Why Do It Alone? | Ask Daily Stoic

The way to understand and comprehend anything important is by doing the work. By going to the source. By returning over and over again, bringing new experiences, new questions, new contexts. 🎉 Celebrate Marcus Aurelius' Birthday this month by reading Meditations with us and the Daily Stoic community. On April 26th, 1905 years after the day of his birth, Ryan Holiday will host an invite-only LIVE Q&A to talk about all things Marcus Aurelius and Meditations. Get 20% off with a Meditations BOOK & GUIDE bundle. Join the LIVE Meditations Q&A with Ryan Holiday by purchasing before April 26th! Get all our Meditations offering and learn more at our official Meditations Collection at dailystoic.com/meditations today. 🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast🎥 Watch top moments from The Daily Stoic Podcast on YouTube: 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, 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.

• 0:05Ryan 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?

  Why do it alone? You could read the book on your own. You could wing it. You could hope to figure it out by yourself. You could do your best to just get the gist of it. Or you could do what the author himself recommends. Marcus Aurelius, the author of Meditations, once said that he was taught to never be satisfied just getting the gist of things. "Mastery of reading and writing requires a master," he writes, and he knew this from experience. Sometime around the year 141 A.D., Marcus was introduced to the philosophy that would change his life by his teacher, Risticus. "The remembrances of Epictetus,"

• 1:39Ryan Holiday?

  as Marcus would refer most gratefully to the book that Risticus gave him, "that which he supplied me out of his own library." We can imagine the underlinings in Risticus's copy that would have called Marcus's attention to particularly important passages. We can imagine the marginalia that would have provided context and insights. We can imagine the discussions the two of them would have had as Marcus was familiarizing himself with the teachings of Epictetus. Indeed, in Meditations, Marcus would write about going straight to the seat of intelligence. And by that, he meant asking questions, hearing from experts, really wrestling with wisdom as it was meant to be wrestled with. And this is, of course, the way to understand and comprehend anything important,

• 2:24Ryan Holiday?

  by doing the work, by going to the source, by returning over and over again, bringing new experiences, new questions, new contexts, refusing to settle for first impressions, remaining unsatisfied, ever curious. And for the past decade here at Daily Stoic, and certainly in my life going on almost 20 years, we've been engaging with Meditations, day in and day out, trying to understand its wisdom so that we can apply it in all of our lives. And we spent hundreds and thousands of hours with this book. And I spent just as many hours hunting down papers and analysis from scholars and historians and translators and biographers, many of which I've gotten to interview along the way as well.

• 3:09Ryan Holiday?

  It's been the work of my lifetime to explore the depths of Meditations, making sense of what this great man wrote down and what those writings can do for us. And I think I've found that Marcus is right, it requires the help of a master. And that's what we've tried to put together in How to Read Marcus Aurelius's Meditations, this guide we made. So it's kind of a book club, but for a singly great book. It's trying to be what all those historians and scholars and translators have been for me over the years, but all in one place, crafted together, organized really well, and to help you make sense of this amazing book.

• 3:52Ryan Holiday?

  And actually, on April 26, we're going to be doing a deep dive discussion of the book together for everyone who buys the guide. So I'm excited about that. I think the best edition of Meditations is a Gregory Hayes translation, which I just wrote a new foreword to. You can grab a hardcover or a paperback edition of that in the Daily Stoic store. And we've got our leather bound edition as well. So I'll link to all of that, or you can just go to dailystoic.com/meditations to get after it. And if you haven't read Meditations, man, I don't know what you are doing with your life, but now is the time. Enjoy.

• 4:32Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Thursdays, I answer your questions. Well, not your questions, but I answer questions. I told you back in November, I was doing a speaking tour of Europe and Canada. London was the first stop in that tour at the Troxy. Today's episode is some questions from that episode. I got to talk quite a bit about one of my heroes. I've sort of fallen in love with people when I am writing books. Like, that's what fascinates me. I want to understand them. I want to explore them. I want to include their story. Queen Elizabeth II was someone I sort of fell in love with. I had to read a lot of books. Actually, I ended up emailing previous guests of the podcast,

• 5:16Ryan Holiday?

  Andrew Roberts, if he had any good recommendations. And he recommended these Robert Hardman books. I probably read 2,000, 3,000 pages about the Queen, and that shaped the, you know, part two of Discipline is Destiny. So I got to talk about that quite a bit in London. Some folks asked me some questions about her as well. But anyways, let's just get into that. Here are some questions from London.

• 5:45Ryan Holiday?

  Hello.

• 5:46Speaker 01

  Good evening.

• 5:46Ryan Holiday?

  Good evening.

• 5:47Speaker 01

  Before I start, I just want to say thank you. Your work is a constant source of daily wisdom and inspiration.

• 5:53Ryan Holiday?

  Oh, my pleasure. Thank you.

• 5:54Speaker 01

  My question is, you talk about in your latest book about developing a North Star. I wondered what yours was.

• 6:01Ryan Holiday?

  I have, I think that's probably maybe not exactly the right answer, but I have a couple, right? I think you have a professional North Star. I think you have a personal North Star. So then for me, when I, when I think about North Stars, I'm thinking, I want to be a great husband. I want to be a great father. And I want to be a great writer. I want to be a great sort of human being slash citizen. So I think about these things in, not in tension with each other, but certainly in a balance with each other. And so my, my North Star is, you know, one of those. Does that make sense? So it's, I think, for sometimes, if you, if you have a singular cause that you're all in on, that's your North Star. For me, I have a sort of a collection of, of interests that I'm aiming towards, and that's kind of how I

• 6:44Ryan Holiday?

  think about it. I don't want to be so focused or so dedicated to one that it comes at the expense of the others. And I think about them in tension with each other, which I think all sort of our commitments ultimately are.

• 6:57Speaker 02

  Hi.

• 6:58Ryan Holiday?

  Hi.

• 6:58Speaker 02

  Thanks as well.

• 6:59Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 7:00Speaker 02

  For your work. I think a lot of us were probably introduced to your work through Tim Ferriss. And it seems like you guys bounce off each other quite well in terms of how you perceive the world. And I just wondered if you maybe had an interesting story of your time with Tim that would be nice to share.

• 7:14Ryan Holiday?

  So I met Tim in 2007 in Austin, Texas, where I now live. We were both at South by Southwest. I was still in college. And I remember that was the South by Southwest that Twitter launched at. And so they'd rented, they had all these TVs all over the Austin Convention Center that they were showing in real time, the tweets that people were sending. And I remember thinking, that's a horrible idea. Tim invested in Twitter, so he made a better call in the short term. I would say I was probably right in that it is horrible in the long term for pretty much everyone involved. So we met, we met there and then we were friends for many years. And then I was in, we were both speaking at another conference in Amsterdam, maybe

• 7:57Ryan Holiday?

  2012 or 2013. And we're sitting down and Tim asked me what I was working on. And I said, I was working on a book about Stoic philosophy. He was very excited about it. And he said, I'm starting an audiobook publishing company. Can I publish it? And he bought the rights to it from my publisher. And that is, in some ways, why you're all here, because it blew up my book in a way that I don't think would have happened otherwise. What was funny about it is at that time, audiobooks were so new that the publishers were basically giving the rights away. They, they, they saw it as this, you know, they would sell them for a few thousand dollars. And if it ended up making money, it was great, but most of them didn't. And so Tim, once again, was just like very clear about where things were going. And he tends to get in on things early.

• 8:42Ryan Holiday?

  So I, I tend now, like if I see something and I don't think it's a good idea, I ask Tim if he thinks it's a good idea, and I just defer to him.

• 8:50Speaker 03

  Hi.

• 8:50Ryan Holiday?

  Hi.

• 8:51Speaker 03

  And you talk about Harry Truman. He seems like a remarkable man.

• 8:56Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 8:57Speaker 03

  I can't get past the whole okaying the dropping of two nuclear bombs.

• 9:01Ryan Holiday?

  It's a little thing to get over. It's complicated, I guess. I think it's interesting. We tell ourselves different stories about things. And I think one of the stories we tell ourselves post the Second World War is that the Nazis were horrendous and unbeatable. And the Japanese were not on par, which they of course were. And the idea that the war was nearly over, that they would have surrendered. You know, anyway, I don't, I, from my reading of it, I don't find to be as clear as maybe it seems in retrospect. So like, one of the things I talk about in the book that I think is an interesting illustration of this.

• 9:45Ryan Holiday?

  So the ship that is carrying the pieces of the atomic bomb, after it delivers all the pieces to be assembled, it's heading through the Pacific and it gets sunk by a Japanese submarine and a thousand men die because they're eaten by sharks as they float in the water after the shipwreck. So the idea that the war was just like on the fritz and the atomic bomb was extra is, I think, a strange story we tell ourselves after because we don't want the necessity of the atomic bombs to be a reality, which they may have been. I think the interesting thing about Harry Truman and the dropping of the bomb

• 10:24Ryan Holiday?

  is that he finds out about it so late in the process. I quote in the book, one of the, one of his advisors says that "He didn't have a choice so much as, he didn't have a choice to use it, he had a choice to not use it." Which, as we see with presidential power, is... The whole game, like the decision when you entrust in one singular person an incredible amount, an incomprehensible amount of power, it becomes very hard for them not to use it. There's a one social scientist or game theory who suggested that to prevent the use of nuclear weapons in the future, the code should take a person, they should cut them open and put the nuclear codes

• 11:09Ryan Holiday?

  inside that person's chest cavity and then sew them up. And so when a president of any country wants to use nuclear weapons in the future, they have to personally kill that person and open their chest cavity to get the codes. The point is that when you disconnect human beings from such an immense amount of destruction and damage, it becomes just a decision like, hey, would I rather do this or would I rather do that? And that is the horrendousness of nuclear weapons. So I don't have a good answer for you. I don't think what I'm trying to highlight about Harry Truman in the chapters in Right Thing Right Now is how you have what seems like

• 11:52Ryan Holiday?

  an ordinary human being thrust into a series of interesting and ultimately enormous decisions. And he has to find some kind of internal code to guide him through this. Is that tested? Does he fail in the use of nuclear weapons? I think that, I guess, is ultimately a subjective decision. But I think as far as human beings who have occupied the Oval Office, top two or three as far as decent human beings. That is the tragic thing about power is how rare the people that find themselves in it are decent. And there's some paradox in it. Like, some of the best American presidents were presidents who did not want to be president.

• 12:36Ryan Holiday?

  They sort of found their way accidentally. There may be something in the seeking of it, which is to bring this back to Stoicism. Marcus Aurelius isn't born to be emperor, does not seem to actually want to be emperor. He finds himself sort of thrust there by circumstances. And that may be why he wasn't, you know, for grading these things on a scale not as bad as all of the others.

• 12:56Speaker 04

  Hello.

• 12:56Ryan Holiday?

  Hi.

• 12:57Speaker 04

  So your research assistant Billy has written about how the two of you have struggled to recruit another team member who has the same level of taste and artistic discernment. What would you suggest is a good way to develop artistic taste?

• 13:13Ryan Holiday?

  Oh, wow. Well, yes, Billy is awesome. He has a great newsletter that he sends out every Sunday. I think it's called The Six. At Six? Yeah. His name's Billy Oppenheimer. Yeah, he's been working with me for many years. He's wonderful. I don't know. I talk all the time about knowing that he's not going to be able to stick around forever and how I'm going to replace him. And I know Robert Greene has said the same thing about me. It's a rare thing that you can find a good apprentice or assistant in any domain. But research assistants are really hard because they're trying to find the material that you can use. Not material that's good. They're trying to find things that specifically

• 13:55Ryan Holiday?

  connect with you. And they're trying to replicate your unique taste and sensibility. So I think developing taste, period, is tough. But then to be able to identify and develop taste like for someone else is its own thing. You have to be a fan of the person. You have to really be able to understand why they do what they do or what motivates them. I think that's a hard part. I'll give you something, though. I remember many years ago, there was an interview by Ira Glass, who's an NPR host on the show called This American Life. He says there's something called a taste-talent gap. The taste-talent gap, for people who don't know, is this idea that actually the taste part is easier,

• 14:38Ryan Holiday?

  but the ability to make good on that taste is the hard part. And as you develop, as you get to where you want to go, you know what you like. That's why you got into this. You know what's good. But it's actually finding or making that stuff that's hard. Billy was not who he is now when he started working for me. So it's part of it is you got to find someone who's got good taste, who seems sane, who works hard, who you can depend on. These are all really important parts. And then you have to develop them. So when I'm looking for someone to replace him, or to replace any assistant, what you have to do, and this is something I have to think about when I'm starting a book, too, is you can't compare the end product with the beginning product of something else. You can't compare

• 15:22Ryan Holiday?

  an end stage with a beginning stage. And I have to try to remember what he or the book I'm working on was like at the beginning, or at this stage, and not try to compare it against the finished product.

• 15:40Ryan 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.