The Virtue That Makes All The Others Worth Having

“Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.” - Mark Twain In this powerful talk, Ryan explains why justice is the true measure of leadership. This is a call to do the right thing, not because it's easy or profitable, but because it’s the only thing that truly lasts. 📚 The Four Stoic Virtues: Justice, Temperance, Wisdom, Courage, are timeless keys to living your best life. The Daily Stoic is releasing a limited collector’s edition https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/stoic-virtues set of all four books signed and numbered, with a title page identifying these books as part of the only printing of this series. PLUS we're including one of the notecards https://ryanholiday.net/the-notecard-system-the-key-for-remembering-organizing-and-using-everything-you-read/ Ryan used while writing the series. Pre-order the Limited Edition Stoic Virtues Series https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/stoic-virtues Today! | https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/stoic-virtues 📖 Preorder the final book in Ryan Holiday's The Stoic Virtues Series: "Wisdom Takes Work":https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/wisdom-takes-work 🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast/?hl=en: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast 🎥 Watch top moments from The Daily Stoic Podcast https://www.youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast: https://www.youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast ✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail 🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/ 📱 Follow us: Instagram https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/,Twitter https://twitter.com/dailystoic,YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic,TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@daily_stoic?lang=en, andFacebook https://www.facebook.com/dailystoic See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

• 0:04Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Sundays, we take a deeper dive into these ancient topics with excerpts from the Stoic texts, audiobooks that we like here or recommend here at Daily Stoic, and other long-form wisdom that you can chew on on this relaxing weekend. We hope this helps shape your understanding of this philosophy, and most importantly, that you're able to apply it to your actual life. Thank you for listening.

• 0:43Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I hope you are having a good weekend. Back in April, I flew to Hawaii for less than one full day, but I packed a lot in. I met my parents there. That was fun. They don't come to a lot of my talks, but I thought Hawaii was a good one to invite them to. I got a long run on the beach. I went swimming. And then I went to the Honolulu Convention Center and I gave a talk. And was actually on a Hawaiian idea, this idea of Iwana, which is the Hawaiian word for family. There's another Hawaiian idea, Kulena, I think is how you pronounce it. I could be getting this wrong, who knows? But it basically means shared responsibility, which if you followed the sort of deeper ideas in Stoicism,

• 1:28Ryan Holiday?

  you see this as very aligned, right? Marx wrote something like 80 Times talks about the idea of the common good in meditations. So I was talking to a group of entrepreneurs. If you're a member of EO, you know what EO is. It's a, it's called Entrepreneurs Organization. It's got tens of thousands of entrepreneurs all over the world. And they do one big conference every year where people fly in from all over the world. And they did it. This time in Hawaii, and they didn't want me to talk about the sort of resiliency side of Stoicism, or the productivity side of Stoicism, or the emotional regulation side of Stoicism. They wanted me to talk about this, right? How to do something good with what you're doing, our shared responsibilities, our connections. And so, obviously, this is

• 2:10Ryan Holiday?

  what the ideas in the Justice book are about. That's what the Stoic virtue of justice is about. So that's what I talked about. And I wanted to bring you this talk because it's very different than my normal talks, and I think very much of the moment. I'll just get into it. Thanks to EO for having me come out. They've been wonderful supporters of my books, in the small chapters, in the big chapters, and then the big events. It's really been cool. And I really got a lot out of being able to put this together, and I hope you get a lot out of listening. Be good, do well, and remember, it's courage and discipline. That's great wisdom. Justice, that's what it's all about. That's the virtue that makes the others worth having.

• 2:54Ryan Holiday?

  It is wonderful to be here with all of you. You guys should think about doing this somewhere pretty next year. No, this is great. Any excuse to come to Hawaii, I will take. I'm excited to chat with you. All right. So, the central tenet of Stoic philosophy is that it doesn't matter what happens to us in life, matters how we respond to what happens. And in his Meditations, Marcus Rios, the Emperor of Rome, he would write that while stuff can get in our way, our plans can be disrupted, our actions can be impeded, we always have the ability to accommodate and adapt and adjust. We can make new plans, we can convert

• 3:35Ryan Holiday?

  obstacles into an advantage. She said, impediment to action advances action. It stands in the way, it comes away. And it's this idea that I built my book, The Obstacle is the Way Around, which, when I went to my publisher over 10 years ago with, and I said, hey, I'd like to write about an obscure school of ancient philosophy. They were not particularly excited, as you can imagine. Here we are. And this book, The Obstacle is the Way, has gone on, it sold millions of copies all over the world. But I think it's worth asking A way to do what, right? When the Stoics are saying the obstacle is the way, what do they mean?

• 4:14Ryan Holiday?

  Are they saying that obstacles, difficulties, that adversity is a chance for us to overcome and thus make more money? To beat our opponents? To be more successful? I think yes, I think that's certainly part of it. Sometimes it is. We can take these difficulties, these problems, the things that hold other people back, and we can use them to our advantage and become more successful as entrepreneurs. Whatever it is that we do. And I think this is why Stoicism has made its way through professional sports. It's why Duke made it their motto this year on their way to the final four and potentially a national championship.

• 4:57Ryan Holiday?

  And it's why, in the ancient world, the Stoics were entrepreneurs and merchants. They were athletes. They were politicians and lawyers and public figures. Marcus realist is the emperor of Rome. But surely there is more to this philosophy than just a way to become more successful, to grow your organization, to grow your stature. Surely there's more to it than that. In fact, Marcus realist addresses this in Meditations 2. He tries himself for working harder at becoming a better wrestler, but not as hard at becoming

• 5:37Ryan Holiday?

  a better citizen, a better person, a better resource in tight places, he says, a better forgiver of faults. So what part of our life are we trying to optimize? Where are we turning the obstacle into the way? And so really what the Stoics were saying is that everything we experience in life, that everything and everyone is a chance for us to practice virtue. It's a chance for us to do the right thing. The Stoic virtues being courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom.

• 6:14Ryan Holiday?

  So the idea is that every obstacle, every person, every difficult person is a chance for us to practice virtue, to practice excellence. It's always a chance to do the right thing. That's what I want to talk about today, this idea of doing the right thing. Stoics lump this under the virtue of justice. Now, today, I think when we hear that word "justice," we think of judges and juries and the law, maybe politics. We think social justice, and all these things are very important. But justice for the Stoics was also something much more individual. It was how we comport ourselves.

• 6:55Ryan Holiday?

  It was the values that we hold, it was the standards that we hold ourselves to. It was honesty and integrity, right? It's those old-fashioned values, right? Justice for the Stoics, doing the right thing, was about being a person who lives and acts with integrity, personally and professionally. That's the idea, that everything is this opportunity to excel personally and professionally. Again, not always regards to the bottom line, but in terms of some other deeper, more profound form of greatness. I want to take you way back. A young man named Harry S.

• 7:39Ryan Holiday?

  Truman is introduced to the Stoics well before he becomes president, and he would rave that Marcus Aurelius was one of the great ones, one of his personal heroes. And he would say that Marcus writes in Meditations about these four virtues, about moderation and wisdom and justice and fortitude, and he says that if we can cultivate these, we have everything we need to live a happy and successful life amidst power and influence, as both Truman and Marcus Aurelius has, and then in every other station and facet of life. And it's pretty remarkable Truman's copy of Meditations survives, and we see some of the passages that he underlined that struck him that...

• 8:23Ryan Holiday?

  He relied on when he found himself in this position of supreme power and influence. He says, "If it is not right, do not do it. And if it is not true, do not say it." This is Marcus Rues writing to himself in his journal, never expecting it to be published, just writing the reminder to himself. "It's not right, do not do it. And if it is not true, do not say it." And then Marcus writes, and Truman underlines this, that we should do nothing thoughtlessly or without a purpose, that we should make sure that everything we do is directed towards a social end. It's this idea of having a set of values or rules that we hold ourselves to. And throughout meditations, Marcus is reminding himself of these over and over again.

• 9:08Ryan Holiday?

  I've underlined some myself over the years, right? "Never under compulsion, out of selfishness, without forethought, with misgivings." Says, "No surplus words or unnecessary actions. Let the spirit in you represent a man, an adult, a citizen, a Roman, a ruler, taking up his post like a soldier and patiently waiting his recall from life." Says, "Cheerfulness without requiring other people's help, or serenity supplied by others." I like this one, he says, "To stand up straight and not straightened." And then coming back to the four virtues, Marcus Rues says, "If at some point in your life you ever come across anything better than justice, honesty, self-control, and courage, it must be an extraordinary thing indeed."

• 9:52Ryan Holiday?

  Says, "Never regard anything as doing you good if it makes you betray a trust, lose your sense of shame, or makes you show hatred, suspicion, ill will, or hypocrisy, or a desire for things best done behind closed doors." So again, these values that we hold ourselves to, these standards that we hold our organization to, this is what Stoicism was ultimately about. And it's what Truman tried to live by throughout his career. He would say that in his long career in politics, he had certain rules that he followed. Number one, he never handled political money in any way. He says, "I engaged in no private interest, whatever, that would be helped by the laws."

• 10:34Ryan Holiday?

  Where the committees that he stood on, he said he refused presents and hotel accommodations and trips. He says, "I made no speeches for money or even for expenses." He says, "I lived on the salary I was entitled to and considered that I was employed by the taxpayers and the people of my country, state, and nation." And I think this is the powerful part. He says, "I would rather be an honorable public servant and be known as such than to be the richest man in the world." Now, this is all the more remarkable because before he entered politics Truman was a businessman. After he returned home from World War I, he was old enough that he didn't have to enlist, but he enlisted anyway. He served honorably in World War I.

• 11:18Ryan Holiday?

  He comes home and he starts a clothing store with his best friend Eddie Jacobson. Truman and Jacobson is in downtown Kansas City, and the first couple of years are really good. He's living high. And then the economy turns and it quite quickly goes out of business. It's one of the humiliations and failures of his life. But Truman spends the next two decades of his life paying back those debts. Could have declared bankruptcy. He found that shameful, decided not to, and he painstakingly pays these debts back. In fact, well into his political career, he's still paying some of them off while he is a senator.

• 12:02Ryan Holiday?

  And it's all the more remarkable that he does this because when he enters politics, he enters politics through the Kansas City machine, one of the most corrupt political machines in the United States. One of his other wartime buddies is related to the political boss in Kansas City, Tom Pendergast. And this is how Truman gets his shot into politics. But he decides crazy that he's actually going to serve the people that he's elected to serve rather than the bosses that helped him win office. He says, "I was taught that the expenditure of public money is a public trust, and I've never changed my opinion on that subject. No one has ever received public money for which I was responsible unless he gave honest service for it."

• 12:44Ryan Holiday?

  There's a scene in Truman's life in 1929 as Truman is overseeing the disbursement, something like $6 million in road contracts. He is also in court. Subject to a default judgment for a $9,000 payment that he owes from the failure of his store. As he is laying out a county road, his mother is taking out another mortgage on her farm. And as that road has to cut through Truman's family property, he decides to forego the reimbursement that he would be entitled to because it seemed like it might be a conflict of interest. And so, basically, in politics in this time,

• 13:29Ryan Holiday?

  everyone gets rich except for Truman. His bosses would describe him as the contrarianest goddamn mule in the world because he had this naive notion that politicians are supposed to serve the people and that, as he said, that money is a public trust. It wasn't his. And ultimately, the reason Truman advances in politics is that the bosses want to get him out of their hair at the local level, and they kick him upstairs into the Senate, so to speak. And it's there, in the Senate, with his experience watching corrupt local politics, that he puts together what becomes known as the Truman Committee during World War II, which looks at fraud and waste

• 14:13Ryan Holiday?

  in federal wartime contracts. So, long before Doge, with real numbers, Truman saves the US taxpayers something like $15 billion. Multiple generals go to jail for fraud, and he holds them accountable. So, he saves the US taxpayers $15 billion. But he's not just eliminating waste and the government should be small. Do you know what he does with this $15 billion? That $15 billion, he calls Samuel Rayburn, the House Majority Leader, after he becomes president, and he proposes they use that money to fund the Marshall Plan. He says, "Let's use that $15 billion and save the world with it."

• 14:58Ryan Holiday?

  It's that money that rebuilds Europe and Japan and all the war-torn countries from the Second World War. And so Truman never gets rich throughout any of this. But what he was trying to do, he said, is leave his family something that couldn't be stolen, right? A good name, a legacy that they could be proud of. And this idea that... We do the right thing even when other people aren't doing the right thing. Politics were openly corrupt at this time. And Truman forgoes all of that even though he, in many cases, desperately needed it. But I think that's the point, right? Integrity is hard, and it's also very expensive. I think about this with another great, I think underrated, American president. When Jimmy Carter is elected president,

• 15:42Ryan Holiday?

  he puts his family peanut farm in a blind trust so there can be no suspicion of conflicts of interest, as if the powers of the president are ever gonna directly impact a small peanut farm in Plains, Georgia. But he does it anyway because it's the right thing to do. And then when he leaves office, he's over a million dollars in debt, right? It costs him, right? It's a beautiful, beautiful thing, though, when we see people do the right thing even though it's not necessarily in their best financial interest. Look, there are, a lot of these things should be covered by the law. A lot of these things should be standard practices. There are incentives for some of these things, too,

• 16:27Ryan Holiday?

  but the reality is most of this is voluntary. And so when the Stoics talk about justice, again, they're not talking about what is legal or illegal, or the fact that everyone else is doing it, or that you can probably get away with it, right? They're talking about whether it's right or not. And to me, that's one of the wonderful things about being an entrepreneur, right? Many of us become entrepreneurs because we wanna be our own boss. That's great, we wanna be in charge. But when you make that decision, it also means you have to be your own referee as well. You have to make these hard decisions yourself. There's a story about a great Roman

• 17:11Ryan Holiday?

  who is approached by an architect who says, "Hey, people can see into your estate. And if you let me do this renovation project, I can give you some more privacy and no one will be able to see in." And he looks at him and he says, "Actually, you know what? Double your fee and get rid of everything." He says, "I have nothing to hide. I want people to see how I live." And this goes back to that idea from Marcus Aurelius, "That we should do nothing that requires walls or curtains," he said, right? There's something about our desire to hide that usually indicts what it is that we're about to do. And I think this is a question we can ask ourselves as entrepreneurs, right?

• 17:55Ryan Holiday?

  What would our customers think if they saw how the sausage gets made, right? Would they still like it? Would it still hold up so well? How would our branding look if we were subjected to some additional transparency, right? What would our customers think if they saw how the sausage got made? And we make these decisions because they're the right thing to do, even though they're scary, even though they're hard. In 1935, the choreographer Martha Graham is approached by an Olympic committee from Berlin. They want her to put on a performance, the upcoming 1936 Olympics. And Martha considers it. She is basically dead broke.

• 18:40Ryan Holiday?

  It is a huge commission. It is literally the world's stage. And she turns it down. She says, "Over half of my company is Jewish. What would they think? I can't in good conscience possibly perform for you." And they said to her, they threatened her, as so often happens when you challenge authority. They said, "If you don't come, everyone will know about it, and that will be a bad thing for you." And so you have both the carrot and the stick. And Martha thinks about it and then famously replies, "If I don't come, everyone will know why I didn't, and that will be a bad thing for you."

• 19:40Ryan Holiday?

  I guess what I'm saying is that we don't control so much of the world. We don't control how corrupt and awful and unfair things often appear to be, and we don't control what other people get away with either. But, and this is the wonderful thing about being an entrepreneur, about running your own business, about working for yourself, is that we do control what we do. We control how we operate. We control the standards we hold ourselves and we control who we are. I think about this with the Daily Stoic Podcast. Every week I get a list of people who would like to sponsor, and I have to decide whether I want to accept money from gambling companies, or alcohol companies,

• 20:25Ryan Holiday?

  or multi-level marketing companies, right? I get to decide. That's not a decision that I'm criticizing someone else for doing, but it's a decision that I get to think about, about who I want to take money from, right? And we all have the ability to do this in our own sphere. With Daily Stoic, a few years ago, we started making these challenge coins, inspired by the ideas in Stoic philosophy. And long before this tariff war we are now going through, we decided that even though we could make them something like 90% cheaper in China, we wanted to work closer to home. And we used this company called Wendell's, which has been in business since 1882. It's still owned by the original family.

• 21:08Ryan Holiday?

  They actually invented the Alcoholics Anonymous chip that you get after one year, and five years, and 10 years. One of their employees came up with this idea. And it's been a great partnership over the years. And most of all, though, I am proud of our supply chain. I'm proud of the fact that it doesn't have to go in a container ship across the ocean, right? I'm also proud that I get to go and see how it's made. I remember one time we went and we saw that each individual coin, as was their standard practice... Comes wrapped in this little plastic bag. And I said, hey, guys, I don't want to tell you how to run your business, but I don't think we need to put a metal coin in a bag. It's not going to get scratched. That's the great part about metal. And so we eliminate the plastic bags, not just from our orders, but from many of their orders.

• 21:53Ryan Holiday?

  I could pick up trash every single day for the rest of my life. And it will pale in comparison to the the amount of plastic waste that I eliminated from one decision in my business, right? This is the wonderful thing about being an entrepreneur. Is that your decisions actually have an impact. You have some control. These aren't abstract political, social, economic issues. They are your purview. They are up to you. We make leather editions of a handful of my books. I bought the rights back from my publisher and we make them. And we started working with this company that had been based in Dallas for many years. And they had a manufacturing, a leather bindery in Belarus

• 22:35Ryan Holiday?

  that they had run since they had immigrated to America from there. And then, you know, a war breaks out in Ukraine. And Belarus has been complicit in that invasion. And I had to decide, hey, from a sanctions standpoint, I'm totally fine. I can continue to make there. Maybe that could change. So there's some uncertainty there. But I just didn't feel good about it. I had trouble sleeping at night. And I said, hey, let's move it to somewhere else. So we moved it to an equally great company in the UK. I thought, hey, it'll cost a little bit more money, but it'll be better. Didn't cost a little bit more money. It cost something like 200% more. But that's the decision that you get to make, right?

• 23:19Ryan Holiday?

  And I heard a great expression once, that it's not a principle unless it costs you money. It's easy to say, oh, hey, I think other companies should do this. Or hey, if I was ever in that position, I would do it this way. But then it's you deciding whether you're gonna use a t-shirt made in a sweatshop or not. It's you deciding whether you're going to electrify your fleet of vehicles or not. It's you deciding whether to provide benefits for your employees or not. It's you to decide what your starting wage is gonna be, right? You get to make these decisions. And you have to make these decisions. And they're gonna be hard, they're gonna be expensive, they're gonna be scary, but that's the job. And there's another story about a Roman politician

• 24:04Ryan Holiday?

  named Helvidius. Helvidius lives in the time of Vespasian, a tyrannical emperor. And he is relentless in his criticism of Vespasian. And as he enters the senate one day, the emperor stops him and he says, "You need to stop criticizing me." And he says, "But it's my job as a senator." And he says, "Then I will prevent you from going in the senate." And Helvidius says, "Okay, but as long as I am a senator, I'm going to say what I think is true. I'm gonna do what needs to be done." And Vespasian stops him and he says, "If you do not stop this, I will kill you. How much clearer do I need to be about this?" And Helvidius looks him in the eye and says, "You do your job, I will do mine."

• 24:49Ryan Holiday?

  So this idea of doing the right thing comes up right against the other Stoic virtue of courage. It's scary, it's risky, but you gotta do it. And if you don't do it, who will? I was reading the news earlier this month. Columbia University is approached by the new administration. And they say, "Hey, look, if you don't make the changes we want you to make, we're gonna revoke a $400 million federal contract." $400 million federal contract, one hand, academic independence on the other, right? Columbia caves. Now, $400 million is a lot of money.

• 25:32Ryan Holiday?

  They have a lot of different responsibilities. I get it, it's tough, it's a complicated issue. So what should they have said, right? What should Columbia have said? Well, Columbia has a $14 billion endowment. So I would say that when you have a $14.8 billion endowment, someone tries to tell you what to do, you tell them to fuck off.

• 26:05Ryan Holiday?

  We tell ourselves that we're making this money, we're building this business, we're getting to a place of security, independence, where we control our own destiny. But does that point ever actually arrive? When do we do it, right? The point of an endowment is to protect against things like that, to preserve your security, to protect your future, to allow you freedom to make hard decisions. And by the way, this is a $400 million contract over several years. It is a fraction of Columbia's operating budget. And so, we tell ourselves that, "Hey, I'm trying to make this. I'm gonna get to a place where, in the future, I can be courageous, I can make these hard decisions."

• 26:50Ryan Holiday?

  But that's the insidious thing. We move the goalposts, right? We move the goalposts. And we don't do what Helvidius did, or we don't do what Martha Graham did, or we don't do what Truman did. At some point, right? And ideally, that point is sooner rather than later. You have to make those hard decisions, where those principles have to cost you money, or they are not really principles. Now, you might be saying, "Why, right? Why can't you just do what's best for you? Isn't that what capitalism is? Isn't that what business is? We have investors, we have shareholders, we have the bottom line. That's all very true. But I would point you to the book

• 27:33Ryan Holiday?

  that Adam Smith, Invisible Hand, the founder of modern capitalistic theory, if you will. You know what book he writes? Before he writes The Wealth of Nations, he writes a book called The Theory of Moral Sentiments, an essay towards an analysis of the principles of which man naturally judge concerning the conduct and character first of themselves and their neighbors. What Adam Smith says in this book is that we should operate as if there is an impartial spectator on our shoulder always. And we have to justify the decision we're making to them. His point, like Marcus Aurelius, don't do anything that requires walls or curtains. Can we justify this thing to an indifferent third party?

• 28:18Ryan Holiday?

  Not to our shareholders, not to our investors, not to our, you know, number that we're trying to get to. But can we justify it to someone who has no dog in this fight, no stake in it? Can we actually show them why this is a good decision for everyone involved? But, look, maybe you're asking still, why, why, I'm supposed to do my... I would point you to one of my favorite articles. I don't know how to explain to you that you should care about other people. We have a responsibility, right? Because what we do affects other people. There are no decisions in isolation. We are all hopelessly, helplessly interconnected with each other.

• 29:03Ryan Holiday?

  And so the decision we make over here affects these people over here and vice versa. And we have to think about that responsibility. It's all intertwined with each other. Admiral Hyman Rickover, the mentor of Jimmy Carter, founder of the Nuclear Navy, he took issue with this phrase that you hear when people say, "I am not responsible." He says, "Really, what they're often saying is, 'I can't be held legally liable,'" which is such a preposterously low standard to hold yourself to. "Well, I can't be sued into oblivion for this, so obviously it's okay."

• 29:44Ryan Holiday?

  There's so many things that are legal, but obviously abhorrent, or disgusting, or wrong, or just beneath us. And he says, though, that from a moral and an ethical standpoint, when we say, "I'm not responsible," we are correct. Because in that instance, we are irresponsible, right? To abdicate our roles as leaders, as parts of a community, as part of this crazy thing called humanity in the world, we do, we have a responsibility, we have an obligation to each other. Every person in this room believes that what you do matters.

• 30:27Ryan Holiday?

  Why would you have spent all these hours building this business, working in this line of work if it didn't matter? Well, let's act like it. Let's act like it really matters. As Rick Over would say quoting Confucius, "Let's act like the weight of the world is on our shoulders." That we have the potential, each of us, to save the world. And what would the world look like if more people acted as if the decisions they made mattered? I think about a decision made about 10 years ago. CBS decides to stop carrying cigarettes. Now, people told them, "Hey, look, this is gonna be bad for the bottom line." And they also tried to say, as we so often do when people try to do the right thing, we go, "In the big scheme of things, it doesn't really matter."

• 31:11Ryan Holiday?

  Right? People would just buy their cigarettes from someone else. And as it happened, in fact, cigarette sales across the United States go down because they're just a little bit harder to get. CBS has done just fine. I own a little grocery store in the town that I live in, right outside Austin, Texas. And I heard this thing about CBS. I'd always been inspired by it. And then I'm looking at the sort of the P and L, the most popular products. And what do you know? The second best-selling product is cigarettes. My wife and I are faced with this same choice. And so we decided to discontinue them. Not so great for the bottom line. Plenty of customers quite upset. I was surprised by that as well. So not only do you sometimes do the right thing,

• 31:56Ryan Holiday?

  but then you get yelled at for doing the right thing. And look, you can buy cigarettes. You just can't buy them from me, right? The decision to say, "Hey, I'm not gonna be a part of this thing." I don't control the whole world. I don't have the power to ban this or magically change everyone's behavior. But I do have the decision, we always have the decision, about how much we're gonna participate, how much we're gonna be a part of it. And if we don't like it, we can decide not to participate. And again, if everyone makes this small decision, it adds up in a big way. I think about companies that, when they experience an economic downturn, when there are setbacks, you know, what do they do?

• 32:39Ryan Holiday?

  Does the leadership hoard money? Or does it take care of its people, right? These are the decisions that we get to make. We're not the president, we're not the emperor, but these are decisions that we get to make in our business, and they matter, they really matter. They don't just matter in the big scheme of things, but they really matter to the people that they affect immediately. That is to say, your people, your staff, and your customers. Stoicism can seem like this very individualistic philosophy. It's about resilience, it's about toughness, it's about not being led by your emotions, but one of the key Stoic concepts is this idea of the circles of concern. Yeah, sure, we're all self-interested.

• 33:23Ryan Holiday?

  We all have obligations to our family, to ourselves, to our business, etc. But that life is a series of concentric circles, the Stoics said. That, yeah, we're in the center, then there's our family, our fellow citizens, you know, this goes further and further out. The Stoics said that the work of our life was to pull these outer rings inward, and that there was a beautiful madness in caring about people you would never meet, or people who have never been born as much, or caring about them at all, right? There's a beautiful madness in caring about them like you care about yourself and the people that you love.

• 34:06Ryan Holiday?

  This is the concept that you are all gathered here to talk about today too, the idea of holana, the idea of shared responsibility, of interconnectedness, the interrelatedness of all of us. Stoics, using the Greek word konos, which means the common good, this word appears something like eighty different times in Marcus Aurelius's Meditations. So, yeah, it is a philosophy about toughness, and resilience, and independence, all of that. But it's also a philosophy of interconnectedness and mutual affection. The fruit of this life, Marcus Aurelius would say, is good character and acts for the common good.

• 34:51Ryan Holiday?

  And I would argue that at the end of your career, at the end of your life, you're not going to be thinking about money, you're not going to be thinking about how big your business was, you're going to be thinking about the impact that that business had. You're going to be thinking about the impact that you had on other people. There's a track by my house that... Football player Hollywood Henderson paid after he won the lottery. He paid to rehabilitate the track that he ran on in high school. And put these signs up all around. It says, "Leave this place better than you found it." Right? At the end of your life, that's what you're going to be asking yourself. Did I leave this place better than I found it?

• 35:36Ryan Holiday?

  You're going to be thinking about people, right? You're going to be thinking about your impact on people. Gregg Popovich is probably the winningest coach in the history of the NBA. Maybe the history of professional sports. He has won a lot of games. He has won a lot of championships. But the most impressive thing about Gregg Popovich, and I think the San Antonio Spurs as a whole, who I've had the honor of getting to work with over the years. The most impressive thing to me about Popovich and the Spurs is their coaching tree. What their players and coaches have gone on to do, not just in the game of basketball, but also in the business of basketball. You know, you talk to them about their coaching tree.

• 36:19Ryan Holiday?

  They don't just point to the coaches that have gone on to win and actually set up their own coaching trees. They don't just talk about people like Becky Hammond, who have, who have not just broken barriers in the NBA, but then she went back to the WNBA where she's won championships. What the Spurs talk about when they talk about their coaching tree is what their social media managers have gone on to do and their ticket salespeople. And they see this organization, this whole institution as a collective effort. I remember I was riding in the elevator one time at a Spurs game. And the guy is an old man. He's sitting on a stool, pressing the buttons in the elevator to take you up to the different suites. And I noticed he has a championship ring on. And I said, "Where'd you get that?"

• 37:03Ryan Holiday?

  And they said, "When the Spurs win a championship, everyone in the organization gets a ring." Right? The guy pressing the buttons in the elevator is considered part... of this team. And then what they go on to do when he gets a job somewhere else, or an intern goes on to start their own company in the future, the Spurs see that as part of their success too. And great coaches, great leaders, that's how they judge their success, what they help others do. One of my mentors is the great George Raveling. Nobody really remembers how many games George Raveling won or lost. He does not brag today that he once led the nation in rebounds at Villanova. Right?

• 37:46Ryan Holiday?

  His greatest accomplishment is that he brought Jordan to Nike. His greatest accomplishment is the other leaders that he has mentored, the other coaches who have gone on to win even more games and win championships. Right? His leadership philosophy is similar to the one that Jackie Robinson has engraved as his epitaph on his tombstone, that a life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives. So I guess what I'm trying to get you to think about here today is like, who are you in this for? Right? Somebody opened doors for you. Who will you open doors for? And that this too is part of justice. And that this too, despite everything that's happening in the world,

• 38:31Ryan Holiday?

  is something that's very much up to us. Right? Who did you bring with you? Whose potential did you unlock? Whose success did we share? Because that's what leaders do. Leaders make other people better. Now, these situations are going to challenge us. Right? We're talking about some ethical quandaries here today. I understand that. They're going to challenge us. Success and failure, right? Adversity and advantage, right? Success and influence and power is going to put us in vexing moral situations. And so will tough times and tough situations. But the Stoics remind us that this is all a chance for us to practice these virtues,

• 39:14Ryan Holiday?

  to do things that ordinary situations would not permit, that allow us to reach a plane or a level of greatness that perhaps we ordinarily wouldn't be challenged to reach. And in fact, Marx really says in Meditations, that is the superpower of this idea that

• 39:34Ryan Holiday?

  Nothing can stop us from doing it, right? He says they can kill you and cut you with knives and shower you with curses, but how does any of this cut you off from clearness and sanity and self-control and justice? It doesn't matter what's happening in anywhere else in the world or in anything else. We have the opportunity to do this always. We always have the chance to do the right thing. Now, if I could come back to Truman here quickly as I, as I close. Truman is famously associated as a leader with this idea that the buck stops here. And that is part of being a great leader. That's part of justice and accountability. Hey, I'm the decider. I'm going to make this tough decision.

• 40:18Ryan Holiday?

  I have to bear the consequences. And we need more leaders that do that, that own when they make mistakes, that don't try to push blame around, that don't make excuses, that own when they are responsible for something. That's great. But there is another sign on Truman's desk that, as far as I know, no photographs of survive, doesn't get taught to schoolchildren, but is in fact a much more powerful and important reminder. And this sign comes from a quote from Mark Twain. It says, "Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest." We always have the chance to do this. And in fact, it's in these situations that perhaps are not in our best interest or are challenging or are difficult or are unpopular

• 41:03Ryan Holiday?

  that we have the chance to astonish people by doing the right thing, right? We have the chance to astonish our customers and our competitors and our employees, our children, maybe even ourselves, by acting with virtue in a fundamentally unvirtuous world, right? To act with integrity in a world where integrity does tragically seem...

• 41:28Ryan Holiday?

  Like an old fashioned value. And so as I close here, I would just leave you with a thought. Are you trying to be a better entrepreneur? Sure, that's great. I wish you all the best. Strive to be the best entrepreneur that you can. But are you also striving to be a better person? A better human being? A better friend? A better forgiver of faults? A better resource in tight places? As Marcus Aurelius said, are you striving for not just good numbers, but a good name and good impact? Thank you all very much.

• 42:11Ryan Holiday?

  Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it and I'll see you next episode.