A Leader Must Be a Reader

"A leader will be forced into countless situations that they have never been in before. Trying, painful, stressful, baffling dilemmas and difficulties unlike any they have known. Nothing could have prepared Kennedy for the Cuban Missile Crisis, but it’s a good thing he had read B. H. Liddell Hart a few years before—it was Hart’s wisdom that helped Kennedy rationally and calmly deal with that unprecedented moment. Nothing could have prepared Churchill for the outbreak of WWII… except of course, the decades he had spent as a historian, which intimately acquainted him with the strategic insights and moral clarity required to bravely fight on."Ryan explains the importance of reading to a leader, and why we all should engage in it, on today's Daily Stoic Podcast.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow Daily Stoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicSee 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.

• 0:06Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to The Daily Stoic, where each day we read a short passage designed to help you cultivate the strength, insight, wisdom necessary for living a good life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us at DailyStoic.com.

• 0:29Ryan Holiday?

  A leader must be a reader. A leader will be forced into countless situations that they have never been in before, trying, painful, stressful, baffling dilemmas and difficulties unlike any they have ever known. Nothing could have prepared Kennedy for the Cuban Missile Crisis, but it's a good thing he had read a book of B. H. Liddell Hart a few years before, and it was Hart's wisdom that helped Kennedy rationally and calmly deal with that unprecedented moment. Nothing could have prepared Churchill for the outbreak of World War II, except, of course, for the decades he had spent as a historian, which intimately acquainted him with the strategic insights and moral clarity required to bravely fight on. "One common

• 1:14Ryan Holiday?

  characteristic of virtually all great leaders I have known is that they have been great readers," Richard Nixon would later write in Life. "Reading not only enlarges and challenges the mind, it engages and exercises the brain." Today's youth, who sit mesmerized by a television screen, is not going to be tomorrow's leader. Television is passive, reading is active. Great advice, that a reader of history also knows that Nixon didn't quite live up to. In all, Nixon watched more than 500 movies while in office in less than six years. Might he have been better served by engaging and exercising his brain? Might he have been better

• 1:53Ryan Holiday?

  off had he had more of his assumptions challenged and fewer of his paranoid delusions indulged? Marcus Aurelius does not become Marcus Aurelius without having read Epictetus at his teacher Rusticus's urging. Seneca would not have been Seneca without

• 2:10Ryan Holiday?

  ...analyst introducing him to the works of the Stoics. But equally, he would not have been Seneca without his diligent reading of Epicurus, which actively challenged his mind and his assumptions. How did he bravely face death at the hands of Nero's goons? He was aided by his reading of Cato's life, just as Cato faced his death by reading of Socrates. A leader must be a reader. We must learn from the experiences of others. We must be challenged. We must exercise our brains. We must prepare ourselves for the things we'll only be able to experience once by learning from the experiences of others. It's not just the best way, it is the only way. And obviously, this is what we built the Daily Stoic Read to Lead Challenge about. It's great.

• 2:55Ryan Holiday?

  It's like two weeks of Stoic-inspired insights about reading. It's built on my own reading practice that's helped me write the books I've written and do the things I've done. Check that out right now at dailystoic.com/readtolead. I think it's a bunch of great stuff in there to start the new year off right. And of course, remember, Daily Stoic Life members get all the courses for free, so you can check that out at dailystoiclife.com. It's been almost four years since The Daily Stoic was published. This little book, the first collection of all the Stoics in one book in centuries, has sold nearly 1 million copies in 20 languages. It's quite possible that your copy, having been cracked open hundreds of times now, is looking a little worse for wear. So we have good news.

• 3:39Ryan Holiday?

  We are releasing a premium leather-bound edition of The Daily Stoic. This limited edition comes with a host of new features to distinguish it from the original, a genuine leather cover with gold foil-stamped logos, gilded edge pages printed on premium-grade paper, and all-new illustrations to delineate each section of the book and more. And the book is on sale now, but this is the first run, which means it's a limited quantity, so don't miss your chance to own this new, beautiful edition of The Daily Stoic. You can buy yours today in the Daily Stoic store or at dailystoic.com/leather.