Empower Yourself with This | Why You Need to Get In the Arena

We all have those days where we’d rather just not. Days where we’d rather not deal with that annoying co-worker or petty family member. Days where we’d rather not bother with all the work we have to do, all the responsibilities we have to manage. The ancients knew days like this. Reading Marcus Aurelius can change your life, but only if you know how to read his work 👉 Head here now to grab your Meditations book and guide bundle | https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/meditations-month-2026📚 Books Mentioned: MeditationsRiver of Doubt by Candice MillardThe Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund MorrisMornings on Horseback by David McCulloughThe Bully Pulpit by Doris Kearns GoodwinDiscipline is Destiny by Ryan Holiday The Obstacle Is the Way by Ryan Holiday🎥 VIDEO EPISODES| Watch the video episodes on The Daily Stoic YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos✉️ FREE STOIC WISDOM | Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

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

• 0:00Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

• 0:14Ryan Holiday?

  It's the most empowering thing. We all have those days when we'd rather just not, days when we'd rather not deal with an annoying coworker or a petty family member, days when we'd rather not bother with all the work we have to do, all the responsibilities we have to manage, days where the awfulness and corruption of the world gets to us, and we'd rather just not get out of bed that day. And Marcus Aurelius and all the Stoics, of course, knew days like this. Life was one thing after another for them, too. Think of Marcus Aurelius's life. We have a plague. We have famine. We have backstabbing. We have wars.

• 0:57Ryan Holiday?

  He does not meet with the good fortune he deserved. One ancient historian noted, as his whole reign was a series of troubles. It would have been easy for him to give up trying to retreat into luxury or pleasure. It would have been easy for him to allow the indelible stain of power to ruin him, as it had for so many emperors before him. Yet, within the pages of Meditations, we witness Marcus Aurelius doing something very different. We see him fighting to be the person philosophy tried to make him. "No role is so well-suited to philosophy as the one you are in right now," he writes in Meditations.

• 1:40Ryan Holiday?

  He was saying that we don't just talk about philosophy, we have to apply it to our daily lives, whatever profession and place we happen to occupy. And that's why, if you're interested in Stoic philosophy, or philosophy in general, Meditations by Marcus Aurelius is the first thing to read, according to Arthur Brooks, when he came on the Daily Stoic Podcast. "It's the most empowering thing I've ever read," he said, "especially since I read it when I was young." He said, "It's always been incredibly important to me." And the reason that he and thousands of other people say this is because in Meditations, Marcus is showing us that it doesn't matter how rich, or powerful, or famous we are.

• 2:25Ryan Holiday?

  Life will still include pain and suffering. Life will still throw obstacles that seem difficult at us. What matters is how we respond to those things. We shouldn't assume that something is impossible because we find it hard, Marcus writes in Meditations, but recognize that if it's humanly possible, you can do it too. And it's ideas like this that explain why Meditations has been this sort of secret of leaders and ordinary people for almost 2,000 years. That people, whether they're military leaders, or students, or entrepreneurs, or artists, or stay at home parents, or championship athletes, they've turned to Meditations for guidance. And it's, it's why for over a decade here at Daily Stoic,

• 3:08Ryan Holiday?

  for almost 20 years in my life, I've been trying to make this work accessible to people. And it's why we're doing Meditations Month here at Daily Stoic in honor of Marcus's birthday. We're doing this deep dive into Meditations, what it means. We put together this really cool sort of guide book club that we're all doing together. We're doing a Q and A about it. It's free for anyone who grabs the guide. Plus, we've got the leather bound edition of Meditations. Meditations Month has been awesome. I'll link to that in today's show notes, or you can just go to dailystoic.com/meditations to get the bundles of all that stuff I was just talking about. Or just go to your local library and grab a copy. I don't care. Just bring Marcus into your life.

• 3:51Ryan Holiday?

  It's one of the most important and empowering decisions you will ever make.

• 4:05Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. You know about Marcus Aurelius's Meditations? Well, at one point in my life, I didn't. And it was a fateful book recommendation that turned me on to the Stoics. And I still have my Amazon receipt from October something or other, 2006, when I bought Marcus Aurelius's Meditations, and also a biography of Theodore Roosevelt, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris, one of my all time favorite biographies. We carried it to Painted Porch. It's a lovely book. And it sort of started my journey down two different rabbit holes. It turned out, discovering much later in that rabbit hole, that

• 4:45Ryan Holiday?

  They connected at some point, that the rabbit holes intersected. And that's actually queues up what we're going to talk about in today's episode because today, on this day, 116 years ago, Deirdre Roosevelt delivered his famous Citizen in a Republic speech in Paris. Maybe you don't know that name. You're like, what a famous speech is that? This is what we in America refer to as the man in the arena speech. Or that's the passage that is most well-known, where he talks about how what matters isn't the critic on the sidelines, but the person who is willing to step into the arena and try. And I guess that metaphor is particularly apt here at Daily Stoic, where we talk about

• 5:30Ryan Holiday?

  the Colosseum, we talk about gladiators. Mark Aurelius was literally and figuratively in the arena. He was seen sometimes writing, he may well have written meditations. Well, the gladiators fought in the Colosseum below. His son Commodus takes the wrong lesson from this and desperately wants to fight in the arena. It doesn't understand it as more of a metaphor. And of course, Mark Aurelius's works have a bunch of gladiatorial metaphors in them. One of my favorites that we talk about every New Year is the idea of being like the gladiator who's torn to pieces at the games, begging to be held over, to be spared and to fight again.

• 6:11Ryan Holiday?

  Mark Aurelius was famous for dragging, we're told by one ancient historian, his philosophy teacher, Risticus, away from his books and into the real world, that he wasn't content to allow them to be a pen and ink philosopher. Basically, he was saying exactly what Roosevelt was saying. He dragged them into the arena, turned them into participants in public life, had them hold public office, had them hold administrative power and responsibility. And that's really what the arena speech is about. It's not just like, oh, screw you to the critics. It's about saying, go be involved, go do something. Don't just talk about it, be about it. Okay, so what is today's episode? Where does Deirdre Roosevelt and the Stoics actually convert?

• 6:55Ryan Holiday?

  Well, did you know that Theodore Roosevelt took a copy of Epictetus with him on his famous River of Doubt expedition? Another lovely book, A River of Doubt by Candice Millard, who I rave about. I love that book. The copy had been lent to him by a guy named Major Shipton. There's a handful of people who are big readers, whose books I would love to flip through. Patton's books I'd love to see through. I'd love to see Marx release his copy of Epictetus. I'd definitely love to see Theodore Roosevelt's copy of Epictetus. You can actually see a copy of this book on the website of the Theodore Roosevelt Center, where he's sort of noting that who gave him the book and that he took it with

• 7:38Ryan Holiday?

  him. And I mean, I would love to hold this book in my hands. Like, what did he underline? What stood out to him? Did it get damaged? Was it wet? You know, what pages seemed to be the most warm? Anyways. And so, in honor of the speech's anniversary today, I thought I would share a passage from the speech, which I read. I read it for something else, which you'll be able to hear my small contribution to at a later date. But here is me reading that famous speech. "It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man

• 8:21Ryan Holiday?

  who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who airs, who comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming, but who does actually strive to do the deeds, who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat."

• 9:10Ryan Holiday?

  It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming. But who does actually strive to do the deeds? Who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions? Who spends himself in a worthy cause? Who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement?

• 9:53Ryan Holiday?

  And who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat? Anyways, as I wrap this up, I deeply admire Roosevelt. He was not a perfect figure. He was a problematic figure in some ways. You get that when you read these big biographies. You see them fully for who they are. But I wrote about him a bunch. Actually, I wrote about him "Obstacles Away," and then I wrote about him "In Discipline Is Destiny." But as I wrap up, I want to tell that story, which I first read in Edmund Morris's book on Theodore Roosevelt. So here is a little riff on the idea of discipline as being the promises you make to yourself.

• 10:42Ryan Holiday?

  It's a famous story. It appears in all the great biographies of Theodore Roosevelt. Two of my favorites are "The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt" by Edmund Morris and "Mornings on Horseback" by David McCullough. It appears in "Discipline is Destiny" and "The Obstacle is the Way." A young asthmatic teddy, smart but frail, is approached by his father, who tells him that although the boy has brains, he hasn't got the body, hasn't got the strength to make good on his intellectual gifts. "I'll make my body," Roosevelt said in response, and proceeded to lift weights, hike mountains, ride horses, wrestle, box, swim laps, and even learned judo. But there's another perspective on this story that we often glide over, for it was Teddy's sister, Corinne, who witnessed the exchange between father and son.

• 11:27Ryan Holiday?

  What struck her about it years later, she said, was that this was her brother's first important promise to himself. Watching him work out in the gym and on the porch of their brownstone, she was watching him fulfill that promise, keeping it to himself. And that's what the virtue of discipline is about. Self-discipline is about the promises you keep with yourself, and not just the physical ones. It's about doing what you say and not doing what you say you won't. The decision to wake up early, the decision not to reach for the bottle, the decision to show up on time, the decision to push yourself a little further, even though your body aches, the decision not to procrastinate, the decision to do your best.

• 12:10Ryan Holiday?

  We all make promises to ourselves, set goals, set standards, make plans. We don't all keep them. I hope you enjoyed this little Theodore Roosevelt-themed episode. And again, what the Stoics want us to do is step into the arena, again, literally and figuratively, be involved. And so I recommend both The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt: Mornings on Horseback by David McCullough is lovely. I love The Bully Pulpit by Doris Kearns Goodwin. And then, of course, The River of Doubt by Candice Millard. All of those you can grab at The Painted Porch. Let's go.