The Beautiful Language Of Marcus’s Philosophy | Ask DS

There are so many beautiful passages in Meditations.“The way loaves of bread split open on top in the oven,” Marcus Aurelius writes in Book 3, “the ridges are just by-products of the baking, and yet pleasing, somehow: they rouse our appetite without our knowing why.” His poetic observation of the way stalks of wheat bend under their own weight. His reflection on the way things in life are often made beautiful by their imperfections.---And in today's Ask Daily Stoic, Ryan speaks and answers questions on zooming out for better perspective when annualizing our cuurent society opposed to the past, and turning trials into opportunities with over 1,600 Agents from Keller Williams in attendance. 📕 You can learn more about the tragedy and triumphs of Marcus Aurelius’ life as well as those of Cicero’s in Lives of the Stoics: The Art of Living from Zeno to Marcus Aurelius.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check 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 Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. While on Thursdays, we not only read the daily meditation, but we answer some questions from listeners and fellow Stoics who are trying to apply this philosophy just as you are. Some of these come from my talks. Some of these come from Zoom sessions that we do with Daily Stoic Life members or as part of the challenges. Some of them are from interactions I have on the street when there happened to be someone there recording. But thank you for listening, and we hope this is of use to you.

• 0:44Ryan Holiday?

  The Beautiful Language of Marcus's Philosophy. There are so many beautiful passages in Meditations. "The way loaves of bread split open at the top of the oven," Marcus writes in Book Three. "The ridges are just a byproduct of baking," he says, "and yet pleasing somehow, they rouse our appetite without our knowing why." His poetic observation on the way stalks of wheat bend over under their own weight, his reflection on the way things in life are often made beautiful by their imperfections. It's also crazy to think he was writing in his non-native tongue to himself, never expecting anyone would see it. "In Rome, the Romans spoke Latin, but Greek was the language of philosophy," Gregory Hayes tells us

• 1:27Ryan Holiday?

  in his introduction of his translation of Meditations. So in Meditations, Marcus was writing to himself in Greek. There he was, in his private journal, challenging himself to write in a more difficult language and doing so in such a beautiful way that it endures all these centuries later. It's a simple reminder we want you to spend some time with this week. As we've said before, if you're gonna do something, do it beautifully.

• 1:56Ryan Holiday?

  And I still have, I was going through it just the other day for a talk I was doing. I still have my edition of Meditations that I bought in 2006 from Amazon, the Gregory Hayes translation. And it's beautiful to me, but it's certainly showing the wastes and wear of time. It's Scotch taped together. So one of the things we did last year is we reached out to Gregory Hayes, we acquired the rights to it, and we made our own beautiful edition of it. It's leather, it has this cool box, it's got gilt-edged pages, it's got a ribbon in it. I tweaked the font size a little bit. I added a cool biography of Marcus in

• 2:34Ryan Holiday?

  the back. Bunch of awesome stuff. We print it in the UK. And we print it in this old factory in the UK, and it comes with this cool box. Bunch of awesome stuff. It makes a great gift. Also is now the edition I have on my nightstand, so I don't ruin the old one. But if you haven't read Meditations, the Hayes translation is my favorite, as I've said many times. And this is my favorite of the Hayes translations. And you can grab it in the Daily Stoic store. I'll link to it in today's show notes, or you can just go to dailystoic.com/meditations.

• 3:26Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another Thursday episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. In today's episode, we're bringing you those Q and As every day where people ask me questions about Stoicism. This was one I did back in February at the Anaheim Convention Center. The nice folks at Keller Williams had me do a talk. So I was talking to a bunch of real estate agents and people in the real estate industry. I'm pretty sure this was on stage. It was kind of a weird talk. Gary Keller, who's an awesome dude, has been very nice to me. He and Jay Papazan and someone else from their group, they sat onstage the whole time I gave the talk. I don't know if that was a glitch or a part of pressuring you to

• 4:09Ryan Holiday?

  really step up and perform, but I could see it, sort of see them in my periphery the whole time I was giving them the speech. Then as soon as I stopped, we went right into a Q and A. So I will bring you that now, talking writing, journaling, Stoicism, and overcoming obstacles. I was lucky enough, I did another talk with Keller Williams here at ACL Live. Just more recently, I'll bring you the Q and A and the, the audio of that at some point. But in the meantime, thanks again to Keller Williams for having me out, and I hope you can enjoy this Q and A.

• 4:46Speaker 01

  I started thinking about obstacles that we've all been through.

• 4:49Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 4:49Speaker 01

  In this industry. And strangely, they all start with the I. Like, we had an infectious disease, right?

• 4:55Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 4:55Speaker 01

  We shut down the world. We had an insurrection. We had an invasion from, you know, Russia to the other. We had an ice storm here in Texas. Now we have an inferno in Texas.

• 5:04Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, yes. I'm not liking this.

• 5:07Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, you're a student of history.

• 5:09Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 5:09Speaker 01

  Is it my imagination, or has every generation said, it's never, no one's ever had it so bad?

• 5:16Ryan Holiday?

  What is, it is funny, right? I'm sure we've all heard this over the last couple of years. People go, when are things going to go back to normal? But I think anyone that has studied history knows that this is very, very normal. I mean, we had an infection, we had an influenza epidemic, exactly 100 years before COVID, right? So these things have happened before. And I think it's worth remembering that things that have never happened before also happen all the time, right? And, and so, history is, you think of the, the things that happened in someone like Queen Elizabeth's life. Like, there was no normal. There was world wars, and there was depressions, and there was declines and falls. There was good times, bad times. That's what life is. And so I think if we If we zoom out, we get some perspective in our own lives and in history.

• 6:00Ryan Holiday?

  And then also, if we, one of the things I've tried to remind myself the last couple of years is like, this is what his, living through history feels like, right? We, we look back on history, we talk to our grandparents and we kind of think that it was all fun or easy or there's just this footnote, but it's like, they didn't know when the Great Depression would end, right? They didn't know when World War II would end. They were living in the present, in the past. And, and that that's where we're in now, but we also have the benefit of looking at the past and going, okay, none of these things last forever, there are, there do tend to be cycles. And so I think that perspective is really key. Sometimes you gotta zoom way in, sometimes you zoom way out. But the point is to not be too consumed, too overwhelmed by the moment that you're in.

• 6:43Speaker 01

  Love it. I, I feel like if it were an absurdly like succession of things, like you're bringing Stoicism back to the world was perfect timing. Like, I know timing counts you in some ways.

• 6:55Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 6:56Speaker 01

  The world did need this on some level.

• 6:58Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, but I think, you know, Marcus Aurelius is writing during the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. He's writing during, like, people have always turned, when things are good, when things are easy, right? People are just like, oh, I'll wing it, I'll be fine. But it's, it's when things go sideways that we go, hmm. You know, if only someone had thought about this or been through this, can I learn from them? And so, you know, it's obviously been exciting and interesting to watch the sort of books have this popular, would I trade it? You know, would I trade for this? Is it trade worthwhile? Certainly not, but, uh, you know, I do like the idea that, you know, when things fall apart, people turn to these sort of tried and true ideas.

• 7:36Speaker 01

  You mentioned, you actually juxtaposed it here, Elon Musk and Queen Elizabeth.

• 7:41Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 7:42Speaker 01

  And it occurred to me, like, these are business people.

• 7:44Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 7:46Speaker 01

  You have Elon Musk that doesn't appear to be living all of these virtues all the time.

• 7:51Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 7:51Speaker 01

  But that hasn't stopped him from being wildly successful. So when, so it's not conditional.

• 7:57Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 7:57Speaker 01

  Success is not conditional on adopting this. But what do you get in exchange for adopting this?

• 8:03Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I think, when I think about this with ego, right? So ego is the enemy. It's not that egotistical people are never successful. Egotistical people are successful all the time. It's that when you get up close and personal with these folks, you go, ugh, I don't know if that was worth it. Right? I don't know if I would trade with that person. Right? And so when I look at someone like Elon, I don't go, oh, look at what a loser this guy is. Look at how he's never done anything. I mean, he's an incredible entrepreneur, a brilliant guy, incredibly successful. Does it seem like he's having a good time? No, to me, it seems, it looks like, more like a compulsion, right? And it looks like someone who's sort of shooting themselves in the foot, or worse, quite often. And then I go, and what is the cost of that?

• 8:45Ryan Holiday?

  Not just to his family, to his friends, to his employees, but where is that holding him back? Right? We only, even someone who's really efficient, really hardworking, there's only so many hours in the day. You only have so much energy. You know, if you are being needlessly deposed in multiple lawsuits, that's not a good use of your time, even if you end up being vindicated in these lawsuits, right? So I think, you know, people who are disciplined manage to avoid trouble. You know, they manage to avoid needless conflict because they're secure in themselves and they are in command of themselves and they go, that looks like trouble, I'm gonna go over here.

• 9:19Speaker 01

  They avoid the kind of spirals that a lot of people get in.

• 9:22Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 9:23Speaker 01

  When trouble's troubles, we're not gonna avoid trouble any other.

• 9:24Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 9:25Speaker 01

  That how we respond to it will allow us not to magnify it and make it worse.

• 9:30Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, it's that expression like, don't go borrowing trouble. You know, like, you got enough on your plate already. You're seeking out things, you know? And, and by the way, anyone who's spent much time on Twitter, you never feel good getting in these arguments with random strangers, right? You feel worse, your, you know, your hormones spike, like, you are stressing yourself. You're, you get this fight or flight reflex without the benefit of, you know, like, training and fighting. You know, it's just this sort of needless excretion of adrenaline that I think wears you down. And, and it's just not.

• 10:06Ryan Holiday?

  Success should not be the freedom to get in a lot of stuff.

• 10:09Speaker 01

  We don't need to go to Twitter for that.

• 10:10Ryan Holiday?

  Exactly, yes.

• 10:11Speaker 01

  So make it practical. I know it's had this, this is a new crowd. Make it practical. If I, if I want to have a better command, right? I want to not be captive to my fears. I don't want to be captive to my emotions. We all are entitled to them, but how we actually respond.

• 10:26Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 10:27Speaker 01

  What's the first step?

• 10:28Ryan Holiday?

  I mean, you're holding, you're holding a journal there. I think journals are a great place to work some of this stuff out, right? There's the moment you're overwhelmed by it, you're frustrated by it, you're scared by it. And then instead of just dumping that out in an email or, you know, freaking out or, you know, hitting the eject button, you, you work through it on paper. This is why, you know, pros and cons lists are so great. But also, you know, we talked about the physical practice. I think walks are magical. You know, it's the, it's the ability to sort of step back and go, here's what I think I should do, but should I actually do that? Here's what everyone else wants me to do. Here's what I normally do. And to go, I'm going to take a beat, I'm going to think. This is what Tim, I think, was talking about is you get knocked down,

• 11:12Ryan Holiday?

  you have this impulse to immediately jump back up. That is a, that is a positive character trait that is great. But you might also just get punched in the face again for no reason, right? If you go, hey, if I back up here, or how can I do it differently? How can I rest for two seconds, right? But I think people are in great command of themselves. They use these opportunities to think and reflect and practice. And to just be sort of conscious of what you're doing.

• 11:40Speaker 01

  A little bit of time.

• 11:41Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 11:42Speaker 01

  Taking a beat is the word you said. So whether it's 20 seconds or 30 seconds, I had E.L. Doctorow was my thesis advisor.

• 11:49Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 11:49Speaker 01

  He saw me smoking and he said, you know how I quit smoking? Every time I wanted a cigarette, I just watched the second hand on my watch. And 30 seconds later, I didn't need a cigarette.

• 11:58Ryan Holiday?

  I love that.

• 11:58Speaker 01

  So a little bit of time, whether in a journal, whatever, get up, walk around, and maybe we don't get, have to respond to the world.

• 12:04Ryan Holiday?

  And I think when I look back at mistakes I've made or the things I regret. In retrospect, I had more time to think about it than I allowed myself. And that it... Look, there are the things you do that look like they should have worked. You planned it out, and it just didn't go your way. And then there's the things where, I'm sure you guys see this with your clients all the time, right? It's like, "We gotta respond tonight." And it's like, "Well, the contract says you have 24 hours." Like, why don't you use all 23 hours and 59 minutes of that?