You Are Never Excused From This | Ask Daily Stoic

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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:05Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a Stoic-inspired meditation, designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life. Each one of these episodes is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women, help you learn from them, to follow in their example, and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. For more, visit DailyStoic.com.

• 0:56Ryan Holiday?

  You are never excused from this. He was an old man. He was considered the wisest leader who ever lived. Yet there he was, leaving the palace, carrying his books. "Where are you off to?" a friend asked. "I'm off to see Sextus the philosopher," Marcus Aurelius told him, "to learn that which I do not yet know." He wasn't even sending for a tutor, which he easily could have done. Everyone was at his beck and call. He was following the example of Hadrian, though, who, as emperor, had traveled all the way to Greece to attend Epictetus's lectures in person. "It was a marvelous thing to see," the friend noted,

• 1:39Ryan Holiday?

  "the king of the Romans in his old age, taking up his tablets and going to school." But this is what the wise do. They don't just learn when they're young, but all their lives. They identify as a student, not just as a person who has attained wisdom. They don't see themselves as better or apart. They're just like everyone else, still learning, still needing to be taught. Until when is a person obligated to study Torah? A Jewish thinker once said, "Until the day of one's death, at no rank, General Mattis likes to say, is a Marine excused from study." So he said recently, "It doesn't matter if you're young or old. It doesn't matter if you're a private or a president, a CEO or a summer intern.

• 2:24Ryan Holiday?

  Your education is your responsibility." And it's something that continues indefinitely, endlessly, for there are always new lands to discover, new lessons to learn, and old ones to discover anew. "Education is something we are doing for life," Seneca said, "not for the purposes of graduation. So we must never stop. We must never think we've learned all there is to know. We must never think we are too important to keep challenging ourselves. There is always that which we do not yet know." Look, even if you're gifted, even if you've graduated from the best schools, even if you've read hundreds of books, Seneca reminds us that to become wise, much toil remains.

• 3:07Ryan Holiday?

  I think about that with my own writing, my own research, always trying to get better, always trying to push myself, always trying to add something new to my game, to my understanding. That's really what the new book is about. Wisdom takes work, and it does take work, and it is the work of our lives. If you want to check out the new book, it's the fourth and final book in the Virtue series. Well, it's almost here. It's coming out on October 21st, but if you preorder it between now and then, you can get some bonus chapters. There's going to be a live Q and A with me. You get the extended bibliography. You can even get a signed page from the original manuscript or have dinner with me here in Bastrop, Texas. We have signed and numbered first editions.

• 3:49Ryan Holiday?

  We also have some signed and numbered editions of all four books. We created like a little set to commemorate the completion of the series. You can grab all of that. We just have a few dozen of those left. All of that I will link to in today's show notes or just go to dailystoic.com/preorder. It would mean so much to me if you supported the book. I've worked really hard on this thing. I'm really proud of it. I think you're going to like it. You can get the audiobook and still get all the bonuses too. All that at dailystoic.com/preorder. Enjoy.

• 4:24Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, everyone. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. It is Thursday, although I am recording this week before you are listening to it. I am still in Burlington, Vermont, about to do this talk and then fly home. But for the Q and A today, I wanted to dive into some questions that people have been asking me about the Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom. Obviously, for the last six years, that's the series that I have been working on. And since 21, when Courage is Calling came out, I've been doing talks about the ideas in the book. So I've been asked a lot of questions over the last couple of years about the ideas in the series. So that's what we're going to answer some questions about today.

• 5:09Ryan Holiday?

  As you know, there is a limited run. We did 1,500 signed and numbered special editions of the whole series, Courage is Calling, Discipline is Destiny, Right Thing Right Now, and Wisdom Takes Work. There are a few dozen of them left, I think. You can grab all that at dailystoic.com/virtueseries, or you can just preorder Wisdom Takes Work. You can preorder his audiobook or digital, whatever you want. All the info about bonuses and stuff is at dailystoic.com/wisdom. Or if you just want a signed edition of that, you can grab that there. I'm really excited for you to check out the book, but in the meantime, let's talk the Stoic virtues.

• 5:58Speaker 01

  My question would be, is what answers are you struggling for right now? And then how do you go about finding them?

• 6:05Ryan Holiday?

  That's a really good question. Wow. Well, so right now, in this series I'm doing, so I've done Courage, I've done Discipline, the book I'm writing about now is Justice. And I think justice, when one of the problems with some of these virtues is like, what they mean to us is not what they were actually talking about. Like, when we think about temperance, they talk about temperance, what they really mean is discipline. When they talk about justice, when we hear justice, we think like the law, or like whether it's something's legal or illegal. Maybe we think about social justice, which is now this sort of political connotation. But I think the Stoics were talking about like the right thing. They were saying like, you have to do the right thing, which is easy to say, but what is the right thing? And so as I... I've been thinking about and writing this book. I've really been struggling with that idea.

• 6:49Ryan Holiday?

  Like, how do you know what the right thing is, right? How do you know what the right thing is right now? Which might not be necessarily like, you know, it might be glib or easy to say you should do X. But, you know, does that put you in a position to not be able to do Y later, right? Like, it's when we talk about what the right thing is. This is the million dollar, billion dollar question. What is the right thing? So I'm thinking a lot about that, right? If you think about these virtues, how related they are, interrelated they all are. Like, to be courageous in pursuit of the wrong thing, or the selfish thing, or the destructive thing, obviously, isn't right. How smart can you be if you don't do what's right? Or you put that brain power to work on the wrong topics?

• 7:35Speaker 02

  So you have obviously written a ton of books.

• 7:37Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, probably too many.

• 7:39Speaker 02

  And you're continuing to write books. Will you ever go off the topic of Stoicism? Will you, will you ever go into other genres? And is there any plans to do so?

• 7:48Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I found out recently, I was talking to my publisher. And so my, my first two books were about marketing. And then I had this idea to write a book about an obscure school of ancient philosophy, which they were not that excited about, as you can imagine. And I found out later, my editor was telling me that they, they were like, we were just hoping you would get this Stoicism thing out of your system and then write more marketing books. It's worked out well for both of us. But I did a work of narrative nonfiction a couple of years ago called Conspiracy. It's being turned into a movie that I'm kind of excited about. And then I'm doing this book for George. So I kind of go where it takes me. And right now, I'm in the middle of this four book series. So I did Courage, Discipline, Just Did Justice. Now I have to finish Wisdom. And then, once I sort of get through, that's the first time I've ever kind of thought

• 8:32Ryan Holiday?

  of projects more than one in a row. I'll kind of come up for air and think about what I do next. But when I take on projects, one of the things I think about is like, how will this challenge me? How will this be different? What will I learn from doing it?

• 8:45Speaker 03

  Besides going back to like Marcus Aurelius's, his third book, where he has that line about, if you find anything more so than like more than courage, justice, wisdom and that, you know, think on those, how did you come to those specifically and sort of like your way of presenting them?

• 9:02Ryan Holiday?

  So those four virtues trace their way all the way back to Zeno, who's the first Stoic to mention them. Now, other philosophers had come up with sort of their list of cardinal virtues that were usually more, you know, I think Aristotle's like seven virtues or something like that. But I think what I like about the cardinal virtues of Stoicism is not just that they trace their way back to the founder of Stoicism, but they were clearly adopted by and integrated into Christian thought around the time of Seneca and then Marcus Aurelius and then beyond. So there's a familiarity with those, right? People have heard them in a church service, or maybe they were visiting some old Catholic church and they saw them kind of inscribed on a building or something. There's a familiarity

• 9:46Ryan Holiday?

  there, which I think is really important because, you know, it wasn't like these were just ideas 2,000 plus years ago that just fell off the face of the earth. They were just co-opted and remixed and reorganized and re-presented in many different ways and present essentially a continuous tradition. I mean, even Epictetus is interesting, you know, for you guys to be reading him in this English composition class, you know, Epictetus doesn't write anything. Epictetus survives to us through the writings of Arian, who, by the way, writes an incredible biography of Alexander the Great, one of the best sort of documentary piece of evidence we have about the campaigns of Alexander. If you haven't read The Anabasis, I would encourage everyone to read it, especially as conflict

• 10:31Ryan Holiday?

  in the Middle East continues to present itself. But Arian is a student of Epictetus, and he captures some of what Epictetus was talking about. It's by no means exclusive. We think some of those books are also probably lost. But, but, you know, as you guys sit there and you write notes from, from what your professors are talking About, just imagine if that was the only records 2000 years later of what that great man or woman had said in their brief time on earth and that those notes, you know, Epictetus is a slave and this sort of high ranking politician or, you know,

• 11:12Ryan Holiday?

  officer of the state writes them down and they survive to us. But shortly thereafter, those notes either from Arian or perhaps Marcus's philosophy teacher, Junius Rusticus, has his own notes or his more extensive notes. We don't know exactly, but those make their way to the most powerful man in the world. And that's Marcus's entry point into the teachings of Epictetus, which he quotes repeatedly throughout meditations. So again, you know, great speaking translates to great writing, which translates into influence at the highest level, both politically and historically that you could just about imagine. It's a pretty

• 11:52Ryan Holiday?

  remarkable, you know, contrast of extreme powerlessness and incredible privilege and power coming together through the common ideas. And Marcus mentions this at the beginning of meditations where he says, you know, thanks to, uh, thanks to, to Junius Rusticus for lending me his copy of, of Epictetus. And, and, you know, he didn't just lend it to him, but Marcus then read it, right? And so that's a, also kind of a timeless process that I've, I've always loved. How do you think about how you're gonna, gonna present those ideas? It's, it's really difficult. I mean, I think you have to accept and understand where the audience is, what their biases are, what their inhibitions are, you know, what their base level of knowledge is. So I'll give you an example. I'm in the middle of this series

• 12:37Ryan Holiday?

  that I've been doing for the last four years on the cardinal virtue. When I'm writing a book that I hope reaches people as diverse as NFL coaches to military officers to stay at home moms and, you know, college students.

• 12:52Ryan Holiday?

  I'm probably not going to sit down and write a book about temperance, particularly in America where temperance is so associated with the ill-fated prohibition movement, right? That's what temperance meant for, you know, it meant not drinking alcohol, not moderation or balance or discipline. It meant not drinking alcohol. So I think a lot in my books about what's the best way into this idea. What's the word that most lines up with, with what the audience also identifies as the virtue? And once I get in, then I can talk about more expansive things. So there's a lot you have to think about when you're trying to communicate seemingly old fashioned ideas to a modern audience.

• 13:31Ryan 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.