It is Not a Fact | 6 Stoic Lessons for Living a Great Life

Instead of mistaking feelings for facts, let’s pause. Let’s get curious. 🎟️DAILY STOIC LIVE https://www.dailystoiclive.com/| Ryan Holiday is coming to a city near you https://www.dailystoiclive.com/! Grab tickets here https://www.dailystoiclive.com/ | https://www.dailystoiclive.com/ 🎙️AD-FREE https://dailystoic.supercast.com/| Support the podcast and go deeper into Stoicism by subscribing toThe Daily Stoic Premium https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ - unlock ad-free listening, early access, and bonus content:https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ 🎥 VIDEO EPISODES https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos| Watch the video episodes onThe Daily Stoic YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos:https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos ✉️ FREE STOIC WISDOM https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail | Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email athttps://dailystoic.com/dailyemail See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

• 0:14Ryan Holiday?

  It's not a fact. It's bad, it's dangerous, it's awful, it's mean. But is it? How quickly we, as the Noah Khan lyric puts it, state a feeling like a fact. We take our initial impression of something, our partial view of an entire event, past, present, future, and decide we know what this is. We no longer get curious about why someone acted the way they did or why something happened the way that it did. We know because we can feel it. We take a strong stance on an issue without taking time to understand what it means, what caused it, who it affects, or its impacts. We immediately jump to a negative conclusion instead of asking ourselves what we might be missing.

• 0:58Ryan Holiday?

  And this is madness, the Stoics remind us, it's misery. Our feelings are not only not facts, most of the time, they're wrong. When we decide our emotional reaction is the truth, curiosity disappears. Humility disappears. Patience disappears. We stop trying to understand. We stop listening. We stop seeing things as they truly are. So instead of mistaking feelings for facts, let's pause. Let's get curious. Let's be humble. Let's be patient. Because the way we feel about something in the moment is rarely, if ever, a fact.

• 1:46Ryan Holiday?

  One of the best stories in all of Stoicism comes at the founding of Stoicism. Zeno, he's this successful merchant. He comes from a long family of merchants, and he suffers a shipwreck and he loses everything. He washes up in Athens. He has nothing. And there he discovers philosophy. That's how Stoicism starts. And so reflecting on this journey, this thing that he never would have wished happening, changing the entire course of his life, and now history, we wouldn't be talking had he not gone through this. He says, "I made a prosperous voyage when I suffered a shipwreck." Meaning, the worst thing that ever happened to him was actually the best thing that ever happened to him. And that's what a Stoic says. We don't control what happens. Bad stuff is going to happen, but we control how we respond to it. We control what we turn it into. And whatever it is, whatever metaphorical shipwreck you're going through, you can make

• 2:30Ryan Holiday?

  it a prosperous voyage if you think about it that way.

• 2:36Ryan Holiday?

  The Stoics have this line, they go like, "If you don't know what port you're sailing towards, no wind is favorable." You have to know where you want to go. And this is really true even for successful people. Like, if you don't know where your stopping point is, what you want your life to look like, now all of a sudden, you're in this wonderful fortunate position where people are like, "Hey, you want to do this? You want to do this? They're offering you this. Do you want to take this amount of money to do this, or more money to do this?" And if you don't know what's important to you, what kind of work you want to do, what you want your life to look like, you end up defaulting to one of two things. What pays most, or what are other people doing? Those are not the worst proxies in the world. It's better than no proxy.

• 3:16Ryan Holiday?

  But you can end up very far from what you actually want, and you'll only know that when you get there. So you have to have a very clear sense of where you're trying to go. Or these things, these opportunities are really chances to get super off track.

• 3:36Ryan Holiday?

  You've got to blow your own nose. To me, that's the core idea of Stoicism. Nobody's coming to save you. Nobody can handle this for you. You're not magically going to get better on your own. Your problems aren't going to solve themselves on their own. You've got to do it. You've got to make the changes. If you want to be beautiful, Epictetus says, "Make beautiful choices. Work on getting better. Focus on getting better. Focus on what you can do today." That's how you solve your problem. Step by step, action by action, as Marcus really said, that's how we improve. Day by day, by making the little choices, the little actions, not by waiting for other people to save us, but by blowing our own nose, getting active in our own rescue.

• 4:24Ryan Holiday?

  You have to be strict with yourself, but tolerant with others. Marcus really struggles with this his whole life. It's why he writes about it in Meditations. He has these exacting high standards. He thinks that the right thing is not just everything, it's the only thing. And yet, he works really hard to remind himself that it's called self-discipline for a reason. It's not a thing you get to project on other people. You don't get to go around insisting other people follow your standards, your code. And this is a thing that disciplined people have struggled with for all time. There's even a saying in ancient Rome, "We can't all be Catos." Kobe Bryant went through the same thing. He couldn't wrap his head around the fact that not everyone else was Kobe Bryant. So this idea that we can be as strict with ourselves as we want to be,

• 5:08Ryan Holiday?

  but we have to be tolerant and accepting and encouraging and forgiving of other people because they don't have the gifts we have, they don't have the drive that we have. Most importantly, they never agreed to sign up to the code or standards that we have set for ourselves.

• 5:27Ryan Holiday?

  There's an amazing story about Marcus Rilis. He didn't want to be emperor. In fact, when he's given the news, he's to be adopted by the Emperor Hadrian, he weeps because he thinks of all the bad kings of history. So Marcus was scared. Maybe he had a little bit of imposter syndrome like you and I have. But the night before he's to ascend the throne, Marcus Rilis has a dream. And in the dream, he feels that his shoulders are made of ivory. And that's how he knows. He knows he's strong enough to bear the weight. He can carry the load. He can do this. And you have to know, you have shoulders of ivory too. You're stronger than you know. You're stronger than people think. You've got this. You can do it. You have shoulders made of ivory. We all do because we've done the work, because we've been training, because we've been watching videos.

• 6:12Ryan Holiday?

  We've been working up till this moment, and now it's here, and we're ready to do it.

• 6:20Ryan Holiday?

  Marcus really writes to himself, he says, "Fight to be the person philosophy wants you to be." And I just love that so much. It's that Stoicism has this ideal for you to be, someone who's resilient, someone who's strong, someone who's virtuous, someone who's kind, who cares about the common good, someone who isn't easily rattled, someone who's committed to bettering themselves. That's what Stoicism wants for you. That's what the Stoics have been writing about for centuries. That's what we do in these videos, in the Daily Stoic email. That's the ideal. But the question is, are you fighting for yourself? Are you fighting to be that thing? Are you striving today to get a little bit closer to that perfect ideal? Are you fighting for yourself?

• 7:03Ryan Holiday?

  The Stoics can't make you be or do anything. They can just lay out the formula, but it's ultimately on you to follow it, to step up and actually be it. That's what I want you to think about today.