BONUS | 5 Rapid-Fire Stoic Rules for Thinking More Clearly

Before you trust your first reaction, assumption, or opinion, the Stoics would tell you to do a few things first. In this bonus episode, Ryan breaks down five rules for thinking more clearly. 🎟️DAILY STOIC LIVE https://www.dailystoiclive.com/| Ryan Holiday is coming to a city near you https://www.dailystoiclive.com/! Grab tickets here https://www.dailystoiclive.com/ | https://www.dailystoiclive.com/ 🎙️AD-FREE https://dailystoic.supercast.com/| Support the podcast and go deeper into Stoicism by subscribing toThe Daily Stoic Premium https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ - unlock ad-free listening, early access, and bonus content:https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ 🎥 VIDEO EPISODES https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos| Watch the video episodes onThe Daily Stoic YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos:https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos ✉️ FREE STOIC WISDOM https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail | Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email athttps://dailystoic.com/dailyemail See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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.

• 0:14Ryan Holiday?

  Five rules that will make you a better thinker. Number one, watch your information diet. As they say, garbage in, garbage out. You're spending too much time on social media. If you are spending too much time reading the latest and the trendiest stuff, what you're missing is the ancient stuff, right? Marcus Aurelius's Meditations is 2,000 years old. Go way back in time. Read old books to have new ideas. Number two, ego is the enemy. As Epictetus reminds us, you cannot learn that which you think you already know. It's through humility, it's through openness, it's through the willingness to admit error that we learn and grow and change. Which leads us to the third one. We have to be good at asking questions.

• 0:59Ryan Holiday?

  Marcus Aurelius praises Antoninus, his predecessor, for his ability to ask searching questions at meetings. This is a skill. If you ask a good question, as they say, you are on your way to a good answer. Be willing to ask questions, be willing to question everything, including yourself. To go back to information diet, it's not just reading, it's the rereading that counts, right? The ancients talked about how we never step in the same river twice, right? Every time we go back to a thinker, every time we go back to a book, every time we go back to a genre, we are different. And so we take different things out of it. And then the final and fifth one is pretty basic. Take more walks. Nietzsche said that it was only ideas had while walking that have any worth,

• 1:44Ryan Holiday?

  and he's absolutely right. We are meant to think and contemplate on the move. We are not supposed to be sedentary. We are not supposed to be stuck in an office. We are meant to be outdoors. We are meant to be in motion. I'm not saying that walks are going to solve all your problems, are going to make everything clear. I'm just saying very little is less clear when you return from a walk. Very few problems are made worse by taking a walk. Walking and thinking go hand in hand.