Persuasion Expert: "You Can Manipulate Yourself Into Doing Hard Things" | Jay Heinrichs (PT. 1)

You’re not lazy, you’re just losing the debate in your own head. In today’s episode, Ryan talks with Jay Heinrichs, bestselling author of Thank You for Arguing and one of the world’s leading experts on rhetoric and persuasion. Jay has spent decades studying how we influence others, but in this conversation, he flips that lens inward to show how we can use the same tools to influence ourselves. Ryan and Jay talk about the fascinating overlap between Stoicism and rhetoric, how Marcus Aurelius used rhetoric to his advantage, and why self-persuasion might actually be more powerful than raw willpower. They discuss the rhetorical tricks Jay used on himself and what the best tools are for getting unstuck. Jay Heinrichs is a New York Times bestselling author of Thank You For Arguing and is a persuasion and conflict consultant. Middlebury College has named him a Professor of the Practice in Rhetoric and Oratory. Jay has conducted influence strategy and training for clients as varied as Kaiser Permanente, Harvard, the European Speechwriters Association, Southwest Airlines, and NASA. He has overseen the remake and staff recruiting of more than a dozen magazines. Pick up a copy of Jay’s latest book Aristotle’s Guide to Self-Persuasion: How Ancient Rhetoric, Taylor Swift, and Your Own Soul Can Help You Change Your Life Follow Jay on Instagram @JayHeinrichs and check out more of his work at www.jayheinrichs.com🎟️ Come see Ryan Holiday LIVE: https://www.dailystoiclive.com/Seattle, WA - December 3, 2025 San Diego, CA - February 5, 2026 Phoenix, AZ - February 27, 2026 🏛 The 2025 LIVE session of Stoicism 101: Ancient Philosophy For Your Actual Life starts November 10th. Don’t miss your chance to join us! Read on for more about the unique opportunities you get from joining the LIVE course.📖 Wisdom Takes Work by Ryan Holiday is out NOW! Grab a copy here: https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/wisdom-takes-work🎥 Watch the video episodes on The Daily Stoic YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Get 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 📢 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 Podcast where each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are, and also to find peace and wisdom in their lives.

• 0:52Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I am here at the office. It is eight something in the morning on a Saturday. The kids are here, my wife is here. A bunch of the Daily Stoic employees are here because we are scrambling to get out the last of the signed copies of Wisdom. It takes work. It's been a lot this launch. First off, I appreciate everyone's support. It's meant a lot to me, like an overwhelming amount of it, like way more than we anticipated, budgeted for, supplied for all of that. So I appreciate it. I'm humbled by it. And then basically, everything that could go wrong has gone wrong. Shipping and international postal workers strike. There

• 1:34Ryan Holiday?

  were some major mistakes with the third-party fulfillment company that we use. There was problems with the publisher. There was problems with shipping delays, problems with packaging. Then some people made some mistakes. It's just kind of one, one thing after another. We've been digging ourselves out of this for some time. But we're trying to just take it one book at a time, which is, you know, basically Stoicism as well. I can't control what happened. I can't retroactively prevent it from happening. Obviously, there can be accountability and stuff going forward, and we're gonna have to make some changes going forward. But for now, it's just been this scramble to get them out. And so that's what we've been doing. I appreciate the patience, everyone.

• 2:20Ryan Holiday?

  I appreciate the support most of all. I'm just really proud for you to get this book in your hands, and I can't wait for you to read it. And if it's been delayed at all for you, I'm really sorry. And I hope it is worth it. I want to read you something real fast. "The ancients weren't in agreement about the ways to achieve happiness or even how to frame the idea of the good life. One group of Athenians insisted on defining happiness in terms of behavior. The purpose of life was to live well, they said, and by well, they meant virtuously. Their idea of virtue was not that different from Aristotle's wisdom, courage, moderation, and justice, standing up for what's right, applying reason to every decision. And these philosophers and students gathered in the sto apo kilo,

• 3:03Ryan Holiday?

  the painted porch, a covered colonnade that fronted one of Athens' largest buildings in the Agora. The group called itself the Stoics, and they taught apotheia, or apathy, a state of mind free from passions. These days, they're drugs for that. The Stoics applied heroic doses of rhetoric that would connect them to the universe, which they believed was the overarching rational soul, or logos." That's from Jay Heinrich's latest book, Aristotle's Guide to Self-Persuasion: How Ancient Rhetoric, Taylor Swift, and Your Own Soul Can Help You Change Your Life. I learned about this book over the summer, and I invited Jay out to Bastrop to talk about it on the podcast. We had a great conversation,

• 3:45Ryan Holiday?

  in part one of which Jay and I talk about self-persuasion versus self-discipline. We actually disagree a little bit here, although I'm pretty convinced that we think the same thing. He was making a somewhat semantic difference. But anyways, that's the point of the podcast, is to talk about things. We talk about Aristotle and Marx realist, why suffering is a skill, and how Jay thinks about Stoicism in the modern world. So let's get into it. You can check out his book, Aristotle's Guide to Self-Persuasion, which I believe we still have some signed copies of in the painted porch. And you can listen to this lovely conversation. We'll get into it.

• 4:22Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. I'm doing a bunch of live dates, including one coming up soon. I'm going to be in Seattle, Washington on December 3rd, San Diego, California on February 5th, and Phoenix, Arizona on February 27th. The talk I just did in Austin sold out, so this will almost certainly sell out, too. I would love to see you there. Go grab tickets at DailyStoicLive.com.

• 4:45Speaker 01

  I gotta tell you that I deliberately avoided reading The Obstacle is the Way-

• 4:49Ryan Holiday?

  Really?

• 4:49Speaker 01

  -until after the book was published, because I didn't want it to influence me.

• 4:54Ryan Holiday?

  Really?

• 4:54Speaker 01

  And boy, am I glad I didn't, because there's so much in common. I mean, we're covering the same, really the same things.

• 5:01Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I am. I mean, you talk a lot about the Stoics in here. It's funny, I was just at the Stoa Pukka Lane in Athens earlier this month.

• 5:08Speaker 01

  I've been there.

• 5:08Ryan Holiday?

  It's, uh, not much. It's just a hole in the ground.

• 5:11Speaker 01

  No.

• 5:11Ryan Holiday?

  It's kind of crazy to think that, like, I mean, they also just built like a railroad through the middle of it.

• 5:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:19Ryan Holiday?

  They did, obviously, like, we sometimes lament our destruction of, like, historical things in America, and it's like, at least we didn't build a railway through the agora.

• 5:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course, we never had an agora.

• 5:31Ryan Holiday?

  That's true. That's true.

• 5:33Speaker 01

  And there is a sto-, there is a painted stoa nearby that you-

• 5:38Ryan Holiday?

  That's a different one, but yes.

• 5:39Speaker 01

  It is a different one.

• 5:39Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 5:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, but you can get a sense of the colonnades and strolling through.

• 5:44Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, and you go, oh, this would be a good place to hang out and talk philosophy. I get it.

• 5:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. They didn't have good coffee, other than that.

• 5:52Ryan Holiday?

  Why did you think that The Obstacle is the Way would be a problem? I think your book is kind of about the mental jujitsu we have to do to make us do things we don't want to do, or see things that we might first be inclined to see as negative as actually positive. So I guess they're similar in that sense.

• 6:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's, it's different in the sense that we're not talking philosophy in my book.

• 6:14Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 6:14Speaker 01

  We're talking rhetoric.

• 6:15Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 6:16Speaker 01

  So it's, it's a matter of persuasion, of reframing, of changing your mood, your attitude toward things, and your willingness to do something or stop doing it. So it's a little bit different from living a life of virtue.

• 6:28Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 6:28Speaker 01

  Of doing the right thing. Perseverance isn't really a big part of rhetoric. It's more about timing, Kairos, as they call it. So, yeah, it's different in that sense. The reason why I didn't read your book is I was careful not to read any modern book.

• 6:42Ryan Holiday?

  I did that, too.

• 6:42Speaker 01

  Because I wanted to go back to this, or it's clear you do.

• 6:45Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 6:45Speaker 01

  Like, read the classics. Then have conversations.

• 6:49Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 6:49Speaker 01

  Then read the other books and realize, you know, how good the other people are and how much you miss.

• 6:53Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, and, and you sort of realize when you're reading the modern books that what you're getting is essentially a rehashing of the ancient stuff, which if you're familiar with, is not as exciting. Like, some of the sort of books about philosophy that I read, I'm glad I read them when I was younger, before I'd read some of the philosophy, because then, like, you're, you're getting these snippets for the first time. It's very exciting. It's like when you've read a decent chunk of scientific research, and then you read the sort of pop science books, you're like, oh, I already know all these studies. The book's not as interesting.

• 7:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:25Ryan Holiday?

  But this line between philosophy and rhetoric is interesting, and I'm thinking, one of the pushes and pulls in Marx's realist's life is these, is these two competing teachers. Yes, Fronto is rhetoric teacher and Risch is his philosophy teacher. And you can tell they're both kind of vying to be the number one influence in his life. And then, obviously, when he goes into politics, probably the rhetoric becomes more important than the philosophy. But what do you, where do you feel like the distinction between those two is?

• 7:52Speaker 01

  That is such a great example.

• 7:54Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 7:54Speaker 01

  That's like, you know, the angel and the devil on his shoulders.

• 7:57Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 7:57Speaker 01

  Rhetoric being the devil.

• 7:58Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 7:59Speaker 01

  Well, so Aristotle defined rhetoric better than anybody, and pretty much before anybody did it well. And so he defined rhetoric as distinct from philosophy in the sense that deliberative rhetoric, which is the, he hoped, was the rhetoric of politics, is the rhetoric of choice and decisions, of talking about the future. Now Aristotle realized that everything is contingent. There is no rulebook that can apply to everything. You've written about this.

• 8:26Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 8:27Speaker 01

  So he decided that there needed to be the specific skills that he picked up from the sophos, the, the wise ones, as they called themselves, who taught the art of manipulation.

• 8:38Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 8:38Speaker 01

  And so the idea of persuading people who disagree that in a way that would lead to better choices or public decisions, consensus, that's distinct from philosophy, which was a pursuit of a truth, preferably a single truth. Both are equally valid, but if you're going to politics, you're going to be a Roman emperor, you kind I don't want the manipulative part.

• 8:59Ryan Holiday?

  Well, it makes me think what's so interesting about philosophy today and why it probably feels inaccessible or irrelevant to most people is a failure of rhetoric, right? The ability to take the truth or the idea and make it compelling or interesting to people or to make it practical to people, this is really where philosophy has fallen short. And it's almost like deliberate, like philosophy is deliberately obscure and inaccessible rather than practical. And the funny thing is when you write books like yours or mine, where you make philosophy or these ideas accessible, the epithet for it is that it's just a self-help book, as if

• 9:43Ryan Holiday?

  that's not a good thing, right? Like, self-help is something you kind of say with a sneer, like, self-help is here and philosophy or art or literature is up here.

• 9:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was troubled by the very idea of writing a self-help book. But guess what? I mean, I was trying to help myself.

• 10:00Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 10:00Speaker 01

  I was writing about how to apply rhetoric to help myself. I had no choice. It had to be a self-help book, although in the book, I deny that it's a self-help book.

• 10:09Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 10:09Speaker 01

  Very rhetorical.

• 10:10Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, you don't want to be tarred with that, with that majority of like, it's like a book that helps people. I don't want to be doing that.

• 10:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:18Ryan Holiday?

  It seems weird that that's, that's what you don't want, but, but just because of where it sort of sits in the market. And then obviously there's grifters and stuff out there that sort of give the genre a bad name, but.

• 10:29Speaker 01

  Yes, like the sophists.

• 10:31Ryan Holiday?

  Yes. Like, if you sort of dismiss what the sophists do and all you focus on is the truth or the idea, and then you don't find a way to make it accessible for people, it doesn't work. I mean, like, I just think about, like, even Aristotle, if his most important work didn't have an unpronounceable name, might it itself be as popular as, say, Meditations? Probably. You know what I mean? Like, like, it's like, oh, are you reading Aristotle? What are you reading? I'm reading Nicomanchian Ethics. It's like, oh, let me rush out and buy that.

• 11:06Speaker 01

  And plus, it's terrible reading.

• 11:09Ryan Holiday?

  But and it's supposedly written to his son, but it doesn't take any of the form of like, you compare this, what he's writing to his son with even, I don't know, Seneca's letters.

• 11:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:19Ryan Holiday?

  Which is the same performative medium, but one is actually reads like letters and the other reads like a philosophy treatise. And so only basically academics read one and laypeople read another.

• 11:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. And if you go fast forward a little bit to Lucretius, when he is doing this marvelous poem on Epicureanism, so much fun. I mean, he says it's like putting honey in the dose of wormwood to make a kid drink it.

• 11:48Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 11:48Speaker 01

  I mean, he realized that.

• 11:49Ryan Holiday?

  Sugar with a medicine.

• 11:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 11:51Ryan Holiday?

  And I guess that's what makes meditation such a remarkable work is here you have someone who's, on the one hand, eschewing rhetoric. He's not trying to convince you. And yet, he's so clearly trained in rhetoric that even his self-talk is better than most performative talk from the other philosophers and writers.

• 12:13Speaker 01

  That's such a great way to put it. But you can even see that Plato doing that, hating rhetoric while applying every rhetorical tool to it.

• 12:20Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. I mean, I don't think Fronto Marxius's rhetoric teacher could read Meditations, a philosophy work, and not go, this is mostly me. Like, his fingerprints are all over it. There's this, this perfect fusing of the philosophy and the rhetoric. Again, so remarkable that it's, it's self-directed, as you're talking about the art of self-persuasion. He's trying to convince himself of the ideas over and over and over again.

• 12:46Speaker 01

  That's a great, there's self-help for you. But you know, not only that, but some of the rhetorical tools he uses, like figures and tropes are absolutely what he had been taught.

• 12:55Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 12:55Speaker 01

  Rhetorically.

• 12:56Ryan Holiday?

  Yes. These sort of beautiful metaphors and images, that sort of repetition of stuff.

• 13:02Speaker 01

  The rhythm.

• 13:03Ryan Holiday?

  Yes. And then to go like, here you have this guy who's very busy, writing in Greek, not Latin, to himself, not expecting it to be published. The idea that an average person with even a sub-average Education could pick up a translation in their language and be like, I get some of this. It's pretty remarkable. You do not have to be a trained classicist. You do not have to, you know, you don't have to read the proceeding works or the following work. Like you can just pick it up, know nothing about philosophy, know nothing about Stoicism and go, oh, there's stuff in here for me.

• 13:40Speaker 01

  You know, it's funny. I actually live in the middle of nowhere and I write out of a cabin in rural New Hampshire and I have a literal outhouse outside. And for years, my bathroom reading has been Marcus Aurelius. He wrote the original bathroom book.

• 13:55Ryan Holiday?

  It's a book that you pick up and take little chunks. You don't read it from cover to cover. It's a collection of epigrams and anecdotes and little insights. It's not, yeah, if you're, if you're going through Play-Doh on the toilet, you're like, wait, what did I read last time? Or, you know, it's not designed to be consumed in snippets.

• 14:18Speaker 01

  No, and you know, longer term bathroom reading is someone you're a fan of, Montaigne. And you get the sense, and who is a big fan of Marcus Aurelius and even had quotations of Seneca painted on his, on the wall. Yeah. Without Marcus Aurelius, I don't think he would have invented the essay. You know, because the essays are sort of long form, epigrams.

• 14:42Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, they're ruminations on a theme. It's basically a very extended commonplace book, his essays.

• 14:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 14:51Ryan Holiday?

  And it's the idea that the philosopher's job is to explore the self, right? So often I think philosophy or most philosophies trying to explain the universe, explain what you should be doing, explain what you need to understand. And I think both Montaigne and and Marcus Aurelius are like, I don't have time for that. What do I know? What's wrong with me? What do I, what am I struggling with? And it's trying to get to some flicker of self-awareness.

• 15:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. What's interesting about Montaigne is that he talked about assaying himself.

• 15:24Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 15:24Speaker 01

  Like Barbie, he wondered what was he made of.

• 15:26Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, yes.

• 15:28Speaker 01

  And so that because. Why we call it the essay because he was assaying himself. So it wasn't a matter of formulation or, you know, a sense of how you should live the good life. He basically said, I represent all of humanity.

• 15:41Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 15:41Speaker 01

  And that got me back when I was thinking about this to my favorite book of Aristotle, which is On the Soul. It's his weirdest book. I found it the most readable.

• 15:51Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 15:51Speaker 01

  Partly because I get a sense, I got a sense he was having fun with it. And that's what Aristotle was doing. He was looking inside his own body and wondering, where's my soul?

• 16:00Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 16:00Speaker 01

  You know, is it an organ or is it something above me? Or what's going on with that? And how do I connect with it?

• 16:06Ryan Holiday?

  Yes. And, and you see in him, I mean, he is rhetorically a genius. He's also an incredible writer who knows all the tips and tricks of the trade. And he's really good at it. He's just, he's applying it inwardly with humility as opposed to the way a demagogue or a, you know, an expert might do it, which is like, let me tell you what I know. He's saying like, I don't know what I know. Let's find out.

• 16:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. Which is a great start.

• 16:37Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 16:38Speaker 01

  If you're truly into your own self-help.

• 16:40Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I think that's right.

• 16:53Ryan Holiday?

  So I was curious, what do you think the difference between self persuasion and, and self-discipline are? Or is one lead to the other? Or how are they related?

• 17:05Speaker 01

  I love that question. And I'm going to give you my own personal take on this. Many scholars, and I'm not one, disagree.

• 17:11Ryan Holiday?

  Okay.

• 17:12Speaker 01

  But I think that if you're applying persuasion to yourself, you're removing discipline altogether. Now sooner or sooner or later, you impose discipline because it's easy. But so this is where Epicureanism, as it evolved directly from Aristotle, differs from the Stoics, which is the sense that they weren't trying to live a virtuous life. They were trying to lead a happy one.

• 17:36Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 17:36Speaker 01

  And, and so you need, needed a series of steps that involve some good behavior along the way. The difference was if you're applying rhetoric to convince your soul that you're worthy of it, you're trying to live up to this higher self, as Aristotle described it. You need to convince this soul that you're doing the right things. Now, in order to do that, you have to apply all the tricks of the manipulative trade to do that.

• 18:02Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 18:02Speaker 01

  Including convincing yourself that whatever goal you're setting is the most amazing thing ever.

• 18:08Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 18:08Speaker 01

  And then ramp yourself up to it very slowly and easily. The other thing you do in terms of rhetoric is you reframe the very idea of suffering. So you're not trying to time when you're going to suffer or prepare to suffer in any way. You're actually seeing the suffering itself as something very different and even possibly enjoyable. The idea of discipline, in other words, really bothered a lot of the Epicureans. And I have to say, it bothers me too. I've painstakingly put together a bunch of good habits. I turn 70 next month.

• 18:43Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 18:43Speaker 01

  And I'm feeling better than I've ever done had in my life, in part because I've manipulated myself into this probably false belief that I'm younger than I am. That's not discipline.

• 18:54Ryan Holiday?

  You don't feel like you have discipline?

• 18:56Speaker 01

  I have habits.

• 18:57Ryan Holiday?

  Okay.

• 18:58Speaker 01

  And Aristotle, being the inventor of, you know, habit philosophy, got me there.

• 19:03Ryan Holiday?

  And you don't think habits are a result of discipline or a form of discipline? Like, I guess I'm failing to see the distinction. I feel like discipline is, this is what I think I should do. Maybe I don't want to do it, but I'm doing it anyway. And whether you're doing it out of habit or you're doing it out of the sort of morning discussion with yourself, it seems like we're getting to the same place.

• 19:31Speaker 01

  Spoken like a true Stoic. Now, the difference, I like to use the analogy of flossing.

• 19:37Ryan Holiday?

  Mm hmm.

• 19:38Speaker 01

  I have flossed for many years.

• 19:41Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 19:41Speaker 01

  Now, in the beginning, it did seem like something that really sucked.

• 19:45Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 19:45Speaker 01

  I mean, the idea, I mean, think about it in detail. It's kind of gross, painstaking and that sort of thing. I did it because I was driven to do it. I was, my dating life was falling apart because my gums were bleeding. It was disgusting. So I did it for a very Specific goal, and I managed to convince myself that it really wasn't so bad to floss my teeth. Now, I've done it for so many years, it's attached to my identity. This is what Aristotle believed was really important.

• 20:13Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 20:13Speaker 01

  It's just, I'm a flosser, that's all I am.

• 20:15Ryan Holiday?

  I'm a woodworker, I'm a flute player, whatever.

• 20:17Speaker 01

  Exactly. Now, a lot of people will say, when it comes to another wonderful skill that doesn't take discipline, except maybe in the beginning, is napping. I'm a champion napper, as every old guy like me should be. And the thing is, a lot of people say to me, oh, I don't nap. And what they're saying is, I am not one who naps.

• 20:39Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 20:39Speaker 01

  Now, if you can change that sense of identity, and you can do it with these manipulative tools of rhetoric to change how you think about yourself, and the soul is one way to do that. It's a little way to divide your daily self from that soul, that Aristotelian soul. If you can do that, it's basically having this conversation with somebody who's not quite you. It's sort of a better version of you. And at that point, you can convince it, using all these tools, that maybe you are the kind of person who naps after all. And you're not doing it saying, I'm gonna lie down and make myself nap. It doesn't work.

• 21:13Ryan Holiday?

  But as someone who flosses every day, you don't see that as a little act of discipline? Or you're saying there's no discipline involved because you've convinced yourself that it's part of your identity and now you just do it? I guess I would just argue that that's discipline. Anything you do every day, anything you turn into a habit, that's, I guess we could say, positive, is discipline.

• 21:32Speaker 01

  But you know, bad habits can teach you what good habits are. So, for example, I have a cocktail every night. I shouldn't, that's bad. And yet, if I don't have the cocktail, that's straying from a habit that I've ingrained in myself. And so, the same thing with flossing, I just feel bad if I don't floss. I don't feel as if I should floss. I sort of can't not floss.

• 21:54Ryan Holiday?

  Right. If we just say, anything you do habitually is discipline, then obviously we're saying you have the discipline to do bad things. I think, I guess I would maybe define discipline as any time you're doing a thing that maybe is painful, or difficult, or not gratifying in the short term, but has benefits over the long term. That is discipline.

• 22:17Speaker 01

  It can be, from a stoical standpoint. On the other hand, one of the things, so one of the things I read about my book is that I really needed to work out and I needed to do a heck of a lot of PT. I had a hip, a hip problem that was very difficult to overcome. It seems like you're breaking down from the book. Your body is falling apart. I was falling apart. Yeah. I mean, I was also suffering from a severe dose of self pity in every way. I had had a nice career and people weren't returning my phone calls anymore. I mean, it was, I was in that old guy, you know, privileged white man problem, you know, era of my life. I needed the, first of all, in order to not discipline myself, in order to make myself do the things

• 23:00Speaker 01

  I wanted to do, I had to do two things, and this is pure Aristotle. Yeah. One was to set a goal that was a whole lot more interesting than walking again. Yeah. I was walking with a bad limp and sometimes not at all. I wanted to be able to run again, which was much more difficult, bigger goal. And you know, the Stoics talk about that too, as you know. I wanted to be able to run up a mountain in fewer minutes than I was old in years and be the first person over 50 to do it. And this was one of the big challenges. Where's this mountain, by the way? It's in New Hampshire. Okay, it sounds amazing. It is amazing. You've got to come and visit. Yeah, yeah. It's, it's one of the most beautiful mountains in the Northeast, but it also happens

• 23:42Speaker 01

  to be just about the right height and angle for the perfect measure of the O2. Yeah. And so Olympians test themselves on this. Now, only a dozen people had ever run their age, which is reaching the top in fewer minutes than they're old in years. Okay. Which is a marvelous fallacy that works great. Sure. And so I was told by two physiologists that it was actually physically impossible. Never mind the fact that I couldn't even walk right. Right. Which turned into a trope for me, a hyperbole, which in the Greek, if you translate it, comes from the words meaning above or beyond, hyper, and bully, which is where we get the word ball from. So to throw beyond, this was. I love that. I needed something stupid and pointless. Sure.

• 24:25Speaker 01

  In order to experiment on myself to see if I could convince myself it was possible. All right. None of that involved discipline. That was sheer fun.

• 24:33Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 24:33Speaker 01

  Like a word nerd kind of fun.

• 24:35Ryan Holiday?

  Well, that doesn't involve discipline because you haven't done it yet. You're just the idea of doing it.

• 24:39Speaker 01

  Exactly. But that was part of setting myself up. So not doing what I was supposed to be doing was the first step. And Aristotle actually writes about this. I call it the ramp. He doesn't. But you know, the idea that you begin at such a low angle, to the point where you're just almost procrastinating. The very first thing I was doing was setting a goal, a very well-defined goal. Okay, now how am I going to do it? That's planning. The biggest problem I had was time, as we all have. So I decided I would create my own time zone. And you know, my name is Jay, so I decided to call it J Light Saving. And again, here's something that's rhetorical.

• 25:17Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 25:17Speaker 01

  That doesn't involve discipline, which is that if you can make your audience, including your own soul, or you, as the case may be, smile or laugh, you're putting yourself into a more persuadable state.

• 25:31Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 25:31Speaker 01

  You know, behaviorists call it cognitive ease. Aristotle calls it receptivity.

• 25:35Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 25:35Speaker 01

  So I was making myself receptive just by making myself laugh at this stupid idea of my own time zone. Of course, the problem with that time zone is no one else is in it, except my wife who gets up early. So I did it by waiting, which is a great thing to do if you don't want to discipline yourself, procrastinate.

• 25:52Ryan Holiday?

  Okay.

• 25:52Speaker 01

  And every good writer, I'm going to ask you, if you do this, is a brilliant procrastinator. Like, you're really good at doing things other than writing.

• 26:00Ryan Holiday?

  Mm hmm. Deciding what day I'm going to start, which is never today. It's, I'm starting this on my birthday, you know.

• 26:06Speaker 01

  That's what makes you a successful writer.

• 26:08Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 26:09Speaker 01

  So all right, so that's part of the, that's whole ramping process. So I waited until the daylight saving changed in the fall to give, you know, the government granted me an hour of the day. And then the next year I did the same thing. Now, in the meantime, I was really starting to do the PT and the workouts and stuff, until finally I spent a year training. Now, one of the things I did was to reframe the very idea of suffering. And it started with this, this doctor giving me hundreds, literally hundreds of dextrose. Sugar water shots to kind of flood the zone of my nerves. I won't explain why it's gross, but I decided while I was lying there sweating on this table that this was part of my training. And what's more, I wasn't training to run up a mountain yet.

• 26:54Speaker 01

  I was training to suffer. And you know, the sophists believed that suffering was an actual skill. Your ability to suffer.

• 27:02Ryan Holiday?

  Certainly the Stoics would agree with that more than the Epicureans.

• 27:04Speaker 01

  They would. Yes, that's true. The Epicureans would do everything they could to avoid suffering. You're absolutely right. But that being said, to me, none of that was discipline at all. There was a desire that came from this, this wonderful silly goal. The other thing that I found was I wanted to be prepared for a higher order of failure. And you've written about this, which is this idea that this was literally an impossible goal. I had to convince myself that it was possible while at the same time realizing that failure, which would come from obstacles beyond my control, a very stoical principle, would still put me ahead. Like, imagine if I could run again.

• 27:46Speaker 01

  It wouldn't matter if I ran up this Mount Musselot in New Hampshire. But I would be able to enjoy myself running. I could ski again, all the delights I used to have.

• 27:55Ryan Holiday?

  But so you did all these rhetorical tricks to persuade yourself and to, you know, make it less intimidating and whatever. But at some point, you had to, to both do the training and then do the run. Isn't that discipline?

• 28:09Speaker 01

  Well, okay, I'm still procrastinating here. So the very first thing I did was to sit down and read. So I took my J. Light saving hour of the day, which became 4:30 in the morning. And I began my training by reading physiology books. So then this is part of changing my identity and getting in touch with my far superior soul, superior to my daily self. So I was looking at what Aristotle calls my phronesis. I translate as craft. It's often called practical wisdom, like whether you know what to do, whether you can solve a particular problem, where you have not just a book learning, but the experience. Well, okay, I'd been running. I'd trained in the past in my youth.

• 28:54Speaker 01

  But I thought, I want to know exactly what's going on with my body, especially an aging body. So I started reading journals. I started, and none of that was training.

• 29:03Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 29:04Speaker 01

  I was deliberately avoiding doing the actual PT and exercises.

• 29:07Ryan Holiday?

  But you did train at some point, right?

• 29:11Speaker 01

  Yes. Weeks later, I started doing really easy things like foam rolling.

• 29:15Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 29:16Speaker 01

  You know, and yoga and stuff. And, you know, actually, the physiology reading was so difficult that I found yoga way easier. So in a way, the ramp kind of leveled itself a little bit. All right. Then gradually, it became like not such a big deal. I was getting bored with yoga, which I hate.

• 29:36Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 29:37Speaker 01

  So I decided to start, you know, the PT I was supposed to be doing, which is painful. I started doing that more because that sure beats yoga.

• 29:45Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 29:46Speaker 01

  Now, so each step of the way, I was trying to keep the angle of that ramp as short as possible.

• 29:50Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 29:51Speaker 01

  Okay, but still, you're right. There was a degree of discipline, but I wouldn't call it that because at the moment I started doing that, I would start feeling sorry for myself. And, and thinking, I'm not doing that. This is actually kind of fun and interesting. I have my own time zone. I have read all about physiology. And I'm learning all kinds of cool stuff, which is super fun.

• 30:14Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 30:15Speaker 01

  And then on top of that, I'm actually, I'm going to end up at the top of that mountain, even though I was still doing just like basic PT stuff.

• 30:24Ryan Holiday?

  Which is interesting because I think we tend to think of discipline as a physical thing, right? So discipline is the running, the lifting weights, the not eating the foods or whatever, doing the flossing. But oftentimes, the discipline, I would argue, is in what you're talking about, which is the persuasion and how we think about it and how we frame it. Like, there's a writing rule I love, which is like two crappy pages a day. That's the ramp. So if you go, I have to write this book and I have to do it in two months. And that's, you know, 5,000 perfect words a day. You're just, you're going to despair and not do it. But if you just say, hey, I just need to make a small contribution today. I just got to show up and by dramatic. Lowering the stakes, or as to use your analogy, the angle of the ramp,

• 31:09Ryan Holiday?

  then you just do it. And oftentimes, you end up doing more than you thought, or you've tricked yourself into thinking that you're not doing it when in fact, you are doing it. You finish a book by showing up every day and just writing a little bit, and then you edit it and refine it and you get where you want to go. But to me, that is an act of discipline also, because what you're doing is sort of going, well, here's the level I would be thinking about, here's what I would be doing. But by sort of outthinking or over or thinking around it, I'm able to come up with. I'll give you an example. I think also, flossing is gross. It sucks. It's a habit that's hard to start, especially when you got to get the little box and pull out the thing, wrap it around your fingers and go like this. And then it's like somebody invents the little sticks or, you know, they invent,

• 31:54Ryan Holiday?

  and then all of a sudden, they've taken the thing that was difficult, and they make it 40% easier. And now the discipline required to do, it's like work smarter, not harder, right? And I think, I think that deciding to work smarter, the work that you did knowing, it's like knowing myself, if this is just sheer physical training, I'm not going to have fun, I'm not going to do it, I'm going to be miserable. And so you did a considerable amount of mental work to think around that, to then just get yourself to a place where you are doing the training necessary to do the thing that you want to do.

• 32:43Speaker 01

  Let's look at the word discipline.

• 32:44Ryan Holiday?

  Okay.

• 32:45Speaker 01

  And because I think you're leading to some, an area where we would probably agree.

• 32:48Ryan Holiday?

  Probably. I just think this is interesting. Yes.

• 32:51Speaker 01

  So when you are practicing discipline, you are becoming a disciple of something. You're following something or somebody.

• 32:58Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 32:59Speaker 01

  So in that respect, what I was doing was following my soul. Now, my soul had to have a kind of voice.

• 33:04Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 33:05Speaker 01

  So what I employ there-

• 33:06Ryan Holiday?

  Changed the voice.

• 33:07Speaker 01

  Changed the voice. Yes. Now, what I change it to is something very specific. So we're going to flash back again now to ancient soldiers going into battle. Back in ancient Greece, soldiers would begin praying to the god of healing on Olympics, Pion. Who in order to protect them. Yeah. So you imagine these soldiers running into battle saying, you know, please, peon, don't let me be the one who gets speared. Yeah. But pretty soon, or maybe right away, we don't know. They were shouting the these prayers in a highly rhythmic way, which they thought was magical. Yeah. Which is, you know, our charms come from this idea of song, of singing something.

• 33:52Speaker 01

  So Cicero wrote about this, saying the peon actually was a group of short and long syllables. Now, in ancient Greek, it gets really difficult to, you know, translate this in anything sensible, but it's pretty clear. He was using terms like a peon would be something like golden haired far shooter, son of Zeus. And you imagine someone shouting that, it actually, and there is some neuroscience behind this, not a lot, which shows that that kind of rhythm is not only remembered more, but it actually creates cognitive ease. Yeah. Where you believe it more. So I started using peons on myself. Yeah. In fact, I do it when I write all the time. I do a peon with the same rhythm. I'm a brilliant writer. Like a mantra? Yeah.

• 34:36Speaker 01

  It's like a mantra, only with a very specific, I say, I'm a brilliant writer. Everybody loves me. And, you know, things, you're smiling. I did too. Yeah. The stupider, it makes a great experiment. The dumber the peon, and the more you repeat it, it's not just the repetition. I swear it's the rhythm. And you can see Madison Avenue has picked up on this. Bet you can't eat just one is a peon. Yeah. And a lot of, if you go back and you look at the slogans, which by the way, peons became. Yeah. The war chant started out as a prayer to peon and became a slogan. Yeah. Where we're going to kill you right away, whatever they're shouting. Yes. That became a kind of implanted belief through rhythm and memory. Sure.

• 35:18Speaker 01

  That actually changes your ventral media prefrontal cortex, which is what has has to do with interpreting your reality. And so you begin to see yourself differently and the things around you differently. Now, this is not so much discipline. This is pure manipulation.

• 35:35Ryan Holiday?

  I think we agree.

• 35:37Speaker 01

  We do.

• 35:37Ryan Holiday?

  At some point, you have to do the thing. You can, you do the persuasion, but what are you persuading yourself to do? What are you, what is the persuasion towards? It's persuading yourself to do a thing. And then you have to do it. And that's where the sort of willpower comes in. I think, but I think what you're getting at, and maybe sometimes the Stoics didn't do enough, or people who, people miss is like, we only have so much willpower. And however you can reduce the amount of willpower required to do a thing. Again, this is the sort of work beforehand, or, you know, it's like the Abraham Lincoln thing about you gotta chop down a tree, you should spend most of the time sharpening the axe.

• 36:20Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 36:21Ryan Holiday?

  You're, but you go, hey, if this is just raw brute force willpower, you know, you better hope you have a lot of it. I would say like, as I've gotten older, I've had to get smarter about these things. Because, you know, it's like, on my first book, before I had kids, before I was married, I could just go, I sit in my chair and this is what I do all day. And, you know, as kids and life takes up more and more, you gotta be, no, I got one hour to be in the zone. And so what are the strategies that you use to get in that zone? It can't just be that kind of brute force.

• 36:58Speaker 01

  That's true. I will say, and you, push back on this, I'm sure you will. One of the ways I define Stoicism, modern Stoicism, is looking at Stoics.

• 37:09Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 37:09Speaker 01

  And the people who are really into Stoicism, who really understand it and seem to practice it, I get a sense they were pretty strong, self-disciplined people to start with.

• 37:19Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I think so.

• 37:20Speaker 01

  Like, they're awesome people.

• 37:21Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 37:21Speaker 01

  And so I like to write for someone like me, a weakling, you know, a nerd, who maybe just loves words so much and would rather be doing that than any kind of painful exercise.

• 37:33Ryan Holiday?

  Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it and I'll see you next episode.