They Don’t Want You To Know This | The Stoics Guide To Becoming Wealthy

Those shoes you’re wearing were likely made in a sweatshop by a child in horrendous labor conditions. That luxury handbag is a few dollars worth of leather and a fortune in deceptive advertising and branding. Those two politicians with radically different agendas are ladder-climbing friends behind the scenes, with the same corporate donors. Those big tough rappers whose beef you’re following are two poets laughing all the way to the bank. That fancy car will not only lose half its value when you drive it off the lot…but many of the cars on that same lot share the same chassis, were made in the same factories, and cost a lot less. Those songs were written by teams of songwriters, the pop star given public credit to preserve their ‘authenticity.’ That ripped actor is on steroids, that beautiful actress had plastic surgery and her images are photoshopped…and by the way, both of them are thrice married for a reason. This list–not a conclusive one by a long shot–is not a morning dose of nihilism. It is, however, an exercise that Marcus Aurelius tried to practice in his own way.---And in today's Daily Stoic video excerpt, Ryan explains how and why the foundational concepts and daily practices of Stoicism were designed to teach people how to thrive, succeed, and live a rich, happy life. You can watch the video on the Daily Stoic YouTube channel.🎓 Sign up for The Wealthy Stoic: A Daily Stoic Guide To Being Rich, Free, and Happy - https://www.thewealthystoic.com/✉️ 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.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  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.

• 0:30Speaker 00

  They don't want you to know this. Those shoes you're wearing were likely made in a sweatshop by a child in horrendous labor conditions. That luxury handbags is a few dollars' worth of leather and a fortune in deceptive advertising and branding. Those two politicians with radically different agendas are ladder-climbing friends behind the scenes with the same corporate donors. Those big, tough rappers whose beef you're following are two poets laughing all the way to the bank. That fancy car will not only lose half its value when you drive it off the lot, but many of the cars in the same lot share the same chassis, were made in the same factories, and cost a lot less. Those songs were written by teams of songwriters. The pop star given public credit to preserve their authenticity. That ripped actor is on steroids.

• 1:15Speaker 00

  That beautiful actress had plastic surgery and her images are photoshopped. And by the way, both of them are thrice married for a reason. This list, not a conclusive one by a long shot, is not a morning dose of nihilism. It is, however, an exercise that Marcus Aurelius tried to practice in his own way. "This expensive wine," he noted, "was just rotten grapes." "This sumptuous dish was actually a dead pig." "The brilliant purple of the emperor's cloak was dyed with shellfish blood made by miserable slaves." What Marcus was doing, what we can do, is strip things of the legend that encrust them. He was using the power of his mind to rip the polish off, to remove the branding, to take things down to their studs. So he could see what was really happening,

• 1:59Speaker 00

  that he was deceived, puffed up, tempted. Materialism, injustice, our lower urges, these things depend on myth and legend and marketing. They depend on a false picture and inflated sense. To act rationally, to know what matters, to do the right thing, to remain self-contained, we need to tear that down. We need to remind ourselves what things are and what they're made of.

• 2:33Ryan Holiday?

  It's just a fact that most of the Stoics were wealthy. I'm not saying that Stoicism is a get-rich-quick scheme, and that studying Stoicism will make you rich. But I am saying that the Stoics were literally wealthy, but more importantly, they were figuratively wealthy. They understood the value of things. Their needs were met because those needs were often small, because they knew what was to be prized and what shouldn't be prized. And whether they were wealthy like Seneca or poor like Epictetus, they lived wealthy lives because they knew what enough was. They felt empowered that they could provide for themselves and their families. They had purpose and meaning, and they valued the right things. And that's what we're going to talk about in today's episode. I'm Ryan Holiday.

• 3:18Ryan Holiday?

  I've written these books about Stoic philosophy. I've been lucky enough to talk about it to the NBA and the NFL, sitting senators and special forces leaders. And I'm also an entrepreneur and a business owner. As a writer, I obviously try to maximize the value I can earn from my work while still in tune with my principles and values. And so in today's episode, that's what I want to talk about. How to become a wealthy Stoic in every sense of that word, figuratively as well as literally. So here are some Stoic lessons on true wealth.

• 3:50Ryan Holiday?

  Three more thoughts from the Stoics about money. Number one, if the money isn't giving you more freedom, what good is the money, right? Seneca talks about how time is our most precious resource, but we waste it. We monitor our money that we waste our time, right? Time is money. Time is the most important asset, not money. Number two, there are a lot of dumb, rich people out there. If money is important to you, you should go spend some time about rich people. There's a story about Musonius Rufus, who gave this awful, obnoxious man in Rome some money. And people said, "Why would you do that?" And he said, "Isn't money exactly what he deserves?" And number three, real wealth is the ability to be generous and to be helpful. Marcus Ruseles in Meditations says, "I count myself fortunate because I never needed to ask anyone for favors.

• 4:33Ryan Holiday?

  And whenever anyone asked me for favors, I could afford to be generous." Money is a tool. It should be getting you freedom. It should be making you better, not worse as a person. And three, it should allow you to be more generous, more magnanimous, more in service of the common good. That's a rich life, according to the Stoics.

• 4:55Ryan Holiday?

  There's an amazing story about Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller, who wrote Catch 22 and Slaughterhouse-Five. They're at the party of this billionaire. And Vonnegut is teasing Heller, and he says, "This billionaire, whose house we're at, he made more money this week than your book will make in its entire life." Heller says, "But I have something that he doesn't have." Vonnegut says, "What's that?" Heller says, "I have some idea of what enough is." He says, "I have enough." This idea of enough is so powerful. Seneca, who quotes Epicureus, says, "If you don't regard what you have as enough, you will never be happy, even if you rule the entire world." Right? Enough is never enough, the Epicureans and the Stoics say, for the person who enough is too little. If you can get to a place of enough, "What I have is good, everything else is extra, then everything you get is a bonus, and the rest of your life is amazing."

• 5:40Ryan Holiday?

  But if you tell yourself, "You'll only be happy if, I'll feel better when," you'll never get there. The finish line will move, I promise you. Enough is enough.

• 5:51Ryan Holiday?

  It always takes longer than you think it's gonna take. That's Hofstadter's Law. In fact, Hofstadter's Law says, "It always takes longer than you think, even when you take Hofstadter's Law into account." And so, we had this idea to open the bookstore in the fall of 2019. We got really serious about it in the late winter, early spring of 2020. And we thought, maybe we'd be ready by the summer of 2020. And then there was a pandemic, and that pushed us a full year. Then it took many, many months to get up and running. And then, every time we thought the pandemic was over and things were about to go back to normal, you know, you were there, it never went back to normal. And the idea is, if you think, starting a business, doing anything is gonna be easy,

• 6:36Ryan Holiday?

  that it's gonna be straightforward, that it's gonna be clean, like, you're fooling yourself. It always takes longer than you think it's gonna take. I remember when The Obstacle is the Way came out. I thought it would be this bestseller. It took five years to hit the bestseller list. So, I think one of the things you learn, doing a business like this, doing anything, is that you have to be really patient. It's gonna take so much longer than you think it's gonna take. And if you're rushed, if you expect it now, if you can't pass the marshmallow test of delaying gratification and deferring things into the future, you're just gonna get crushed.

• 7:12Ryan Holiday?

  One of the best decisions I ever made was that I didn't quit my job to become a writer. I eventually quit my job to become a writer, but I wrote three books while I had a full-time job. There's this idea that to pursue your dream, you have to go all in, you have to burn the boats behind you. It doesn't always have to go that way. I saw the job as a trust fund that I earned. Of course, it's easier to be a writer if you're independently wealthy, if your parents are picking up the tab for you. That wasn't in the cards for me. The Stoics 2,000 years ago came from rich families. Seneca inherited estates. Their properties were tended to by slaves. That's not in the cards for all of us. So we have to find a way, earn money, that we can then use to invest in ourselves, that we can use to give ourselves runway

• 7:54Ryan Holiday?

  to pursue what we want to pursue. But the decision to keep working and to squeeze the writing time in in the morning, to squeeze it in at night, to use the job as a way to meet people and build relationships, develop my platform, all of that allowed me to build my career slowly. It allowed me to make more long-term decisions. It allowed me to make better creative decisions. When I went to my publisher with the proposal for what became The Obstacles of the Way, they offered me less than half than I got for my first book. Because I had the trust fund, right? I had the salary of the job. I didn't need to think about that. I could bet on myself because I was also working myself. If I had just leapt off the cliff, I wouldn't have had the time. The books wouldn't have had the ability to develop over a long period of time and then be able to work. So that was one of the best financial decisions that I ever made.

• 8:43Ryan Holiday?

  "If you don't take the money, they can't tell you what to do." That's a quote from the famous photographer Bill Cunningham. His point was not that people are out to bribe you, but salaries, status, the fancy things that we aspire to in life, they're great. But they come with them a certain set of obligations or a certain amount of control over them. Cato, one of the famous Stoics, he said that "Nothing is cheap if it is superfluous." If you don't need it, if you don't want it, don't take it. Because in taking it and going after it, you are imprisoning yourself, you are enslaving yourself, and then they and it can tell you what to do.

• 9:23Ryan Holiday?

  Stoicism was designed to help people live what the ancients called the good life. Its daily practices were there to teach people how to thrive, how to succeed, how to live a rich and happy life in any and all circumstances. If that's the kind of life you want, then Stoicism can show you the way. And that's why we've created a new course built around these Stoic ideas called The Wealthy Stoic, A Stoic Guide to Being Rich, Free, and Happy.

• 9:52Ryan Holiday?

  The Stoics have a slightly different definition of wealth. Seneca himself admits this. He says, "Poverty isn't having too little, it's wanting more." Your needs, your lifestyle, your relationship with money and finance, is actually much more important than the balance in your bank account. That's something we talk about in our new course, The Wealthy Stoic, which is a guide to being rich in all senses of the word, but also happy, and most importantly, free. We're going to talk basic finance stuff, we're going to talk elite-level finance stuff. We're also going to talk about mindset, we're going to talk about lifestyle, we're going to talk Stoic strategies to live in a wealthy life, which is more than just money. I'm excited to share this awesome course with you.

• 10:36Ryan Holiday?

  We've been working on it for over a year here at Daily Stoic. We do all sorts of awesome challenges, the New Year, New You, we have our reading challenge, we have our habits challenge. And I think this is going to go into our stable as one of our absolute bests because it helps you do something really important to get financial freedom, but also freedom from your finances. I'd love to have you join us. Join me, I'm a big part of the course. I write all the content, I put it out there, you do live Q and As with me, a bunch of other awesome stuff. And you can sign up right now at dailystoic.com/wealth.

• 11:10Ryan Holiday?

  There's a story about an ancient philosopher who wanted to prove that philosophers were not motivated by and obsessed with money, that they were indifferent to material things. But he didn't want that to come off as sour grapes, meaning that it's not that the philosophers were incapable of making money, it's that they weren't consumed by the need to have a lot of it. And to me... This is the idea of the preferred indifferent for the Stoics. That if making money is something you have the ability to do in your profession, why wouldn't you? Why would you do what you do for less than what it's worth? Right? If you have inherited money or you've earned money in what you do, why wouldn't you want to become astute at investing it, in making it grow? This is the parable of the talents, right?

• 11:54Ryan Holiday?

  How do you take what you have and turn it into something more? So, we shouldn't think of philosophy as being utterly indifferent to money, or that its relationship to money and the wealthy is spiteful. No, a Stoic should figure these things out. That's the discipline of wisdom. A Stoic should be good at saving and investing. That's the discipline of temperance, right? But that doesn't mean your entire life is oriented around obsessed with getting more of it.

• 12:24Ryan Holiday?

  I make my living from my brain, right? I come up with ideas and those turn into books. I make creative stuff like on social media. I make things like these videos. So, I am very exposed to this, right? This is both my asset and my liability. If I fell and hit my head, if I ran out of ideas, all of these would get in the way of me earning my living. So, if you think about the idea of diversification, I try to take the money that I have earned from my creative pursuits, put it into things that are safe, but also don't depend on me actively being involved in them, that don't depend on me being smart on an ongoing basis. So, real estate is a form of this, and private lending, obviously, the stock market, index funds. I want to save as much of the money that I make as possible,

• 13:09Ryan Holiday?

  and then I want to invest it in ways that create income so that, as I did early in my career when I had a day job, I can make creative decisions, I can make lifestyle decisions, I can make decisions and know that if the well runs dry tomorrow, or something happened to me, or I got canceled, or whatever, I have assets and vehicles that earn a reasonable living wage that can support me and my family. And that's what diversification is about. The opposite of this would be like you write about tech, you invest in tech, and then you go work for a tech startup. Right now, you're super exposed. You're all concentrated in one little industry, and that's really vulnerable. The Stoics are, while not afraid of risk, they do try to mitigate and spread risk out, and that's what diversification is really about.

• 13:57Ryan Holiday?

  One of the hardest things for humans to do is admit error, and that's why cutting our losses is so difficult. But Marx really says, like, when someone points out that you've been wrong, when they show you the flaws in your reasoning, they're not insulting you, that doesn't make you an idiot. You're getting new information that allows you to make a new decision and thus improve. And so you have to think about it this way, like, if you picked a stock, or you started working for a company, you invested in something, you got excited about something, you promoted something. You have to realize that what you knew then is different than what you know now. And if what you know now changes the decision you would make then, or it sheds new light on the decision you would have made then, you have to be able to switch. You have to be willing to cut your losses. Don't think of admitting error as something to be ashamed of. It's something you should be proud of, right?

• 14:42Ryan Holiday?

  It shows that you have the ability, as Cicero said, to remain a free agent, to not be wedded because of your identity, because of statements you've made, to not be wedded to the past, to be able to embrace the current moment and the future by changing and adjusting, by selling, by cutting bait, by disavowing something, by walking away, and stop throwing good money after bad. Cut your losses and move on.

• 15:07Ryan Holiday?

  There's a great story about Epictetus. He's in his house one night, and he hears that someone's breaking in. He rushes there, and he sees that a thief has run off with his prized silver lamp. And you might think he's upset, that he feels violated. Instead, Epictetus says, "You can only lose what you have." And the next day, he goes out and he buys a cheaper lamp. He says that having something he was afraid of having stolen, that was on him. So when you think about your possessions, you have to think about the cost of ownership. And often, the cost isn't just the insurance or the upkeep. It's the anxiety, it's the worry, it's the wanting to hold them close so someone doesn't take it. Do you own your possessions, or do your possessions own you? The Stoics wanted to be free, and that's why Seneca says, you know, slavery resides under marble and gold.

• 15:50Ryan Holiday?

  Because often, being rich, being successful, having everything you think you want is actually an incredible burden. It's incredibly stressful, and it's not a reward for hard work at all.

• 16:03Ryan Holiday?

  One of the questions Tim Ferriss asked me, what do you spend your money on? He's like, do you collect baseball cars? Do you have a speedboat? Like, do you have a drug habit? Like, do you like to travel? He's like, what do you spend your money on? And I was like, nothing. You know, I was like, I don't really have anything. And he's like, you should be aware of that when you go out and try to earn money. His point was, if you don't need the money, or even enjoy having the money, make sure you make financial decisions accordingly, right? Like, so many people, they don't care about money. And yet, if you looked at the decisions they made in their life, the primary determining factor was, does this help me make more money?

• 16:41Speaker 02

  Yes. I feel like my wife and I kind of fall into that bucket as well. You know, our income went up substantially with the book, but our spending didn't. And that's fine with me, because what I want more than anything is independence. I want financial independence, just like, so if this all implodes tomorrow, like, we're totally fine, the kids are fine, everything's all good. But there has to be some end to that. At some point, you have to say, okay, like, I'm independent now, and now I can go out and do what I want to do.