Trust Your Prep List | No Blame, Just Focus

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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, Rilius, 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.

• 0:51Ryan Holiday?

  Trust Your Prep List.

• 0:55Ryan Holiday?

  When Chef Kwame Unwachu got his first break in the catering business, he called his mother, who had run her own small catering company years earlier, for advice. Flying in with a crew of friends, she was ready to help her son in a mad dash to complete his first job. As Kwame writes in his book, Notes from a Young Black Chef, his mother gave him a piece of advice that has since stuck with him. "Always trust the prep list," she told him in his apartment as they were getting ready. "You've made it in your sanest moment," she said, "in this kitchen, you'll be crazy." A few months ago, we discussed a similar insight from the Super Bowl-winning GM Les Snead,

• 1:36Ryan Holiday?

  who spoke of panic rules. When things fall apart, when stress and chaos hit, you need to have things that you revert to: principles and guidelines, a plan. In a sense, this is what Stoicism is. It's what the practice of journaling is really about. You're writing down these principles and guidelines and plans while you know things are sane, so that if, or rather, when they get insane, you know what to turn to. You know what to rely on. As we also heard from A.J. Delario on this podcast, having emergency routines is also key, whether one wants to keep sober or stay at an elite level of performance. Again, it's when the doubts or the cravings or the laziness kicks in that you want to have something to trust,

• 2:21Ryan Holiday?

  something to lean on, something to follow. The work you're doing today, as you read these emails, as you write in your journal, as you review your premeditatio melorum, this is your hard winter training, as Epictetus would say. This is your prep list. And now, when a crisis comes, and it will, trust it, rely on it, use it. You made it in your sanest moment.

• 2:50Ryan Holiday?

  No blame, just focus.

• 2:54Ryan Holiday?

  And I'm reading to you today from The Daily Stoic, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, by yours truly and my co-author and translator, Stephen Hanselman. You can get signed copies, by the way, in the Daily Stoic store. Over a million copies of The Daily Stoic in print now. It's been just such a lovely experience to watch it. Spend more than 250 weeks, consecutive weeks, on the bestseller list. It's just an awesome experience. But I hope you check it out. We have a premium leather edition at store.dailystoic.com as well. But let's get on with today's reading. "You must stop blaming God and not blame any person. You must completely control your desire and shift your avoidance to what lies within you, your reasoned choice. You must no longer feel anger, resentment,

• 3:39Ryan Holiday?

  envy, or regret." Epictetus's Discourses 3:22. Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for resistance to the brutal apartheid regime in South Africa for 27 years. For 18 of those years, he had a bucket for a toilet, a hard cot in a small cell. And once a year, he was allowed a single visitor for 30 minutes. It was vicious treatment meant to isolate and break down the prisoners. And yet, in spite of that, Mandela became a figure of dignity within the prison. Though he was deprived of many things, he still found creative ways to assert his will. As one of his fellow prisoners, Neville Alexander explained to Frontline, "Mandela always made the point, 'If they say you must run, insist on walking.

• 4:23Ryan Holiday?

  If they say you must walk fast, insist on walking slowly.' That was the whole point. We are going to set the terms." He pretended to jump rope and shadow box to stay in shape. He held his head higher than the other prisoners, encouraged them when times were tough, and always retained his sense of self-assurance. That self-assurance is yours to claim as well. No matter what happens today, no matter where you find yourself, shift to what lies within your reasoned choice. Ignore as best you can the emotions that pop up, which would be so easy to distract yourself with. Don't get emotional. Get focused. What I always find so amazing about the stories of Nelson Mandela, Reuben Hurricane Carter,

• 5:03Ryan Holiday?

  Epictetus, James Stockdale, is not only how they managed to comport themselves, the dignity and poise and resistance and fortitude they underwent in the prison, which was incredible and a feat of human survival. But as I get older and I've experienced things and I've been slighted or wronged, frustrated, I'm even more impressed with how they behaved after. The forgiveness that they offered, the lack of resentment or bitterness that they carried, the way they brought people together. They could have come out of the prison like Bane in Batman, right?

• 5:44Ryan Holiday?

  It could have been the origin of a villain story, right? But it was the opposite of that. You think even Martin Luther King, you think of the horrible things, you know, when you think of Gandhi, we've done a bunch of podcasts on Gandhi recently, you think of how unjustly they were treated, how people took things from them, years that they would never get back, time with their family they would never get back, broke down their bodies in the way that Epictetus experienced under torture, or Stockdale experienced under torture. You think of John McCain not being able to lift his arm a certain way for the rest of his life. They were deprived of so much, but they chose not to see it that way. Hurricane Carter famously doesn't ask for reparations after he leaves prison.

• 6:27Ryan Holiday?

  He doesn't even want to admit that that had been taken from him. He was in control. And I just think of the incredible poise and strength and pride and all the stoic virtues. And I'm putting pride in there deliberately, like their carriage, this is who I am, you cannot break me. I decide. That, to me, is just the essence of Stoicism. I hope none of us are ever tested in such a way. And I hope Stockton is the only one who tests Epictetus's theories in the modern world, in the laboratory, so to speak, at that level. But each of us, we have a period in a marriage, or we have a bad boss, or maybe is how you think about the pandemic.

• 7:12Ryan Holiday?

  But we have these periods of our life where we were subjected to something that we didn't like. And we could be angry about it. We could sow division afterwards about it. We could get even for it. But instead, we focus on our reason choice. We focus on being good and decent. We don't hang on to anger, or resentment, or envy, or regret, as Epictetus says. But we maintain that dignity. We don't perpetuate the same injustices that were perpetuated upon us. And we show, as Marx really says, that the best revenge is to not be like that, to be better, to make a better world, where hopefully something like what we just went through doesn't happen again. Or at the very least, doesn't happen because of anything that we say or do.

• 8:02Ryan Holiday?

  It's not that life is short, Seneca says. It's that we waste a lot of it. The practice of Memento Mori, the meditation on death, is one of the most powerful and eye-opening things that there is. We built this Memento Mori calendar for Daily Stoic to illustrate that exact idea, that your life, in the best-case scenario, is 4,000 weeks. Are you going to let those weeks slip by? Or are you going to seize them? The act of unrolling this calendar, putting it on your wall, and every single week, that bubble is filled in. That black mark is marking it off forever. Have something to show, not just for your years,

• 8:44Ryan Holiday?

  but for every single dot that you filled in, that you really lived that week, that you made something of it. You can check it out at dailystoic.com/mmcalendar.