like you're going through something too. So that sounds like a personal question, so I'm sorry. What we can say they would not do is shrug it off, or say that it's nothing, or you would never feel it. That's, again, the stereotype of the Stoics. And we know this because, and I'll just point to this, it's better than any answer I could give you. Seneca writes three incredibly moving essays on grief. They're actually called his "Consolation Series." One of them is "Consolation to His Mother" after he's been exiled and she's devastated. And he's writing to reassure her, but you can tell he's really trying to reassure himself. He writes to the daughter of a friend of his

• 5:07Ryan Holiday?

  who is grieving her father, who's devastated by grief. And I'm forgetting who the other one is for, but Seneca, the Stoic philosopher, the philosopher that's supposed to not be affected by things or ravaged by emotions or whatever, three of his best writings are only about dealing with this fundamentally devastating and overwhelming thing. He's saying, you know, you don't shrug it off. There are ways to think about it, there's ways to process it, there's ways to deal with it, but it's also just a part of life. It's one thing we all have in common because we all have that other thing in common, which is that we're mortal.

• 5:45Speaker 03

  Hey, Ryan.

• 5:46Ryan Holiday?

  Yes?

• 5:46Speaker 03

  So I've seen your crazy stack of Lincoln books. And just trying to figure out, are there any helpful hints for how to read more? How to read lots?

• 5:59Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 6:00Speaker 03

  Do you speed read? How do you do it all?

• 6:04Ryan Holiday?

  Okay, so it's important that everyone realizes that speed reading is a scam. There's almost nobody who reads a lot who...

• 6:16Ryan Holiday?

  No, people who read a lot of books spend a lot of time reading. And they spend a lot of time reading because reading is hard. And to do it well, you have to spend time. But also, people who like reading, like spending time reading. And so why would I try to rush through it as fast as possible? Name another pleasure that you try to get over as quickly as possible.

• 6:42Ryan Holiday?

  So I spend a lot of time reading. I think about it as my job, right? And it is my job to say I own a bookstore and I write books. But I spend a lot of time reading because it makes my life better. And it's one of the highest ROI activities that I've had. And by ROI, I mean professional and personal. Makes me better as a human being, makes me better at my job. It also is enjoyable and lovely and makes me happy. So I spend a lot of time doing it. Should you spend as many hours as I spend reading books about living? Probably not. I maybe want to do and save the trouble. But that's what I love doing. Like, nothing gets me more excited than finding out there's like a thousand pages. You look about something I'm really interested in.

• 7:26Ryan Holiday?

  Written by someone who's an amazing writer. And so that's what I love doing. But yeah, you spend a lot of time doing it. And I will say though, that the more time I spend reading, particularly about a singular subject, that is the only way I have found to read faster. Like, if you want to read faster, know a lot about the topic you're reading about. That is one way to read faster because you're not like, wait, what is that? You're not stopping to look things up. You're hoping to, you understand where this is going and you can speed up a little bit. But there's really no way to read faster other than by doing the work of having read a lot about this subject. And it's good work and it's worth doing.

• 8:08Speaker 04

  So you mentioned earlier with the question about how to actually get disciplined, that you want to start small. Something that really helped me was to just think about the next five seconds and think,

• 8:16Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 8:17Speaker 04

  In five seconds, what would I be really happy about if I did it right now? All the times just like get up, take a deep breath, fix your posture, something like that. And that starts the chain of the next things to do.

• 8:26Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 8:26Speaker 04

  That really ties into how like you said, like there's always more before you count them. But in the face of like uncertainty about uncertainty, where you're not really sure how to do the counting, what kinds of things would still exist about how to get started doing that? When it's not even clear how to plan and the tools that you have to plan aren't really, there's no clear precedent on what to do.

• 8:46Ryan Holiday?

  So you're saying what do you do when you don't know what to do? Is that the question?

• 8:49Speaker 04

  How do we try to make a plan?

• 8:51Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 8:52Speaker 04

  To do what we don't know what to do when we don't know how to make that plan in the first place?

• 8:57Ryan Holiday?

  I have a magic trick for you. Take a lot of walks. Maybe the single best thing we could possibly do to think better, to think more clearly, to get that sort of philosophical view, that perspective.

• 9:12Ryan Holiday?

  I try to take a walk every single day. We found this dog on the side of our road and dumped it. And my kids assured me that they would do the walking and they've not felt for that lie. But like I take the dog for a walk, but really the dog is taking me for a walk. And really the dog is allowing me to do my thinking, right? To get that perspective, to review the day, or to prepare for the day. I think human beings were designed to think on the move, right? Where the oldest evidences that we have of human beings on this continent are our footsteps in White Sands International Park. Or somebody traveling with their young child, probably a woman carrying a kid.

• 9:56Ryan Holiday?

  And that walk they're on, their path is crisscrossed by like giant sloth tracks and all these species that don't exist anymore. Like that's what we were evolved to do, to travel long distances. And I think that's, there's something about walking that a job's in my mind. So to me, my philosophical and meditative practice is inseparable from my walking practice. And when I'm jammed up writing or

• 10:22Ryan Holiday?

  Frustrated or pissed off, I take a walk here usually. Usually makes whatever that next small thing a little bit clearer. It's a well-known fact in my house that no one's allowed to talk to me after I get back from a wander walk. The first couple of minutes, they're stuck, I gotta write down. Don't, don't lose it, don't say it.

• 10:42Speaker 05

  I just wanna say, this is my introduction to Stoicism, so I want to thank you.

• 10:47Ryan Holiday?

  You're welcome.

• 10:48Speaker 05

  Yeah, I enjoyed it very much, thank you. What I picked up, there's a lot of information, but what I picked up and the biggest lesson from what I learned is, focus on what you can control and act on it, correct me if I'm wrong in that.

• 11:01Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 11:01Speaker 05

  But the first thing that I kind of thought of when I was thinking of that is, where is the line drawn between what you can and what you can't really control? Because if we start to overthink it, which I definitely was, and I see the line, see we got a little blurred.

• 11:16Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 11:16Speaker 05

  I was just wondering.

• 11:17Ryan Holiday?

  I wish there was a very clear line between what was in our control and what isn't. I mean, there's some stuff that's obviously not in our control, weather or, you know, weather balloon or how tall you are, things like that. But there is a middle ground that Stoic writers have talked about, you know, for a very long time. There's that middle gray area of stuff we have some influence over. And if you are super literal about what's in your control and what's not in your control, you can sort of neglect things that, hey, there's a probability of doing, if you do X, Y, and Z, it could have this impact. So there is some gray area there. I wish there was a, you know, a clear button, this side and this side. It's more complicated than that.

• 12:02Ryan Holiday?

  But I think first and foremost, we have to sort of stipulate that there's a bunch of stuff that's outside our control. We spend a lot of time and energy upset about those things, trying to change those things, blaming people for those things, wishing those things were otherwise, and that's all energy that could be spent on the other stuff.

• 12:25Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. I just wanted to say we so appreciate it. We love serving you. It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple of years we've been doing it. It's an honor. Please, spread the word. Tell people about it. And this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say thank you.