How To Better Understand The Past | Say No to the Need to Impress

In retrospect, so many of the decisions the Stoics made are baffling. Marcus Aurelius and his son Commodus. Seneca and Nero. Their attitude toward women, toward slavery, toward violence, toward what society was supposed to look like. Even more recently, what of Stockdale and the complicated nature of the war in Vietnam. Didn’t they know? Didn’t they know better? Sometimes…but not always.---And in today's Daily Stoic Journal reading, Ryan discusses the importance of avoiding the need for external validation, especially in the age of social media.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more, including Discipline is Destiny.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee 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?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Each day, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, illustrated with stories from history, current events, and literature to help you be better at what you do. And at the beginning of the week, we try to do a deeper dive, setting a kind of Stoic intention for the week, something to meditate on, something to think on, something to leave you with, to journal about, whatever it is you happen to be doing. So let's get into it.

• 0:40Ryan Holiday?

  How to Better Understand the Past. In retrospect, so many of the decisions that the Stoics made are baffling. Marcus Aurelius and his son Commodus, Seneca, and Nero, their attitude towards women, towards slavery, towards violence, towards what society was supposed to look like. Even more recently, what have stopped dealing with the complicated nature of the war in Vietnam? Didn't they know? Didn't they know better? Sometimes, but not always. To understand the Stoics, we have to understand something. They weren't living in history. They were living in what they viewed as the present, what they thought was actually a progressive time. They did not know where things were going. They had only a partial view of the picture, just as today, we have only a partial picture

• 1:25Ryan Holiday?

  of our own moment. The late David McCullough, whose Truman biography I've raved about a bunch of times and I carry at the painted porch, he once said that the hardest part about being a biographer is getting the reader to keep in mind that nothing was ever on track. As he continues, "Things could have gone any way at any point. As soon as you say was, it seems to fix an event in the past, but nobody ever lived in the past, only in the present," he said. "The difference is that it was their present. They were just as alive and full of ambition and fear and hope and all the emotions of life. And just like us, they didn't know how it would all turn out." The challenge, he said, is to get the reader beyond thinking that things had to be the

• 2:05Ryan Holiday?

  way they turned out and see the range of possibilities of how things could have been otherwise. And this is not to say that no one should ever be judged for their mistakes or for the failures of the past. Of course, they can and should be, but we have to understand the context in which these things happened and why they happened.

• 2:24Ryan Holiday?

  Because it helps us do better here in the present. The ancient world was not a thing that existed. It was just the world, just as it is in our time. Then and now, the world was filled with flawed and emotional people. And these flaws and these emotions were responsible for things that did not age well, just as ours will be if we do not properly manage them, if we do not strive to do better, strive to see as much of the picture as we can. It's also a reminder, as always, that we must be humble.

• 3:01Ryan Holiday?

  Say no to the need to impress. If the desire to impress and be liked by others is innate to humans as a species, then every generation born before social media got lucky. Today, we face an unending stream of status updates, demanding to be filled with all the impressive things we are doing, the trials we are overcoming, announcements of our dangers averted, and triumphs realized. It's exhausting. Centuries ago, Epictetus saw this pride and narcissism, even in his own computerless students, and reminded them that it wasn't so innocent. In fact, he told them that it would destroy their life's purpose. It would distract and fatigue them.

• 3:42Ryan Holiday?

  Seneca too saw the seeking of approval of spectators as one of life's disgraces. Watch those impulses today. Notice how much you seem to need your phone and status updates and ask, is this the person I want to be? Is this what a philosopher would do? And this is from this week's entry in the Daily Stoic Journal, which you can check out. I do the journal every morning. I sit down and spend some time with the blank pages. But we've got two Epictetus quotes and one Seneca quote to round it out. "If you should ever turn your will to things outside your control in order to impress someone, be sure that you have wrecked your whole purpose in life. Be content then to be a philosopher in all that you do. And if you wish also to be seen as one,

• 4:26Ryan Holiday?

  show yourself first that you are, and you will succeed." That's Epictetus's Inqueridion 23.

• 4:34Ryan Holiday?

  In public, avoid talking often and excessively about your own accomplishments and dangers. For however much you enjoy recounting your dangers, it is not pleasant for others to hear about your affairs. Epictetus's Incoridion 33:14. How disgraceful is the lawyer whose dying breath passes well at court at an advanced age, pleading for unknown litigants and still seeking the approval of ignorant spectators? Seneca on the brevity of life. 20. You know, I think about this. I have a little rule for me. When I'm working on a book, I don't talk about it. I don't tell people that I've finished. I don't tell people that I just finished chapter two. I don't, I don't tell people that I just signed a deal.

• 5:17Ryan Holiday?

  In fact, on my last book deal, I didn't even announce it. I could have gotten a little press. And early in my life, I kind of wanted that validation. Hey, I did it. Maybe media, maybe it's good for my brand. Now I see all that stuff as distraction. Even social media, if you, if you follow me, I'm at Ryan Holiday on Twitter and Facebook and, I guess, yeah, on Instagram and at Daily Stoic also. But you'll notice there's almost no real time updates from me. I, I never really got the habit, but when I feel it peeking up, I break it immediately. These are not platforms for me to fish for validation. I don't want to say, hey, look what I'm doing. And then people go, oh, you're so great. Oh, you're so awesome. And I'm not saying they do that because I'm like well known.

• 5:59Ryan Holiday?

  I'm saying like, your friends do this. We want to congratulate each other. We want to encourage each other. And I get that, but that's not why I want to be a writer. That's not why I want to do things. As I say in The Boy Who Would Be King, all the things Marcus Aurelius did made him very popular. That's not why he did it. He did it because they're the right thing. So I, I try not to let social media, I try not to let the chase for validation or approval. I try, I just, it's not a need I really ever try to sate. I don't feed it because I feel like the more you feed it, the more it wants from you. So I try to focus on just not talk, I try to let my work do the talking about my work. That's not to say I don't believe in marketing. I do, brand is important.

• 6:43Ryan Holiday?

  I mean, I have the social media. I just try to have a healthy relationship with it, a healthy balance with it. So I'm using it, it is not using me. And look, Twitter and Facebook and Clubhouse and all these apps, you're the product that's being sold. They're exploiting your need for validation and attention, right? They know that you want to tell people what you're doing and then you want to hear what people say about what you're doing. And then you want to respond to the people who aren't liking it enough. And then you want to check back and see how many comments it got or likes it got or whatever. There's a reason Instagram, I think Instagram did people a public service when they turned off, you know, some of the, not everyone can see how many likes or, you know, views their post got. I think that's great.

• 7:27Ryan Holiday?

  As a public figure, they leave these tools and they are tempting. And so I don't even have it on my phone. I don't want to touch it. Every time I, I never go to one of these sites and I feel better about myself as a person. I just feel that that insatiable need has been encouraged a little bit. So let's say no to trying to impress other people. Let's not care what other people think. As Marcus Aurelius said, this is another quote we could have included in the entry. He says, you know, "We care about ourselves more than other people. Yet for some reason, we care about their, their opinions way too much." No, focus on what you have to do. Focus on you, focus on what you think, what you know is right. Do things for that reason. If you get validation for it afterwards, wonderful, but that can't be why you do it.

• 8:09Ryan Holiday?

  And if it is why you do it, it's going to break your heart, I promise you. So say no to the desire to impress other people. Plus, other people, man, they don't know. They're wrong 99% of the time anyway. Focus on what you know. Just do the right thing. The rest doesn't matter.