Let Us Fulfill Our Obligation | 10,000 Pages That Will Change Your Life

Let us try to put some of our energy towards helping the less fortunate. Let's alleviate someone else's worry and fear. Feeding America https://teamfeed.feedingamerica.org/participants/19745 | We donated the first $30,000 and would love your help in getting to our goal of $300,000 https://teamfeed.feedingamerica.org/participants/19745—which would provide over 3 million meals for families across the country! Just head over to dailystoic.com/feeding http://dailystoic.com/feeding—every dollar provides 10 meals, even a small donation makes a big difference. Resources Mentioned: - Action Against Hunger https://www.actionagainsthunger.org/take-action/donate/giving-tuesday/?utm_medium=cpc&utm_source=google&utm_campaign=Brand&utm_adgroup=THRIVE&utm_term=action%20against%20hunger&gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=1554086878&gbraid=0AAAAAC-ISxJpOAv81q6N-ggZPmhQK1GBc&gclid=CjwKCAiA55rJBhByEiwAFkY1QNcYrAebUADVj0DBfzjbl_aoFfJjeN4pVJeUEqnLqz6Ujehz69QtvxoCGtkQAvD_BwE: https://www.actionagainsthunger.org/ https://www.actionagainsthunger.org/take-action/donate/giving-tuesday/?utm_medium=cpc&utm_source=google&utm_campaign=Brand&utm_adgroup=THRIVE&utm_term=action%20against%20hunger&gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=1554086878&gbraid=0AAAAAC-ISxJpOAv81q6N-ggZPmhQK1GBc&gclid=CjwKCAiA55rJBhByEiwAFkY1QNcYrAebUADVj0DBfzjbl_aoFfJjeN4pVJeUEqnLqz6Ujehz69QtvxoCGtkQAvD_BwE 🎟️ Come see Ryan Holiday LIVE https://www.dailystoiclive.com/: https://www.dailystoiclive.com/ Seattle, WA - December 3, 2025 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/daily-stoic-live-onstage-with-ryan-holiday-tickets-1830976292379?aff=oddtdtcreatorSan Diego, CA - February 5, 2026 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/daily-stoic-live-onstage-with-ryan-holiday-tickets-1527497619499?aff=oddtdtcreatorPhoenix, AZ - February 27, 2026 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/daily-stoic-live-onstage-with-ryan-holiday-tickets-1830981698549?aff=oddtdtcreator 📚 Sign up for Ryan’s free monthly reading list newsletter: https://ryanholiday.net/the-reading-list/ 👉 Support the podcast and go deeper into Stoicism by subscribing toThe Daily Stoic Premium https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ - unlock ad-free listening, early access, and bonus content:https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ 🎥 Watch the video episodes on The Daily Stoic YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos: https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos 🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast/?hl=en: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast 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 https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail 🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/ https://store.dailystoic.com/ 📱 Follow us: Instagram https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/, Twitter https://twitter.com/dailystoic, YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic, TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@daily_stoic?lang=en, and Facebook https://www.facebook.com/dailystoic See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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.

• 0:56Ryan Holiday?

  Let us fulfill our obligation. That nice, warm feeling you're carrying over from Thanksgiving? That fullness after your big family get-together? From the meal, from the company, from all of it? It's important that you realize that not everyone is feeling that right now. In fact, many people are experiencing the exact opposite. More than 47 million people in America face hunger. Nearly 14 million children. That's one in five. One in five. Tragic, and it's also unacceptable and preventable. Add to that the recent government shutdown, federal cuts to programs that help food insecure families,

• 1:40Ryan Holiday?

  and interruption of SNAP benefits. And it's not hard to understand why people in need of food assistance are there and why their numbers have gone way up. Maybe you're thinking, well, what can I do about it? How could I possibly help? Isn't Stoicism about focusing on what's in my control? How could I personally do anything about this insurmountable problem? Well, as Marcus Aurelius wrote, "Those suffering humans are us and we are them. To allow harm to come to them through indifference, through callousness, through despair, is to allow harm to come to ourselves." It's why the most magnificent moment of Marcus Aurelius's reign was not when he conquered

• 2:21Ryan Holiday?

  some foreign power, but instead the day he decided to sell off the palace furnishings to keep Rome going during the Antonine Plague. He did it to help those in need. Hyrcles was a Roman Stoic who spoke of our circles of concern. Our first concern, he said, was our mind, but beyond this was concern for our bodies, for our family, then our extended family. Like concentric rings, these circles were followed by our concern for our community, our city, our country, our empire, our world. The work of philosophy, though, he said, was to draw this outer concern inward, to learn how to care as much as possible for as many people as possible, to do as much good for them as possible. This was our obligation, the Stoics believed.

• 3:06Ryan Holiday?

  It was our duty to help others, to serve others, to illustrate the virtues of courage and justice towards and for and through others. So today, when some people might go line up to get a deal on an absurdly large TV or gorge themselves on leftovers or spend hours shopping sales online, let us decide, let us try to put some of our energy towards helping the less fortunate. Let's help people from going hungry. Let's alleviate someone else's worry and fear. Let us put food on their table. And better yet, let's do it together, which is what we have been doing here at Daily Stoic for the last several years. Once again, we're teaming up with Feeding America to help families who are hungry.

• 3:49Ryan Holiday?

  And last year, me, you, all of us came together and we raised close to $250,000 together, which provided 2.4 million meals. This year, we're trying to get to our goal of 300,000, which would provide 3 million meals for families across the country. Daily Stoic put up the first 10% of the goal already. We're chugging away. I think we're going to break 100,000 easy today. And then hopefully we'll get there to the whole 300,000, but we can't do it without you. So you can head over to dailystoic.com/feeding to donate and learn more. And I think together, we can all make a small dent in a very big problem. We can alleviate everyone's suffering or struggle,

• 4:31Ryan Holiday?

  but for the people we do help, that difference, well, it makes a difference. So let's do it. Let's be good Stoics today and we can fulfill our obligation together. As I said, that's dailystoic.com/feeding. Now, if you live outside the US, you can check out Action Against Hunger. It's a global humanitarian organization that fights against hunger across nearly 50 countries. I'll link to that in today's show notes or just Google Action Against Hunger. Or just go down to your local food bank and donate something. But the point is, do something for someone else. That's how you should celebrate Black Friday and be well.

• 5:16Ryan Holiday?

  Today, I'm going to give you 10,000 pages that will change your life. These are some of the best, but also some of the longest and biggest books ever written, but they are worth it, I promise you. All right, let's get into it. Here we have the collected works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. My favorite Emerson essay is of course Self-Reliance, but I also love his one on compensation. He has this very Stoic idea that everything that happens in life has its compensation. What are we going to do about it? How are we going to learn from it? What's it going to demand from us? But of course, famously, as he says, "Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of your principles." If you haven't read Emerson, I don't know what you are doing.

• 5:58Ryan Holiday?

  Let's not only give Emerson a read, but let's read past just self-reliance. Of course, Marcus Aurelius's Meditations. This is the shortest one on the list, but it is the most remarkable, "The private thoughts of the most powerful man in the world." Here we have Atlas Shrugged clocking in at a measly 1,200 pages. You should read them and then you should grow the fuck up and... Not be an Ayn Randian. These are ideas that appeal to the ego, that appeal to the selfish part of us. There are some interesting insights for sure, but I think Ayn Rand is someone you read and then you grow out of. This is a wonderful biography.

• 6:38Ryan Holiday?

  We think of Gandhi mostly in India, but we forget that he invents his principles of nonviolence. He comes of age as a political strategist, as a lawyer in India. So this is all about Gandhi before he becomes Gandhi as we know him. There's a great line about him in this book that Gandhi goes to Britain, he becomes a lawyer, and then he goes to South Africa to become the Mahatma. And this is where he's introduced to Tolstoy. This is an amazing book, absolutely one of my all time favorites. You read The Odyssey because The Odyssey is the key to not just understanding difficulties and trials and the ups and downs of life, which Odysseus of course goes through, but

• 7:21Ryan Holiday?

  is also the key by which you unlock most of the metaphors, analogies, ideas, plot points, the hero's journey that is so pivotal to all of the rest of Western literature. The Stoics believed you needed to have read both The Odyssey and The Iliad because they were the key to understanding what Stoic philosophy was all about. Another book about the ancient Greeks, this is Stephen Pressfield's The Gates of Fire, which is one of my all time favorite novels. I have the mass market paperback here, so we'll call it here at 450 or so pages, just a masterpiece, should definitely read it. Robert Caro. I have two Robert Caro selections here.

• 8:01Ryan Holiday?

  So we have The Power Broker, which is a riveting book about the New York City Parks Commissioner, maybe one of the greatest builders and political tacticians of all time. This book is 1,200 or so pages. You'd think it would be boring. Every single page is riveting. It's kind of a mirror of Breaking Bad. Like here you have someone attracted to power, driven by power, but also driven by idealism and principles and making a difference at the beginning. And yet, something changes in him as he accumulates more and more power. And yet, also, it is an insight into how we get things done. People who want to do good things need to read this book.

• 8:45Ryan Holiday?

  People who want to not do bad things need to read this book. Robert Caro is one of the greatest biographers to ever live. And his series on Lyndon Johnson is the next one. This is one of the books in the series. I've read all of them. This one's 880 pages. They're all about this length. He hasn't even gotten to Vietnam yet. Hopefully, he will finish it in time. If these were the only books you ever read in your life about history, power, politics, you would probably have a better understanding than 99% of the population. But it's not the only thing you should read. You should also read Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals about Abraham Lincoln. We see Abraham Lincoln, kind of like we do Gandhi, as this saint, a man who came out this way fully formed.

• 9:30Ryan Holiday?

  Of course, it wasn't. It was an evolution. And he was a politician, just an effective politician. He was a politician who had principles. And this is largely about Lincoln during the Civil War, the cabinet he selects, many of which were people who thought they were better than him, people who he disagreed with, people who wanted his job. And yet, Lincoln was not only able to save the country, he was able to save the country and make this unwieldy cabinet work. It's one of the great feats of leadership of all time. You should absolutely read this book. If you haven't seen the movie Lincoln, it is based on this book, Ron Chernow's Biography of Hamilton. Lin-Manuel Miranda reads this book on vacation as a young, up-and-coming songwriter and playwright.

• 10:14Ryan Holiday?

  And he immediately sees in it what most people had missed, what Ron Chernow famously was able to see. Alexander Hamilton has one of the most incredible and most American lives you could possibly imagine. How does a bastard orphaned son of a whore become a founding father? This is an absolutely incredible book, and in many ways, a cautionary tale, because as brilliant and talented and inspiring as Alexander Hamilton was, his

• 10:42Ryan Holiday?

  Passions, as the Stoics would have said, his ambition, his drive, his lack of emotional control, his lack of control of himself ultimately leads to his downfall. There are so many cautionary tales and lessons in here. I read this book in hardcover and then I listened to it in audiobook with my son, who's obsessed with the Hamilton musical. It is as good as the play, The Warmth of Other Suns, Isabella Wilkerson's book on the Great Migration. History is not supposed to make you feel good. It's supposed to challenge you, supposed to challenge your assumptions. Why do Black Americans live in the cities that they live in? What happened during the Jim Crow era? Where did those people go? That's what The Warmth of Other Suns is all about. This reads almost like a giant Russian

• 11:25Ryan Holiday?

  novel, but it's about America and it's about generations of Americans fleeing for a better life, but not coming from overseas to America, but coming from the deep south to Chicago and California and New York and what they learned, what they overcame, how it changed them and how they changed the country. Absolutely love this book. If you've read my book, Discipline is Destiny, I talk a lot about Queen Elizabeth II, I think is one of the most incredible figures of the 20th century. The world literally remakes itself in her reign, like half the countries on earth when she died did not exist when she was born, or vice versa. I forget. The point is, she lived an incredible life and the arc of most of the 20th century

• 12:06Ryan Holiday?

  and interacted with most incredible people of the 20th century. I am fascinated by the role of the queen or the British monarch because they are both invested with an incredible amount of symbolism and authority and yet they have very little power, yet much is expected of them. It seems like it would be an easy job. You see in this book that it was actually an incredibly difficult job and it required an incredible amount of restraint and discipline to be able to do it well, which she did for basically longer than anyone. She met literally millions of people. She gave hundreds of thousands of speeches. She gave out hundreds of thousands of awards. She traveled millions of miles all over the

• 12:47Ryan Holiday?

  world. Incredible and fascinating book. This book here is one of the most incredible stories in the history of publishing. How does one of America's greatest generals, one of its greatest presidents end up losing everything? A crooked Wall Street operator steals all of his money. He's dying of cancer and he's looking at leaving his family nothing. Talking about, of course, Ulysses S. Grant. Ulysses S. Grant is on the verge of death. And Mark Twain, who hated what publishers had done to him, approaches him with effectively a self-publishing deal. They work out a publishing venture and Grant rushes to finish these memoirs. He dies just a few days after they finish. And then they go on to be one of the best-selling memoirs in American history.

• 13:30Ryan Holiday?

  And I would say one of the best memoirs in American history. It is the art of an incredible American life. Graduates from West Point, a hero of the Mexican-American war. But then he plunges into alcoholism. He makes a number of mistakes. Ends up selling firewood by the side of the road. And yet, within a few years, he's not just a general back in the Union Army, but he is leading the Union cause to victory in the Civil War. He has a strategic vision, a determination, a perseverance that makes him the right man at the right moment. He and Lincoln managed to triumph over the Confederacy. And then afterwards, he writes this incredible memoir about his incredible life, which was

• 14:11Ryan Holiday?

  filled with tragedy and triumphs alike, but it is a brilliant, beautiful book that every American should read. Big epic novel, lots of Stoic themes, but it's a novel about human nature. It's a novel about Stoicism. It's a novel about race. It's a novel about American history. It's a novel about California. It's a novel about many, many things. It's one of my absolute favorite books. Actually, I like this book so much that I read the book that Steinbeck wrote about writing this book. It's called Journal of a Novel. This is just one of the great novels of all time. You should read it and then reread it because you take something new out of it each time. A lot of people not that interested in Queen Elizabeth II. I get it.

• 14:51Ryan Holiday?

  Queen Victoria has an even less attractive reputation, but equally worthy of an incredible book. She lived an incredible life through incredible times and was actually a great ruler. Most of the big biographies that I recommend were written by men, but Julia Barrett does Queen Victoria an incredible service. It's also about her husband. Just a fascinating book. I loved this. I used it a lot, actually, when I was writing Still This Is The Key. This book reads like a novel about an incredible life. Absolutely amazing. What do all of these writers have in common? They were masters, masters of their craft. And then the person they were writing about was a master of something, which is why I will give you this book, which, you know,

• 15:35Ryan Holiday?

  compared to some of these others, seems short, but it's still almost 400 pages. This is Robert Greene's mastery. I was a research assistant on this book, which was the treat of my life. Taught me a lot. Robert also published a thousand-page transcript, I believe you can get it for free on Amazon, of all of the masters he interviewed. So that gets us well above 10,000 pages on these books. If you haven't read them, you are missing out. Should you read all of them? Yes. Can you go wrong by picking any one or a couple of them? No, you cannot. Read all of these books and all 10,000 pages. Masters writing about masters. Read these. I read a lot. It's sort of my job. You can't write without reading. But for almost 15 years now, once a month, I send out an email with my favorite book recommendations for that month.

• 16:19Ryan Holiday?

  Books that I've been reading, books that I've been going through, books that changed my life, that inspired me, that I can connect to what's happening in the world. And you can sign up right now at ryanholiday.net/readinglist.