You Need to Calm Down | How To Read Epictetus (Enchiridion, Discourses)

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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, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. On Tuesdays, we take a closer look at these Stoic ideas and how we can apply them in our actual lives. Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy.

• 0:26Ryan Holiday?

  You need to calm down. We live in a time of social upheaval. What work looks like has changed. What marriages look like has changed. How kids dress has changed. How we understand or view our history has changed. Our discussion about race is different. Even gender is fluid and up for debate in the modern world. And guess what? It was like that in the ancient world, too. That isn't just to say that one can find precedence for some of today's debates about gender and sex in ancient Rome, but more generally that the only constant in history was change. People have always felt like they were reeling, that life was moving too fast, right down to the first appearance of Stoicism in Rome,

• 1:11Ryan Holiday?

  which Cato the Elder thought would be such a dangerous import from Greece that he tried to ban it. Taylor Swift's advice to all of you who are freaking out about this is fitting. You need to calm down. You're not going to succeed at banning things. It never works. It only heaps shame and embarrassment on the people who ignorantly stood athwart history and tried to shout, "Stop!" And it certainly doesn't make a great case for the old values, which do have values, when you present them as being so fragile that they need protection by any means necessary, including tyranny and cruelty. Focus on yourself. Try to practice some empathy. Try to, you know, understand. Try to mind your own business.

• 1:54Ryan Holiday?

  Let people figure things out for themselves. Let them break new ground. Let them find themselves. And while they're doing that, focus on what you control by being decent and kind and open-minded.

• 2:17Ryan Holiday?

  Obviously, I talk a lot about Marcus Aurelius on the podcast. I talk a lot about Seneca on the podcast. Those are my two favorite Stoics. Epictetus rounds out that big three, and I think he's kind of the hardest of the big three to get into. I think that's because, in some ways, he was the least talented a writer of the three. And I don't mean that as a knock. In fact, that's sort of why I wanted to do this episode, which is how do you read Epictetus, given the fact that he wasn't a writer? What survives to us of Epictetus is not his writings, but the writings of someone who was listening to Epictetus. But it's nevertheless an incredible story and an incredible philosopher that you do

• 3:01Ryan Holiday?

  have to study. Epictetus going from a slave, literally his name means acquired, going from a slave to an advisor and influencer of the emperor. I mean, it's just an incredible story. And the only equivalent, really, I think, is the unique symbiotic relationship between Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln. So it's an incredible story. And in this episode, I'm going to break down who Epictetus was, the themes of his teachings, his influence throughout history, the best way to access Epictetus's wisdoms and teaching. And of course, you can get all the books mentioned in this episode at my bookstore, The Painted Porch. Just go to thepaintedporch.com, click the links in the description, or just stop

• 3:40Ryan Holiday?

  by and grab them. Enjoy this deep dive into Epictetus, how to read him, and what you should know from him.

• 3:50Ryan Holiday?

  Most people have heard of Marcus Aurelius, and they know that he was the emperor of Rome, which is this incredibly powerful, privileged, majestic position. But what they don't know is how he became so wise, who introduced him to the Stoic philosophy that changed his life. And it's an incredible story. It's actually Epictetus, a slave, is the philosophical mentor of the emperor of Rome. Marcus Aurelius is given a copy of the writings of Epictetus by his philosophy teacher, Risticus. This may have actually been Rusticus's handwritten notes from attending Epictetus's lectures himself, or it may be a copy of the writings of Arian, who gives us the edition of Epictetus that we still have to this day.

• 4:35Ryan Holiday?

  We're not sure, but it's an incredible story. The most powerful man in the world introduced to and changed by the writings and the thinkings of a slave. And so in today's episode, I want to talk about that guy, Epictetus, one of the wisest, most brilliant philosophers to ever live, but of the Stoics, perhaps the hardest to start with. Now, maybe you've heard of Epictetus from some of the quotes we post on Daily Stoic. Maybe you've heard me mention him in other videos. Maybe you just read Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full, and you want to know where to start with Epictetus. Well, here we go.

• 5:12Ryan Holiday?

  Epictetus is born in the year 55 in what is now modern Turkey. We don't know the name of his mother or really anything about his family, but we know he was born into a brutal form of slavery. And Roman slavery typically would last for the first 30 years of one's life. As a young man, he's purchased by a secretary to the then Emperor of Rome Nero. And he serves in Nero's court, and Epictetus is right there. So on the one hand, he's experiencing this extreme powerlessness, this brutality, but he's also amidst incredible luxury. And he may well have met Seneca, who I have another video about.

• 5:52Ryan Holiday?

  But Seneca and Epictetus are operating in the same relatively small world, but again, from very different positions. Now slavery itself is unjust, but Epictetus experiences particularly cruel slavery. We know that his master was violent and depraved. At one point, and I think this is an insight into who Epictetus is as a person, Epictetus's master is torturing him. And he's twisting and bending his leg. Is it a punishment? Is he just a sadist? We don't know. And he's twisting his leg, and Epictetus looks him in the eye. And he says, "If you keep doing that, it's going to break my leg." And then he says, "If you keep doing that, it's going to break my leg. My leg is going to..." My leg is going to break and then snap, his leg breaks.

• 6:37Ryan Holiday?

  And Epictetus doesn't cry, he makes no sound and he looks at him and he says, "Didn't I warn you?" So if we want a sense of who Epictetus is as this stoic who's mastered himself, I mean, I don't think it gets much better than that. But in fact, Epictetus returns to this injury over and over and over again in his philosophy because it changes his life. He walks with a limp for the rest of his life, but he says many, many times something to the effect of lameness or a disability is an impediment to the leg, but not to the mind. We find that he finds a way to push forward, to not consider himself deprived or disabled by this, but actually to see a philosophical lesson in it, which is that the body and the mind are separate and that the mind is higher than the body and that although the

• 7:22Ryan Holiday?

  body can be crippled or disabled or wounded, the mind has the ability to tell itself what this means and to move forward from there. We don't know how Epictetus himself is introduced to philosophy, but he begins to study under a teacher named Musonius Rufus, who was pretty socially ahead of his time. Musonius Rufus is considered the Roman Socrates. He's brilliant, he's wise, he's a strict teacher, but he also allows for the teaching of women in his classes and probably for that reason also allows for the teachings of slaves in his classroom. And, and at some point, Epictetus is singled out as a star pupil. He and Musonius Rufus become close. When Epictetus is given his freedom and Musonius Rufus is later exiled, as all the philosophers

• 8:08Ryan Holiday?

  in Rome are exiled, they go off together and Epictetus begins teaching by himself and becomes one of the great philosophy teachers of his time. So great in fact, that he teaches the Emperor Hadrian, who stops by his school in Neapolis and, and goes on to be one of the most influential philosophy teachers of his time. People would send their, their, their children to study with Epictetus. And I think it's just incredible, right? Epictetus is born anonymous into great adversity and difficulty, but it's his tenacity, his perspective, his sheer self-sufficiency that makes him not just...

• 8:42Ryan Holiday?

  In his own life, not just to the emperors who he influenced, but for history and all time, a symbol of the human ability to find freedom and self mastery in the most difficult of circumstances. He dies in roughly the year 135 AD, circumstances unknown. But his teachings survive, and that's where we're going to start with today's books.

• 9:08Ryan Holiday?

  Epictetus has a great line that I think captures both how we're supposed to think about Stoic philosophy, but also what his writings serve best, and I actually have it on the back of the Daily Stoic Journal. He says, "Every day and night, keep thoughts like these at hand. Write them, read them aloud, talk to yourself and others about them." So, we want to think of Stoic philosophy, and particularly the writings of Epictetus, something you return to, you riff on, you're incorporating into your life, into your own thinking. And if you've read Meditations, and I have another video about that, Marcus Aurelius is doing this. In fact, several quotes and exercises that survived to us from Epictetus come to us through Marcus Aurelius, who was so intimately familiar with Epictetus

• 9:53Ryan Holiday?

  that he's citing and quoting him from memory. Epictetus says that the first task in life, the first job of the philosopher, is to separate matters into two buckets, what's in our control and what's not in our control. And this, this exercise, what we call the dichotomy of control, is really at the core of Epictetus's teachings. Is it up to me? Is it not up to me? If it's up to me, it gets my attention, my energy, my focus. If it's not up to me, I try not to think about it. I try not to put energy or emotion towards it. The truth is, so much of what we spend time on is not in our control. He says, "Some things are in our control and others are not." He says, "Things in our control are our opinions, our pursuits, our desires, our aversions,

• 10:38Ryan Holiday?

  or in a word, our own actions." Now, what's not in our control, he says, is our body, our property, our reputation, commands. In one word, things that are not our own action. Now, try to think about where this is coming from. This isn't just like some guy sitting in a mansion just riffing on big ideas the way that some of the other ancient philosophers were. When he's saying, "Your body is not in your control." He's saying this from the perspective of a person who was owned by other people and had his legs broken by those people. But he came to understand that even in the confines of slavery, what's up to him are his decisions, his actions, his thoughts, right? And everything else was not up to him.

• 11:22Ryan Holiday?

  And so when we separate things, it winnows what there is to focus on. Epictetus believed that as powerless as we were over external conditions, we always have the ability to choose how we respond to those conditions. He says, "You can bind up my leg, but not even Zeus can take away my power of choice." And then he says later, which I love, and this is an important tag to that. He says, "If we want to be beautiful, make beautiful choices." So for Epictetus, it's all about choice. And I love this so much because he was a guy who, for much of his existence, had very little choice about where he lived, what he did, what people did to him. But he always focused inside that on where his choices were. The other thing Epictetus says

• 12:07Ryan Holiday?

  is that we have to test every impression. So it's not just that a lot of things are outside our control. It's not just that our judgments about things upset us. When something comes in, we have to stop. He says, "Don't let the force of an impression knock you off your feet. Say to it, 'Hold on. Let me see who you are and what you represent. Let me put you to the test.'" It's like if you were to try to pay with something with a hundred dollar bill, hold it up to the light, or they'd scribble on it. He even talks about how, back in Rome, a money changer could hear by the way a coin hit a table or a rock, whether it was counterfeit or not. And he says that really, the job of the philosopher, the job of the Stoic, is to separate these sort of counterfeit impressions from the real impressions, to try to strip away our judgment, to strip away our biases, strip away our fears, strip away our desires, all of that to see things as they really are.

• 12:55Ryan Holiday?

  Let's riff on some of my favorite quotes from Epictetus's writings. He says, "It's not things that upset us, it's our judgment about things." A few years ago, I gave a talk to the Pittsburgh Pirates and as I walked into their practice facility in Bradingford, they actually had this on the wall. They said, "It's not things that upset us, it's our opinion about things." They didn't know that this came from Epictetus, but it does, and I think that's so cool. The idea being that we control our thoughts and opinions, right? Everything else is objective and outside of us. He talks about this specifically in regards to being offended. He says, "When someone provokes you, understand that you are complicit in getting upset."

• 13:37Ryan Holiday?

  He says, "We shouldn't respond immediately, we should take a moment to react, we should regain control." But the idea is that nobody is responsible for your emotions, for your feelings, but yourself. Another person can't make you angry, another person can't offend you, another person can't hurt your feelings, another person can't frustrate you. This is something that you have the power over. Now, other people can do bad things, they can do cruel things, they can do stupid things, they can do things you don't like, but we control how we respond to those things. Most importantly, we control our emotions in response to those things. Running through Epictetus's philosophy is the idea of intellectual humility, and you can get the sense he was bumping up against, you know, the sort of best and

• 14:22Ryan Holiday?

  the brightest of young Roman life. So, a lot of egotistical kids, a lot of kids who'd been coddled, a lot of kids who thought they were geniuses. But he says, "Look, it's impossible to learn that which you think you already know." He says, "It doesn't matter that you read, it matters what you read, it matters how you read." He says, "Don't just tell me that you've read books, he says, "Show me what you have learned by thinking better." And, he says, "Look, to get better, you have to be willing to look not good, right?" He says, "If you wish to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid, right?" Not only can you not learn what you think you already know, if you're not willing to admit that you don't know something, right? If you're not... Not willing to ask questions. If you're not willing to be bad at something,

• 15:07Ryan Holiday?

  you will never get good at that thing. You will never get better. And I think this pertains to another important thing, where Epictetus is saying, look, when you're grounded in life, when you know what's important, when you only focus on what you control, you don't care what other people think. You don't look outside yourself for approval. You don't care what your teacher thinks. You don't care what your classmates think. You don't care what anyone thinks. You're focused on yourself. But ultimately, for Epictetus, philosophy was not a parlor trick. It was not intellectual exercises. Unlike Seneca, unlike Marcus Aurelius, he wasn't writing these things in pseudo-retirement. He didn't get to go to the best schools. He wasn't anything even like his rich and successful students. Epictetus had a really, really hard life.

• 15:52Ryan Holiday?

  So for him, philosophy was a coping mechanism. It was something that got you through the worst things that we can experience as human beings. And so basically, he says the equivalent to the, "Don't talk about it, be about it." He says, "Don't talk about your philosophy, embody it." And I think it says something that Epictetus didn't write anything down. And yet, he comes to us all these thousands of years later, because he embodied his teachings most of all. Yes, his students jotted down what those teachings were, but the power of them was who he was as a person. Epictetus is obviously around the richest and most successful Romans. He sees in Nero's court, one guy go to Nero one day and go, "Nero, I'm down to my last million dollars." And Nero says, "Oh, my God, how have you survived?"

• 16:36Ryan Holiday?

  And Epictetus sees that even these successful, rich people are actually quite poor, because they want more, always, because they're insatiable, and because they don't know what's actually important. He says, "It is better to starve to death in a calm and confident state of mind than to live anxiously amidst abundance." And I think that's what he's seeing in Nero's palace every day, that Nero isn't someone to admire or to be jealous of, that Epictetus is actually freer than the most powerful man in the world, because Epictetus is in command of himself. And I think opting out of this competition is a big part of it. Epictetus is, again, saying, "By focusing on what you control, you decide what success is." He says, "You can always win if you only enter competitions where winning is up to you."

• 17:20Ryan Holiday?

  And he says, "The only way to achieve this is by despising things that are not up to us." What I think he means is, look... For me as a writer, for me making this video, if I care about how many views it does, if I cares about how many copies I sell, or what awards I win, then I've handed over the approval to something that I don't control. Success is now whether something breaks my way that's not up to me. Now, if I focus instead on whether I did my best possible job, if I focus on the part of it that's in my control, then I can always win that competition, if I show up, if I do my work. And when we think about Epictetus's life, this hard, brutal existence of slavery, how does he endure it? Part of it is by having his eyes wide open. He's not naive. He says, "Set before your eyes every day

• 18:04Ryan Holiday?

  death and exile and everything else that looks terrible, especially death, and you will never have any mean thought or be too keen on anything." And actually, Marx's realist gets, I think, one of the most haunting exercises in all of Stoic philosophy from Epictetus, just saying that even as you tuck your children in tonight, say to yourself, "They may not survive till morning." Now, does this mean that you're not attached to them? You don't love them? No, I think it's that you're not taking them for granted. He says, "You do not possess the precious people in your life." And I think that's a really important way to think about it. There is a funny story about Epictetus. One night, he's in his house and he hears someone breaking in. He rushes downstairs and they've stolen his most valuable possession, this silver lamp. And he says, "Ah, Epictetus, this is your fault. You possess this expensive thing.

• 18:49Ryan Holiday?

  Tomorrow, you will go down and buy a cheaper lamp. You can only lose what you have." I just love the idea that, you know, he's a philosopher who says not to be attached, but then he has this thing that he's attached to. It gets stolen. But instead of crying about it, instead of whining about it, he just says, "Let's get a cheaper one and let's not worry about it so much." Epictetus, you know, just knows that doing the right thing is sometimes going to be judged. But if it's worth doing, if you've committed to doing it, you shouldn't care what other people think. He says, "Whenever you do something you have decided ought to be done, never try to avoid being seen doing it, even if people in general may disapprove of it. If, of course, your action is wrong, don't do it at all. But if it's right, why be afraid of people whose criticism is off the mark?" And as we said, you don't care about other people's criticism because it's not in your control. It doesn't change you.

• 19:34Ryan Holiday?

  It doesn't affect you. It's outside you. What matters is, did you... Do you think this was something that needed to be done? If so, you should do it to your app to the absolute best of your ability. And if we think about the injustices that Epictetus endures, it makes this quote, which is one of my favorites, even more admirable. He says, "Until you know their reasons, how do you know whether they've acted wrongly?" The point is, people are often doing what they think is right or what they haven't thought about at all. And to take it personally, to assume the worst, to add judgment on top of it, right? That's what upsets us, right? It's not things that upset us, it's our judgment about things. So when we add to it, "They did it because they hate me. They did it because they don't like me. They did it because they're trying to be cruel.

• 20:18Ryan Holiday?

  They did it because they're an awful person." These judgments make hard things harder. So as Epictetus gets smarter and wiser and better, how does he know or how does he measure the progress of his students? He says, "The sign of a person making progress in philosophy is this: criticizing nobody, praising nobody, blaming nobody, accusing nobody, saying nothing about oneself to indicate being someone or knowing something." And he says, "Whenever such a person is frustrated or impeded, he accuses himself. If he is complimented, he laughs to himself. And if he's criticized, he doesn't defend himself." Again, talking about progress, he says, "Let's see some evidence of your progress. It's as if I were to say to an athlete, 'Show me your shoulders,' and he responded, 'Have a look at my weight. Get out of here with your giant weights,' I'd say.

• 21:03Ryan Holiday?

  What I don't want to see is the weights, but how you've profited from using them." So again, don't talk about it, be about it. And again, I think that's what makes Epictetus so great. It's not what he said, it's that he endured something that almost none of the other Stoics would have possibly been able to endure. But how do we balance like caring what's in our control and not in our control, but then still go through the world? He says, "It isn't easy to combine and reconcile the two: the carefulness of a person devoted to externals and the dignity of one who's detached, but it's not impossible. Otherwise, happiness would be impossible." He said, "It's like going on an ocean voyage. What can I do? I can pick the captain, the boat, the date, and the best time to sail. But then a storm hits. Well, then it's no longer my business. I've done everything I could. Somebody else..."

• 21:47Ryan Holiday?

  This problem now, namely the captains. He says, but what if the boat starts to sink? What are my options? The only thing I'm in a position to do drown, but fearlessly, without bawling or crying out to God, because I know that what is born must also die. I don't know, I guess I would say you could also swim, right? But I think he's implying that that's outside your control at this point. You know, he's basically saying we work with the material we're given. We try to make the best of every situation, but sometimes all we can do is practice the art of acquiescence. Right? The acceptance of things outside our control, which is actually something Marcus takes from Epictetus as well. In book three of Discourses, one of my favorite chapters, he says, "Every circumstances represents an opportunity. Being healthy is good, being sick is bad."

• 22:32Ryan Holiday?

  He says, "No, enjoying health in the right way is good. Making bad use of your health is bad." He says, "So even illness can can benefit us? Why not if even death and disability can't? So it's possible to benefit from bad circumstances? Yes, from every circumstances, even abuse and slander. A boxer derives the greatest advantage from his sparring partner." And he says, "When you are struggling in life, when you're going through something difficult, think about it as if life has paired you with a strong sparring partner, and that's how you become a better boxer and fighter." And then we get to just some fragments of Epictetus, which I'll riff on with you real quick. "Whoever chafes at the conditions dealt by fate is unskilled in the art of life. Whoever bears them nobly and makes wise use of the results

• 23:17Ryan Holiday?

  is a man who deserves to be considered good." Epictetus would say that there are two vices more blacker and serious than the rest, lack of persistence and lack of self-control. "It's not events that disturb people, it's their judgments concerning them. To blame oneself is a proof of progress, but the wise man never has to blame another or himself. Don't hope that events will turn out the way you want. Welcome events in whichever way they happen. This is the path to peace." Remember, it is not enough to be hit or insulted to be harmed. You must believe that you are being harmed. And then this is my favorite exercise from Epictetus, and I think it's a good one to end with. He says, "Every circumstances has..." Two handles with one of which you can hold while another is insupportable.

• 24:02Ryan Holiday?

  If your brother mistreats you, don't try to come to grips with it by dwelling on the wrong he's done because that approach makes it unbearable. Remind yourself that he's your brother, that you grew up together, and that you'll find you can bear it. The idea that every situation has two handles. We decide how we're going to see things. We decide what response we're going to make of them. That is the essence of Stoic philosophy.

• 24:26Ryan Holiday?

  Probably Epictetus's best and biggest influence, and that is through the great James Stockdale. James Stockdale was a captain in the Navy. He's sent to Stanford and he's wandering through the halls one day and he bumps into a philosophy teacher, sits in a philosophy class and is introduced to the writings of Epictetus. Now, flash forward a few years later, he's shot down over Vietnam. And as he's parachuting into what he knows will likely be death or at the very least terrible imprisonment, he says to himself, "I am leaving the world of technology and entering the world of Epictetus." This is "don't talk about it, be about it" opportunity. This is where he has to apply his philosophy.

• 25:09Ryan Holiday?

  And for seven years, he's at POW in what we now call the Hanoi Hilton, one of the worst prisoner of war camps of all time. And every day he's thinking of Epictetus and using Epictetus's sort of philosophy under real fire. He eventually does survive. He comports himself heroically, bravely, stoically, endures this horrible torture. And he gets back, he's talking to the writer Jim Collins. And Jim Collins says, you know, "How did you do it?" And he says, "Well," and he's riffing on Epictetus here. He says, "I had to accept it unflinchingly, the difficulty, the pain, the struggle of my situation. But I told myself that if I were to survive, and I thought that I would,

• 25:52Ryan Holiday?

  that I would turn it into something that in retrospect I would not trade." And that is the essence of Epictetus, right? Epictetus wouldn't have chosen to be a slave, just as James Stockdale did. Everything he could to not be shot down and to not be a prisoner of war. But once they were In these horrible circumstances, they tried to see it as an opportunity, that life was pairing them with a difficult sparring partner. They tried to apply their philosophy to these difficult circumstances. They tried to be great inside of it. Couple other interesting little factoids about Epictetus. Albert Ellis, one of the founders of Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy, R E B T, actually thinks of Epictetus as one of his founding influences.

• 26:35Ryan Holiday?

  As Donald Robertson says, Albert Ellis oriented most of his clients in the fundamental concepts of cognitive behavioral therapy by teaching them this famous quote from Epictetus. It's not things that upset us, it's their judgment about things. So I love that. You might not have known, and you can actually go see this edition at the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace in New York City. But Theodore Roosevelt carried a copy of Epictetus with him on his famous River of Doubt expedition, where he nearly died. You can see his inscribed copy of Epictetus. Toussaint Leventur, the Haitian revolutionary, read Epictetus. So did Montaigne. He actually had a quote from Epictetus inscribed on the roof of his office. And then Stockton, after he got out of the Hanoi Hilton, he wrote this little book, Courage Under Fire,

• 27:19Ryan Holiday?

  about his experiences testing Epictetus's doctrine in a laboratory of human behavior. It's an incredible document that everyone should read. It's a signed reading to all the people in the Naval Academy, which I've been lucky enough to talk at. He basically applies, as I said, Stoicism under incredible adversity. And I think it is an endorsement both of his character, of course, Epictetus.

• 27:42Ryan Holiday?

  Now, I know I've been referring to Epictetus's writings, but Epictetus didn't actually write anything down. Everything we have from Epictetus survives to us in the form of lecture notes from a student named Arian in the Discourses in the Incredian, and then a handful of fragments or quotes from other people. That's the entirety of what survives to us. We sort of have a snapshot of a snapshot of Epictetus, but I do think it is enough. If you've never heard of Arian, Arian was an influential Roman politician and writer. He also writes a great biography of Alexander the Great. But it's His dutiful note-taking in the lectures of Epictetus, likely in Necropolis, that allows these to survive.

• 28:25Ryan Holiday?

  I myself am a fan of the Penguin Classics translation. It's hard to go wrong. This is what I carry in my bookstore, The Painted Porch. This has both the discourses and a selection of his writings. But as I said, the Sharon LaBelle translation of Epictetus is really readable. It's nicely organized. You can see she sort of breaks it out in different passages. I really like that. There's also How to be Free, which is a selection published by Princeton University Press, translated by A. A. Long. I like this one a great deal as well. What I think is interesting about this word, "inqueridian," and I know that's a difficult word, we'll flash it on the screen.

• 29:07Ryan Holiday?

  But "inqueridian," as A. A. Long says in this translation, the earliest usage of this word refers to a knife or a dagger. And I think what he implies is that "arian," by titling it this, was that Epictetus's writings were meant to be defensive or a protective weapon, or that it's just literally at hand. "Inqueridian" basically means handbook, like book in your hand that you have on your person whenever you need it. Once you've read Epictetus, this will make a lot more sense because it's just there for you. You almost get the sense that he's answering questions from his students. There's something from Epictetus on so many different situations or circumstances that you might find yourself in.

• 29:51Ryan Holiday?

  And so he really works as a great resource in that capacity. That's why his writing is so important. Whether you start with a really accessible translation, like The Art of Living, or one of these collections like How to be Free, or you go straight for the Penguin translation, which I always suggest. The important part is that you figure out how to, as Epictetus says, "every day and night, keep these thoughts at hand. Write them, read them aloud, talk to yourself and others about them." Most of all, Apply them to your life. That's what Epictetus shows us. That's why he's worth reading. Two other quick recommendations. Tom Wolfe's fantastic novel, A Man in Full, is actually based on the writings of Epictetus. It's a beautiful, inspiring novel. It should be

• 30:35Ryan Holiday?

  read by everyone who's interested in studying philosophy. I also have a chapter about Epictetus in Lies of the Stoics, which I think you might like. Anyways, I will cut this video off here. You go read Epictetus, then, most importantly, apply it.

• 30:51Ryan Holiday?

  Epictetus said that philosophy wasn't this dry, abstract thing. It was a thing, he said, you should be talking about, writing down, reading about, exploring with other people all the time. He said, constantly have it at hand. That's how I think about philosophy. And it's weird. For the last five years, every single day, I've been writing this free email about Stoic philosophy. It's been not just cool to meet all these fellow practitioners of Stoic philosophy, but in writing about it, talking about it, reading it for our podcast, I have got to internalize these ideas in a way that I never would have been able to under any other circumstances. That's the idea. Philosophy is something we're supposed to engage in, not keep in these dusty old books or read once and be done with. It's

• 31:36Ryan Holiday?

  a constant process. And I think that's why the email has worked so well for the people reading about it and sharing it and talking about it, all of that as well. So I'd love to have you join us on this email. You can sign up at dailystoic.com/dailyemail. It's totally free, no spam. You can unsubscribe whenever you want. I've basically given away a book for free every single year for five years, and I'm going to keep on doing it until I drop dead. Check it out, dailystoic.com/dailyemail.