Your Job is to Transition | Revenge Is A Dish Best Not Served

Think of all the responsibilities on Marcus Aurelius’ plate. He’s emperor. He’s head of the army. He’s serving as consul (yes, in the Roman system, the emperor also stood for elected office). He judged cases. He was a husband. A friend. A philosopher. He also had fourteen children.📕 Ryan Holiday's new book "Discipline Is Destiny" is out now! We’ve extended the pre-order bonuses for the next week—among them is a signed and numbered page from the original manuscript of the book. You can learn more about those and how to receive them over at Dailystoic.com/preorder. ✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail📱 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.

• 0:03Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Thursdays, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from the book The Daily Stoic, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful co-author and collaborator, Stephen Hanselman. And so today, we'll give you a quick meditation from one of the Stoics, from Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, then some analysis from me. And then we send you out into the world to do your best to turn these words into works.

• 0:48Ryan Holiday?

  Your job is to transition. Think of all the responsibilities on Marcus Aurelius's plate. He's emperor, he's head of the army, he's servant as consul. Yes, in the Roman system, the emperor also stood for elected office. He judged cases, he was a husband, a friend, a philosopher. He also had 14 children. The point is, he wore a lot of hats. He had a lot going on, and his days were packed. He would have had to embody the rule that the Wall Street coach Randall Stutman gave out as part of the Daily Stoic Leadership Challenge, which is open now, and you should check out if you haven't. "A leader," Stutman said, "has to make quick transitions from one task to the other, one meeting to the next,

• 1:30Ryan Holiday?

  from serious to ceremonial, from professional to personal." And they can't take any residue from one task into the other either. When Marcus was with his children, he had to be able to laugh and play. And when speaking about the victims of the plague, he had to be serious and somber. He had to deal with backbiters and complainers and schemers at the palace one minute, and the next take seriously a plea for mercy from a criminal. He had to gratefully and gracefully accept the applause of the crowd without letting it puff up his ego the next day as he weighed the military might of Rome against the threat of invading tribes. We all wear a similar Similar number of hats. We also have here in the modern world, an infinite

• 2:14Ryan Holiday?

  number of distractions and temptations, many of them inside a device we carry in our pocket or are constantly required to check for work. How fast can you transition? How quickly can you wipe the slate clean? How good are you at being fully present at locking in? The Stoics spoke of stillness as the goal of philosophy, but it's also the key to good leadership, the ability to be present, to connect, to switch from one task to the other, and to concentrate in this moment, as Marcus Aurelius writes, "like a Roman." And we talk a lot about this in the Daily Stoic Leadership Challenge, which I cannot recommend enough. My hour, hour 20 minute interview with Randall was

• 2:59Ryan Holiday?

  one of the absolute best. You can listen to my questions, the questions from the cohort who did the class with us. You can listen to all that, plus from a bunch of other leadership experts. I think the Leadership Challenge is one of the best courses we've done here at Daily Stoic. You can check that out at dailystoic.com/leadershipchallenge. I want to invite you to do this. 63 emails, 30,000 words of content, goes over nine weeks, 12 hours of Q and A's and deep dives. And you can check that out either at dailystoic.com/leadershipchallenge or at store.dailystoic.com. And if you're thinking about joining Daily Stoic Life, this is a great way because basically the cost of Leadership Challenge is almost the same as the cost of Daily Stoic Life. So you can get that if you sign up for Daily

• 3:44Ryan Holiday?

  Stoic Life, you get this course and all the other ones totally for free, plus a bunch of other awesome stuff, which you can do at dailystoiclife.com.

• 3:56Ryan Holiday?

  Revenge is a dish best not served. This is from today's entry, October 13th, 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, and also get a signed personalized copy from me in the Daily Stoic store at store.dailystoic.com.

• 4:38Ryan Holiday?

  The best way to avenge yourself is to not be like that. Marcus Aurelius's Meditations 6:6. "How much better to heal than to seek revenge from injury? Vengeance wastes a lot of time and exposes you to many more injuries than the first that sparked it. Anger always outlasts hurt. Best to take the opposite course. Would anyone think it normal to return a kick to a mule or a bite to a dog?" That's Seneca's On Anger 3:7:2. And then today's entry from the Daily Stoic says, "Let's say that someone has treated you rudely. Let's say that someone got promoted ahead of you because they took credit for your work or did something dishonest. It's natural to think, oh, that's how the world works, or one day it will be my turn to be like that.

• 5:23Ryan Holiday?

  Or more common, I'll get them for this." Except those are the worst possible responses to bad behavior. As Marcus and Seneca both wrote, the proper response, indeed the best revenge, is to exact no revenge at all. If someone treats you rudely and you respond with rudeness, you have not done anything but prove to them that they were justified in their actions. If you meet other people's dishonesty with dishonesty of your own, guess what? You're proving them right. Now everyone else is also a liar. Instead, today, let's seek to be better than the things that disappoint or hurt us. Let's try to be the example that we'd like to see others follow. It's awful to be a cheat, to be selfish, to feel the need to inflict pain on our fellow human beings.

• 6:05Ryan Holiday?

  Meanwhile, living morally and well is quite nice. It is funny, though, because I wrote this book, Conspiracy, about Peter Thiel and his sort of epic quest for revenge. And I'm fascinated by the sort of brilliant, diabolical, some would say driven by justice, response that he takes against a media outlet that had not just rudely and, I think wrongly, outed him as gay, but it also bullied and picked on a number of people. And while I do discuss revenge at great length in that book, it wasn't until I was actually finishing up the book that... That expression, revenge is a dish best served cold, that I actually got what it was saying.

• 6:49Ryan Holiday?

  There's a funny joke in 30 Rock where he goes, revenge is a dish best served cold, like pizza. And he goes, really? Cold pizza is better than hot pizza? Now, why? So what is it saying? No, almost no dish is better cold than hot. Except for maybe, I guess, dessert. But even the best desserts are hot, if you think about it. I think the expression, the emphasis there is on the serving. The dish is best served cold, because when you grab the hot dish, it burns you, right? And that is what Stoics were warning against when they talked about revenge, that it often does evil to you, it changes you, it warps you. And I think you could even make an argument that this is the trajectory that Peter Thiel is on, right?

• 7:33Ryan Holiday?

  From his sort of secretive, contrarian bet on destroying Gawker, this leads him to Trump, this leads him and some of his people to ultimately run for office on despicable platforms, it makes him a sort of hated villain. I don't know if he would do it again in retrospect. I don't. The counterfactual is fascinating to me. You know, Nietzsche said that, you know, beware that he who fights monsters, meaning that you become like the monster. You could argue even America after 9/11, there's some sort of irony as we go to get our revenge, to get back at the people who do this. Now, we're a nation with domestic terrorism and religious fundamentalism.

• 8:15Ryan Holiday?

  And we squander trillions of dollars in the Middle East that makes us quite vulnerable and quite hypocritical when it comes to much more pressing and ominous and evil enemies. So revenge is something that we have to push away, for the most part. Seneca does make an interesting distinction between getting justice. Says if someone kills your father, right? You should get justice, not revenge. I think that's important. Obviously, I'm thinking about justice as I'm writing this new book. But we have to make sure that as we are responding to treatment, that we don't become like the thing that so mistreated us, right?

• 9:00Ryan Holiday?

  That we don't become like the enemy, that we don't become worse than the enemy, that we don't add insult on top of injury, that we don't add self-inflicted injury on top of the injury.

• 9:12Ryan Holiday?

  And that's today's message from the Daily Stoic. I was just riffing on this on TikTok, actually. We did, we did, I was actually standing near Robert Greene's house and I recorded a little thing on this quote from Marcus about the best revenge not being like that. And I'll close today's episode with running that for you. Enjoy. The best revenge is to not be like that, the Stoics would say. And if you think about it, yes, people can hurt you, but when you look at those people, who they are, why they do what they do, it doesn't actually feel like they're getting away with anything. They're their own worst enemy. It sucks to be them. So the Stoics say, you give up on revenge. You give up on getting even because you already won. You are already better by not being that person. The best revenge, Marcus really says, is to not be like that.

• 10:00Ryan Holiday?

  You know, the Stoics in real life met at what was called the Stoa, the Stoa Pokile, the Painted Porch in ancient Athens. Obviously, we can't all get together in one place because this community is like hundreds of thousands of people and we couldn't fit in one space. But we have made a special digital version of the Stoa. We're calling it Daily Stoic Life. It's an awesome community. You could talk about, like today's episode, you could talk about the emails, ask questions. That's one of my favorite parts is interacting with all these people who are using Stoicism to be better in their actual, real lives. You get more Daily Stoic meditations over the weekend, just for the Daily Stoic Life members, quarterly Q and As with me, cloth-bound edition of our Best of meditations, plus a whole bunch of other stuff, including discounts, and, this is the best part, all

• 10:45Ryan Holiday?

  our Daily Stoic courses and challenges totally for free, hundreds of dollars of value every single year, including our New Year, New You Challenge. We'd love to have you join us. There's a two-week trial totally for free. Check it out at dailystoiclife.com.