No More Than This Is Required | Ask Daily Stoic

We are impressed by people who do incredible things–whether it’s creating some great work of art or pulling off some impossible athletic feat, bringing about social change or building an enormous organization. How did they do it? Where did that come from? Sometimes to excuse our own failures, we tell ourselves it was genius or genetics, inspiration rather than perspiration.📕 Ryan Holiday's new book "Discipline Is Destiny" is available for pre-order now! We’ve put together a bunch of cool preorder bonuses—among them is a signed and numbered page from the original manuscript of the book. You can learn more about those and how to receive them over at Dailystoic.com/preorder. ✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and Facebook See 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.

• 0:03Speaker 00

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. But on Fridays, we not only read this daily meditation, but I try to answer some questions from listeners and fellow Stoics who are trying to apply this philosophy, whatever it is they happen to do. Sometimes these are from talks. Sometimes these are people who come up to talk to me on the street. Sometimes these are written in or emailed from listeners. But I hope in answering their questions, I can answer your questions, give a little more guidance on this philosophy we're all trying to follow.

• 0:54Speaker 00

  No more than this is required.

• 0:59Speaker 00

  We are impressed by people who do incredible things, whether it's creating some great work of art or pulling off some impossible athletic feat, bringing about social change or building an enormous organization. How do they do it? Where did that come from? Sometimes, to excuse our own failures, we tell ourselves it was genius or genetics, inspiration rather than perspiration. In actuality, it's rarely something so miraculous. Steven Pressfield, whose books like Gates of Fire and The War of Art have sold millions of copies, explains in his new book, Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants To Be, The Rather Banal and Low Key Process of Creation. "When I sit down to write in the morning," he writes, "I literally have no expectations for myself or the day's work. My only goal is to put in

• 1:42Speaker 00

  three or four hours with my fingers punching the keys. I don't judge myself on quality. I hold myself accountable for quantity. The only questions I ask are, did I show up? Did I try my best?" Seneca famously said that the path to wisdom could be walked by finding just one thing a day, one quote, one story, one conversation that makes you better. That's what philosophy is about. That's what greatness is about. "It might not seem like much, but it adds up." Remember what Zeno said, "Well-being is realized by small steps, but it's no small thing." And so it goes with writing a book, getting in shape, or improving an industry, or winning a championship.

• 2:28Speaker 01

  Ryan, thank you so much.

• 2:29Ryan Holiday?

  Of course.

• 2:30Speaker 01

  And I really appreciate your talks on stillness. Is there a takeaway we can all walk away with today for next week? One thing that we can start to work on our stillness? You gave us a lot of stuff to chew on. Is there one thing you find that can just give us that little nugget that'll get us to the next step?

• 2:47Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I think the morning, if you can get the morning set right. So really think about the time in the morning, the way you're setting up the morning. What's the first thing you're doing out of bed? Tackling that hard thing first. To me, if you own the morning, the rest of the day follows. And again, you stack that on top of each other. That's where you're successful. So I think it's all about the morning to me.

• 3:09Speaker 03

  Hi, Ryan.

• 3:10Ryan Holiday?

  Hi.

• 3:10Speaker 03

  Thank you very much. Hey, Kevin here. My question is, I agree with you. We get these thoughts and ideas when we're out of position doing things like running or exercising, and it's not convenient to capture. I noticed in your slides, your index, how do you organize those thoughts that come to you at the most or the least opportune times to, you know, sit down and put them to use?

• 3:34Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, there's obviously all sorts of wonderful digital solutions from Rome to Evernote or, you know, Google Docs or whatever. I'm a big analog person, so I use four by six note cards. It's what I do sort of all my research and brainstorming on. I have a to-do list, obviously, also, but I'm just writing, like, when I have a thought, I write it down on the card. I have an article, you can, if you just Google my name and commonplace book. I keep what they would call a commonplace book. So a collection of thoughts or ideas as you collect them. Over time, you organize it into themes, and then when you need stuff related to that topic, or you're thinking about something, or struggling with something, or you're writing a memo, or giving a talk, you have something to rely on. And there's a million ways to do it.

• 4:18Ryan Holiday?

  I gave a talk at the Reagan Library a few years ago, and they let me go into the library and see. He would keep note cards in like a photo binder. And as he would write a speech, you know, he'd, you know, the speechwriter would come to him with a speech, and then he's like, no, this needs an anecdote, or a story, or a stat. And he'd go to his book, and he'd find the perfect thing that he might have written down 28 years ago, right? And so to me, it's about collecting and accumulating information that you can then use. I definitely see the advantages to the digital system, but I tend to find that if I'm just highlighting stuff or copying and pasting, it's kind of just going in a black hole somewhere. The actual engagement with the material, being forced to write it down, think about it, have it in a place,

• 5:01Ryan Holiday?

  to me creates a better recall and relationship with the idea. So that's why I do it that way.

• 5:09Speaker 04

  Hi, my name is Haley. I like these principles. I find it's a lot easier to set boundaries for stillness when you're in a job where you have a lot of power.

• 5:16Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 5:17Speaker 04

  Or when you have a more strategic or analytical role. If you have less power, you're in a job or in the middle of a chaotic operation, it's harder. How would you help create an organizational culture where it's easier for your middle managers to set the boundaries they need to sometimes pause and focus?

• 5:30Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, it's funny, like managers know how important this stuff is and then because they have the power, they give it to themselves, but then they want to sort of micromanage the time of everyone else or they want to see them or they don't, we don't give the freedom to the people who work for us. And that's something I've been thinking about with my, you know, with my employees, it'll be like, man, I probably like, I'm calling this person in the middle of the day every time a thought pops into my head and I'm probably breaking up, you know, their time or their focus. So I think, one, just being considerate, thinking about, you know, if it's good for you, it's probably good for them. But I think culturally, we have to, you know, Google famously used to have like 10 or 20% of an employee's time was allocated for exploration or free projects. I don't know if it has to be that explicit,

• 6:14Ryan Holiday?

  but we do have to give people time and space for reflection. I was, again, just thinking about this with someone who works for me. I'd thrown so much stuff on their plate, then I started to notice the quality of the work diminishing and then it's this vicious feedback loop where you're upset and then they're nervous. You know, you got to figure out the right amount of balance for each person so we have time and some level of autonomy to set up our day and our practices that get the best work out of us.

• 6:43Speaker 05

  My name is Kurt. Question for you is more, I don't very often get a chance to ask a question directly to the author, but I'm in a sales leadership role. My team is global. I am a morning person. I do try to set away time, but it's very hard. It came from the one thing, and then also from your discussion is setting time aside. Well, regretfully for me, I've got time zones that that window in the morning allows me to kill some of the chaos my reps are dealing with globally. So I don't have the opportunity to plan out that perfect two or three window. What would your thoughts on that be?

• 7:18Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I remember I worked at American Apparel for many years and the CEO had this open door policy, which worked great. You know, any employee with any problem could come to the leader with it. And that worked great when it was a small company, but as the company got bigger and bigger, it became a thing where there was always somebody in the world with a problem and access. So I don't know if there's any way to do it but setting aside some time. I mentioned General Mattis at the end of the talk, and I was reading a book about him recently. And in his calendar, he had time scheduled out, usually like around lunch, where he would eat and read. So they knew he doesn't do lunch meetings. You know, he has to be back to the office by this time because that's when he sits

• 8:03Ryan Holiday?

  and reads and thinks. And I know this is hard to do, and it never, it's like, you know, if you came in and you saw someone, you know, sitting at their computer, you assume they're working. You come in, you see someone reading or just sitting there thinking or going for a walk. That doesn't seem like work, which goes to her question. But you have to understand, if it makes you better at the job, it's work. And it's not running away from problems. And you know, who knows, maybe being more disciplined, setting up that time would make, would not just solve those problems day to day, but it might help you come up with a permanent solution to those problems. So I think about it like, you know, it's not just, hey, you know, this is what I need to be well rested, but I might

• 8:44Ryan Holiday?

  have a breakthrough that accomplishes weeks or months of work in a single stroke because I was disciplined. I had the idea for the book that I have coming out later this month.

• 8:55Ryan Holiday?

  On a hike with my kids, you know, on the weekend, I had to put the work aside to agree to go do the thing. But if I hadn't done that, you know, I don't know if that idea ever would have occurred to me. So, you know, it feel, you almost have to be disciplined about your work discipline to set up time to get lucky or serendipity like that to happen.

• 9:15Speaker 06

  Excellent. You have so much discipline in your life. Like, that seems to be a massive value and it creates a lot of freedom and within the form. Can you tell me about, like, has that always been your outlook? Or was there a defining moment where this became your approach?

• 9:32Ryan Holiday?

  I don't know if it's always been that way. I think discipline is something you accumulate. It's something you build on. I'm actually in the middle of doing a series of four books. So, the cardinal virtues, Christianity and in Stoicism are courage, temperance, which is self-discipline, justice and wisdom. And I think these four ideas are sort of the framework. Actually, cardinal comes from the Latin word cardos, which means hinge. The like success, life of being a good person hinges on courage, self-discipline, justice and wisdom. So, I sort of see them as being related to that. But I find that chaos is way more stressful and harder than order and discipline. So, you know, by creating structure, and again, as we move into a more remote

• 10:16Ryan Holiday?

  sort of work world, or where things are in flux or chaos, if the discipline is not being imposed on you, it's going to have to come from you. So, it's this internal thing that you have to work on. And I think it's good, but it's just a challenge. And I've seen so many people struggle to adjust to, no one's telling me what to do. This is so wonderful. And then the break, they're like, oh shit, I have to tell myself what to do. And that's the struggle.

• 10:45Speaker 06

  Right. And that structure in some of those guideposts are so... So key to being able to stay with it when we aren't, because motivation doesn't always come from within.

• 10:53Ryan Holiday?

  Well, and especially as all the days blur in together, I have no idea like what day it is, what, how long this has been happening, you know, as the, as the sort of world stopped, the world stopped operating on this structure that, you know, commute, office, weekends, you know, planned vacations, it just all got blurred together. So in that sense, discipline becomes even more important just to like, you know, time is an invention, right? Just as discipline has to create structure from a fundamentally unstructured thing.

• 11:24Speaker 06

  Definitely. I saw that Andy Silvernail had a question.

• 11:27Speaker 07

  Hi, Ryan. See you, Andy. Very early in your presentation, you talked about a very important inflection point, and you didn't elaborate. I wonder if you could just talk about the experience of that inflection point and what made you decide to change?

• 11:41Ryan Holiday?

  I don't remember that. What inflection point was I talking about?

• 11:44Speaker 07

  You were talking, you said you were in a job that was kind of miserable.

• 11:46Ryan Holiday?

  Oh.

• 11:47Speaker 07

  And you, all of a sudden, something changed and you've become the writer and the speaker that you've become.

• 11:51Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, so I was at American Apparel, I was the director of marketing, and it was going well, and I liked it, but I, I felt called to, to write and, and I wanted, I had this idea for a book and I wanted to work on it. And what Robert was talking to me about is like, I couldn't leave for like a year, a year and a half, there's a bunch of reasons why. But his question was like, what, how are you going to spend that time, right? Are you going to show up every day and kill time? Are you going to be resentful? Or are you going to, you know, focus and use that time? The irony is, as soon as I decided to leave, the year and a half went by like that, and I was much better at it because I wasn't stressed, I wasn't catastrophizing, I wasn't thinking about, I can't do this forever. But it also, you know, forced me to think about, you know, what am I going

• 12:35Ryan Holiday?

  to have, like, if I want to start, if I want to write this book in a year and a half? What can I do now so on day one I have all the things that I need? Right? And so for me, it was just, you know, I think this goes to what the essence of the talk was is really think about like, what do you want your life to look like? What do you want a day in your life to look like? And a lot of times we just have these kind of vague ideas of what success is. And it's usually more responsibility, more money, more recognition. But if you haven't really thought about what you want your day to look like, it's hard to evaluate opportunities as they go. And so I found increasingly I enjoyed writing, I enjoyed thinking, I enjoyed having more autonomy over my life, all those things. And I hope this isn't a bad thing to tell a bunch of people at a company.

• 13:18Ryan Holiday?

  But I wanted, I just was really thinking about what I wanted my life to look like. And that gave me a lot of clarity about the decisions that I needed to make. Because oftentimes we just, again, we unthinkingly say yes because somebody offered, because it sounds cool, because it is more lucrative. You know, people do this all the time. They kind of like, they really like their job. But then someone poaches, wants to poach them to a company. And the only improvement is that it's more money. And it's like, what are you going to do with that money? Right? Maybe you actually really like the freedom or structure that you have in this. Or it's wonderful that you only have a 10 minute commute. And now you're going to have an hour commute. We don't really think about how these things fit in the larger context of our life

• 13:59Ryan Holiday?

  and the sort of stillness or happiness or productivity we need to be great at what we do. And so I think we evaluate decisions or opportunities on the wrong set of criteria. And so that's what that breakthrough was for me, for sure.

• 14:15Ryan 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.