If You Want to Make the World Better, Do This | Give Thanks

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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.

• 0:56Ryan Holiday?

  If you want to make the world better, do this. It's discouraging out there. It's a sad state of affairs. No one thinks this is how things should be. No one thinks this is how society should work. There's cruelty, there's stupidity, people being left behind. We're failing to address basic problems. We're failing at basic functions. Okay, so what do we do? After all, each of us is only an individual. Well, the Stoics tell us that this is precisely the place to start. While others were obsessed with working their land or breeding their horses, Epictetus said that he preferred to cultivate his own improvement day to day. Rome was a dark and screwed-up place then,

• 1:39Ryan Holiday?

  especially in Nero's Court where he lived. But Epictetus turned himself into a bright light. He was a beacon that shined then and continues to shine today. Stoicism is the art of getting active in your own rescue. And in so doing... You end up rescuing others. By reforming and improving ourselves, we are reforming and improving the world because we are a part of the world. To put a spin on one of Marcus Aurelius's great lines, what improves the bee improves the hive. Look, we don't control what anyone else is going to do in 2026, but we can guarantee right here, right now, that it won't be all bad.

• 2:22Ryan Holiday?

  We can make sure right here, right now, that things do move forward. How? By making sure that we are good in 2026, by making sure that we take a big step forward in the year ahead. We can be of service to the hive, to society, by getting serious about taking care of ourselves. Let's quit those bad habits. Let's opt out of the nastiness and the divisiveness. Let's focus on getting better. Let's get serious about stuff we've put off. Let's lend a helping hand. Let's fight to be the person that philosophy tried to make us, as Marcus Aurelius said. Not later, not only if everyone else does too, but right now, on our own, because we

• 3:05Ryan Holiday?

  know we need to, because we know somebody needs to. And look, my way of getting serious about this, every year, and I do this every year, is through the Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge. It's 21 days of Stoic-inspired challenges that kick off on January 1st that are designed to make me cultivate that improvement, that are designed to make me be what I wish more people would be in the year ahead. I don't control what they do. I don't control what the norm is. I don't control what the trends are, but I control whether I get serious. I control whether I get better, right? I control whether I'm a bright spot or not in the year ahead. And that's what we built the Challenger out.

• 3:48Ryan Holiday?

  And by the way, you're not going to be doing it alone because it's going to be thousands of Stoics all over the world doing it as well. We've been doing it for almost 10 years now. I have habits, practices, things I picked up. In the 2019 challenge, in the 2018 challenge, in the 2022 challenge, every year we do a new version of the Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge. It gets better every year, and it helps thousands of people all over the world get better, too. I'd love to see you in there. You can sign up right now at dailystoic.com/challenge. It's gonna be awesome, but it starts here really soon. It's gonna start on January 1st, so you gotta sign up before it's too late. Dailystoic.com/challenge. I will see you in there.

• 4:39Ryan Holiday?

  Give thanks. This is the December 29th entry in the Daily Stoic. "In all things we should try to make ourselves as grateful as possible," Seneca says in Moral Letters 81. "For gratitude is a good thing for ourselves in a manner in which justice commonly held to belong to others is not. Gratitude pays itself back in large measure." Guess what you could say is that gratitude is a gift you gave yourself, even though you are expressing your gratefulness to other people. But think of all the things that you could be grateful for today. That you're alive, that you live primarily in a time of peace, that you have enough health and leisure to read a book or listen to this podcast. But what of the little things? The person who smiled at you? The woman who held the door open?

• 5:24Ryan Holiday?

  The song you liked on the radio? Pleasant weather? Gratitude is infectious. Its positivity is radiant. Even if today was your last day on earth, even if you knew in advance that it was going to end in a few short hours, would there not still be plenty of things to be grateful for? How much better would your life be if you kicked off every morning like that? If you let it carry through from morning to night and touch every single part of your life? I think about gratitude a lot. Obviously, we did our Thanksgiving message a month ago. We're talking about gratitude. I have a gratitude journal. Actually, Mona Katon, the makeup artist and online influencer, sent it to me as a gift a couple of years ago.

• 6:07Ryan Holiday?

  And it's, I write like one or two things that I'm grateful for a day. You know, my family, my friends, my success, you know, the obvious things. But I, I try on a really consistent basis to take the time to express gratitude for things that maybe on the surface I'm not grateful for. Political polarization, Trump, you know, critics, pain that I feel, an argument that I just had, that I'm sick. You know, I try to express explicitly there on those pages gratitude for things that, again, I'm not feeling grateful for. But in taking a moment to write why I am grateful for them, I become grateful for them.

• 6:52Ryan Holiday?

  I force myself to see something good in them. I force myself to find a positive in it. I force a way to see that actually I'm quite lucky, even if this thing is itself an unlucky thing, right? In perspective of all the things that I am lucky for, this little bit of bad luck isn't so bad. And so forcing myself to write that down to think about is really great. My friend Pete Holmes, a comedian, talked about how whenever he thinks of his parents, he says to himself, I forgive them, right? He's actively practicing like what he wants to feel, even though he doesn't actually feel that. And it becomes true over time. And I think this is an exercise we can apply to gratitude.

• 7:34Ryan Holiday?

  And, and, you know, Marcus says, convince yourself that everything is a gift from the gods, that it's all a gift, that you're grateful for all of it, that it's great, even though it doesn't always feel that way. Talk soon.

• 7:51Ryan 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.