We Can Get This Expensive Thing Cheap | The Long Way Around

The rarest thing in the world is wisdom. The most expensive thing in the world is experience. How many truly wise people have you met? How many of them would take the time to download to you all that they know? And of the small amount of wisdom you have accumulated in your life, how much painful trial and error did it take to get it? There is really only one shortcut or hack around this. It is the theme we have returned to here many times: reading.---And in today's excerpt from The Daily Stoic, Ryan examines what the Stoics say about choosing to stop taking the long way around to getting what you want, and the benefits that immediately follow. If you want to become a great reader, the Stoics can help. We built out their best insights into our Read to Lead: A Daily Stoic Reading Challenge. Since it first launched in 2019, Read to Lead has been our most popular challenge, taken on by almost ten thousand participants. Sign up today!✉️ 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 the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Friday, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from The Daily Stoic, my book, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful collaborator, translator, and literary agent, Stephen Hanselman. So today, we'll give you a quick meditation from the Stoics with some analysis from me, and then we'll send you out into the world to turn these words into works.

• 0:43Ryan Holiday?

  "We get this expensive thing cheap. The rarest thing in the world is wisdom. The most expensive thing in the world is experience. How many truly wise people have you met? How many of them would take the time to download to you all that they know? And of the small amount of wisdom you have accumulated in your life, how much painful trial and error did it take to get it?" There's really only one shortcut or hack around this, and it's a theme we have returned to many times here. It's reading. "By spending a few dollars for a book," the great Admiral Rickover once said, "the thoughts and life's work of a great man is available to us." Or, as Seneca put it, "by reading and studying philosophy,

• 1:26Ryan Holiday?

  a person is able to annex every age to their own." "All the harvest of the past is added to their story," he said, and it's this beautiful quote that is the epigraph to The Daily Stoic. "Consider how many Marcus Aurelius's there have been, how many Rickovers, how many Stockbills. Consider how much pain and struggle went into their becoming who they were. And now, for a few dollars, their thoughts and life's work is available to you. Only an ingrate, Seneca would say, would fail to see this as the incredible gift that it is. Only a fool would not take this amazing deal and take it right now."

• 2:12Ryan Holiday?

  One of the things you learn when you talk to really great readers, really great thinkers and really great leaders, is that they have a specific practice for reading, for turning those words into works, as Seneca said, turning insights into action. And so what we're going to do in this course is break down that process. How I take a book like The 48 Laws of Power, this biography of John Boyd, this biography of John D. Rockefeller, a novel like Invisible Man, and how I turn that into actionable insights in my life, how I break that down, how I organize the information, how I apply it in my life and in my writing. And we're going to learn how people like Marcus Aurelius and Seneca and Epictetus and Cato and James Stockdale did this in their own life at the highest levels.

• 2:57Ryan Holiday?

  There is so many insights from these people, and that's what we've built this course around. You'll get more than a dozen specific, daily-delivered exercises and practices about reading. We have a workbook for you to follow. We have a huge list of recommended books. We have videos from me every day breaking down these strategies from these great thinkers. We have thousands of words of original content. There's a community you can be a part of. There's proven things that I promise you will take from this challenge and apply, not just that single day, but for the rest of your life.

• 3:45Ryan Holiday?

  The Long Way Around. This is today's entry in the Daily Stoic.

• 3:54Ryan Holiday?

  "You could enjoy this very moment, all the things you are praying to reach by taking the long way around if you'd stop depriving yourself of them." Marcus Aurelius's Meditations 12:1. "Ask most people what they're working towards, and you'll get an answer. I'm trying to become insert professional." Or they'll tell you they're trying to get appointed to some impressive committee or position, to become a millionaire, to get discovered, to become famous, whatever. If you ask them a couple more questions, such as, "Why are you doing that?" Or, "What are you hoping it'll be like when you get it?" And you'll find that at the very core of it, people want freedom. They want happiness. They want the respect of their peers. A Stoic looks at this and shakes their head at the immense effort and expense we put into

• 4:37Ryan Holiday?

  chasing things that are simple and straightforward to acquire. It's as if we'd prefer to spend years building a complicated Rube Goldberg machine instead of just reaching out and picking up what we want. It's like looking all over for your sunglasses and realizing they were on your head the whole time. Freedom, that's easy. It's in your choices, the Stoics would say. Happiness, that's easy. It's in your choices, the Stoics would say. Respect your peers. That too is in the choices you make. All of that is in front of you. No need to take the long way to get there. It's actually like a viral email chain. You've probably seen it before about the fisherman in Thailand or something. And the Western businessman sees him and he says, oh, you've got this little boat.

• 5:22Ryan Holiday?

  What if you got another boat and another boat? You scale this operation, you can make all this money. And the guy says, well, then what? And he's like, well, then you could retire and live on a beach somewhere. The guy says, but that's what I do now. And actually, this story dates back to like the 14th century. It's about a king who's advised by his advisor to, you know, conquer this territory, this territory, this territory, this territory. Why? Why? Why? Well, at the end of it, you can live in peace, although he lives in peace now. I've experienced my, my own version of this as an author. It's been funny. I meet these really successful people who do the things that I sometimes wish I could do. They play, they play professional sports. They have huge audiences where they've made all this money.

• 6:06Ryan Holiday?

  They have all this stuff and, you know, you catch yourself being a little jealous and they invite you over to their fancy houses and you sit there and you go, man, what it'd be so cool to live this life. And then I find out the real reason they invited me over is that they want to learn how to write books, right? Like I'm jealous of their life, they're jealous of my life, right? And it's, I think this is what Marcus is saying is that you can have what you want right now.

• 6:33Ryan Holiday?

  And more importantly, the thing that you think will bring you something, peace, contentment, happiness, whatever, it's not gonna happen. It's this horizon that you never quite meet. It's always a little bit out of view. Marcus is saying that we try to get our stuff the long way, the hard way, at the end of this long war, at the end of this long journey, right? It's after I become rich and successful, after I make it, after I win a Super Bowl, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba. Then I'll feel good. Then I'll be able to spend time with my family. Then I can be at peace, whatever. And you can have that right now. I have this chapter in Stillness is the Key about enough. Actually, it's funny.

• 7:17Ryan Holiday?

  My wife just did this triathlon in Austin. And as I was walking our kids back to the car after watching, this lady stopped me and she said, "Oh, I saw this viral video you did about that story of Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller." And she said, "Could you tell that again?" And she made me tell it in front of her. But it's one of my favorite stories. Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, they're at this party, this rich person. Again, just like I was just telling you that I've experienced myself. And Kurt Vonnegut is sort of teasing Joseph Heller. And he says, "You know, this guy made more money than your books will ever make in your life." And Joseph Heller says, "Yeah, but I have something that he doesn't have." And Vonnegut says, "What could that possibly be?" And Joseph Heller says, "I have enough. I have what I need."

• 8:01Ryan Holiday?

  And that's what Marcus is saying too. You could have it right now. It's already yours. It's already there in the things that you control. Having the other stuff is nice and you can still get it, right? I feel like I have enough. I feel like there's nothing I'm really trying to prove, but I'm still doing interesting things. I've got this new cool project I'm working on. I'm about to start another book. I'm trying to do it from a place of enoughness and fullness, not a place of emptiness, right? Not a place of having to prove myself, of getting more and more and more, of doing it because I actually enjoy it. And knowing that if I don't finish, if I don't make it all the way there, if just the time that I spent working on it today was all I got. That was enough. That itself was enjoyable.

• 8:45Ryan Holiday?

  And to me, that's just a much healthier place to live and be and operate from. And I hope you can give yourself that gift. Give yourself the gift of enough, because you are enough.