What To Do When You Have Fallen Short | The Three Areas of Training

He had considered not going public with it. He had wanted so badly to be able to keep saying, to get credit for being the guy who says, ‘I’m sixteen years sober.’ But he could not. So in September of 2020, the actor Dax Shepard opened up on his podcast about relapsing. The episode was titled “Day 7”—because after a streak of a decade and half he was effectively back at the beginning. “Today, I have seven days,” he said with as much strength as he could muster. Beautiful.---In today's Daily Stoic reading, Ryan discusses Epictetus's assertion that there are three areas in which a person who would be wise and good must be trained: desires and aversions, impulses to act and not to act, and composure of judgment. There are just 5 more days left to sign up for Session 2 of the Daily Stoic New Year New You Challenge! Sign up today and join Session 2’s discord channel!✉️ 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 the Premium Leather Edition of the Daily Stoic.📱 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.

• 0:03Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Thursdays, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from the book The Daily Stoic, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful co-author and collaborator, Stephen Hanselman. And so today, we'll give you a quick meditation from one of the Stoics, from Epictetus, Marcus really is Seneca, then some analysis from me. And then we send you out into the world to do your best to turn these words into works.

• 0:45Ryan Holiday?

  What to do when you have fallen short? He had considered not going public with it. He had wanted so badly to be able to keep saying to get credit for being the guy who said, "I'm 16 years sober." But he could not. So in September of 2020, the actor Dax Shepard opened up on his podcast about relapsing. The episode was titled "Day Seven," because after a streak of a decade and a half, he was effectively back at the beginning. "Today, I have seven days," he was saying, with as much strength as he could muster. It's actually beautiful. Marcus really is himself said not to feel exasperated, or defeated, or despondent,

• 1:29Ryan Holiday?

  because your days aren't packed with wise or moral actions, but to get back up when you fail, to celebrate behaving like a human, however imperfectly, and to fully embrace the pursuit you have embarked on.

• 1:44Ryan Holiday?

  And maybe that's what you're having to come to terms with here, just a few weeks into a failed sober January. Maybe your diet's already off track. Maybe you're already overcommitting again. Maybe you've lost your temper more times than you expected to all year before the first month was out. Well, you can't be too hard on yourself, as we said. You have to pick yourself back up. You're a human being. Now get back on track. Don't quit or beat yourself up just because you're not perfect. Instead, get back up and celebrate day one, day seven, or day 700. Whatever day it is for you, you want to get back on track. You want to have better habits. If you want to challenge yourself to control your life, well... I would like to invite you to join us in the relaunched Daily Stoic New Year,

• 2:29Ryan Holiday?

  New You Challenge. As you've heard before, we usually do this at the beginning of the year. It starts on January 1, but we heard from a ton of people that came back from vacation late, or they procrastinated, or they changed their mind, or they stumbled and they fell off and they want to get serious. And so, we're going to reopen the registration for just five days for people who want to join. And it's going to start immediately. So, you can do the New Year, New You Challenge at your own pace. I've gotten so much out of this challenge. Like, seriously, my mantra for the year, which is the first day one I was just writing about, has already been a huge driver of change for me. It's affected the decisions I'm making, and I think it will for you, too. You'll get all the Q and As and all the other stuff. It's just archived in the challenge. I think it's great. And

• 3:12Ryan Holiday?

  I'd really like to see you in the Daily Stoic New Year, New Challenge. And you can sign up right now at dailystoic.com/challenge or NY23 to take it right now. Registration closes on the 31st. So, don't procrastinate. Join us, dailystoic.com/challenge.

• 3:42Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Today is January 27, and we're pulling from the Daily Stoic. This is the regular hardcover. There's a leather bound edition. You can grab it at store.dailystoic.com. But the entry is about the three areas of training. The quote today comes to us from Epictetus's Discourses 3:2. "There are three areas in which a person who would be wise and good must be trained. The first have to do with desires and aversions, that a person may never miss the mark in desires or fall into what repels them. The second has to do with

• 4:23Ryan Holiday?

  impulses to act and not to act, and more broadly with duty, that a person may act deliberately for good reasons and not carelessly. The third has to do with freedom from deception and composure and the whole area of judgment, the ascent our mind gives to its perceptions. Of these areas, the chief and most urgent is the first, which has to do with the passions, for strong emotions arise only when we fail in our desires and aversions."

• 4:50Speaker 01

  So let's riff on that, right? The three areas of training that Epictetus lays out for us. He says, first, we must consider what we should desire and what we should be averse to. Why? Because we want to want what is good and avoid what is bad. It's not just enough that we listen to our bodies because our attractions can lead us astray. Then we must examine our impulses to act. That is, our motivations. Are we doing things for the right reasons? Or do we act because we haven't stopped to think? Or do we believe that we have to do something? And finally, there is our judgment, our ability to see things clearly and properly when it comes to use our great gift from nature, reason.

• 5:32Speaker 01

  These are three distinct areas of training, but in practice, they are inextricably intertwined. Our judgments affect what we desire. Our desires affect how we act, just as our judgment determines how we act. But we can't just expect this to happen. We must put real thought and energy into each of our lives. If we do, we'll find clarity there and success. I think Epictetus is corresponding to the same disciplines that Marcus lays out in his famous quote. He says, "Objective judgment now in this very moment. Unselfish action now in this very moment. Willing acceptance, assent now in this very moment. That's all you need." Those are the three disciplines that The Obstacle is the Way is built around.

• 6:15Speaker 01

  And in fact, that the Daily Stoic is organized around perception, action, will, right? The discipline of perception, the discipline of action, the discipline of will, right? How we see things, what motivates our actions, right? The common good, who we're trying to help, what we're trying to do, why we're trying to do it. That's the discipline of action. And then the third is the discipline of will, which is accepting, being resilient, judging, you know? The discipline of will, which is actually similar, I think, to the discipline of perception, but it comes down to accepting these things that are much bigger than us, much bigger than our control could ever conceive to be.

• 6:57Speaker 01

  I don't know. I don't know. I'm just wrapping up the end of the year here as I record this. You're listening to it much later in the year. But I'm trying to take a minute and think about how I want the year to go for me, what I want to be motivated by, what is potentially in store for me, what could happen, right? It's the range of possibilities. And knowing that these are the three things that I should be focused on, then essentially, everything else is worth sort of ignoring, putting out of view or mind, right? I think that's what's so powerful about Marcus's quote, "objective judgment, how you see things, unselfish action, what you do, who you do it for,

• 7:41Speaker 01

  willing acceptance that things are bigger than you, out of your control, that all you can do is work with them. That's all you need. That's it, right? It's simple, not easy. It's hard. But everything else is noise. Everything else is noise. I just love that simplicity from the Stoics, that straightforwardness. Then we have to try to put it into practice, which is the tough part, right?

• 8:12Speaker 01

  It's funny, I worked with a dog trainer a couple of years ago who'd read some of the Stoic books. And he said, you know, if you move it, if you look at it, it's perception, action, will. It's paw. He's like, that's how I think about it when I'm training dogs. Well, yeah, right? How am I perceiving the thing I'm trying to get my dog to do or the behavior that's bothering me? What's the action that I'm going to take? You know, what am I willing to bring to it? What am I willing to accept? What am I willing to put up with? I don't know. We all interpret these things differently. I'm sure that wasn't what Epictetus or Marx really thought about. Ah, this will help you train a dog. But such is life. Such is life. All right, guys. I'll talk to you all soon.