Stoop and Build ’Em Up | Stronger Stoics Together

Failure. That's life. Then what? DON'T WAIT 👉 Go to dailystoic.com/spring and enter code DSPOD20 at checkout to get 20% off the Spring Forward Challenge! Challenge yourself to spring forward and become the person you aspire to be. The Spring Forward Challenge starts March 20, 2026.🎥 VIDEO EPISODES| Watch the video episodes on The Daily Stoic YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos✉️ FREE STOIC WISDOM | Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

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.

• 0:15Ryan Holiday?

  Stoop and build them up. Zeno lost everything in a shipwreck—a family fortune, his occupation, his entire future swallowed by the sea. On at least two occasions, Seneca lost everything he'd worked so hard for. First, illness derailed his legal career, and it took him a full 10 years, his prime years, to recuperate. Then, just as he was getting things back on track, he ran afoul of the emperor and was banished from Rome for nearly as long as he had been infirm. Zeno and Seneca, like countless other Stoics and people throughout history, were members of Rudyard Kipling's Club, the one where we learned to "watch the things you gave your life to broken and stoop and build them up with worn-out tools."

• 0:58Ryan Holiday?

  There was nothing Zeno could have done to prevent that shipwreck. There was nothing Seneca could have done to prevent that illness or that exile. Just as there was nothing you could have done to prevent this or that bad break, but here you are, facing it. That's life. Stuff happens, then what? We can whine about it, we can shift blame, we can become bitter or disillusioned, or we can lose and start again at our beginnings, Kipling writes, "and never breathe a word about your loss." Shipwreck, exile, failure, getting fired, a season-ending injury—none of these things are good. They are certainly not things we would choose. But for a Stoic, they can be good if they make you good. It's not unfortunate if one finds a way

• 1:42Ryan Holiday?

  to make something fortunate from them. So stoop down, pick up the worn-out tools, and start building again.

• 1:55Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. It is pouring rain here in Austin right now. I was about to go for a run. And I said, you know, maybe there's a chance the rain will die out a little bit. So why don't I record some stuff? The kids are at school, so it's quiet. Maybe I'll just record for a little bit, change the order up. So that's what I'm doing, just waiting out the rain. It's those spring showers. The spring sort of snuck up on me. I don't know if it snuck up on you, but it sort of snuck up on me. And that's why the Daily Stoic Spring Forward Challenge is perfectly timed. It's going to start on March 20th. I'd love to see you in there. We've got an awesome discount for Daily Stoic podcast listeners.

• 2:36Ryan Holiday?

  Just head over to dailystoic.com/spring and enter code DSPOD20 to get 20% off. In today's episode, I wanted to bring you some of the Q and A from last year's Spring Forward Challenge. Thousands of Stoics all over the world did the challenge together. I got better, they got better. I think you might get better by doing it with us this year. But here are some questions we answered from folks in the Spring Forward Challenge.

• 3:06Speaker 01

  Hey, how are you? Thanks for having me on. And I just really want to say thank you because, you know, I was in a car accident in 2003 that left me paralyzed from the waist down.

• 3:15Ryan Holiday?

  Oh, wow.

• 3:16Speaker 01

  And then your challenge came about because I receive all your newsletters. And I just thought it was a great opportunity. And my favorite challenge within that was the one about just trying to forgive. And it wasn't necessarily about forgiving anyone in particular, but forgiving the situation that I found myself in. Instead of being so angry and sort of feeling victimized about it, was just trying to find peace about it and trying to reframe the impression and look at this as an opportunity to like, well, you know what? Maybe you were going at 100 miles an hour. Why did that accident actually happen? And maybe take time to regroup. And I really found that very beneficial.

• 3:58Speaker 01

  And I loved writing all of this down and then burning it up like you asked us to. And yeah, it was actually very therapeutic. So thank you for everything.

• 4:05Ryan Holiday?

  Well, it's incredible to hear your story. I can only imagine that anger and resentment and, you know, sort of grievance would be a part of anything that would, you know, you would lose something like that. So that's very understandable. And you might, you know, Epictetus loses at least partial use of one of his legs through this torture that he went through. I can imagine why he would be, you know, he would have, in his case, a specific person did a specific thing to him. So he would have, you know, sort of every justification for fixating on that. And I think his point was, no amount of fixating on it is going to change it, though. And so how do you sort of move forward? When you say you're not angry

• 4:49Ryan Holiday?

  at a specific person, you're just sort of angry at the world that it happened?

• 4:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's, I think it's very easy to fall into that trap. I'm like, well, why was I chosen?

• 4:59Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 5:00Speaker 01

  And so instead of feeling somewhat victimized and just being angry at the universe, or the cosmos, I think you were talking about metaphysics a few minutes ago, right? It's just kind of understanding the situation. And actually, I've really come to embrace it the last, you know, two weeks of being home. I've been writing more, I've been reading more, you know, kind of this minimalist kind of approach.

• 5:22Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 5:23Speaker 01

  And I've really found it beneficial. And, you know, just kind of repeating these mantras every single day that I'm writing to myself. And then, you know, constantly reading The Lives of the Stoic, you know, I just read about Cato 2. And, you know, what I learned about Cato was his inability to compromise, right?

• 5:39Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 5:40Speaker 01

  So I have, I have a lot to learn from that as well. How do I compromise with this situation as well?

• 5:44Ryan Holiday?

  I'm fascinated by what you're talking about. And it strikes me, I do this in my own life, you know, there's two ways to look at what happened, right? One way is that you were unfairly chosen to have this terrible thing happen to. The other way to look at it, I was just writing about this in the book that I did with with George traveling. He has this terrible car accident that he does manage to walk away from. But you know, the, the police officer comes up to him after the accident, he goes, you know, 95% of the time when I come upon an accident like this, uh, I'm, I'm putting somebody into a body bag. And his point was like, you were lucky that you lived, that you were chosen to, to live, right? And so it's interesting how we can look at the same

• 6:27Ryan Holiday?

  situation and go, hey, why was I so unlucky that, you know, I lost this in the accident? And just as easily, we could say, how lucky am I that I survived the accident versus dying in said accident, right? And, and this is that, that stoic practice of what handle are we going to grab? And obviously I try to practice this in my life in much less serious situations, but we're so quick to focus on what we were deprived of as opposed to what we were given, or we focus on what was taken rather than, than being grateful for what, what they didn't also take, that they just as easily could have taken in that same swoop.

• 7:04Speaker 02

  Hi, Ryan. Thanks for being here. You speak a lot about in the challenge of, you know, saying no, you share that picture of your schedule, which is blank, no, you can't pick my brain, et cetera. I'm always trying to gear towards something like that myself. Um, do you mind speaking about sort of grappling with that and any friction that comes up with also the goals to bring the circles closer to you, the mentoring importance that you talk about a lot on your podcast and also in the challenge as well. Um, you know, I try to balance that. I'd be curious to hear your, your balancing act.

• 7:37Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. When I show a blank day in my calendar and, and I say, this is my ideal day. Obviously I'm, I'm being a little facetious. That's pretty rare. But mostly what I'm saying when I see a blank day in my calendar, when I see a, it's not that I'm not working. It's that I haven't scheduled a bunch of distractions from the work, you know? And it's, it's when I am doing a bunch of things that I shouldn't be doing, that I find myself much less generous, you know, to somebody who emails me or somebody who walks into the bookstore, like. I think one of the problems is we end up saying yes to so many things that we don't even know all the things that we're saying no to. And when we're overtaxed, when we're overcommitted, when we're just bogged down, I think it makes

• 8:21Ryan Holiday?

  it hard for us to be compassionate, to be generous, to also to take advantage of serendipity, right? Or random things that come across our path. And so I'm just trying to be more conscious of having large, blank spaces so I can be a little bit more free-flowing in what I say yes and no to. The problem for me is when it's like, I have this at nine o'clock, this at 10 o'clock, there's a two-minute break between, and if one goes long, then I'm right. And like, so not only do I literally not have that much time, but I'm stressed and I am like, really hoping and expecting things to go, I need things to go a certain way, right?

• 9:05Ryan Holiday?

  Or else I can't physically or literally do all the things. That's just not me at my best. You know, I'm best when things are chill. And I think most of us are chill. Are there going to be moments where, you know, there's some big thing that you've thrown yourself into, there's some really important thing you're solving, or you're in the middle of a disaster? Of course, all that goes out the window then. The problem is, I think, day to day, we're often in this sort of crisis management mode, and it's totally self-inflicted, and it's doing nothing for nobody.

• 9:46Speaker 03

  My question is, and I did the New Year's New Year's Challenge, love the burn the anger list.

• 9:52Ryan Holiday?

  Mm-hmm.

• 9:53Speaker 03

  I'll do it again, but I started to think, as I was writing the list down, is what's better, to burn this, or to reframe and accept these things, and/or address them? And it's probably a combination of all the above, but just curious on your thoughts on those two different approaches.

• 10:13Ryan Holiday?

  No, I think that's right. I mean, look, there's even a slight contradiction in the days we have the idea of writing these things down and burning it, and then we also have the idea of making amends. These are, you know, different ways of getting at the same thing. I think the idea is, you know, how do you get this off your shoulder? How do you get it off your chest? How do you get it? Out of your mind and onto the page or into the air. The idea is just to stop carrying it around and we just carry around too much stuff. We carry around mental load, emotional load. We're just carrying too much stuff. So whatever, whatever processes it, whatever gets it, gets rid of it. That, that's what I want, you know? Like, look, do you, do you throw this stuff away? Or do you donate it to charity?

• 10:58Ryan Holiday?

  Or do you sell it? Those are three ways of accomplishing the same thing.

• 11:04Ryan Holiday?

  One's better for your pocketbook. Maybe one's better for the world. One's, you know, one's faster. And I think depending on what the thing is, that might answer your question. But then also, you know, one of the things I find when I'm getting rid of stuff, just to be real specific, is we'll go, okay, we're going to get rid of this stuff. And then we say, oh, but that's valuable, so we should sell it. And then what that really means is it's just going to sit in the garage longer. Or it means we say, we're going to donate it. And what that really means is we're going to drive it around for a couple of weeks in the trunk of the car. So we're really just, you know, doing a doom box thing, really just moving stuff around. And so whatever helps you process the thing faster, helps you move on. I'm all, I'm all about.

• 11:47Ryan Holiday?

  So I'm agnostic, I guess is what I'm saying. Yeah, great question, though. Lisa, what's up?

• 11:53Speaker 04

  Thank you. I'm new. I got the Daily Stoic Journal and it's helped. And I've been reading meditations at the same time. So this is a bit of a one off. But I'm struggling with the concept of reason versus emotion. I'm empathetic and somewhat intuitive and I rely on my emotions to help guide me with impressions of others and how to move forward. And I combine that with what I think is logic and reasoning. And I'm not sure when I'm reading through meditation, it almost seems like, you know, the emotion part of it, which I'm interpreting as the reactiveness.

• 12:40Speaker 04

  Is what I've got to watch and catch and just let it go. But there are parts of me I can't let go. It's part of my reasoning and logic. Could you comment on that and help guide me to other reading or whatever?

• 12:57Ryan Holiday?

  Well, look, I don't have a problem with the idea. And I don't think the Stoics do being guided by your emotions, being informed by them, instructed by them. The problem is when we are led by our emotions, when we are in the thrall of our emotions. You know, like if you're angry about something, maybe that's because there's an injustice there. Or maybe that's because, you know, you are recognizing something you don't like about yourself. Right? That's a valuable piece of information. Now punching someone because you're angry, calling them mean names or sending an angry email, not so great.

• 13:36Ryan Holiday?

  And so the idea of our emotions informing and instructing and opening our eyes to things, great. Unthinkingly being led by our emotions is something very different. And I think intuition is probably right there in the middle between those two things. Intuition is, you know, sort of hard won experience. Maybe it's even an experience or lessons you haven't quite been able to articulate, but but some part of you knows. But even though you don't know, I like all that. So the Stoics are, I would say, are try to be less emotional rather than emotionless. Right? It's not about reducing or eliminating our emotions.

• 14:16Ryan Holiday?

  But it is about, you know, not being overcome by and directed by our emotions. And that's the distinction I would make.

• 14:25Speaker 04

  Okay, because I can cry from joy.

• 14:28Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 14:29Speaker 04

  I feel so deeply. And when I'm reading through this, I'm like, you know, I'm picking and choosing what resonates with me and what can help me have serenity and a stronger mind. But I don't want to lose that aspect of me.

• 14:46Ryan Holiday?

  No.

• 14:46Speaker 04

  And that's okay.

• 14:48Ryan Holiday?

  Look, you can you can cry from sadness also. We just did a daily Stoic email about how often we how many stories we have about Marcus Aurelius crying. But I think there's a difference between crying because you're sad or crying because something hurts. And then, you know, giving up or quitting, you know? So so it's about what you do after the emotion.

• 15:09Speaker 05

  I guess I have a logistical question.

• 15:13Ryan Holiday?

  Okay.

• 15:13Speaker 05

  There's so much stuff coming at us every day. I mean, if we just restrict ourselves to the things that you do. You know, we have these challenges that have something every day. There's the Daily Stoic emails, there's the Daily Stoic book. And that's only this one universe, right?

• 15:31Ryan Holiday?

  True.

• 15:31Speaker 05

  There's so many things and so many good ideas. There's so many, you know, you, you see these things like, oh, I want to do that. I wanted, you know, I want to incorporate this into my life. How do you in a structured way, you know, incorporate this and remember everything? I mean, I know you literally can't remember everything. But how do you not lose sight of it? Or, or lose your grasp on, on these various ideas that, that you want to incorporate?

• 16:02Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I don't think the Stoics were parochial or dogmatic. You know, Seneca talks about how he wants to learn from every single one of the schools. He reads widely. I think the Stoics would have been fascinated by Buddhism or Confucianism or Hinduism. Had they known about it, they would have found things to like. They would have found things that they disagreed with. And I think both schools would have been better for that discussion. So obviously Stoicism is mostly what I write about. But I, I, I think if I'm the only person you're getting anything from, you're, you're swimming in a pretty small pool. So I, I try, I try to read widely. I try to enrich my life with as many different sources and ideas and schools of thought as possible.

• 16:45Ryan Holiday?

  Now ultimately I do sort of come back to a core set of ideas that I, I find I need the most help with. And I go over them over and over again. This is also from Seneca that we sort of linger on the works of the master thinkers. But we got plenty of time. We should read as widely as possible and try to absorb as many sort of disparate ideas and, and benefit from as much ancient wisdom and modern wisdom and cutting edge science as possible. That's kind of how I think about it.

• 17:16Speaker 05

  Do you do anything in a structured way? Or do you just kind of let yourself absorb these and hope that those things that are most important to you just rise to the top over time?

• 17:26Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I guess to use the word we were just talking about, I sort of try to be intuitive and I just kind of go towards what I feel like I need, what I would like to learn about, what I don't know about, and I just kind of follow that. And then sometimes I come back home and start over again. So I'm much more intuitive as opposed to like, this is my practice and I read six pages from this every day and two pages from this, I'm kind of just going through.

• 17:54Speaker 06

  My question is, and I know we're going around it in different ways because it really is the spring challenge is getting rid of stuff. I mean, that's the heart of it is spring cleaning, right? So I'm just looking for, I think there's this blending of emotion and identity that keeps us grasping for things and making it so inefficient. So yesterday, so I had boxes of books and it took a lot for me to give away The Will to Power, Nietzsche, my college book. Like, I'm not reading it and it was just so inefficient that I was still grasping. So I'm looking for something that's just a little bit more of an efficient way to

• 18:37Speaker 06

  just immediately make the decision, let it go, make the decision, let it go. And because I could spend a month with thousands of books.

• 18:47Ryan Holiday?

  No, no, I totally get it. The emotion that we project or the identity we project on the thing makes it hard to get rid of and there's, it feels pointless to get rid of it. And look, I can't, I can't give you any advice specifically about books because I am a hoarder of books, as you can tell from even this set behind me. But I'll tell you something I've been doing with my kids. I forget who I learned this from, maybe it was from Dr. Becky. But you know, when we're at a store and they're like, I want this or I want that, I want this, I want that. A lot of times what my kids are doing is that they're just, it's like they just saw this thing for the first time. They're worried that if they don't get it right now, it will disappear forever and they'll never have a chance to have it ever again.

• 19:31Ryan Holiday?

  Even if this is a place we come, you know, every Saturday. And so one of the things we learn what we do is we just go, okay, we can't have that right now. I'm not saying we can't have it ever, but we can't have it right now. But in the meantime, let's just take a picture of it. We'll just take a picture of it. My phone is filled with thousands of pictures of stuff my kids saw in stores or even saw in videos that they liked, that they have never once asked to see ever again. But just the idea of like, hey, I'm gonna, I'm gonna capture this for a moment. I'm gonna validate this feeling that you have because it's perfectly valid to be attached to this thing or interested in this thing. In your case to go, this is my college copy of Nietzsche. Look, here, here's the cover.

• 20:16Ryan Holiday?

  Here's a, a passage that I underlined, you know, whatever. You don't have to lose that, especially if there is some way to keep a piece of it forever. But do you need a, uh, you know, a one and a half pound memento of that thing? Maybe not. And so, I don't know, that, that's something I've been doing and I've been trying to apply on things that I, I don't need anymore, but I have trouble getting rid of because I'm attached to. I'll just take a picture of it.

• 20:45Speaker 06

  I, I like it. I think that's sort of the journaling, like, because that's what I need is the efficient tool. And so just creating sort of a photo montage journal of, loved it. It was important somehow I identified with it as being, I'm an intellectual or, you know, whatever. You know, whatever it was. And then dispense with it, you know? And it, it, or that could be a clothing item too, you know, just, oh, how beautiful that blah, blah, blah, blah. Take a picture, that was a lovely wedding, blah, blah, blah, out. So I like that. I think that's really helpful. Thanks, Ryan.

• 21:24Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. I just wanted to say we so appreciate it. We love serving you. It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple of years we've been doing it. It's an honor. Please, spread the word. Tell people about it. And this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say thank you.