This Will Sustain You | Make Honesty Your Only Policy

Each of us goes to work every day and deals with obstacles, with difficult people. We deal with stress at home. We have responsibilities in our community. Some of us have other problems still: A divorce. A looming bankruptcy. Maybe we’re on deployment. Maybe we’ve just done a stint in jail.✉️ 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 See 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?

  Bienvenidos al podcast diario de Stoic. Cada día te traemos una meditación inspirada por los antiguos estoicos, ilustrada con historias de la historia, eventos actuales y literatura para ayudarte a ser mejor en lo que haces. Y al principio de la semana intentamos hacer un profundísimo descubrimiento, estableciendo una especie de intención estoica para la semana, algo para meditar, algo para pensar, algo para dejarte con, para journalizar, lo que sea que te ocurra de hacer. Así que vamos a entrar en ello.

• 0:39Ryan Holiday?

  Esto te sostendrá.

• 0:43Ryan Holiday?

  Cada uno de nosotros va a trabajar todos los días y trata con obstáculos, con personas difíciles. Tratamos de estrés en casa, tenemos responsabilidades en nuestra comunidad. Algunos de nosotros tienen otros problemas todavía, un divorcio, una bancarrota, tal vez estemos en desempleo, tal vez hemos hecho solo un ataque en la cárcel. En 1513, Machiavelli estaba en un lugar difícil que pocos envidiarían, pero muchos pueden relacionarse. Estaba en exilio, había sido quitado de su vida y su estatus social. Su país era un desastre político, estaba inseguro de su siguiente movimiento. ¿Qué hizo? Hizo lo que Seneca hizo en una posición similar. Hizo lo que Marcus Aurelius hizo en los campos de la frontera romana. Hizo lo que Zeno hizo después de la caída de la nave.

• 1:25Ryan Holiday?

  Machiavelli encontró una manera, como dijo Marcus, de lavar la polvo de la luz del cielo. Lo encontró en los libros. Como escribió Machiavelli, "Cuando la noche llega, vuelvo a casa y entro en mi estudio. En el límite, quito mis vestidos de trabajo húmedos y colocé las ropas de la corte y el palacio. Y en esta vestida de gracia entro en las cortejas antiguas de los antiguos y me reciben, y allí disfruto el comida que solo es mía y por la que nací. Y aquí hago bolda para hablarles y preguntar los motivos de sus acciones, y ellos, en su humanidad, responden a mí. Y durante cuatro horas olvido el mundo. Recuerda, sin vexación, miedo, pobreza, no más, tremeces, no más, a la muerte.

• 2:08Ryan Holiday?

  Pasaré, de hecho, a su mundo." Hemos hablado tantas veces sobre la importancia de tener una práctica de lectura, de regresar a la filosofía cuando te encuentras adentrado o perdido. This is why it can sustain you, it can reassure you, it welcomes you with open arms, builds you back up, guides and repairs you. So whatever is happening in your life, whatever you're going through, when you return home today, go as Machiavelli did, into the proverbial study, cross the threshold into the world of books and ideas, the greats of history, rest and recharge in it. Let it make you brave. Obviously, this is what stillness

• 2:50Ryan Holiday?

  is about. I think Machiavelli is talking about how reading gives him stillness. It's what I was talking about and stillness is the key. But really, really, this is why I love books. It's why I have a place that I read in my house. It's also why I read on planes when I'm stressed out, when I'm working. Books are a magical retreat, a place to guide us, a place that welcomes us, a place that stabilizes us even when the world is crazy. And if you don't have a reading practice, I think you're missing out. And if you want to have a better reading practice, that's why we built the Read to Lead Daily Stoic Reading Challenge. Since it first launched in 2019, it's been our most popular challenge. It's been taken by over 10,000 people all over

• 3:32Ryan Holiday?

  the world. It's a five-week course. We teach you how to get the most out of your reading, how to find books that can change your life, how to think critically, how to find time to read, how to digest books above your level. We just wrapped up a live cohort of participants of the challenge in June, which exceeded our expectations. So now you can get access to all the live sessions we did with those students and fellow Stoic readers. It's two emails a week for five weeks, five Q and A video sessions that you're really going to enjoy. And you can sign up now at dailystoic.com/readtolead or find it at store.dailystoic.com. And as always, if you're a Daily Stoic Life member at dailystoiclife.com, get this challenge and all our challenges

• 4:16Ryan Holiday?

  for free. But I'd love to see you in the Read to Lead Challenge. The reviews have been amazing, and I think you're really going to like it. And I want you to have that experience that Machiavelli was talking about.

• 4:33Ryan Holiday?

  Make honesty your only policy. And this is from this week's entry in the Daily Stoic Journal, 366 Days of Writing and Reflection on the Art of Living by yours truly and my co-writer and translator, Stephen Hanselman. I actually do this journal every single day. There's a question in the morning, a question in the afternoon, then there's these sort of weekly meditations. As Epictetus says, "Every day and night, we keep thoughts like this at hand. Write them, read them aloud, and talk to yourself and others about them." You can check out the Daily Stoic Journal anywhere books are sold. You can also get a signed personalized copy from me in the Daily Stoic store at store.dailystoic.com.

• 5:13Ryan Holiday?

  As Emperor Marcus Aurelius did not see the best of humanity, leaders never do. At court, there would have been backbiting, people who sold their friends out when they saw an opportunity to advance themselves, avarice and deceit. He especially didn't like faux attempts at honesty. His point, "If you have to say, 'I'm gonna be honest with you here,' what you're casually saying is that honesty is an exception for you and not the rule, that you're making a special effort to tell the truth here, because you usually don't." And how sad is that? It's time to think about what these little statements say about us and how to make sure that our default policy is honesty and straightforwardness. And then

• 5:55Ryan Holiday?

  the two quotes we have from Marcus Aurelius's meditations and then from Seneca's moral letters go as follows. "How rotten and fraudulent when people say they intend to give it to you straight. What are you up to, friend? It shouldn't need to be your announcement, but be seen readily, as if written on your forehead, heard in the ring of your voice, a flash in your eyes, just as the beloved sees it all in a lover's glance. In short, the straightforward and good person should be like the smelly goat. You know it when they're in the room with you." I love that quote. That's so great. "A calculated 'give it to you straight' is like a dagger, and there's nothing worse than a wolf befriending sheep. We should avoid false friendship at all costs. If you are good, straightforward, and well-meaning, it should show in your eyes."

• 6:40Ryan Holiday?

  And not escape notice. That's from Marcus Aurelius's Meditations 1115. And then Seneca's Moral Letters 109, he says, "It is in keeping with nature to show our friends affections and to celebrate their advancement as if it was our very own. For if we don't do this, virtue, which is strengthened only by exercising our perceptions, will no longer endure in us." Look, I think this idea that honesty is your best policy is really important. And obviously, we should cultivate a reputation for candor, for straightforwardness, for not holding back, for not being two-faced. If you have an opinion, you put it out there. You don't say one thing in private, another thing in public, right? But I would say, you know, and we had Randall Stutman on the Daily Stoic Podcast and in

• 7:25Ryan Holiday?

  the Daily Stoic Leadership Challenge recently, and he did push back on this trend of radical candor, you know, that often it can be an excuse for being a jerk. You know, the Stoics take their original roots from the cynics, you know, Diogenes, who sort of walks the streets of Athens, just saying whatever he thinks. But I don't particularly admire him. I see him as sort of antisocial. So I think what Marcus is saying, cultivate a reputation for straightforwardness, this is in context of the other Stoic virtues. It takes courage to be clear and to voice unpopular opinions and to say what people don't want to hear. But it also takes moderation and an understanding of justice to know what opinions to voice,

• 8:10Ryan Holiday?

  how to voice them, how not to be a jerk about them. You know, radical candor in Wall Street firms, Randall was saying, is again, often an excuse for asshole bosses to be more of a jerk. And that's not the excuse they need. We want to be both straightforward as well as restrained. And I know that seems a little contradictory, but well, life is complicated and it's about balance. So when we say we want to be the smelly goat in the room, I don't think we want, and as someone who owns goats, let me tell you, man, goats can stink. I can sometimes smell my neighbor's goats. He's like a half mile away. I'll catch a whiff of it in the wind. A male goat, this sort of musk they have, man, it is repulsive. It's disgusting.

• 8:55Ryan Holiday?

  I don't think that's what Marcus is saying. I think he's being a bit exaggerated. He's just saying that I'm gonna be level with you, with you here. Or when we say, I don't mean any offense, or no offense intended. You really did mean, you're, you can almost expect that the next words out of this person's mouth are gonna be really poorly thought out, not so nice things. And so I think we should take some time here to think about this balance. This is what temperance is really about, right? Just in the way that courage is a midpoint between cowardice and recklessness. I'd like to think that honesty is a line somewhere between omission, not saying things,

• 9:36Ryan Holiday?

  and saying too many things, or something like to that regard, if you get what I'm saying. It's, it's that, yes, we have to tell the truth, but you don't have to tell someone that you find them repulsive today. You don't have to tell them that you really hate the sound of their voice, right? There are things you can keep to yourself. And I guess I just wanted to add a little color to this week's meditation, that being a Stoic, and there was an interesting lawsuit recently, a workplace lawsuit, where a man claimed that Stoicism was his religion, and therefore the offensive things he said at work, the way he comported himself and behaved, even some of his hygiene habits, he could not be fired for them because they were his religious beliefs.

• 10:20Ryan Holiday?

  But when you really look at the remarks that he was defending, the way that he's behaving, it's true that he's actually just a jerk. And that's not what we're talking about. So all things in moderation, including this kind of honesty that we're talking about from Marcus really is, have an identifiable scent that you are an honest person, but don't be a stinky goat. 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.