You Can’t Get Your Dawns Back | Ask DS

Once a dawn happens, it is gone to you forever. Once a day ends, it’s done for you for all time. Act accordingly. Protect your time accordingly. Ask DS:When will Ryan’s next non-Stoic book come out? How has Stoicism helped Ryan free his own biases? What does Ryan think about Ted Lasso as a Stoic? Does Ryan have any insight on passing along Stoic principles to the next generation? What is Ryan’s advice to someone who loves their friends and family but struggles to fit in due to different beliefs?🎟 Ryan Holiday is going on tour! Grab tickets for London, Rotterdam, Dublin, Vancouver, and Toronto at ryanholiday.net/tour📚 Pick up a copy of On the Shortness of Life: Life Is Long If You Know How to Use It by Seneca at The Painted Porch | https://www.thepaintedporch.com⏳ Get your own Memento Mori Premium Signet Ring to wear as a reminder that you can't get your dawns back | https://store.dailystoic.com/🪙 Designed with the intention of carrying them in your pocket, our Memento Mori Medallion is a literal and inescapable reminder that “you could leave life right now.”Check it out at https://store.dailystoic.com/✉️ 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, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and 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.

• 0:02Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. Well, on Thursdays, we not only read the daily meditation, but we answer some questions from listeners and fellow Stoics who are trying to apply this philosophy just as you are. Some of these come from my talks, some of these come from Zoom sessions that we do with Daily Stoic Life members, or as part of the challenges. Some of them are from interactions I have on the street when there happened to be someone there recording. But thank you for listening, and we hope this is of use to you.

• 0:43Ryan Holiday?

  You can't get your dawns back. It feels like you have time, you're young, you're healthy, the future is bright, but it will not always feel this way, because those things will not always be true. Seneca knew this, that's why he wrote his famous essay on the shortness of life. We have our favorite edition of that here in the painting porch, I'll link to that. "This is why he admonished his friend Lucilius to be intentional, to protect his time and to keep death always in mind. It's not that life is short," he writes, "it's that we waste a lot of it. We watch our money, we protect our property, yet we fritter away the most valuable of our resources, the most finite of them, the one thing we can never get back, that they aren't making any more of. The time that passes,"

• 1:23Ryan Holiday?

  Seneca writes, "belongs to death. It's gone forever, never to return. Once a dawn happens, it has gone to you forever. Once a day ends, it's done for you for all time. Act accordingly. Protect your calendar accordingly. Say no accordingly. Do it now, before it's too late." You might have seen me when I do my talks, or a lot of times when I'm filming, I have this ring on my finger. Sometimes it's on the left, sometimes it's on the right, I fiddle with it. But it's the Memento Mori ring. We have this awesome jeweler in Brooklyn who makes them all by hand, and it's got the same thing that's on the Memento Mori coin, if that's more your style, or the necklace. It's the hourglass, the skull, and the flower,

• 2:07Ryan Holiday?

  life, death, time. And on the back, it says, "You could leave life right now with that determined what you do and say and think." That's the power of this line from the Stoics, from Marcus Aurelius, that life is very short. Don't waste it. Be here now. Take advantage of it. Don't act as if you'll live forever, because you won't. Can't get your dons back. Doesn't work that way. Anyways, you can grab all those at stewart.dailystoic.com. I'll link to those in today's show notes. And I hope this message stays with you today.

• 2:49Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another Thursday episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I'm always really excited when I get to go to a place I've never been before. So I've been to Sydney, I guess, three times, but I'd never been anywhere else in Australia. So when the dates came up and I got to go to Melbourne to do a talk, I was really, really excited. And I sold out Melbourne Town Hall, which was an incredible experience. Today's episode, I'm going to bring you some of those questions that they got to ask me. It was a really awesome and cool experience. And I'm going to be in London, Dublin, Toronto, Vancouver, and Rotterdam in November. So if you want to come and ask me a question, you can do that. Grab tickets

• 3:32Ryan Holiday?

  at ryanholiday.net/tour. But in the meantime, here's some folks in Melbourne asking and answering your Stoic questions.

• 3:44Speaker 01

  G'day. Thank you so much. Love that Stoic eras tour. Love some of your other books as well. Perennial Seller, Conspiracy, Trust Me, I'm Lying. When's your next non-Stoic book coming out?

• 3:56Ryan Holiday?

  I got to finish this, this series first. I don't know what I'm going to do next. I have some idea. I always try to have the next one lined up. So having these four in a row has kept me, kept me pretty busy. But I'm going to do some more non-Stoic stuff in the future, for sure.

• 4:14Speaker 02

  Hey, Ryan. Thank you so much for your talk today.

• 4:17Ryan Holiday?

  Of course.

• 4:18Speaker 02

  Stoicism is, I believe it is like, it is as much as domesticating your emotions.

• 4:26Speaker 02

  As well as freeing your own biases against any kind of decisions that you have to make.

• 4:31Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 4:31Speaker 02

  So how has Stoicism helped you free your own biases? And like, how would you recommend us like kind of look at it to kind of free our own biases when judging some things?

• 4:45Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, that's a great question, yeah. To me, Stoicism is about seeing things stripped of our judgments, of our assumptions, of our predilections, our prejudices, all these things, trying to see them from different perspectives, from different angles, including yourself. I mean, to me, one of the benefits of journaling is that you get a time capsule or a timestamp version of yourself. So you can see what you thought in this moment, what you were worried about. One of the journals that I love, I have this journal, it's called a one-line-a-day journal. And it's five lines. And every day for five years, you write what you're thinking about or what you're working on or what you're dealing with in that moment.

• 5:29Ryan Holiday?

  So the first year is cool, the second year is kind of cool. But by three and four and five, you can see the patterns or the things that keep happening over and over again. And I often find, you know, I'm overcommitted or I'm worried about this or I'm anxious about this. But with the perspective of a year's distance or two years' distance, how silly and small some of these things seem. So that's a big one for me. How often have I lost my temper, gotten anxious, been concerned about something? And then how did that age over time? And usually not well. And I try to take that wisdom or that perspective and give myself the benefit of it or the color of it in the present moment. And the better I'm able to do that,

• 6:14Ryan Holiday?

  the better the decisions I make and the better like my just overall happiness.

• 6:20Speaker 03

  Welcome to Melbourne, Ryan. Two-fold question. How's Robert Greene going after his recent health issues? And also, I love the way you apply Stoic principles to popular culture and modern life. I wonder if you could make a comment on Ted Lasso as a Stoicist.

• 6:38Ryan Holiday?

  Sure. Robert is doing good, better. We did a couple sort of live conversations last year that was really fun to do. But I think... I think it's been really hard. It was fascinating and inspiring to watch someone who sort of talked about resiliency and grit and pushing through things, as he has always done to me, go through something so challenging, a stroke, having to rebuild his life and figure out how to do stuff again. To watch him have to actually apply that and to not give up, to not despair, to not be broken by it, it's been profoundly moving and inspiring to me.

• 7:20Ryan Holiday?

  I know he's having a hard time with all of it, but he's just chugging away on this book. Also, I so admire about Robert, like I work on books for a year or two years, and Robert is, I think, like seven years in on this book that he's doing, and he's working on it every day. It's not like he's procrastinating, but he just does these amazing, wonderful things. So I think he's doing better, and I'll tell him you inquired. I thought Ted Lasso was a wonderful show. I think that's a form of Stoicism, too. I think, again, we see Stoicism as this kind of harsh philosophy, this sort of grit your teeth and bear it, stuff it down. But what I loved about the show and what I think is great about it is there's a kind

• 8:05Ryan Holiday?

  of emotional vulnerability and empathy and softness to it, but still built around the idea of persevering and growing and doing what you're put here to do. So I do think rounding out the philosophy, sort of showing it as something other than just enduring the awfulness of life, is an important perspective we have to have on the philosophy.

• 8:33Speaker 04

  Hi.

• 8:34Ryan Holiday?

  Hi.

• 8:35Speaker 04

  So I read your book, like "Obstacles Away," about eight years ago, and it changed my life, very young, impressionable age, my first introduction to Stoicism. And I love the idea of teaching this to my son, so one parent to another. Do you have any sort of wisdom or insight on passing this on to our next generation?

• 8:57Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, my kids do not like hearing about Stoicism from me, as you can imagine. The other day, my son said to me, he said, "Dad, what do you think the worst book in our bookstore is, other than yours?"

• 9:16Ryan Holiday?

  He's a bully, actually.

• 9:20Ryan Holiday?

  No, I worked on a book with him, actually, called "The Boy Who Would Be King", that's sort of a fable about the life of Marcus Aurelius.

• 9:32Ryan Holiday?

  And I think telling it in the form of a story and these sort of little exchanges has been great because I can, as we experience things, I can call back to this sort of character he's familiar with. So I do think stories are a way that we sort of teach these lessons, which is, by the way, how they were taught in the ancient world. I mean, one of the cute things in meditation is Marcus Aurelius is quoting, like, Aesop's fables, that he obviously remembers from his own childhood. And the timelessness of those wisdom or those ideas. My son is actually obsessed right now with this podcast called "Greeking Out", and it's all about the Greek myths, which we've been listening to. So I try to find indirect ways

• 10:16Ryan Holiday?

  to deliver the ideas. And then, of course, the most important thing is like actually modeling them, which I am not as good at, but I am trying.

• 10:29Speaker 05

  Welcome to Melbourne, first of all. I was just wondering what advice you'd have for a younger person that loves their friends and family, but perhaps finds it difficult at times to fit in and sort of, you know, things like that because of different beliefs and goals, I guess you could say, as well.

• 10:50Ryan Holiday?

  There's a passage in Epictetus about precisely this. He's talking about a difficult sibling, and he says, "Every situation has two handles. You can choose the one of sort of arguing and fighting, or you can remember that you love them, that you care about them."

• 11:13Ryan Holiday?

  That you had all these shared experiences. And he says, "You've got to choose which handle you're going to grab each situation by." And I do think it's important that we see the Stoics as human beings. Cato was seen as probably the most heroic and superhuman of the Stoics, but he has a brother who's very not Stoic. And we're told that he sort of looked the other way, that he just loved him as who he was and he tried to make, tried to see the good in him, he tried to appreciate him. Actually, I'll give you another one. There's Marcus Aurelius talking about this in the beginning of Meditations again.

• 11:55Ryan Holiday?

  He has a brother, but it's kind of an odd arrangement. So before Hadrian chooses this succession plan, he had attempted to adopt another person who died. And that man had a son. And so this kind of spare heir is around. And Marcus has a choice when he becomes emperor. What do you do with this extra emperor? And Marcus makes the extraordinary decision to appoint this person who he is not legally or genetically related to.

• 12:38Ryan Holiday?

  He anoints him his co-emperor. And he says in Meditations, in Book One, he basically says of his stepbrother, maybe it's not in here later. He basically says what he loved about his stepbrother, who was very different than him and not everyone appreciated. He says, "He loved the way that his character challenged Marcus Aurelius to improve his own." And sometimes family can do this, right? They can show us what we don't want to be. They can show us the flaws or the predilections that we share. And they can show us the costs or the dangers of indulging those very things.

• 13:17Ryan Holiday?

  So the point is, I agree, family can be difficult and frustrating. They are also the only family we've got. And we can be made better by how we decide to treat and respond to them.

• 13:41Ryan 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.