The Surprising Habit Hack from Aristotle

What is the "Tortoise Method" and how can it help us build habits for happiness? Look no further than this excerpt from Chapter 9 of the audiobook of Aristotle’s Guide to Self-Persuasion: How Ancient Rhetoric, Taylor Swift, and Your Own Soul Can Help You Change Your Life by Jay Heinrichs (last week's guest on The Daily Stoic Podcast!). Jay Heinrichs is a New York Times bestselling author of Thank You For Arguing and is a persuasion and conflict consultant. Middlebury College has named him a Professor of the Practice in Rhetoric and Oratory. Jay has conducted influence strategy and training for clients as varied as Kaiser Permanente, Harvard, the European Speechwriters Association, Southwest Airlines, and NASA. He has overseen the remake and staff recruiting of more than a dozen magazines. Pick up a copy of Jay’s latest book Aristotle’s Guide to Self-Persuasion: How Ancient Rhetoric, Taylor Swift, and Your Own Soul Can Help You Change Your Life Follow Jay on Instagram @JayHeinrichs and check out more of his work at www.jayheinrichs.comThanks to Penguin Random House Audio for granting us permission to run this excerpt from Aristotle’s Guide to Self-Persuasion.🏛 The 2025 LIVE session of Stoicism 101: Ancient Philosophy For Your Actual Life starts November 10th. Don’t miss your chance to join us! Read on for more about the unique opportunities you get from joining the LIVE course.📖 Wisdom Takes Work by Ryan Holiday is out NOW! Grab a copy here: https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/wisdom-takes-work🎥 Watch the video episodes on The Daily Stoic YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram: https://www.instagram.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 Facebook 📢 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 weekend edition of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Sundays, we take a deeper dive into these ancient topics with excerpts from the Stoic texts, audiobooks that we like here or recommend here at Daily Stoic, and other long-form wisdom that you can chew on on this relaxing weekend. We hope this helps shape your understanding of this philosophy, and most importantly, that you're able to apply it to your actual life. Thank you for listening.

• 0:43Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another weekend episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. As you know, I love books. I write books, but mostly I love books. And one of the things I have always tried to do is support other authors. Like, I started all of this, all of this is possible, traces back 2008, 2009, when I started the reading list newsletter, right? I thought, well, I know having a reading list is good, but who's going to want to hear from a person who hasn't done anything? So I started this newsletter where I just recommended books, and that started with 40 or 50 people. And, you know, now it goes out to hundreds of thousands of people all over the world. And it's physically manifest in this bookstore.

• 1:27Ryan Holiday?

  But that was where I learned newsletters. That's where I learned marketing. That's sort of the beginning of it all for me. Nothing makes me happier than when I hear people tell me they heard about a book through me, and they liked that book. So one of the things we've been doing the last couple of years on these Sunday episodes is like when we have a podcast guest who's really interesting or has a new book out, we go, hey, would you want us to run an excerpt on the podcast? And we've run all sorts of wonderful ones over the years, and I'll link to those in today's show notes. But when we had Jay Heinrichs on the podcast, who'd just written this interesting book about persuasion or self-persuasion. It's called Aristotle's Guide to Self-Persuasion: How Ancient Rhetoric, Taylor Swift, and Your Own Soul Can Help You Change Your Life.

• 2:11Ryan Holiday?

  I asked if he would be open to us running the chapter that me and the team liked the most. It's a chapter on habits and he talks about something called Aristotle's Tortoise Method. I won't try to summarize it here. It's worth listening to, which is the whole point of these Sunday episodes. Just give you something to chew on, something to think about. And Jay is a fascinating guy. He's the New York Times bestselling author of Thank You for Arguing. And he's a persuasion and conflict consultant and a professor at Middlebury College. He has consulted and taught and done strategy for Kaiser, Harvard, the European Speech Writers Association, Southwest Airlines and NASA.

• 2:52Ryan Holiday?

  And in a previous life, he oversaw the remake and staff recruiting for more than a dozen magazines. You can grab signed copies of Jay's latest book, Aristotle's Guide to Self-Persuasion from the Painted Porch. He signed them while I was here. You can check out his full episode of the podcast. Thanks to Penguin Random House Audio for granting us permission to run this excerpt. You can grab the audiobook on Audible or wherever you get your audiobooks. And I hope you like this episode. Enjoy.

• 3:29Speaker 01

  Chapter nine. Habit. Adjust Your Routine. Aristotle's Tortoise Method. The question is asked whether happiness is to be acquired by learning or by habituation or some other sort of training. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics. If you want to know how Aristotle would describe your character, eat dessert, preferably the kind of chocolate geological event described on the restaurant menu as a sin. If you were trying to maintain a low sugar diet, Aristotle would not judge you by the

• 4:10Speaker 01

  decadence of the dessert, but by the amount of guilt you felt afterward. If you believed you deserved the treat or simply ate it because you wanted to, he would call you self-indulgent. If you felt guilty, if you just couldn't help scarfing down that whole gooey mess, then Aristotle would say you were incontinent. Chances are, you are not a self-indulgent person. If you were, you might be happily binge-watching Too Hot to Handle with a side of Oreos instead of listening to this. But most of us are incontinent to some degree. We know the right things to do, but we succumb to the temptations that surround us.

• 4:52Speaker 01

  "The essential problem," Aristotle said, "is a disconnection between our ends and our means." Our animal instincts often wander from our goals, away from what he called "the ruling part of ourselves." We wish to be fit, healthy, and productive, yet we make choices that fail to reach those ends. We become happy only when we align our wishes with the means to achieve happiness. So, okay, how on earth do we consistently make the right choices? Aristotle's advice: don't. You need not act like a saint every moment. The trick is to limit the number of choices we must make. This does not mean avoiding decisions; it means sticking to the prudent ones.

• 5:36Speaker 01

  We're talking about habits. The subject may seem mundane, coming from Aristotle, the man who invented logic and tutored Alexander the Great. But habits are more than a means to fitness and productivity. Aristotle believed that choicelessness is a crucial key to happiness. This might sound positively un-American. After all, we enjoy the most self-indulgent culture on the planet, where the snack food aisle might as well have been guaranteed somewhere in the Constitution. But you also know that making choices, especially those that fall on the continuum from "good for you" to "avoid the doctor," is stressful.

• 6:19Speaker 01

  "To be happy," Aristotle implied, "we need to put much of our life on autopilot." This principle made him the first great evangelist of daily habits.

• 6:31Speaker 01

  I've come across other habit evangelists over the years, but one particularly stands out in my memory. Back when I was young and single, I visited a dentist's office that employed an attractive young hygienist. Halfway through scraping my tarter, she nudged my arm with her hip. "Know what I like to do with my dates?" I shook my head. "I floss them." She nodded toward the little sink and I spat into it. "You floss them?" "I do, I floss them. If they don't let me, there's no second date." "Huh." In my dating life, I had met some interesting women, but had not yet experienced one with a flossing Jones. She resumed cleaning my teeth.

• 7:15Speaker 01

  "You can tell a lot about a person by their gums," she continued. "What kind of lives they lead. People lie, but their gums don't." She reached over for the dental floss and broke off a section, lovingly wrapping it around her long fingers. "Your gums," she said, squinting into my mouth, "aren't bad at all. I bet you don't even bleed." Were we flirting? Did she consider this appointment a sort of dental advanced placement, allowing us to skip the relationship's flossing stage? I'll never know. She gave me her number, but I didn't call it. Still, you might say that her gum-centric test of a date's virtue counted as Aristotelian.

• 7:57Speaker 01

  My decent gums revealed a soul capable of at least one steady habit. It so happened that I had been flossing for so many years that it seemed a necessary bedtime ritual. This, in both Aristotle's and the hygienist's terms, was a sign of virtue.

• 8:17Speaker 01

  The unexciting upside of being regular.

• 8:22Speaker 01

  Humans are already a habitual species. Only cats seem more regular than we are. Unlike cats, we are also extraordinarily adaptable. We can get used to almost anything. What seems ghastly at first, eventually becomes natural, even de rigueur. If you had somehow never heard of flossing, and someone introduced you to the idea of taking a string and painstakingly forcing it into every tiny gap between your teeth, the chore would seem arduous and a little disgusting. But do it every evening, year after year, and it becomes robotic, even necessary to your identity, a perfect alignment between your daily self and your gum-preserving soul.

• 9:06Speaker 01

  Admittedly, this adaptability can turn life bland. When you travel to a new city, try this experiment: Ride public transportation to the suburbs and back just to see what it might feel like for a resident. Some commutes, the Seattle ferry to Bainbridge Island with its spectacular view of Mount Rainier, or the Metro-North Railroad line that follows the beautiful Connecticut coast to New York City, seem like miniature cruises. Yet, the notable thing about being a guest commuter in these places is how little people pay attention to the ride. This is understandable. Most of the passengers have gotten used to it. But it still seems amazing when you ride the Yellow Line Metro

• 9:51Speaker 01

  over the Potomac River in Washington DC and see no one look up from their smartphone to gaze at the spectacular views of the monuments. The regular commute takes something special and turns it into the everyday. Our daily meals can take on this same aspect of commuting. Give a donut to a two-year-old, and you'll see pure passion. Stop by a Dunkin' for a Boston Cream every morning, on the other hand, and it offers little more indulgent pleasure than a good floss. But adaptability has its upside. Yes, it might extract color from our lives, but it also holds the secret to turning bad habits into good ones.

• 10:33Speaker 01

  Replace the donut with a protein bar for the first time, and it feels like a letdown you really don't need that early in the morning. But continue for a month to swap protein for cream filling, and never mind what it does to your body, the bar seems just as naturally boring as the donut once did. Keep it up for a year, and the thought of an early morning donut might seem unnatural, even stomach-turning. The hard part is to get to that quotidian stage. Aristotle considered the act of sacrificing instant pleasure for a long-term goal to be a form of courage. But do this with your good habits, and that courage becomes a kind of super habit all its own.

• 11:18Speaker 01

  People who are into CrossFit, the competitive workout system, have a slogan, "Embrace the suck." Welcome the pain that leads to gain, and it becomes a habitual part of your identity. Reaching that point, though, requires courage all its own. Aristotle distinguished between the courage to embrace the suck and the habit of avoiding temptations. "Resisting passing pleasures is its own virtue." He called it "temperance." The temperate person avoids seconds and skips dessert. She drives a sensible car and never goes outside without sunscreen. She does not embrace the suck so much as avoid life's harmful allurements.

• 12:02Speaker 01

  The courageous person seeks ways to replace bad habits with good ones. The temperate person never acquires bad habits in the first place. At our best, we tend to embody a mix of the two. But temperance and courage make sense only if steady habits and suck-embracing lead to happiness. Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma and a champion of temperate nutrition, once made the mistake of appearing on the NPR show Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me. The comedian Paula Poundstone offered a contrarian view of nutrition. "One of the things that has made my life worth living is ring dings," she told him.

• 12:45Speaker 01

  Pollen conceded that an occasional ringding wouldn't kill her. The ultra-processed pastries counted as "special occasion foods," he said. "What the hell's the matter with you?" Poundstone retorted. "I said it's what makes my life worth living. You may know a lot about food, but you don't know the first thing about living, buddy." Aristotle might accuse Poundstone of being self-indulgent. But if ringdings really are her soul's delight, who are we to tell her to switch to fiber? Poundstone is no fool. She undoubtedly knows what ringdings do to her gut biota. But she embraces that suck in her pursuit of the meaningful life, which clearly includes snack cakes.

• 13:28Speaker 01

  Okay, maybe she's just rationalizing the fact that she gives in to temptation. But you could also say the woman shows courage.

• 13:40Ryan Holiday?

  Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it, and I'll see you next episode.