You’re Only Loaning This | Life Isn't A Dance

None of us own anything. Everything is constantly in flux. What we have today may be gone tomorrow. 📓 Grab your own leather bound signed edition of The Daily Stoic! Check it out at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/🎟 Ryan Holiday is going on tour! Grab tickets for London, Rotterdam, Dublin, Vancouver, and Toronto at ryanholiday.net/tour✉️ 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 FacebookSee 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.

• 0:03Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Friday, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from The Daily Stoic, my book, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful collaborator, translator, and literary agent, Stephen Hanselman. So today, we'll give you a quick meditation from the Stoics with some analysis from me, and then we'll send you out into the world to turn these words into works.

• 0:44Ryan Holiday?

  As we work and achieve, we pile up titles and money. We accumulate assets and influence. We build a life, as they say, and a life is made up of things: our job, our house, our car, our relationships, our reputation. Looking around at what we possess, what we've poured so much sweat and blood into, is an immensely rewarding experience. As Margaret Atwood writes in a beautiful poem, "The moment when, after many years of hard work and a long voyage, you stand in the center of your room, your house, a half-acre, square-mile, island country, knowing at last how you got there, and say, 'I own this.'" But the Stoic knows that we never really own anything. All we possess in this life, Marx really

• 1:29Ryan Holiday?

  says, even life itself, it's really only ours in trust. We are renters. Our lives are here on loan, loans that can get called in at any time, can be fired. Someone can dislodge our seemingly dominant market position. A loved one can leave. People die. And that's why Margaret Atwood warns against the pride and satisfaction of surveying one's possessions. "The moment you do that," she says, "nature rebels. Almost out of spite, it feels the need to rebuke you for your pride. 'No,' they whisper, 'you own nothing. You were a visitor, time after time, climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming, 'we

• 2:12Ryan Holiday?

  never belonged to you. You never found us.' It was always the other way around."

• 2:19Ryan Holiday?

  None of us own anything. Everything is constantly in flux. What we have today may be gone tomorrow. We ourselves may be gone tomorrow. Understand that. Appreciate everything accordingly. Be grateful and humble, or life will rebuke you. Fate will remind you who is in charge and nature will reclaim what is hers.

• 2:47Ryan Holiday?

  Life is not a dance. This is the September 20th entry in the Daily Stoic. I'm holding it in my hands here. 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living. And by the way, in November, I will be in London, Dublin, and Rotterdam, as well as Vancouver and Toronto. So if you want to come see me do talks and ask some questions, it should be fun. The talks in Australia were awesome. You can grab those tickets at ryanholiday.net/tour. And I'll tell you why I'm bringing this up here in a second.

• 3:27Ryan Holiday?

  But the quote from Marcus, Meditation 761, says, "The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing, because an artful life requires being prepared to meet and withstand sudden and unexpected attacks." Dancing is a popular metaphor for life. One must be limber and agile and go along with the music. One must feel and follow the flow along with their partner. But anyone who has tried to do something difficult, whether it's competition or an adversary, knows that the dancing metaphor is insufficient. Nobody ever gets up on stage and tries to tackle a dancer. The dancer never gets choked out by a rival. For a wrestler, on the other hand, adversity and the unexpected are part and parcel of what they do.

• 4:12Ryan Holiday?

  Their sport is a battle, just like life. They are fighting an opponent as well as their own limitations, emotions, and training. Life, like wrestling, requires more than graceful movement. We have to undergo hard training and cultivate an indomitable will to prevail. Philosophy is the steel against which we will sharpen that will and strengthen that resolve. Before I get up on stage, I mean, obviously, I want to be loose. I want to be ready. I want to be in a flow state. But I also am prepared for things to go wrong. Actually, when Robert Greene and I Gave a talk in Los Angeles back last September.

• 4:52Ryan Holiday?

  A woman got up to get something from concessions or whatever, and she tripped and fell and had a serious brain injury. You never know what's gonna happen, right? That's like an extreme end of the spectrum. But the other extreme end of the spectrum is stuff goes wrong for me, right? The slides don't work. I forget what I have to say. I don't feel good. Actually, the talk Robert and I were supposed to do in San Francisco a couple of months before that, he got seriously, seriously ill and I had to figure out someone to replace him. Guy Raz, a friend and fellow student of the Stoics stepped in. It was awesome, but very much not what I expected. And so, yeah, you gotta flow with it. You gotta dance with it. You also gotta be prepared for serious things to go wrong.

• 5:35Ryan Holiday?

  You gotta be prepared for the sudden attacks. You gotta be prepared for critics. You gotta be prepared for hecklers. You gotta be prepared for someone running the event to be a real jerk, right? You gotta be prepared for all of it. And you gotta have that sort of competitive drive, that urge to not be deterred, to wanna win, to wanna pull off this difficult thing that you're trying to pull off. And, and these are just, I don't know, some of the things I think about to kind of height myself up before I go. You know, I don't listen to beautiful classical music before I go on stage. I listen to heavy metal. I try to get into a sort of a vibe or a zone. It's funny, sometimes, you know, before the talk, the organizers wanna chat and I'm like,

• 6:19Ryan Holiday?

  no, like, I'm about to do something hard and I wanna get in the right headspace for this. It's a performance, but it's also a contest. It's a competition. It's a wrestling match. You're, you're having to win over the crowd. I think about it too. It's like, hey, obviously you guys are fans. I'm glad you're listening, but you know, most of the time when I'm talking, I'm not gonna be talking like to the audiences that I'm talking to, to in Rotterdam or London or Dublin or whatever. It's not my fans that I'm normally talking to. It's usually people at a company or people at a conference and I have to. I have to like win that audience over. I have to fight for their attention. And that's hard. It's harder to do when you're talking about an obscure school of ancient philosophy.

• 7:01Ryan Holiday?

  So I've always loved this idea. Marcus is fond of many metaphors and he talks about, you know, when you lose the rhythm, come back to it. So he also liked the idea of dance. And in his famous passage about waking up in the morning, you know, he talks about a dancer's art. So it's not like he was dismissive of these like, you know, fancy, non masculine dancers. He didn't think that at all. He knew what dance was and he knew that it was difficult. He was just saying like, look, life is a battle. Life is a contest. And this is why we have some of these martial metaphors in Marcus. We have, you know, wrestling metaphors, we have fighting metaphors, we have boxing metaphors. We have, you know, dueling metaphors. We have all this stuff because that's how the Stoics saw life.

• 7:43Ryan Holiday?

  It's a bit of a battle. And I think that's true. Anyways, I'm excited to see all of you. You can come out and see me. The tour dates are at ryanholiday.net/tour. If you came and saw me in Australia or saw Robert and I in Seattle and LA, it was awesome to see you. You can see the videos of those on the Daily Stoic YouTube, so I'll link to that. In the meantime, I'm going to go prep for this thing. I'm going to be dug in and ready for attacks. I hope nobody jumps up on stage and, you know, pulls a Chris Rock. But if they do, I'll be as ready as I can be. Be well, everyone.

• 8:15Ryan Holiday?

  Thanks so much for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. If you don't know this, you can get these delivered to you via email every day. Check it out, dailystoic.com/email.