Look for the Smooth Handle | Balance the Books of Life Daily

In 1811, a 68-year-old Thomas Jefferson sat down to try to put down some advice that he could pass along to his 12-year-old granddaughter Cornelia. His advice survives to us as “Canons of Conduct,” 12 rules for living. Ryan discusses the importance of one of Jefferson's rules, and reads over the week's guidance from the Daily Stoic Journal, on today's Daily Stoic Podcast. This episode is brought to you by Four Sigmatic. Four Sigmatic is a maker of mushroom coffee, lattes, elixirs, and more. Their drinks all taste amazing and they've full of all sorts of all-natural compounds and immunity boosters to help you think clearly and live well. Four Sigmatic has a new exclusive deal for Daily Stoic listeners: get up to 39% off their bestselling Lion’s Mane bundle by visiting foursigmatic.com/stoic.***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.

• 0:02Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Each day, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, illustrated with stories from history, current events, and literature to help you be better at what you do. And at the beginning of the week, we try to do a deeper dive, setting a kind of Stoic intention for the week, something to meditate on, something to think on, something to leave you with, to journal about, whatever it is you happen to be doing. So let's get into it.

• 0:32Ryan Holiday?

  Look for the smooth handle. In 1811, a 68-year-old Thomas Jefferson sat down to put down some advice that he could pass along to his 12-year-old granddaughter, Cornelia. This advice survives to us as his Canons of Conduct, 12 Rules for Living. Did Jefferson always live up to these rules? No, certainly not. For instance, he often spent money before he had it. He was prideful, and of course, he was a slave owner, and he quite hypocritically violated his rule to never trouble another with what you can do yourself. But still, the rules are all easy to understand and hard to disagree with, except for one.

• 1:13Ryan Holiday?

  Rule number 10 says, "Take things always by their smooth handle." What does that even mean? Well, it's actually a sly reference to a passage from Epictetus, one we have talked about many times before here. "Every event has two handles," Epictetus said, "one by which it can be carried and one by which it can't. If your brother does you wrong, don't grab it by his wrongdoing, because this is the handle incapable of lifting it. Instead, use the other, that he is your brother, that you were raised together, and then you will have hold of the handle that carries." That's what Jefferson was making one of his Rules of Life, and it's worth thinking about today. Don't grab things by the rough or the weak handle. Don't grab them by the easy one. Grab them by the smooth and sturdy handle,

• 1:58Ryan Holiday?

  the one that will bear weight. Think of the good in people. Think about where we are to blame. Think about when you have done similar wrong yourself. Think of it as a challenge. Think of it as an opportunity to help someone. Think about how connected we all are to each other. Think about this as a challenge that you can be made better for. The smooth handle is always the one to grab.

• 2:27Ryan Holiday?

  Balance the books of life daily. We journal as a way of gathering up life's experiences, insights, frustrations, unexpected struggles and triumphs, and more. In all of this, we are making a reckoning of our progress on life's way. Seneca, whose father-in-law was in charge of keeping the books on Rome's granary, liked the metaphor of balancing life's books each day. Rather than postpone, our impulse each day should be to bring things as much as possible to completion. Why? Because we never know what tomorrow might bring. Epictetus would tell his students that the important thing was that they had begun, begun to practice, learn, to get better.

• 3:09Ryan Holiday?

  Give yourself some credit this week for the journey you're on and reflect how far you have come and how far is left to go. As Seneca would say, "Let us prepare our minds as if we'd come to the very end of life. Let us postpone nothing. Let us balance life's books each day. Life's greatest flaw is that it's always imperfect and a certain portion of it is postponed. The one who puts the finishing touches on their life each day is never short of time." That's from Seneca's Moral Letters, number 101. "Believe me," he says, "it's better to produce the balance sheet of your own life than that of the grain market." That's Seneca on the shortness of life. "I am your teacher and you are learning in my school.

• 3:54Ryan Holiday?

  My aim is to bring you to completion unhindered, free from compulsive behavior, unrestrained, without shame, free, flourishing and happy-looking to God in things great and small. Your aim is to learn and diligently practice all these things. Why then don't you complete the work? If you have the right aim, and I have both the right aim and the right preparation, what is missing? The work is quite feasible and it is the only thing in our power. Let go of the past. We must only begin. Believe me and you will see." That's Epictetus's Discourses. I think what the message for this week is really about is sort of the tension between beginning

• 4:34Ryan Holiday?

  And completing. So, you know, the Stoics would say that what we have the capacity to do is start. We don't know what's going to happen, right? You start the day off well. You don't know what the rest of the day is going to bring. You start the, the week off with high hopes, with high expectations, you know, with a, a to do list for what you're trying to do. And then of course, life has other plans, things interrupt. I think this is why we try to get an early start. It's why we try to get going quickly. It's why we, we try not to procrastinate. We try not to make delays. And then, you know, sometimes we get there, sometimes we don't. When we do happen to get there, that's when we need to stop and reflect.

• 5:15Ryan Holiday?

  That's when we need to stop and analyze, evaluate what we did well, what we could have done better, right? This is kind of how we built the Daily Stoic Journal, right? It's the prompt in the morning, hey, here's what you should be thinking about. What's your intention? What's your plan? And then in the evening or the following day, let's take a minute and go, well, how did that go, right? It's the briefing and then the debriefing. And it's hard to argue which is more important, but together they become very, very powerful. And if you're not doing this, then you're just winging it. I've been thinking about this lately, like we just drove from Austin to Florida and then back. And then we're leaving again, we're going to go to Arizona. We're staying in a camper, so we're not seeing anyone. It's all socially distanced.

• 5:57Ryan Holiday?

  But the point is, it's like, I tend to find like, you never know what the day on the road is going to bring, right? Traffic, delays, accidents, kids want to get out of the car, somebody has a meltdown, so on and so forth. I think my strategy is always, okay, let's leave as early as possible, get as much done as possible. I want to be up in doing, I want to be up in getting started. It's like, I want to try to beat the odds. I want to beat the averages that are eventually pulling you down. And to me, that's why waking up early is so important. That's why getting started early on a project is so important. It's like when you wait, when you defer, when you put things off, that's where you're going to trouble. And I think this is true, not just on a trip, not just for a group project or, you know, a thing at work, but it's also really true in life, right?

• 6:42Ryan Holiday?

  You don't want to wake up 20 years from now. Like, man, I've been really putting these things off. And now I have to get serious about saving, about starting a family, about writing that novel you've always wanted to do. That's what Seneca is talking about. But it's this tension, right? It's starting, realizing that in the middle, you're almost certainly going to run into obstacles and difficulties. And then wherever you end up, now you want to evaluate and learn. And I mean, even my strategy of getting, of trying to leave early, that's come from like, hey, it's like, I feel like every minute we delay, it increases the chances that you'll bump into rush hour traffic. Or you're, you know, I, I, I feel like it's like tempting fate, which I'm sure is a little illogical, but I like to get started early. I like to get into it. I want to have as much momentum as possible before entropy

• 7:26Ryan Holiday?

  and Murphy's Law starts to do its work on me. And that's kind of how I thought about life, right? Like, you know, I wrote my first book at 25. Here I am in my mid 30s and I've done now 10 or 11 books. Like whatever happens from here, whether I continue at this pace or not, I've done what I've wanted to do. I've balanced the books of life. Everything is bonus from here. And that's to me, the right way to think about it, the best way to do it. And I think it's the Stoic way. So let's get started this week. Let's get moving. And then when you get to the other side, let's do some evaluation and let's try to do it better next time. If you're liking this podcast, we would love for you to subscribe. Please leave us a review on iTunes or any of your favorite podcast listening apps.

• 8:10Ryan Holiday?

  It really helps and tell a friend.