This Is What Kindles The Soul | Ask Daily Stoic

Today, on the 24th anniversary of 9/11, let's honor Brian Sweeney and the thousands of others we lost by striving to be, as Marcus said, "free of passion and yet full of love."📓 Pick up a signed edition of Ego is the Enemy! Check it out at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/📖 Preorder the final book in Ryan Holiday's The Stoic Virtues Series: "Wisdom Takes Work": https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/wisdom-takes-work🎙️ 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 Facebook 📢 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.

• 0:55Ryan Holiday?

  On this day 22 years ago, Brian Sweeney was a passenger trapped on hijacked United Airlines Flight 175. He knew something was wrong, but he could not have fully understood that he and so many others were about to be murdered in one of the most hateful and deranged acts of terrorism in history. But in those final few short minutes of his life, he managed to leave a beautiful message on his wife's voicemail.

• 1:21Speaker 01

  Good job. This is Brian. Listen, on an airplane that's been hijacked, things don't go well when it's not working good. I just want you to know I absolutely love you. I want you to do good, go have a good time. Thanks to my parents and everybody that I just totally love you, and I'll see you later. Bye, babe. I'll call you.

• 1:43Ryan Holiday?

  In Book One of Meditations, where Marcus Rilis catalogs the most important things he learned throughout his life, he said that he learned from a teacher named Sextus "to be free of passion, yet full of love." Imagine the terror of that moment. Yet, when you hear Brian's voice coming through the phone, there's not a trace of fear. It's free of passion, free of anger, free of despair, free of everything, yet full of love.

• 2:09Ryan Holiday?

  Because everything else has been stripped away, rendered irrelevant and insignificant. Pure love, Seneca said, careless of all other things, kindles the soul, makes us selfless, it emboldens us, makes us courageous, inspires us to be strong, instills us with purpose. It doesn't always win, as Sweeney's tragic death reminds us, but it is an antidote to terror and cruelty and evil. It is the thing that keeps going, that lives on after us, that brings meaning and comfort, even in the worst of situations. So today, on the anniversary of 9/11, let us, as Marcus really is said, and Sweeney was, let us be full of love.

• 2:52Ryan Holiday?

  Let us tell those we love that we totally love them. Let us bring love to every situation we face. Indeed, there is almost no situation in which passion helps, but almost every situation is made better when it is full of love.

• 3:16Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I'm staring out a hotel room in Vermont, looking out over a beautiful lake. I've never been here before. I thought I had my mic with me. I brought it and it's not working, which is going to cause me some problems for the virtual talk I'm about to give. But that's something we're going to talk about here very quickly. We're going to talk about ego. I was just doing a podcast for Wisdom Takes Work, which is out in a couple of weeks with Chris Williamson. And we were talking about what are some of the things that make smart people stupid? And I was listing a bunch of the things and I was again struck, as I have been now, writing and thinking about this very idea

• 3:59Ryan Holiday?

  for over 10 years, how much it comes back down to ego, right? Ego makes us think we already know everything. It makes us uncurious, makes us not listen to other people, makes us complacent.

• 4:13Ryan Holiday?

  Deludes us, makes us think we have powers we don't have. It gets in the way. And so I thought I would bring you a special Q and A episode of the podcast where we just talk about ego. Over the last six months, I've been all over the world. As I said, right now I'm in Vermont, but I've been traveling all over and people have been asking me about ego. It's one of the questions I get the most. So that's what we are going to be answering questions about today. Before I get into that, when Chad was on the podcast from Chad Goes Deep, he had something interesting to say about ego. Here's that.

• 4:46Speaker 02

  We kind of experienced that with, we got a show on Netflix.

• 4:49Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 4:49Speaker 02

  And it was great. The whole experience was great. But to me, it was like, actually, I was listening to Ego is the Enemy a lot during it. Cause I'm like, I was like, gotta keep the ego in check. Like, don't become like too. And, you know, it kind of like, it was like the dream. And especially growing up is like, if you're a comedian, like hitting a TV show, you're like, that's the career maker. And to me, I was like, when this comes out, you know, I'll be cruise.

• 5:14Ryan Holiday?

  You're a made man.

• 5:15Speaker 02

  A made man, exactly. And it was great. Like, the whole experience was awesome and we're really proud of how it came out. But it came out and next day it was, you know, you're kind of like, and nothing happened.

• 5:26Ryan Holiday?

  Where's the parade?

• 5:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 5:28Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 5:28Speaker 02

  And I'm saying, I'm like, I was miserable for like two weeks. And my fiance was kind of like, what's your deal? I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I don't, you know, just, you just expect everything to be easy from that point. And then, but it kind of humbled me in a sense to where I was like, I was like, oh, I just, I need to get back to that open mic mentality of just getting back to the craft. And, and just putting the work in every day. Like, there's, there's, there's never going to be a moment where you're kind of just on easy street.

• 5:56Ryan Holiday?

  But anyways, let's get into some questions. These are people asking me about ego. If you want to book on this topic, of course, we have Ego is the Enemy. And then I would argue that Wisdom Takes Work is largely a meditation on this theme as well. You can preorder copies of Wisdom Takes Work and get a bunch of awesome monesses if you go to dailystoic.com/wisdom. Enjoy.

• 6:27Speaker 03

  You're a very successful writer, bestseller. You give all these conferences. How do you ground yourself? How do you not have an ego? How do you... I mean, you talk about your day, but that's more around how you plan your day. Maybe it's part of that. But then what else can you do? And, "Oh, I came out of this conference and I'm not the greatest because they hired me and stuff." How do you work about that?

• 6:49Speaker 04

  Well, I think it's important. Everyone has an ego. And if you don't think you have one, that's like the most egotistical thing you could do, right? But I find that like, doing the task is inherently humbling, right? So if you're focused on like, how you can get better, as opposed to, "Look at how awesome I am. Look at what I've done." You're gonna naturally, I think, be humbler. So like, what I try to do is, whenever I finish a book, I start the next one. Because when I start the next one, you're starting with page zero or page one. And it's blank, and it's intimidating, and it's not gonna be good for a long time. So like, by throwing myself into the next project,

• 7:33Speaker 04

  I feel like I'm not only protecting myself against the ego of like, "Look how great the last one is selling. Look at all the cool things that I've done. Look how proud I am of what I've published." But I'm also insulating myself against the failure too, right? Like, so I've had books that have done really well out of the gate, and I've had other books that took a long time to take off. And I really didn't sweat either one, because I had this other thing that was kicking my ass every day. And that was taking up the most of my focus. And so, Amazon has this slogan of like, "It's always day one." Right? That you're always starting anew and fresh.

• 8:13Speaker 04

  And part of that is not being sort of rigid and set in ways and complacent. But I think it's also always reminding yourself that you're starting at the beginning, and to not get too full of yourself.

• 8:27Speaker 03

  Right, amazing. You talk in the book about, you talked today about, a little bit about the Patriots, and then we heard about the Spurs. You talk a little bit about Bill Belichick and how he started. And he was like the guy, you know, doing the job that nobody wanted to do. You probably now know him as, you know, the six-time Super Bowl winning coach and probably Brady was there also. How do they remain egonist in a multi-billion dollar business with all the hype they get around, et cetera, et cetera? How do they ground themselves?

• 9:01Speaker 04

  Well, I think it's a similar thing, you know, in football, right? The team that wins the Super Bowl, not only play the longest season, but then they have the most trouble retaining talent and coaches. They have the worst draft picks the next year, right? And so they're starting that next season behind April, right? Everyone else got knocked out earlier and has been thinking about how they're going to do the next year, right? And so realizing that actually your success, you could get, you could take this too far and become paranoid and never happen. But if you realize that your success is actually putting you in a position of disadvantage.

• 9:45Speaker 04

  Now you've got the most competition, people are the most familiar with what you just did, right?

• 9:53Speaker 04

  You're the person they're trying to be, you know, you've got a target on their back. You realize, I think, really quickly, like, there is, the margin for error is so small that if you introduce ego or complacency or entitlement, you're going to get, you're asking. I mean, I was looking up, I spoke to the Los Angeles Rams a couple of years ago, they ended up winning the Super Bowl last year. And then this year, they didn't even make the playoffs, right? And I'm not saying that's out of ego, it was this team that got ravaged by injuries. But it's realizing that, hey, like, just because you were successful before, it is not to be taken for granted that you will continue to be successful. You have to stay hungry, you have to focus on...

• 10:34Speaker 04

  ceaselessly solving problems and you have to look at what you're doing next. Right. And, and I think that's, that's a way to just be so locked in that you don't have, you could, you could look at how awesome your career was after you retired, you know, but if you're looking at it in the moment, you're taking your eye off the ball.

• 10:54Speaker 05

  So on the opposite side, the, the ego is the enemy that I just read this week. Even though you wrote that, and this is your study, is there ever a time being a dad, being a leader, being a partner, being a husband, where the ego gets in your way?

• 11:08Ryan Holiday?

  Oh, all the time. Yeah. I think if you think ego is not a problem for you, you are talking about ego, you know, uh, that's one of the more insidious things about ego is that we can spot it so clearly in other people.

• 11:21Speaker 05

  Like your ego almost says, there is no ego.

• 11:23Ryan Holiday?

  Yes. Yeah. Well, it's just, we can, we can so very clearly see how ego holds other people back, but they're like, me, no, no, no, I've transcended this, I'm over this. And it's like, no, you just can't see, if you could get honest feedback from people around you, they'd be like, here's all the ways that your ego is holding you back. But what ego does is it, it sort of blinds us to that thing. And, and so I, I do, I make a big distinction between confidence and ego. Confidence is essential. If you don't think you can do something, you're probably not going to be able to do it. The problem is just because you think you can do something, doesn't mean you can. And I think where ego gets in the way is it, it says you already have all the tools, all the skills, all the signs point to yes, instead of doing the work to earn those things.

• 12:08Ryan Holiday?

  Right. There's a quote from Epictetus, one of the Stoics, he says, remember, it is impossible to learn that which you think you already know. And so where like being a know it all is so problematic is that you're kind of right. You can't know anything more and humility or confidence can continue to learn and grow because it's secure with itself, but also aware of how much more it needs. And so, you know, like I was just, I just got notes back from my, my last book and my first reaction every time, even though I know this is like, how dare you, you know? I sent you a work of art. And you-

• 12:47Speaker 05

  You told me you used a different color.

• 12:48Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, you sent me back this thing covered in red marks. What is this? And then I go, okay, that's ego. Ego doesn't like to be criticized. Ego doesn't like to have to do extra work. Ego doesn't like to be challenged. Ego thinks I'm the expert, you're the assistant to the editor. How, you know, all the things that you're pushing back on. And then I go, all right, let's sit on that for a day. And then usually what I tell myself is, let's do all the easy notes first. You know, let's do all the ones-

• 13:17Speaker 05

  You're easing your way into-

• 13:17Ryan Holiday?

  All the ones we agree with. I'm only gonna put in the ones that are obviously right, that I agree with. And then, you know, by the end, I put in all the notes. Because I've gotten over that initial resistance, right? And, you know, anytime you get criticized or you screw up, you wanna think about how it was somebody else's fault, how you didn't deserve it. They don't understand. And then, once you can let that subside a little bit, or what I try to do is, once I let that subside, I go, okay, and now where's the truth in this? Where was I responsible? What do I wanna take from this experience? And that's kinda how I think about it. But I generally, ego is not this thing that you don't have. It's not this thing that you kill and it goes away. It is a constant process.

• 13:58Speaker 05

  And would the opposite of ego be humility? Or what would be the opposite of, or just-

• 14:03Ryan Holiday?

  Well, the ancients had this idea of the golden mean. And the golden mean being that most virtues are actually in the middle between two vices. And so, I'd actually say that confidence is there in between a sort of- humility has a positive connotation, but there's certainly people who are too humble, too self-effacing, riddled with imposter syndrome and doubt and feelings of worthlessness. On the one hand, we have this. And then ironically, ego on the other end is actually quite similar, right? Ego is an obsession with the self. Actually, when you meet really egotistical people, you see how insecure they are deep down. So to me, confidence is there in the middle. It's an understanding and an awareness of our strengths, coupled with an awareness of our weakness,

• 14:47Ryan Holiday?

  of our need for improvement, where we can get better, what we don't know. And it's these two things fused together that is what we're aspiring to be, as opposed to stuck on either end.

• 15:02Ryan 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.