The Better You Get, The Less You Care…

“Whether it’s a great athlete or a great comedian, the truth is the same. The better they get, the less they care about results. That’s not to say they don’t care about winning, or about success—of course they do—it’s that the longer you do something, the closer you get to mastery, the less external results matter in terms of measuring progress.”Ryan discusses why you should strive to measure progress internally, rather than externally, on today’s Daily Stoic Podcast.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow Daily Stoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicSee 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.

• 0:04Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to The Daily Stoic, where each day we read a short passage designed to help you cultivate the strength, insight, wisdom necessary for living a good life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us at DailyStoic.com.

• 0:28Ryan Holiday?

  The better you get, the less you care. Whether it's a great athlete or a great comedian, the truth is the same: the better they get, the less they care about results. That's not to say they don't care about winning or about success, of course they do. It's that the longer you do something, the closer you get to mastery, the less external results matter in terms of measuring progress. The comedian Dave Chappelle has talked about how he hardly even cares about the crowd anymore, and definitely not the money. What matters to him is doing the thing at getting closer to perfecting his craft, even if it's in ways that the audience can't even notice. Early on in a career, because we don't know much about it or ourselves, we use proxies to measure ourselves. We care about the critics,

• 1:12Ryan Holiday?

  or we care about stats, or we care about getting this honor or that one. But the better we get, the more it becomes clear to us how little control we have over those things. The more experience we get, the more it is evident how little our best work actually correlates with getting those external achievements. As Marcus Aurelius writes, "Ambition means tying your well-being to what other people say or do. Self-indulgence means tying it to things that happen to you. But real success, real mastery, real sanity, that," he says, "comes only by tying it to your own actions." The better you get, the more you are able to tie your identity to the only thing that matters, according to the Stoics: your own choices, your own work, your own judgment. And everything else, the better you get,

• 1:57Ryan Holiday?

  the less it matters. Hey, it's Ryan. Look, our New Year, New You Challenge is on sale now. It starts January 1st, which means you have to sign up now to join it. You can't put this off. Marcus Aurelius says, "You could be good today, instead you choose tomorrow." People put these things off, so let's stop procrastinating. Let's do this challenge together. You get a whole bunch of awesome stuff. You get 21 custom challenges, almost a book's worth of new content, weekly check-in calls with me, daily audio message from me, a principal 21-day calendar with illustrations, a group Slack channel for accountability, all sorts of awesome stuff. We'd love to have you. You can sign up now at dailystoic.com/challenge. You'll be doing it alongside me and thousands of other Stoics.

• 2:41Ryan Holiday?

  It's our best thing we do every year. People love it. We can't wait to have you. Sign up at dailystoic.com/challenge. But there's not much time left. Don't delay. It starts on January 1st. You can't do it after that. No exceptions. I'll see you on the other side.