Are You Ready For Combat? | Clarify Your Intentions

It’s not for posterity that the Stoics sat with their journals. It wasn’t whiney self-indulgence either. They weren’t cataloging their achievements or pouring out their fantasies. They were doing important work.📙 For a limited time, you can purchase The Daily Stoic ebook for only $1.99 on Kindle✉️ 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.

• 0:03Ryan 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 Aurelius, 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.

• 0:47Ryan Holiday?

  Are you ready for combat?

• 0:51Ryan Holiday?

  It's not for posterity that the Stoics sat with their journals. It wasn't whiny self-indulgence either. They weren't cataloging their achievements or pouring out their fantasies. They were doing important work. Many years ago, in a fascinating essay, the philosopher Foucault described journaling as a weapon in spiritual combat. Quoting Seneca and Epictetus as examples, he explains that "writing constitutes a test and a kind of a touchstone. By bringing to light impulses of thought, it dispels the darkness where the enemy's plots are hatched." For the Stoics, philosophy wasn't just this thing that you read, nor, given the immense difficulty of the Stoic ideals,

• 1:36Ryan Holiday?

  was it something that one magically lived up to in moments of stress or strain? No, it required a lot of active training and practice, the most effective form of which was done, as Marcus Aurelius did, in the pages of meditations, meditating on the ideas over and over and over again, until he absorbed them. As Foucault writes of this process, "We begin by going from philosophical meditation to the activity of writing, and from there to training and trial in a real situation, a labor of thought, a labor through writing, a labor in reality," he says. Reading and writing and experiencing life become a kind of feedback loop, where, he says, "the meditation precedes the notes,

• 2:18Ryan Holiday?

  which enable the rereading, which in turn re-initiates the meditation."

• 2:24Ryan Holiday?

  It's quite a beautiful cycle. You read the Daily Stoic or meditations, you struggle, you journal about the struggle in the Daily Stoic Journal, or you apply what you've journaled about to your struggle. You reread your journaling and it teaches you new lessons to journal about and use in future struggles. It's truly a virtuous cycle. But of course, this process can only happen if you do the work, if you make time for the journaling and the writing, if you submit to the cycle. Too often, we're unwilling to do that. We claim we don't have time, we're too self-conscious, we don't have the right materials. Nonsense. Start today. Now.

• 3:08Ryan Holiday?

  Couple of quick pieces of news about philosophy and of journaling. Number one, the Daily Stoic is $1.99 as an ebook right now. I'll link to it in today's show notes. It's $1.99 as an ebook in the US, in the UK. That's Kindle, that's iBooks, wherever you get your ebooks, you can get it for $1.99. That's pretty cool. And we have the Daily Stoic Journal, which you may know about. It came out quite, it came out a few years ago, but I don't know if you could hear that. That is my edition of the Daily Stoic Journal with this awesome leather cover that we just rolled out. On the front, it says, "Make time." It's got the four virtues, courage, temperance, justice, and wisdom on the front, and it's got Epictetus's reminder stamped in the leather every day

• 3:51Ryan Holiday?

  and night. Keep thoughts like this at hand. Write them, read them aloud, talk to yourself and others about them. We worked with this amazing tannery up in Minnesota that's been in business for over 100 years. This, this cover should last you a lifetime for sure. I've been using it the last couple of months. I'm on my fourth or fifth year of the journal, but this is my first year with the cover and I hope to last many, many years with it. You can get the cover and the bundle for 50% off if you check out store.dailystoic.com and pick up the Daily Stoic for $1.99 right now, or pick up the new journal. And I'll see you tomorrow.

• 4:36Ryan Holiday?

  Clarify your intentions. This is the January 5th entry from the Daily Stoic. I am holding the cloth-bound edition. We have a leather-bound edition, but also exciting news at this very moment. If you haven't read the Daily Stoic, it's $1.99 on Amazon right now as an ebook in the US and the UK. It's as cheap as it'll ever be. If you want to pick up as an ebook or give it as a gift, you can grab that. I'll link to it in today's show notes, or of course, you can grab the leather edition at store.dailystoic.com. But today's entry starts with a quote from Seneca. He says in On Tranquility of the Mind, "Let all your efforts be directed to something. Let it keep that end in view.

• 5:17Ryan Holiday?

  It's not activity that disturbs people, but false conceptions of things that drive them mad." And then I write, "Law 29 of the 48 Laws of Power is plan all the way to the end." Robert Greene writes, "By planning to the end, you will not be overwhelmed by circumstances, and you will know when to stop. Gently guide fortune and help determine the future by thinking far ahead." And as it happens, the second habit in the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People is, "Begin with an end in mind." Having an end in mind is no guarantee that you'll reach it. No Stoic would tolerate that assumption, but not having an end in mind is a guarantee that you won't. To the Stoics, false conceptions

• 6:01Ryan Holiday?

  are responsible not just for disturbances in the soul, but for chaotic and dysfunctional lives and operations. When your efforts are not directed at a cause or a purpose, how will you know what to do day in and day out? How will you know what to say no to and what to say yes to? How will you know when you've had enough, when you've reached your goal? When you have gotten off track? If you have never defined what those things are? The answer is that you cannot, and so you are driven into failure, or worse, into madness by the oblivion of directionlessness.

• 6:35Ryan Holiday?

  One of my favorite quotes from Seneca, and actually Montegna quotes it as well. He says, you know, "If you know not what port you are sailing to, no wind is favorable." If you don't know where you're trying to go, if you don't know what the end is, if you don't know what you want your life to look like, what you want this project to look like, if you haven't defined what success is to you, you're gonna have a real hard time, not just getting there, but making every individual decision in the course of your life. When I consult with people, that's one of the things I ask them almost always, especially authors, I go, "What does success look like to you?" Because so often, we just go, "Well, I want what that person has, and that person has, and that person has, and that person

• 7:20Ryan Holiday?

  has," or we go, "Oh, what, what, what other people are doing, that's what I want," right? This is what Rene Girard says, "We don't know what we want, so we want what other people want." We just sort of default to the defaults, and we haven't actually thought about how that fits for us, what that means to us, what that actually looks like, if we'll actually be happy with that thing that we're sacrificing and working so hard for. So when you clarify your intentions, when you get clear about what you're trying to do, who you're trying to be, who you want to be when you get there, you're gonna be in a tough spot. And so, at the beginning of a year, it's a great time to think about that, to think about who you want to be, to think about what you want to do, to think about what success looks like, and define it concretely, not abstractly, but concretely.

• 8:04Ryan Holiday?

  You know, the reason Robert talks about planning all the way to the end is he talks about, like, this isn't just a problem of somebody at, you know, step zero, not knowing where to go, but this is the person who on step 99 doesn't stop after one more step. They go through that, they keep going, and they turn, they snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, they go too far, they go past the mark they aimed for. So you plan all the way to the end, so you're not taken to excess, so you're not distracted, and so you know how to plan, what to do, you know what's important. If you don't know where you're sailing, no wind is favorable, right? You can't ask for directions to a destination you haven't defined.

• 8:46Ryan Holiday?

  So today, here at the beginning of the year, let's spend some time defining precisely that, our intentions, our goals, what success looks like to us. And

• 9:00Ryan Holiday?

  It's fun to be starting The Daily Stoic again. Like I said, it's $1.99 on Amazon right now if you haven't given it a shot. If you have given it a shot, if this is you starting the book again, the leather-bound edition will stand the test of time a little better, I think. Hopefully, my copy will be with me and long enough to give to my own children. And hopefully, the same is true for you. All right. Talk tomorrow.

• 9:33Ryan Holiday?

  Thanks for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Just a reminder, we've got signed copies of all my books in the Daily Stoic store. You can get them personalized, you can get them sent to a friend. The Obstacle is the Way, He Goes the Enemy, Stillness is the Key, the leather-bound edition of The Daily Stoic. We have them all in the Daily Stoic store, which you can check out at store.dailystoic.com.