What Are You Waiting For? | 10 Timeless Meditations From Stoic Philosophy

You are at a crossroads. Make the right call. The Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge is 3 weeks of ALL-NEW, actionable challenges, presented in an email per day, built around the best, most timeless wisdom in Stoic philosophy, to help you create a better life, and a new you in 2025. Why 3 weeks? Because it takes human beings 21 days to build new habits and skills, to create the muscle memory of making beautiful choices each and every day. Head over to dailystoic.com/challenge today to sign up.📕 The Daily Stoic eBook is on sale for $2.99! Grab yours now at dailystoic.com/discount📓 Grab your own leather bound signed edition of The Daily Stoic! Check it out at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast🎥 Watch top moments from The Daily Stoic Podcast on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast✉️ 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 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.

• 0:02Ryan 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.

• 0:29Ryan Holiday?

  What are you waiting for? And by the way, today is the last day to sign up for the Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge, dailystoic.com/challenge. But let's get into it. This is that weird time of year that sneaks up on us. We knew that last year was winding down. We knew that the date was coming and then suddenly it's here, the last day of 2024. Faced with a calendar turning over, we suddenly have to get serious about the vague plans we had for next year. Because that year is almost here. Those resolutions we were thinking about, that we'd been kicking around, the things we were going to start, the habits we were going to quit, all our runway has run out. Now we have to decide.

• 1:12Ryan Holiday?

  Will we commit to them? Will we make a serious go of it in 2025? Or not? It's kind of mind blowing to think of how many of us are coming simultaneously to this same crossroads, the kind that Hercules came to thousands of years ago in the hills of Greece, the one that inspired Xeno to start Stoicism. Across the globe, millions of people simultaneously decide to embrace change, to get in shape, to start that big project, to be more present for their families, to give back, to finally read those books, gathering dust on their shelves. Or they'll tell themselves it's just another day. They

• 1:53Ryan Holiday?

  tell themselves that they'll start when they get back to the office. They are already deferring, making excuses, choosing the easy way, the betrayal of self that Hercules knew he could not make. You don't love yourself enough, Marcus Aurelius writes in Meditations as he worked on a habit that you might be thinking of starting this year. He's talking about waking up early. Or you love your nature too, he says, and what it demands of you. So here you are today, staring down the barrel of another year. The truth is, the best time to demand more of yourself was years ago, but the second best time, it's right now. Do what your

• 2:35Ryan Holiday?

  nature demands. Choose to challenge yourself this year. Make a firm and clear resolution. Quit being a slave. Stop delaying. You are out of runway. You are at a crossroads. Make the right call. And as I said, the Daily Stoic 2025 New Year, New Year Challenge begins tomorrow. I'm pumped. I'm doing a polar plunge tomorrow morning and it's gonna be awesome. That's how I'm starting off the year, a Seneca-inspired thing, which is partly how we start the challenge. So I am giving a little bit of a teaser there, I guess. It's gonna be a set of 21 actionable challenges presented one per day, built around the best Stoic practices to help you have an awesome year. The next 12 months, I don't know what's

• 3:20Ryan Holiday?

  gonna happen. I just know that I don't know what's gonna happen, but I would predict challenges and difficulty, and we gotta prepare accordingly. You've been meaning to get out of your comfort zone and make serious changes. Well, now is the time to do it. We here at Daily Stoic have been doing this challenge every year for the last seven years. I've done it every year for the last seven years. I have all these different habits, practices in my life that have come from the challenges each year. Thousands of Stoics from all over the world join us for three weeks of new and unique challenges designed to help them get the best out of themselves and to start the year off with a bang. Will you join us? You can sign up right now at dailystoic.com/challenge. Let's put missed opportunities behind

• 4:00Ryan Holiday?

  us and think about this passage from Epictetus. From now on then, he says, "Resolve to live as a grown-up who is making progress and make whatever you think best a law that you never set aside. And whenever you encounter anything that is difficult or pleasurable, highly or lowly regarded, remember that the contest is now." You are at an Olympic Games. You cannot wait any longer and your progress is wrecked and preserved by a single day and a single event. Well, that single day and single event is right now. Today is your moment, not Monday, not next year, not when things settle down, now. So I would love to see you in the Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge. I will be in there with you, looking forward to all the different Q and As and all the stuff we

• 4:45Ryan Holiday?

  get to do together. What will you choose? You are at that crossroads. Demand the best from yourself or not? Push yourself or not? Sign up or not? You know what to do. Daily Stoic dot com slash challenge for the 2025 Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge. This is your last day to sign up. The challenge begins tomorrow. I will see you in there.

• 5:13Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I am recording this late. Apologies to Claire, the editor of the Daily Stoic Podcast. The internet went out. My kids took forever to go to bed. But now I am recording this down here in Florida. I was just sitting with my father-in-law and I said, you know what's crazy? Next year, not like the year that starts in a day, but 2026 will be the 10-year anniversary of the Daily Stoic, which is absolutely insane to me. I would have been writing it about this time, finishing it up. I'm reading this book about Vietnam, where I've never been,

• 5:57Ryan Holiday?

  but it's made me think of where I was when I was finishing up the book. I was doing a talk in Thailand and I remember sitting down and editing some of the final entries. And then on my run this morning, I was running down the road and I passed, you know, sometimes you have kind of one of those fleeting little memories. You go, I remember something totally insignificant, but it happened exactly in this spot. And I remember I was having breakfast with my family at this little restaurant. I guess I only had one kid then. And I'd stepped out to take a call from my publisher. There was something about getting scrubbed from the New York Times list. We'd sold enough copies for The Daily Stoic to hit it. And suddenly it wasn't there.

• 6:42Ryan Holiday?

  And the reason it was happening exactly, I guess this would have been maybe six or seven years ago to now, to the end of January, is we started doing this thing about a year or so after The Daily Stoic came out, which is that we would discount the ebook going into the first week of the year, just to get people who were maybe interested in trying Stoicism, they wanted another more portable copy or whatever. And so we started back, I think maybe it was 2017, 2018, we started doing this. And we've done it every year since, including this year. So if you want to get the ebook of The Daily Stoic, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, you can grab it right now as an ebook for $2.99 anywhere you get your ebooks in the US.

• 7:27Ryan Holiday?

  That's at dailystoic.com/discount. It'll redirect you to the right link. And then, of course, we have the leather bound edition, which has got some signed copies in the painted porch. And at store.dailystoic.com, we've got the, obviously, the regular hardcover edition, which I will also sign, if you go to store.dailystoic.com. But in today's episode, I wanted to bring you some thoughts from The Daily Stoic. Here are some entries that I think will help you kick off this final day of the year. And then if you want to check out the book, you can. dailystoic.com/discount. You'll get your signed leather edition at store.dailystoic.com.

• 8:13Ryan Holiday?

  Every good thing in your life has come from change. Don't fight it, accept it, bend with it, be flexible about it, embrace it, and flow alongside the river.

• 8:24Ryan Holiday?

  For 2,500 years, the Stoics have been putting out wisdom and insights about how to get better. The hard part is knowing where to start. Should you read Epictetus? Should you read Seneca? Should you read Marcus Aurelius? I'm Ryan Holiday, and I feel so blessed that 15 years ago, I randomly got the right translation of Marcus Aurelius at the right time in my life. But a different translation at a different time. The entire scope of my life might have turned out differently. I wouldn't have written these books. I wouldn't have got to speak about Stoicism to the NFL and the NBA, to special forces and sitting senators. I wouldn't be standing here in this bookstore right now. So, one of the reasons I wrote The Daily Stoic was the idea that, first off, don't start with one of the Stoics. Start with all of the Stoics.

• 9:06Ryan Holiday?

  There should be a sampling of the best of Stoic wisdom available for everyone. And since that didn't exist, I wanted to make that. And so, this book now has sold more than a million copies. It's translated in dozens of languages. I hope you check it out. But in today's video, I wanted to give you a sampling of some of the best Stoic quotes from pages in The Daily Stoic that I think you will get a lot out of. I hope you check out the book. We have a leather edition also that you can check out. But here's the book. Enjoy.

• 9:42Ryan Holiday?

  "God laid down this law, saying, 'If you want some good, get it for yourself.'" I mean, what I think this is saying is there's one way to guarantee that you have a good day today. It's that you do good, right? You can always do that. It's always in your control. It doesn't depend on other people. It doesn't depend on things going right. If you want to feel good, do good. It's as simple as that.

• 10:09Ryan Holiday?

  "Whatever anyone does or says, my part is to be good. In the same way that an emerald or gold or purple must always claim what anyone else does or says, I must be what I am and show my true colors." The Stoics believed that we all have a purpose. We all have a task. We all have something we were uniquely fitted to do. And I think our job is to not only do that well, but to be good in the world, to be a positive difference maker. Marcus says in Meditations, one of my favorite quotes. He said, "You have to remain the person that philosophy tried to make you. You have to be good. Whatever anyone says or does, whatever other people's jobs are, however well or poor they do them, your job is to be good and do good."

• 10:54Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Quick interruption from me. Crazy news. The Daily Stoic is $1.99 as an ebook this week only. Amazon, iBooks, anywhere you get your iBooks. Check it out. We do this every new year. It's the cheapest the book will ever be. It's like 1/10 of the retail price. It's like 1% of the leather-bound edition price. So, check it out. If you were on the fence about checking out the book, it'll never get cheaper than this. Hope you like it.

• 11:26Ryan Holiday?

  This is Epictetus. He says, "You can bind up my leg, but not even Zeus has the power to break my freedom of choice." And this happens to Epictetus. His leg is broken by his slave master. He walks with a limp his whole life. And I think what he's saying is that those things can happen to you. Life can literally break you, can take things from you. But nothing can affect the power you have over your own choices, about your thoughts, about your opinions, about the story you tell yourself about things. And I think he's literally doing that there. He's deciding to tell himself a story that says, yes, he's been deprived of one thing, but he still maintains, even in Roman slavery, which is a horrible institution, even within that, he still has control over so much, his power of choice.

• 12:10Ryan Holiday?

  And you have that power today.

• 12:16Ryan Holiday?

  "Meditate often on the swiftness, which all of it exists, and is coming into being, is swept by us and carried away. Substance," he says, "is like a river's unending flow. It's constantly changing and causes infinite shifting, and so that nothing stands still." I think the Stoics say this over and over again, that the one constant in life is change. You try to keep everything as it is. Not only are you acting contrary to nature, what the Stoics say, is it not right? You are preventing good things from coming into being as well. Borrowing from Herakles, Marcus says that, "We never step in the same river twice. The river is changing, and also, we are changing." Right? Even this book, you read The Daily Stoic one or two or three times, you come back to the entries, you are different, even though the words are exactly the same.

• 13:00Ryan Holiday?

  The world is different. I am different as the person who wrote them. And so, we have to remember that everything is changed. All is changed. Life is changed. Every good thing in your life has come from change. Don't fight it. Accept it. Bend with it. Be flexible about it. Embrace it and flow alongside the river.

• 13:20Ryan Holiday?

  Silence is a lesson learned from the many sufferings of life. One of my favorite quotes, actually, from Robert Greene is one of the laws of power. He says, "Always say less than necessary. The more you say, the more likely you are to say something foolish." What we learn by messing up, by saying too much, saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, is that we are better to shut up. And that's why Zeno said, "Two ears and one mouth for a reason."

• 13:49Ryan Holiday?

  "Who is invincible?" he said. "The one who cannot be upset by anything outside their reasoned choice." So as we said, the job of the philosopher is to distinguish what's in my control, what's not in my control, and then to tune out all those things. The person who can't be upset by things that are not up to them, that only measure themselves by what is up to them, that person, to the Stoics, is invincible. And you are invincible in the sense that you are impervious to the things that are happening in the outside world, what other people are saying, what other people are doing, the random bad news that just got tweeted out, the thing that your phone is buzzing about. All that matters is what's up to you, what you're doing, what's in your control. And if you focus on that, you become, in a sense, invincible.

• 14:35Ryan Holiday?

  "That which isn't good for the hive, isn't good for the bee." You know, Marcus Aurelius talks in Meditations more than 80 times about the common good. He said, "The fruit of this life is good character and acts for the common good." The Stoics believed that we were all interconnected, there was a kind of mutual interdependence of all of us. We were woven together, we were put here for each other. And to do something that's good for you at the expense of everyone else is not only not right, it is ultimately a punishment of yourself. The Stoics believed in this connectedness, it guided why they participated in public life, and it should guide you, and it should be something to think about today. What isn't good for the hive, isn't good for the bee. What isn't good for the whole, isn't good for me.

• 15:19Ryan Holiday?

  Don't let your reflection on the sweep of life crush. You don't think about all the bad things that might happen. Stay focused on the present situation. Ask yourself why it's unbearable and can't be survived. He says, "You will find that it can be." It's a great line from the writer Chuck Palahniuk that I like. He says, "The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at it up close." Sometimes, yeah, we have to zoom way out and see the big picture, but sometimes we have to zoom way in because the big picture is overwhelming and scary and quite frankly, more than we can bear. Zoom way in, focus on a small piece. You're crossing a tight rope. You don't think about how high up you are. There's a great Hebrew saying about how the world is a narrow bridge. Don't look down, don't be afraid. Zoom in on the next step you have to take.

• 16:08Ryan Holiday?

  Philosophy calls for simple living, but not for penance. It's quite possible to be simple without being crude. I love this because Seneca was, I think, the most worldly and practical of all the Stoics. He's wealthy, he has nice parties, he has friends. It's important that we don't see Stoicism as like self-flagellation or needless deprivation. The Stoics say if it's there, enjoy it, you just don't need it. And in fact, the Stoics sort of are rejection of the cynical idea that nothing matters. Diogenes sort of walks around in a barrel, he's very uncouth. The Stoics are saying, "No, you should be a part of the world. You should figure out how the world works. Just don't be addicted to it, just don't be dependent on it."

• 16:49Ryan Holiday?

  Often injustice lies in what you aren't doing, not only what you are doing. This goes to that famous quote, it's now a sort of a common expression, that "The only thing that evil needs to triumph is for good men to do nothing." Right? Yes, other people might be committing the injustice, but if you don't say anything, if you don't try to stop it, if you just go along with it, then you are complicit in it happening.

• 17:15Ryan Holiday?

  So we talked about this before, but Seneca says that one of the ways to get to wisdom is by like finding one thing a day, one thing to chew on each day that makes you better. His exchange of letters with his friend Lucilius, that's what they're doing. And that's also what I tried to build The Daily Stoic around. The idea of one quote from the Stoics, which had never before been in one book together, one thought from the Stoics each day, and then some analysis, a meditation, a prompt from me about how to apply that in your actual life. So that's what The Daily Stoic is. I wrote this book now five years ago. It sold over a million copies. It spent something like 300 weeks on the bestseller list. But my favorite thing about the first week of January is that the publisher discounts it as an ebook. It's as cheap as it'll ever get. That's like a tenth of the retail price.

• 18:00Ryan Holiday?

  That's like 1% of the leather bound edition price. So check it out and why not start the new year with Daily Stoic in audio, digital, leather bound, hardcover, whatever. But I'm wishing you a very Stoic new year.