Which Approach Will You Take? | The Sign Of True Education

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

• 0:03Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Friday, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from The Daily Stoic, my book, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful collaborator, translator, and literary agent, Stephen Hanselman. So today, we'll give you a quick meditation from the Stoics with some analysis from me, and then we'll send you out into the world to turn these words into works.

• 0:43Ryan Holiday?

  Which approach will you take? When Seneca was exiled to Corsica, he was overwhelmed with hopelessness and devastation. We can understand this, as we discussed recently, it was unfair, and the charges that he was convicted of were bogus. It would have been hard, it would have been lonely and sad. It's just interesting that a generation later, a lesser-known Stoic, Musonius Rufus, you can read a great translation of his work in this book called "That One Should Disdain Hardship: A Carrot at the Painted Porch." Anyways, Musonius is exiled to a different island. It's equally unfair, and it's hard, and it's lonely. But as I write in Lives of the Stoics, what made Musonius so remarkable is what he did next. He set about improving the island he was banished to. He taught things

• 1:28Ryan Holiday?

  to the locals. He helped discover a natural spring that brought everyone fresh drinking water. It's one thing to just not be overwhelmed by the situation you're in. That's basic Stoicism. What Musonius did was next level. He accepted his fate, yet he refused to see it as static. He found a way to improve things, to be of service, to keep himself busy. He made a positive difference. Eventually, someone would do that in Corsica too, as we said, it's now a vacation destination. But it wasn't Seneca. He couldn't see the potential. He was too consumed with his own situation to see what was in front of him. A lot of us do that. But Musonius shows us a better way, a way to make a better world, and to make things better for ourselves.

• 2:17Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Today, I have the March 22 entry from the Daily Stoic, "The Sign of True Education." I am holding the hardcover edition. And today's quote comes to us from Epictetus's Discourses 122. "What is it then to be properly educated?" he asks. "Is it learning to apply our natural preconceptions to the right thing according to nature, and beyond that, to separate the things that lie within our power from those that don't?" A degree on a wall means you're educated as much as shoes on your feet mean that you're walking. It's a start, but it's

• 3:02Ryan Holiday?

  hardly sufficient. Otherwise, how would so many educated people make unreasonable decisions or miss so many obvious things? Partly, it's because they forget that they ought to focus only on that which lies within their power to control. A surviving fragment from the philosopher Herakles expresses that reality. Many who have learned from Hesiod and the countless names, gods, and monsters never understand that day and night are one. Just as you can walk plenty well without shoes, you don't need to step into a classroom to understand the basic fundamental reality of nature and our proper role in it. Begin with awareness

• 3:41Ryan Holiday?

  and reflection, not just once, but every single second of every single day. I guess I am both educated and not educated. It's funny, I was just trying to talk to someone about this the other day. I realized I was remembering that my college admissions essay to a bunch of the colleges I wanted to get into, I wrote about that Mark Twain quote about that never letting schooling get in the way of your education. Which I thought was pretty clever and certainly captured my philosophy of learning at that time. And then also in my youthful arrogance, didn't quite conceive how that's like the

• 4:24Ryan Holiday?

  exact opposite of what you would want to communicate to a college admissions expert or college admissions, whatever their job is called. I don't know. I didn't get into that many colleges. But the, the point is, I ended up getting into a pretty good school. I went to Ushua Riverside. I had a scholarship. I was an honor student, but I dropped out at the end of my sophomore year. And it's funny, that's where my college education began. That's my post grad work came before I graduated. But after I left school, some people go, oh, did you find, some people ask me about where I heard about Stoicism. And I say, I learned

• 5:08Ryan Holiday?

  about it in college. But I have to go, but not from college, right? I was writing for the college newspaper. I was covering an event. I met a person. That person told me about Epictetus, right? And even then, my understanding, my writing about Stoicism, which I did for a good chunk of my twenties, is very different than my understanding of it now, having had kids, having been through a pandemic, having been through the ups and downs of life, having success, having faced adversity and difficulty, bumped up into my limitations, hit rock bottom in some things, right? We change and we grow. And then from

• 5:49Ryan Holiday?

  this, we become truly educated. And Epictetus would also say, in one of my other favorite quotes from him, he says, only the educated are free. His point, I think, you can combine these two quotes when he's saying that one of the things that to be properly educated does for you is it allows you to learn how to separate the things that lie within our power from those that don't. And it is in this that we become free, right? And understanding that impressing other people, chasing the wrong things, chasing the things that other people are chasing, right? Being worked up about the things that everyone else has worked up about, that these are not only the mark of the uneducated, these are also the mark

• 6:35Ryan Holiday?

  of a kind of servitude or slavery, or certain, let's just say less dramatically.

• 6:41Ryan Holiday?

  Evidence of not being free. And so that's what I just so love about the Stoics. I love what they taught me. I love the rabbit holes they sent me down. I heard about Heracletus through the Stoics. I heard I am a self-educated student of the Stoics. I had no professor guiding me on this journey. I've been able to talk to many professors over the years. But that was all driven by me. It was funny, I read meditations in college and then I emailed Gregory Hayes and we struck up a, you know, occasional email relationship. And that was such a big part of my learning journey, just reaching out to people and asking questions.

• 7:23Ryan Holiday?

  Being a student, long past actually officially being a student, although funny thing, I was just pulled out my wallet the other day and my student ID is still in there and I keep it in there. And I just sort of a reminder to me to always, always stay a student because being a student, being educated, trying to always learn. This is where our freedom begins. This is where we find our freedom. This is what frees us. So that's today's message. Thank you for listening. You don't have to listen to this podcast, right? You're choosing.

• 8:03Ryan Holiday?

  There's so many hilarious, amazing, fascinating, whatever podcasts out there, but you chose to listen to one about an obscure school of ancient philosophy because you're trying to get better and improve yourself. And I think that's really cool. I'll talk to you all soon.