This Is How You Stay Intact | Accepting What Is

Maintaining healthy boundaries in your life requires discipline. And only through self-discipline and self-control are we capable of achieving the greatness that lies within each of us.📕 Discipline Is Destiny, the second book in the Stoic Virtues Series, is only $2.99 at all major ebook retailers! Head to dailystoic.com/did We also have signed copies available at the Daily Stoic Store! https://store.dailystoic.com/📓 Pick up a signed edition of The Daily Stoic Journal: 366 Days of Writing and Reflection on The Art of Living: https://store.dailystoic.com/✉️ 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 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.

• 0:02Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Each day, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, illustrated with stories from history, current events, and literature to help you be better at what you do. And at the beginning of the week, we try to do a deeper dive, setting a kind of Stoic intention for the week, something to meditate on, something to think on, something to leave you with, to journal about, whatever it is you happen to be doing. So let's get into it.

• 0:42Ryan Holiday?

  This is how you stay intact. We can imagine people wanted things from Marcus Aurelius. They wanted jobs, they wanted favorable rulings, they wanted policy changes, they wanted his attention. We're not quite emperors, but people seem to want a lot from you too, don't they? Your boss does, your kids do. The news wants your attention, your neighbor wants your time, that group wants your money, your spouse needs your affection, your parents need your help. People need stuff from you. This is part of being human, but just as part of being a country or an empire means having borders, as humans, we have to have boundaries. We have to be able to be accessible as parents and employees and friends and offspring, but we can't give everything away.

• 1:26Ryan Holiday?

  I talk a lot about this in Discipline is Destiny, which by the way, is 299 as an ebook right now. You can grab it at dailystoic.com/did. I'll link to it in today's show notes. We just can't allow ourselves to be run roughshod over. There's an Aristotelian mean here, a midpoint between the vices of closed offedness and chaos, between appropriate and inappropriate. In the famous Rush song about being in the limelight, they sing about this.

• 1:58Ryan Holiday?

  Marcus Aurelius had to learn this. You have to learn this. What will you allow and not allow? Bear and not forbear? These are issues of boundaries. These are essential conclusions that you have to come to as a mature, self-sufficient, responsible adult. Marcus Aurelius understood that to rule effectively, he couldn't allow himself to be consumed by everyone else's demands. Without boundaries, without the discipline to protect those boundaries, you lose yourself in the chaos of other people's needs. Boundaries don't limit your capacity to help others. They preserve it. Look, I would just say that maintaining healthy boundaries in your life requires discipline, lots of it. The ability to say no being one of the hardest ones that I struggle with. And it's really only through self-discipline and self-control are we able to achieve

• 2:43Ryan Holiday?

  the greatness that lies inside each of us. And Discipline is Destiny, which was the second book in the Stoic Virtues series, is all about that. And as I was saying, it's $2.99 as an ebook right now on Amazon. I do have some signed copies of the hardcover in the Daily Stoic store. I'll link to that also. But if you want the ebook, you can go to dailystoic.com/did or pull it up on Amazon. I'll link to it in today's show notes. Grab your copy. We could all use a bit more discipline in our lives, and hopefully it will help you fulfill your destiny.

• 3:23Ryan Holiday?

  Accepting What Is. This week's entry from the Daily Stoic Journal, 366 Days of Writing and Reflections on the Art of Living. It's our companion to the Daily Stoic. Reinhold Niebuhr's Serenity Prayer is a mantra for many. "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change," it reads, "courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference." The Stoics wanted to push past simply accepting what is. They wanted us to be grateful and happy with what is. Epictetus taught that we get a well-flowing life when we wish for what is going to happen, not for what we want to happen.

• 4:08Ryan Holiday?

  And Marcus Aurelius adds that we should meet anything that comes our way with gratitude. Not, "I wish this was different and I'll tolerate it, but I'm glad it happened this way. It's for the best. So let us try that on for size this week." And we have two quotes from Epictetus and one from Marcus Aurelius. "Don't seek for everything to happen as you wish it would, but rather wish that everything happens as it actually will, and then your life will flow well." That's Epictetus's Incoridion 8. And then from the Discourses 1:12, he says, "To be truly educated means this: learning to wish that each thing happens exactly as it does."

• 4:51Ryan Holiday?

  Marcus Aurelius' Meditation 9:6, "All you need are these: certainty of judgment in the present moment, action for the common good in the present moment, and an attitude of gratitude in the present moment for anything that comes your way." One thing I wanted to point out, because I was fascinated to learn this, is the Serenity Prayer of one, it sounds like some sort of real hymn or prayer that must go back thousands of years. Honestly, it sounds like something that could come from the Stoics. And then obviously, a lot of people associate it with Recovery Movement, which it has become a big part of. But it really dates to like the 30s and 40s. They think that he composed

• 5:36Ryan Holiday?

  the prayer somewhere around the time of 1932, 1933, which for some context is in the midst of the Great Depression. But again, one of the benefits of wisdom is that it is both timely and timeless at the same time. So this idea of the prayer, "Father, give us courage to change what must be altered, serenity to accept what cannot be helped, and the insight to know one from another." Also, I think the difference between that as he first writes it and then what it sort of commonly gets rendered out is also a sign of, as Twain says, the difference between lightning and a lightning bug, like, just the perfect wording of it, the perfect encapsulation

• 6:20Ryan Holiday?

  of the wisdom, it feels, as soon as you see it, even though, you know, it's as old as some people's grandparents who are listening to this, or perhaps some people who are listening to this themselves, they may be well older than that short little prayer, but it feels as current and fresh and also as ageless and timeless as just about anything. But anyways, let's not nerd out too much on the history of the prayer. What I thought I would focus on today, because we've been talking about acceptance quite a lot here on the podcast, I tend to disagree a little bit with Epictetus. I find that Epictetus's life was so tragic and painful. His name literally means, like, enslaved. We know

• 7:03Ryan Holiday?

  almost nothing about his family. We know nothing about his existence, except that he's born a slave. He has a cruel master who tortures him. He walks for a limp the rest of his life. And then, after 30 years of slavery and, you know, eventually getting his freedom, Epictetus is exiled by a cruel emperor. So it is a hard life. But I find it striking that nowhere in Epictetus's writings, does he really question whether any of it was right or fair, whether anything could be done about it. Now, you might say this is him reaching this sort of sage-like level of wisdom. And I think there's truth to that. I mean, who am I to question, obviously, such a great and brave and, you know, enduring

• 7:48Ryan Holiday?

  spirit? But I guess, obviously, we live in a world now where people have more agency. And why do we have that agency? Because people were willing to fight for it and change. So obviously, the Stoics are mostly right, that so much of what happens in this world is outside of our control. We should accept it, resenting it, crying over it, whining about it, simply wishing it was otherwise, does not do anything. And then a lot of the things that there, I think this is referred to, are things that you just... Look, you were born five foot three instead of six foot three. That's just a reality. You're going to have to accept it, right? People in your family go bald. You're going to have to accept it, right? Your spouse turned out to be a jerk. They ran away with all your money, left you, broke your heart. It happened, right?

• 8:31Ryan Holiday?

  That is true, but I just don't want Epictetus to be misinterpreted as some sort of rationalization or acceptance of profound injustices, including the injustices that Epictetus seemed relatively okay accepting, right? As they say, progress depends on the unreasonable man. I talk about this a little bit in the Courage book. We have to be accepting. We have to face unflinchingly the reality of our situation. But even as I read this paragraph that I have written, I would push back on it a little bit. And I do think it's important that we focus on what we're going to do about the situations that we find ourselves in. I feel like Epictetus could have done that a bit more himself. Still, obviously a great man, better man than I.

• 9:16Ryan Holiday?

  Certainly, I could not have endured what he had endured. But it's just a thought today. And I want you to be okay pushing back and questioning things from the Stoics as well. They weren't perfect. They were products of their time. They were products of their own experiences. And we can challenge and debate and argue with them as long as we think we're getting them closer to what they actually mean, what the wisdom of the Stoics actually mean. And that's today's message.

• 9:47Ryan 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.