Small Things Are No Small Thing | Judge Not, Lest…

George Washington’s favorite saying was “many mickles make a muckle.” It was an old Scottish proverb that illustrates a truth we all know: things add up. Even little ones. Even at the pace of one per day. Our perennial Page-A-Day Calendar is designed to help you grow one day at a time. It’s one page with one Stoic quote for every day—perfect for your desk, your nightstand, your kitchen counter, or your bathroom mirror, just in time for the New Year. Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemailGet Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and Facebook See 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 another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Thursdays, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from the book The Daily Stoic, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful co-author and collaborator, Stephen Hanselman. And so today, we'll give you a quick meditation from one of the Stoics, from Epictetus, Marcus really, Seneca, then some analysis from me. And then we send you out into the world to do your best to turn these words into works.

• 0:48Ryan Holiday?

  Small things are no small thing.

• 0:52Ryan Holiday?

  George Washington's favorite saying was that many mickles make a muckle. It's an old Scottish proverb that illustrates a truth that we all know. Things add up, even the little ones, even at the pace of one per day. That's what the Stoics believed, too. They said it is the little things that add up to wisdom and virtue. What you read, who you study under, what you prioritize, how you treat someone, what your routine is like, the training that you undergo, what rules you follow, what habits you cultivate, day to day, practiced over a lifetime. This is what creates greatness. This is what leads to a good life. Well-being is realized by small steps, Zeno would say, looking back at his life.

• 1:38Ryan Holiday?

  But it is truly no small thing. And in one of his most famous letters to Lucilius, Seneca gives a pretty good prescription for the good life. Each day, he wrote, acquire something that will fortify you against poverty, against death, indeed, against all other misfortunes. And after you have run over many thoughts, select one to be thoroughly digested each day.

• 2:02Ryan Holiday?

  "One quote a day," he was saying, "and Sharon, that's the path to getting better and wiser and stronger and more resilient." And what excuse do you have for not meeting that goal? For not hitting that benchmark? It's within reach for all of us, no matter how busy or stressed or simple we are, if we decide that it is. And actually, you know, one of the ways I do this as part of my practice is I have this Daily Stoic Page a Day calendar on my desk. This is today's quote. "Remember that you are an actor in a play," Epictetus says, "playing a character according to the will of the playwright, for this is your duty, to perform well the character assigned to you." I just love this. So I keep it on my desk. I pull it off each day. I meditate on it.

• 2:46Ryan Holiday?

  I put it in my little recycling bin and compost it. But the point is, it's helpful to have something to kick off each day. The next quote is, "The universe is change. Life is opinion." That's from Meditations 4:3. Actually, the quote each day corresponds to the quote in the Daily Stoic. Anyways, we've got them back in stock in the Daily Stoic store. The calendar is now perennial, so if you get it now, you get the next two months, and then you just keep going through the rest of the year. It's really awesome how it works. I've been doing it now, what, three, four years? People have loved these calendars, and just in time for the new year. They're available at store.dailystoic.com. I'll link in today's show notes. But one gain per day, one thing to meditate or think on each day, if we can accomplish

• 3:30Ryan Holiday?

  that, especially first thing in the morning, it's a great place to start. And I hope you check out the Daily Stoic Page a Day Calendar.

• 3:43Ryan Holiday?

  Judge not lest you be judged. That's the November 17 entry in the Daily Stoic. 366 Days of Writing and Reflection on the Art of Living by yours truly and my co-writer and translator, Stephen Hanselman. I actually do this journal every single day. There's a question in the morning, a question in the afternoon, then there's these sort of weekly meditations. As Epictetus says, "Every day and night, we keep thoughts like this at hand. Write them, read them aloud, and talk to yourself and others about them." You can check out the Daily Stoic Journal anywhere books are sold, and also get a signed, personalized copy from me in the Daily Stoic store at store.dailystoic.com. And our quote today is from Seneca's Letters 103.

• 4:27Ryan Holiday?

  "When philosophy is wielded with arrogance and stubbornly, it is the cause for the ruin of many. Let philosophy scrape off your own faults, rather than be a way to rail against the faults of others." And the meditation for today is, remember the proper direction of philosophy of all things we're doing here. It is to be focused inward, to make ourselves better and to leave other people to that task for themselves and their own journey. Our faults are in our control, and so we turn to philosophy to help scrape them off like barnacles from the hull of a ship. Other people's faults?

• 5:11Ryan Holiday?

  Not so much. That's for them to do. Leave other people to their faults. Nothing in Stoic philosophy empowers you to judge them, only to accept them, especially when we have so many of our own. You know, it's interesting, both Seneca and Jesus have some observation around this idea of like, why focus on the splinter in your neighbor's eye when you have a log in your own? Seneca talks about why judge the pimples on someone else's face when you yourself are covered in sores? Judge not lest you be judged.

• 5:53Ryan Holiday?

  This sort of essence of Christianity and also of Stoicism, I think, is the idea that you've got enough trouble at home, man. You don't need to be going around judging, condemning, critiquing, questioning what other people are doing. And I think it's important that we remind ourselves of this because one of the things that I think social media does is give us so much more insight into what other people are doing. You know, you see some celebrity's marriage implode and you shake your head. But are you thinking about and working on your own, right? You think this behavior or that behavior is improper?

• 6:37Ryan Holiday?

  Okay, don't do it then, man, right? That's the end of where you control things is. This idea that we should be up in other people's business, that we should be policing, shaming, canceling, et cetera, is so often a distraction from our own work, right? And that's what I think is so beautiful about Lincoln's second inaugural address, right? He says, "Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes his aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing

• 7:22Ryan Holiday?

  their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not that we be not judged." His point was that slavery was as close to an indisputable evil as one could possibly get. And yet, even there, right? What defines Lincoln in the Civil War is his understanding of the fact that if people from the North had been born into the South, they'd almost certainly think and act differently. And if many of those people from the South had been born in the North, they would certainly think and act differently. And so by approaching it with this kind of empathy, right?

• 8:05Ryan Holiday?

  That doesn't mean that he doesn't, he doesn't make very clear decisions about what he's okay with. That doesn't mean that he doesn't make very clear decisions about what he can change that is within his power, right? He's the president, so he has a lot more power than, say, your average person. But he realizes that judging and condemning and writing people off is not a constructive attitude, and it certainly does not make us better.

• 8:34Ryan Holiday?

  So I try to take a cue from Marcus Aurelius here. Marcus Aurelius is famously very strict with himself, has very strong standards. But he works really hard not to project those on to other people, not to demand from other people things that they didn't sign up for, right? He's tolerant with others, but strict with himself. He judges himself quite harshly, holds himself to very high standards. But then he understands that other people are on another journey. And he tries to have a very clear understanding of where his circle of control begins and ends, which is what we must do. And then we must have empathy and kindness and patience and love for other people, even

• 9:17Ryan Holiday?

  when they're wrong, even when they're doing things we disagree with, even when they do things that we don't like. We can't cast them out, cast them aside, you know, act as if we are superior to them. We've got to leave those mistakes, as Marcus says, to their makers. I'll leave that there and I'll talk to you all soon.

• 9:41Ryan Holiday?

  It's not that life is short, Seneca says, it's that we waste a lot of it. The practice of Memento Mori, the meditation on death, is one of the most powerful and eye-opening things that there is. We built this Memento Mori calendar for Daily Stoic to illustrate that exact idea, that your life, in the best-case scenario, is 4,000 weeks. Are you going to let those weeks slip by? Or are you going to seize them? The act of unrolling this calendar, putting it on your wall, and every single week, that bubble is filled in, that black mark is marking it off forever. Have something to show, not just for your years, but for every single dot that you filled

• 10:25Ryan Holiday?

  in, that you really lived that week, that you made something of it. You can check it out at dailystoic.com/mmcalendar.