Turn These Things Over | How 10 Years Of Studying Stoicism Changed Ryan Holiday's Life

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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?

  Turn these things over. It was in those dark moments that he drew on them. It was in the happy moments that he drew on them, too. It was in the ordinary, in the everyday, that Marcus Aurelius took a few moments to read back over the writings of the Stoics, took time to write them down and rewrite them in his own way in the pages of what would become meditations. And it is, of course, this tradition that we continue all these thousands of years later, reading and riffing, rewriting his words in our own journals. We turn to them for edification, for inspiration, for reminders of what we need to know. "Every day and night, keep thoughts like these at hand," Epictetus commanded. "Write them, read them aloud, talk to yourself and others about them."

• 1:14Ryan Holiday?

  It was about the repetition. It was about the process of feeling it come through your fingers or come out your mouth, hearing it from someone else, seeing it written down, returning to it in moments of peace, but also stress and good times and bad, keeping it with you as an advisor and a confidant. It was this that turned Stoicism into muscle memory, let the words become works. "Just as a muscle strengthens with each repetition, so too does the mind when it engages in these spiritual exercises." Marcus knew this. Every time he sat down to write, to reflect, to return to the wisdom that had shaped him, he was not merely contemplating life's lessons, he was training for life itself, for the moments when the storm would come, when the joy would beckon, or when the mundane

• 1:58Ryan Holiday?

  would stretch out before him in long, quiet hours. "By practicing these daily reflections, we build resilience for the unexpected, for the tests we cannot foresee. The small, deliberate acts of journaling, reading, and meditating, these are not just habits, but rituals that fortify the soul and create the steady hand that we reach for." When everything else falters. And this is what we do in the Daily Stoic Journal. I do the Daily Stoic Journal every night. I know that might be a little weird because I, I wrote it. But the questions, they help me. I want every year to be thinking about the same things on the same day. There's daily prompts, weekly meditations, and if you're trying to start a meditation practice this year, this is the time. If you want to bring Stoicism into your life, this is a way.

• 2:43Ryan Holiday?

  You can check out the Daily Stoic Journal. I'll link to that in today's store notes. And if you want me to sign your copy, I can do that. And we've got this amazing leather cover for it that I have. I've been, this is my, my third year that I've been slotting in a new journal into that leather cover in the front. It's got two important words you have to do to have a good journaling practice, and that is make time. Make time for your journaling. Make time for Stoicism. Turn these thoughts over in your mind. I'll link to that in today's show notes.

• 3:19Ryan Holiday?

  What could they possibly teach us? It seems crazy that the Emperor of Rome, a lowly slave, a playwright, that these men from 2,000 years ago, different continent, in a different country, in a different time, in a totally different society and world, could teach us anything about modern life. But in fact, they could not only teach us something, they can teach us the most essential lessons that there are. They, they, they can be for us a guide to the good life. I want to talk about Marcus Aurelius today. I'm talking about Seneca today, and I want to talk about Epictetus today. Three figures from the distant past in the Roman Empire that can teach us today how to thrive, how to be happy, how to realize our potential, and, and how to deal with what life throws at us, because it threw a lot at them. And let's get into it.

• 4:10Ryan Holiday?

  I was maybe 19, 20 years old when this book came to me. This is the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. And again, it's an incredible historical document. The most powerful man in the world was writing notes to himself in the midnight dimness of his palace, in his tent, on the front lines, leading the Roman army in battle, or sometimes, as he was spotted to do, in the Colosseum as the gladiatorial games raged on below. Marcus Aurelius was sitting down and writing notes to himself about how to be better. Specifically, he was keeping meditations. This is one of the most valuable lessons from him. He was taking care not to be Caesarified, not to be dyed purple, not to be changed by being the emperor of Rome. And all of us can be changed by the circumstances we're in.

• 4:51Ryan Holiday?

  Extreme success, extreme adversity, we can be changed by the circumstances we're in. But Marcus Aurelius wasn't changed because the fact that he had unlimited power didn't alter the fact that philosophy had power over himself. He said, "I'm fighting to be the person that philosophy tried to make me." And who was that person? What does Marcus Aurelius teach us? Marcus Aurelius teaches us to live with courage, self-discipline, justice, and wisdom. Those are the four virtues of Stoicism that Marcus Aurelius talks about over and over and over again. I have them tattooed on my wrist here as a reminder. He says, "What an extraordinary thing indeed." He said, "If you ever find anything better than courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom, it must be even more amazing." And he said this really powerful thing. He said, "So what if they lie about you? If they curse you? If they stab you with knives?"

• 5:35Ryan Holiday?

  He said, "What could possibly happen to you in life that would prevent you from acting with courage and justice and discipline and wisdom? Nothing." So that's the core teaching from Marcus Aurelius, that everything is an opportunity to practice virtue. His famous quote that I wrote a book about, "The obstacle is the way," right? What is he saying? He's saying that every situation we face in life is an opportunity to practice one of those virtues. That's the most valuable teaching from Marcus Aurelius. Every situation is an opportunity for excellence. You're suddenly made king? Now you have to be excellent. You have to be restrained. You have to be disciplined. You have to be good. You have to be decent. Suddenly, you're thrown in prison on trumped-up charges. There's a plague. There's an economic crisis. Also, opportunities for virtue, for courage, for wisdom, for justice. That's the

• 6:17Ryan Holiday?

  The core teaching that Marcus Aurelius gives us that that so hit me when I was just a kid, that virtue is this thing that we're aspiring to towards that erate excellence, this thing we all want and need to embody. Everything we face in life is an opportunity to practice that. And look, when this hit me as a teenager, as a person just entering my twenties, I just didn't know that that's what philosophy was about. I thought philosophy was abstract. I thought philosophy was theoretical. I thought it was these arcane questions. But the idea that philosophy is something we're fighting to live up to, that it's an ideal, it's a tradition. I think that's a really powerful thing that I've taken from Marcus Aurelius. And the personal, the personalness with which Marcus is writing, the way he's holding himself accountable. You know, he famously talks about, okay, you're waking up in the morning and you want to stay in bed. And he goes, yeah, but what is your duty demand?

• 7:03Ryan Holiday?

  Why you want to huddle under the covers and stay warm? That's not what you were put here to do. You know, he says, love the discipline you know, and let it support you. It's a beautiful book. There's never been anything like it. No one will ever talk to you as directly, as honestly and as vulnerably as Marcus Aurelius does in Meditations, which is something I actually learned from him as a writer. I would say stylistically, Marcus Aurelius changed my life. And yet, here you have a guy who's being incredibly specific, who's saying that posthumous fame doesn't matter, that, uh, that, that being remembered by history doesn't matter. And yet here he made something that's incredibly universal and timeless. The timeliness of it makes it timeless. The personalness of it makes it universal. The not caring about impressing people or trends or fads or sales, just making something that works, that's why it works.

• 7:48Ryan Holiday?

  That's why it lasts and endures. But if Marcus Aurelius is such an amazing writer and thinker, why don't we have a bunch more books from him? Well, that's because meditation ends with Marcus Aurelius ending. It ends with his death. He dies of the plague in the year 180 AD. As he says in the final pages, and we can imagine him facing death courageously. Of course, we all want to live longer. He says, but I've only gotten through three acts, right? He's seen his life as a play. He says, yes, this will be a drama in three acts. The length fixed by the power that directed your creation and now directs your dissolution, neither was yours to determine. And then he says, so make your exit with grace, the same grace shown to you. Marcus Aurelius wasn't a pen and ink philosopher. He wasn't on the sidelines. He didn't live in the ivory tower. He was a man of action. He wasn't what they would call a pen and ink philosopher.

• 8:31Ryan Holiday?

  He was leading Rome through a plague and eventually he succumbed to that plague. And so too did the chance of him writing any other books. But Meditations, it does survive so it this is my edition that you can see it's taped here. It's falling apart. It's got a million notes. There's probably notes on every single page of this book because I've gone through it over and over and over and over again. And that's the wonderful thing about Marcus Serelius is that you bring something to him and you take something new out each time. The poet Heraclitus talks about, we never step in the same river twice. You're never the same person going into this book or coming out of it, even though it remains the same, even though it hasn't been touched in 18 plus centuries. Marcus Serelius is there. He's a resource. He's a leader. He's an inspiration. If you haven't let him change your life, you're missing out.

• 9:17Ryan Holiday?

  He was a very famous writer in his own time. So famous that there is a line from one of Seneca's plays, entombed in graffiti on a wall at Pompeii. So he wasn't this obscure, unknown philosopher. In fact, he was known not just as Rome's greatest playwright, but he was Rome's most powerful political broker. He'd had this long storied, complicated career at the top of Roman politics. So Seneca, like all the great Stoics, was not a pen and ink. He was a thinker, but he was also a doer. And he can teach us a lot. His interesting life can teach us a lot. One of Seneca's famous essays is on the shortness of life. And he says, look, life isn't too short. It's that we waste a lot of it. And he said, even people who live a long time, their big problem that all they have to show for it is a number of years.

• 10:02Ryan Holiday?

  Seneca was in the room where it happened. He was in the arena. He wasn't always perfect. Some people thought he was a massive hypocrite. But what you can't argue is that Seneca wasn't involved in the great moments of his time. It's also interesting to think Seneca is born in a province of the Roman Empire. He becomes a wildly popular philosopher in his own time. And then is put to death at the hands of the Roman state. This should be springing to mind to you, the life of another famous philosopher who was born the exact same year as Seneca. I'm talking here about Jesus. And they both die tragically, heroically, magnificently, you might say. So Seneca has a lot to teach us. First off, about the shortness of life, but he also writes a series of letters. That's Seneca's letters. It's a series of essays. He writes a fantastic essay on anger. He writes a fascinating essay on tranquility.

• 10:43Ryan Holiday?

  And he writes a number of consolations, these notes to people who are grieving about how to work themselves through their grief. My favorite essay from Seneca is his one about tranquility. And he has this word that I think about all the time. Seneca said the Greek word for the kind of tranquility he's after is this word euthymia. And he said euthymia is a sense of the path that you're on in life. And he said, the ability, the strength, the confidence, the self-awareness to not be distracted by the paths that crisscross yours. He said, especially from those who are hopelessly lost. And if we can cultivate, if all we take from Seneca is this sense of euthymia, a sense of why we're here, what we're supposed to be doing, what's important, what's in our control. I mean, that is a massive philosophical contribution and a massive breakthrough.

• 11:25Ryan Holiday?

  I think about this as a writer, I'm writing my book, I'm in the Ryan Holiday industry, right? What other people are doing, the success they're having, the things they're saying about me, the trends of the moment, right? None of this pertains to me. None of it should change what I need to wake up and do today. And this is true, not just professionally, but personally. It's when we're keeping up with the Joneses, it's when we're comparing ourselves to other people. This is when we steal joy from ourselves. This is when we take our eye off the ball. I think what struck me so much about Seneca when I read him, this is the first book I read, Seneca's letters. You just, you have a friend talking to a friend. And he defines philosophy so excessively. He says, how do I know I'm making progress as a philosopher? He said, I know because I'm becoming a better friend to myself.

• 12:03Ryan Holiday?

  So if you think of Stoicism as this stern philosophy, this philosophy that sucks the joy out of it, that's hard, that whips yourself, that is constantly taking stuff from you, you're missing it. Seneca of all the Stoics strikes me as the happiest, he's the most epicurean, I would think. In fact, that's something else we can take from Seneca. How liberally he quotes Epicurus, his ostensible rival. Seneca said, I'll quote a bad author if the line is good. He says, I want to read like a spy in the enemy's camp. Seneca loved life, he loved ideas, he loved thinking, he loved helping people. He would write to his friend Lucilius, he said, look, let's have this exchange. I'll send you something every day, you send me something every day. Let's try to find something every single day that makes us a little bit stronger, a little bit wiser, that fortifies us against death or adversity. That's the path to wisdom. And that's kind of what I built the day.

• 12:47Ryan Holiday?

  Really stoic around. That's how I built my own philosophical practice. I don't need magical enormous epiphanies. I don't need to do these huge deep dives. Of course, I can also have those things. If I can find one thing a day, that's awesome. And Seneca reminds us that we should linger on the works of these master thinkers, go over them over and over and over again. So my copy of Seneca is well read. My copy of Marcus Aurelius is well read. You gotta digest these works, let them wash over you, come to them time and time again. Seneca reminds us that there are temptations out there. And he is, I think, corrupted by being in Nero's service. He falls short of his ideals. He's an embodiment of that Upton Sinclair line about it's hard to get someone to understand something that their salary depends on them not understanding. Other Stoics who were more removed from Nero's service saw more clearly what a threat he was,

• 13:32Ryan Holiday?

  saw the corruptive power of it. Epictetus being one, Thrasse being another. Seneca flattered himself. He told himself he was making a positive difference, that he was the adult in the room. You know, Seneca shows us how we can fall short of our ideals. But he talks about this too. It's good to have ideals. It's good to fall short of them. He said, it's certainly better than the alternative of not aspiring, not having high standards. So Seneca, the life teaches us something. And Seneca, the writer teaches us even more. And if you haven't availed yourself of Seneca, you absolutely must. This is just a very surface level, hopefully tease, and you'll deep dive into on the shortness of life. You'll read all of his letters. This is just a short collection of them. His many, many essays and his consolations. One of the greatest thinkers to ever live, and he's someone you need to be familiar with.

• 14:18Ryan Holiday?

  It's one of the most remarkable pairings in all of human history. The only analog I can think of is, is the time that Abraham Lincoln invited Frederick Douglass to a dinner at the White House. But the idea that Marcus Aurelius, the most powerful man in Rome, the emperor, his favorite philosopher, would be a slave named Epictetus. And how does Marcus Aurelius get introduced to Epictetus? The same way that many of us in the thousands of years since have been introduced to him. Marcus Aurelius credits his beloved philosophy teacher, Risticus. He says, he thanks him for everything that he gave him. He says, for teaching me to read attentively, to not be satisfied with just getting the gist of things. And then he says, and for introducing me to Epictetus's lectures and loaning me his own copy. Almost 2,000 years ago, Rusticus says, hey, you gotta check out this guy Epictetus.

• 15:02Ryan Holiday?

  And Rusticus may have, in fact, studied under himself. Epictetus had been banished from Rome along with all the philosophers a generation or so before. And he sets up shop as this influential teacher and thinker. And that's how it comes to Marcus Aurelius, the philosopher king. Epictetus lives in the time of Seneca. He was in the same court. He would have seen Nero's administration from a very different angle. And this is something very powerful that we get from Epictetus. Epictetus doesn't have control of his body, doesn't have control of his wages or his freedom. And yet he looks around in Nero's service and he sees these very rich people who are ambitious, who are afraid, who are sycophants, who are addicted to pleasure. And he realizes that he might be freer than them, right?

• 15:47Ryan Holiday?

  That he sees a man sucking up to Nero's cobbler, trying to curry favor with the emperor by being overly complimentary to the man who makes his sandals. And Epictetus realizes that this guy is the real slave. Both of them are. He says, "You make yourself a slave to slaves." And so Epictetus has this very interesting understanding of what freedom is. For him, freedom is not a legal status. For him, freedom is how much control you have over your urges, over your decisions, over your actions, within the confines of your reality, right? That the emperor may be less free than Epictetus. Epictetus understands that people who are whipsawed by their emotions, by their anxieties, by their fears, by their desires, by their ambitions, are not free. And so he has this definition then of freedom.

• 16:31Ryan Holiday?

  He says, "Look, there are some things that are up to us, there are some things that are not up to us. This is the essence of Stoic philosophy, this dichotomy of control. And that comes to us from Epictetus. The Serenity Prayer, if you've ever heard it, ultimately traces its way back to this Greek slave." Epictetus eventually did become free and became a wonderful teacher of philosophy. He himself was instructed by a great Stoic named Musonius Rufus. And Musonius Rufus didn't have a cushy life either. He'd been exiled four times. So it's from Epictetus we really get the idea of Stoicism as a philosophy of resilience, of being able to look at whatever life throws at you, Epictetus says, and go, "This is what I trained for." And in fact, to see the opposite. And difficulties of life as something that life is throwing at you to train with. He says that when you face something difficult, when something doesn't go the way that you want it to go,

• 17:15Ryan Holiday?

  you say to yourself, life has spared me with a strong sparring partner. He says, this is how I become Olympic class material. And Epictetus becomes Olympic class as a result of what he goes through, which is not just slavery, but torture. He walks with a limp for the rest of his life because he'd been tortured by his master. So Epictetus knew difficulty, he knew pain, he knew loss, he knew injustice. And yet, what you hear in his lectures, what you see in his thinking, is a guy who's not phased by it, a guy who's certainly bowed and disabled by it, but not broken by it. No one could touch the spirit inside of him, the strength inside of him. And this is why Admiral Stockdale, who would spend seven years in the Hanoi Hilton, the prisoner of war in Vietnam, so resonates with Epictetus's writings

• 17:56Ryan Holiday?

  and how it guided him and those fellow prisoners through that immense gauntlet that is this human experience. So from Epictetus, we learn how to deal with adversity and obstacles and difficulty. We learn to focus on what's in our control. We learn to make the best of the situation that we're in. He says, most of all, we learn that philosophy is not something you talk about, that you read about. It's something you do. Says, don't talk about your philosophy, embody it. He says, a weightlifter doesn't show you their shoulders, they show you what they can lift. And that's what Stoicism was to him, a thing that helps you lift more, that helps you handle more, that makes you stronger, more adept, more skilled. He said, we're like an athlete. We don't label throws, good or bad, we catch it and throw it back. Life is this game and our job is to hit it back, to throw it back, to catch it. And everything's a catchable ball in its, its own way.

• 18:41Ryan Holiday?

  And Epictetus didn't just talk this talk, he walked this walk. Essentially, no one else ever has. And that's why it's so resonated with Marcus realist, because although Epictetus is on the very other end of the sociological spectrum, both he and Marcus are constrained. Both of them are dealing with something that they didn't choose. Both of them have a heavy burden on their shoulders. For Marcus, it's extreme success, for Epictetus, it's extreme adversity. But they both saw this as a sparring partner. They both saw this as an opportunity to step up and be great. And that's how we have to think of Stoicism, what we, it should teach us. And there's an exercise that Marcus learns from Epictetus that he quotes specifically in his meditations. He says, when you tuck your child in at night, say to yourself, They will not make it till the morning. Now, this wasn't because both Seneca, this wasn't because both Epictetus and Marcius didn't care about their children. They were practicing the Stoic art of memento mori.

• 19:26Ryan Holiday?

  That life is short, that we could go at any moment. And they were reminding themselves of this specifically with their family because we can't take them for granted. He says, why, he's basically saying, why are you rushing through this? Why are you not being present? And so because of the adversity that he went through, because of how fragile he must have seen life as, Epictetus gives Marcus Aurelius, and thus us centuries later, a reminder to not take a minute for granted, to know that we could go at any moment, to live life that we have in whatever form we have it, that memento mori, life is very short. How much longer are you going to wait? Epictetus says, till you demand the best of yourself. That's what we can take, not just from Epictetus, but from all of the Stoics. And we're lucky that he had a student named Arian, who records these lectures that survives to us. That's known as the discourses.

• 20:09Ryan Holiday?

  And then it's shortened into a thing called the incoridion, which just means a handbook. Actually, there's a weapon connotation there, that it's something you have for self-defense. That survives to us in these two forms. And that's what ultimately made its way from Epictetus to Rusticus to Marcus Aurelius, and now hopefully to you. Somebody press Epictetus on me when I was 20 years old. And now I am pressing Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius and Seneca on you.