The Problem Is Within You—And So Is The Solution | 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.

• 0:57Ryan Holiday?

  We'd like to think that if we become rich, our lives will be easier and we will have less to be stressed about. It's a reasonable assumption, given the fact that anyone who has ever been short of money has felt how stressful that can be. Yet, anyone who has ever had money, as Seneca did, as Marcus Aurelius did, quickly finds that it too brings its own kind of stress. You're stressed because you're keeping up with the Joneses. You're stressed, as many rich people are, because despite your ample income, it's still easy to live beyond your means. You're stressed, even if you do have a surplus of funds, because you always wonder if you're putting it to work effectively enough, or you're worried that someone is going to steal it from you or mismanage it for you. What does it mean, then, to discover that you'll be stressed either way?

• 1:42Ryan Holiday?

  Stressed that you have too little? Stressed that you have too much? Stressed that you could have more? It means the same thing that Marcus Aurelius discovered when it came to his anxiety. "I escaped anxiety today," he writes, before correcting himself. "No, I discarded it, because it was within me." The stress is always there, because no matter the situation, there is always one commonality: you. It's your mind that's doing this. The wanting, the comparing, the catastrophizing, the worrying, the scheming, the striving, that's your mind at work. That's you who is choosing not to be happy, to torture yourself, to waste

• 2:22Ryan Holiday?

  time on what you don't control. Plenty of people with less have been content. Plenty of people with more have been a lot more miserable. You can lead a good life anywhere, the Stoics remind us, you can be stress-free and self-contained, or at least not a mess on any bank balance, because these things have nothing to do with money and everything to do with you.

• 2:51Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another Thursday episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I think when people think leaders, they tend to think, you know, like generals and heads of state. But, you know, the leaders most of us spend the most time with are like school principals, are our teachers. Certainly, our kids spend a lot of time with those leaders, and we want them to be good at it. We want them to inspire. We want them to instruct. We also want them to be good at leading, holding people accountable, AKA our kids' teachers, the janitor, the coaches, all the people involved in the educational process. So when I got

• 3:32Ryan Holiday?

  asked to come talk to a group of school executives and principals and leaders back in October, I was very excited. Went down to the Hotel Van Zant on Rainy Street, and Joe Powers and Arvind Grover were very nice to moderate the Q and A. There was about 30 to 35 heads of different independent elementary schools and elementary school districts from around the country. Joe and Arvind were from New England, but there were people from all over the country, and they asked a bunch of great questions. And so I'm going to bring you another chunk of that Q and A, and hopefully you enjoy, and hopefully you can take it back to whatever and wherever you are a leader. And if you want some more Stoic

• 4:14Ryan Holiday?

  principles on leadership, do check out the Daily Stoic Leadership Challenge, which is filled with a bunch of leadership experts and leadership lessons for precisely these kinds of situations. You can check that out at dailystoic.com/leadership, and I will link to it in today's show notes, or just sign up for Daily Stoic Life, because you get this and all the other challenges for free.

• 4:40Speaker 01

  It sounds like the Stoics are defensive pessimists or minefield navigators. How do you reconcile that elementary education is inherently an optimistic endeavor? How do we prepare for the worst but keep hope for the future?

• 4:55Ryan Holiday?

  So Marcus Aurelius's life is extraordinarily depressing. He loses his father at age three. He is groomed for power by the Emperor of Rome. Hadrian is a sort of paranoid sadist. He has to leave his family and go live in this guy's palace. He is groomed for power. He takes this incredibly isolating job that almost nobody comes out of alive, let alone sane. Along the way, he experiences a devastating pandemic, a series of historic floods. Almost all of it, all his reign is spent at war, thousands of miles from his family. He dies in Vienna.

• 5:38Ryan Holiday?

  So if you've ever been to Europe, Rome is not close to Vienna, and neither is Budapest, two places that we know he spent considerable amounts of time. He buries half of his children, and he has 12 in all. He loses his wife. He loses teachers, loved ones. There is a coup attempt. So it's like one thing after another, to say the least, for this guy. I say all this because when people read Marcus Aurelius's Meditations and go, "This is a little depressing," I'm like, "Yeah." I mean, like, it would be weird if it wasn't. But the other way to think about it is that he even got out of bed in the morning is

• 6:23Ryan Holiday?

  a profoundly hopeful, optimistic statement, you know? He had health issues. He had personal issues. He had a really tough job. And it's not like the other emperors took that job particularly seriously. Like, most of them sort of retreated to pleasure palaces or, you know, went insane. And he took it all very serio... There is an earnestness and a commitment to decency and competence and progress in Marcus Aurelius's Meditations and in his life that you could argue is totally unwarranted by the facts of...

• 7:04Ryan Holiday?

  Existence at that time. So I actually find the Stoics to be very inspiring. Do you guys know who Viktor Frankl is? He wrote Man's Search for Meaning? So that's his famous work. And a few years ago, they discovered a lost series of lectures and essays that he wrote that was published maybe in 2021. And it's, I think the title of it sort of captures everything about what I'm saying about Marcus Tereles here, too. The title is "Yes to Life in Spite of Everything." To me, that's what Marcus Tereles embodied, and that's kind of what Stoicism is. Now, to get to your point about sort of young people, obviously, this is not what you

• 7:45Ryan Holiday?

  I dump on my eight-year-olds. I don't think that's what Stoicism is about. Obviously, at a young age, you have to be sort of, and clearly Marcus Tereles was steeped in, you know, a belief in your own agency, a belief in the power to change and grow and do hard things. You know that poem "Good Bones"? Has anyone read that poem? It's a beautiful poem, but basically it's, I won't quote it because I don't know it off the top of my head. But basically, she's saying that as you teach kids, you have to talk to them about, you have to talk to them like a realtor showing them through a house that's not looking so good. And you tell them that, you know, sort of in spite of

• 8:27Ryan Holiday?

  everything, there's good bones, and that you could make this something, right? And to me, that's the sort of hopefulness in the Stoic message. So there's a brutal realism to it, but it doesn't lapse into cynicism or nihilism because there is the hope that one can be great inside of that and do good inside of that. And in fact, that's your obligation as a, you know, as a person.

• 8:51Speaker 02

  I'm gonna combine two questions here.

• 8:53Ryan Holiday?

  All right.

• 8:54Speaker 02

  And so one of the questions is, what's a counterphilosophy to Stoicism, if there is one? And When might Stoicism, the approach of Stoicism, not work?

• 9:05Ryan Holiday?

  Sure. So the two rival schools in ancient Rome and Greece around this time are Stoicism and Epicureanism. Now, both these philosophies are done a complete hatchet job by what that word means in the English language, right? So Epicureanism, we take like lowercase epicureanism means hedonist, glutton, you know, we associate it with food or other forms of pleasure. And then Stoicism, lowercase Stoicism, means has no emotions, feels nothing, stuffs everything down, just sort of brute force, brutish existence. And this, of course, is not what either of the Stoics or the Epicureans were actually

• 9:50Ryan Holiday?

  about. The Epicureans, though, and the Stoics diverge. Epicureanism, to me, has a more of an eastern flavor in that it, Epicurean builds this famous garden, it says, stranger, you would do well to Terry here, that's what the sign on it says outside. And I take the Epicureans to look at the craziness and dysfunction of the world and say, let's turn away from all that, let's go to this nice place, let's focus on our own individual self-improvement, let's try to avoid pain, let's try to enjoy pleasure. But by that, they don't mean like, you know, orgies and feasts. They mean, how do you enjoy the simple pleasures of life?

• 10:33Ryan Holiday?

  You know, Epicurus talks a lot about how when you measure a pleasure, you have to add the hangover in also. And so Epicurus was not some crazy guy, he's like, pretty chill and pretty low key. And the Stoics, you know, got married, they had kids, they went to the theater, they made works of art. They were regular, well-adjusted people. They weren't like, you know, walking around in rags or something. But they did believe that the world was tough and you had to be tough. And Seneca says that the key difference between the Epicureans and the Stoics is that the

• 11:12Ryan Holiday?

  Epicurean gets involved in politics or public life only if they are forced to, and the Stoic gets involved unless something prevents them.

• 11:24Ryan Holiday?

  So it's funny that we have the idea of the Stoics as being uninvolved and apathetic when they were almost to a man and woman, involved deeply in public affairs, ran for public office. I mean, the philosophy that influences the American founders more than any other is Stoicism, and they created a new country. So the idea that these revolutionaries were at the same time resigned strikes me as insane. So that's kind of how I would think about the rival schools. Is there a place for both? I do, and I think it's fitting. Epicurus is, basically, we just have a series of fragments from Epicurus's work, but the

• 12:08Ryan Holiday?

  title of it, the Penguin title anyway, for Penguin Classics, is called "The Art of Happiness." And happiness isn't something the Stoics talk as much about. They talk about it here and there, but there is no sort of Stoic text on happiness, because I, something that wasn't important, but I think they believed it was more of a byproduct than something to pursue, and I'm not sure that's exactly right.

• 12:32Speaker 01

  Could you pivot a little to the practice around family? And many of us have all different kinds of families, and how this applies into the life of raising a family, being in a family?

• 12:43Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. My oldest is eight, my youngest is five, so they're not so interested in these things. But I wrote these two kids' books that I tried to sort of illustrate the ideas. I sort of tried to talk to them about these ideas, mostly also in accordance with the ancient tradition, which is through stories. I mean, it's fascinating to me, there's a passage in Meditations where Marcus Aurelius makes an allusion to one of Aesop's fables. And it's just fascinating to think, okay, here 2,000 years ago, this old man is remembering a fable that he learned as a kid, which is what fables have always been there to do, to sort of teach these kind of timeless lessons.

• 13:26Ryan Holiday?

  And we were listening in the car the other day to this podcast that sort of does a breakdown of the fables, and just the sort of timelessness of that. I just Really love. I think there's something I'm writing a lot about Lincoln in the book that I'm doing now. I went back and you can read a lot of the school books that someone like Lincoln would have read as a kid. And obviously, from a sort of historian's point of view, they're really bad. Just all sorts of stories that are not true at all. And they're kind of this hodgepodge of stuff that they, you know, here's a passage they stole from a Shakespeare play. And then here's a story they took from here, and here's one of Aesop's fables. And then, you know, here's some, you know, famous speech. They're kind of these, they were called readers, and they were just these kind of collections.

• 14:11Ryan Holiday?

  And that was because books were so rare. Is it Parson Weems? I think that's the historian around that time. That's where we get like the George Washington and the cherry tree story, which is totally not true at all. But Lincoln, I think on his way to assume the presidency is talking to someone about how he thinks Parson Weems is like the greatest historian of all time. And how much he learned about Washington from him. He's a very smart man who had, at this point, it's crazy. As a congressman, Lincoln actually used the Library of Congress as he was writing his famous speeches against slavery. When he comes back to Illinois to protest the Kansas Nebraska Act.

• 14:53Ryan Holiday?

  He would like go and check out books as president, by the way. When war breaks out, he has someone get him all the books they can about military history and strategy. Because he was, he was just sort of going back to his practice of being a self-taught learner. But the point is, he knew at this point that the fables about Washington had no basis in reality. But what he had taken from this study of Washington was what history is supposed to do, which is teach us moral truths, which is to teach us timeless things about human beings. Whether he literally chopped down a cherry tree or not is to me not that important. And I feel like historically, I'm getting way far from your question at this point.

• 15:36Ryan Holiday?

  But I think, like, I remember as a kid, learning that George Washington did not chop down a cherry tree.

• 15:44Ryan Holiday?

  No discussion of what the reason that that story was taught at some point was. And certainly, there was no kind of replacement moral instruction, right? Because we've removed that from school. And I'm not making this like, oh, we took gods out of school or whatever. But what I'm saying is that the purpose of learning all of these things to the ancients was to figure out how to be a good human being and to live a life of virtue. And when you focus so much on literal facts, I think you kind of miss that. And so when I talk to my kids about it, or I think when people talk to their kids about it, I think it's through story that we learn. And the earlier you learn these stories, the more they stick with you.

• 16:28Ryan Holiday?

  I gave a talk at the Naval Academy a couple of months back. And every time I'm there, I like to stop at the Annapolis State House. You can see where George Washington resigns his commission, where he returns to civilian life. Now, why does Washington do this? It's because as a young boy, he learned about Cincinnatus, the Roman statesman who is made dictator, saves Rome, and then lays down his title and returns to his farm. There is almost no evidence that Cincinnatus was a real person. This is a complete myth. But Washington himself learns this as a young man.

• 17:06Ryan Holiday?

  And our country is made possible by his sort of belief in the higher truth of that story, that there is a separation between sort of civilian and military commands, and that there is nothing more powerful than a leader voluntarily laying down power. So even the peaceful transition of power that operates in this country for the next 200 years until January 6th is built around Washington's understanding of that myth, and then for many generations, a shared understanding of that myth, and then that goes away. So all of which is to say, I think, understanding these sort of classical ideas and not just

• 17:50Ryan Holiday?

  their origins, but how we have integrated them into Western society over, you know, thousands of years is, to me, that's what I try to do in my books.

• 18:06Ryan 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.