It's the Little Moments That Make the Big Lessons

In today's episode, Ryan reads his recent article about the lessons we can learn from the smallest moments in the lives of the philosophers and scholars who inspire us. Read the article here: https://ryanholiday.net/study/Get Lives of the Stoics: https://dailystoic.com/livesThis episode is brought to you by Amazon Alexa. Amazon Alexa is the perfect system to use to set up your house with Smart Home functionality—and with the new Amazon Smart Lighting Bundle, it’s easy to get started. Just connect your Amazon Echo Dot with your first Sengled color changing light bulb and you’re on your way. Visit Amazon.com/dailystoic to get 20% off the bundle.***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 @DailyStoic: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.

• 0:04Ryan Holiday?

  Bienvenidos a la edición de fin de semana del diario estoico. Cada viernes, te traemos una meditación inspirada por los antiguos estoicos, algo que puede ayudarte a vivir los cuatro virtudes estoicas de coraje, justicia, sabiduría y temperance. Y aquí, en el fin de semana, nos sumamos a un profundismo en esos mismos temas. entrevistamos filósofos estoicos, nos reflejamos, nos preparamos, pensamos profundamente sobre los problemas desafiantes de nuestro tiempo y trabajamos en esta filosofía de una manera que es más posible aquí cuando no estamos ruidos de trabajar o de llevar a los niños a la escuela, cuando tenemos el tiempo para pensar, para ir por un caminato, para sentarnos con nuestros diarios

• 0:48Ryan Holiday?

  y para prepararnos para lo que traerá el futuro.

• 0:55Ryan Holiday?

  Es de los pequeños momentos que aprendes las grandes lecciones. Eso es lo que vamos a hablar hoy. Estoy emocionado de que "Lives of the Stokes" está ahora publicado. Pero quería llegar a la idea clave de este libro, que vamos a entrar en ahora mismo. Pero es algo que pienso mucho. Siento que la mayoría de las cosas que noto cuando leo libros, cuando hago mi marginalidad, cuando estoy transfiriendo cosas de un libro que leí a mi libro común, va a ser algo a lo largo de lo que vamos a hablar hoy. "Eventos pequeños, un solo momento, un simple intercambio y una decisión inindudable.

• 1:39Ryan Holiday?

  Esto es lo que cambia el mundo. En un día afortunado en el cuarto siglo de B.C., después de una desastrosa viaje en el Mediterráneo, un comerciante llamado Zeno despeinó Penilis en Atenas. Podría haber desaparecido. En cambio, estudió filosofía y terminó fundando la Escuela de Stoicismo. "Hice una viaje prospera", diría más tarde, "cuando sufriera un desastre de barco". In the first century BCE, Pompey tried to corrupt Marcus Porcius Cato by dangling a marriage alliance. "Go and tell Pompey," Cato said, "that Cato is not to be captured by the way of women's apartments." A few years later, his daughter collaborating in an attempt to overthrow Julius Caesar would

• 2:23Ryan Holiday?

  stab herself in the leg to test her ability to withstand torture. Able to successfully bear the pain, she and her husband Brutus went ahead with the conspiracy. Several generations would pass and eventually place Marcus Aurelius at the head of the Roman Empire. A friend stopped Marcus as he was leaving his home one morning. "Where are you going?" he said. "To handle business?" No, Marcus was on his way to attend a philosophy lecture. "Learning is a good thing, even for one who is growing old," Marcus said. "From Sextus the philosopher, I shall learn that which I do not yet know." These little moments, these are insights into the lives of what made the greats great.

• 3:07Ryan Holiday?

  This, the great moral biographer Plutarch would say, is why you often learn more from a single anecdote than a sweeping historical portrait. Unlike the biographers of our time who published big, thick books published with footnotes and postmodern digressions, Plutarch included only the essence of great men and women so that he might inspire us to follow in their footsteps. He was obsessed by what we could learn from the figures he wrote about. "It's not histories I am writing," Plutarch would say, "but lives. And in the most glorious deeds, there is not always an indication of virtue or vice. Indeed, a small thing like a phrase or a jest often makes a greater revelation of character than battles where thousands die."

• 3:52Ryan Holiday?

  This distinction is core to Stoicism. "Study the philosopher," they said, "not the philosophy." Unlike the so-called pen and ink philosophers, as the type was known even 2,000 years ago, the Stoics said to pay not so much attention to what philosophers had thought or written, because what counts is what they do: the choices they made, the causes they served, the principles They adhered to in the face of adversity, cared about what you did, not what you said. "Don't talk about your philosophy," Epictetus would say, "embody it." And that's why he would become so frustrated with his students who congratulated themselves on being able to read the obscure writings of Chrysippus. They were missing the point. Philosophy wasn't about big words or complicated texts. It was about applying concepts to the real world.

• 4:38Ryan Holiday?

  It was about living a happy and resilient and purposeful life. "I know," Seneca wrote in a book on mercy written for the young Emperor Nero, "that the Stoics have a bad reputation among the uninformed for being too callous and therefore unlikely to give good advice to kings and princes. They're blamed for asserting that the wise man does not feel pity and does not forgive. In fact, no philosophical school is kindler and gentler, nor more loving of humankind and more attentive to the common good, to the degree that its very purpose is to be useful, bring assistance, and consider the interest not only of itself as a school, but of all people individually and collectively." And of course, this is the model that I tried to base Lives of the Stoics on.

• 5:23Ryan Holiday?

  We wanted to pour over the ancient texts and modern scholarship to bring you not necessarily biographies of the figures, but lives. We had an eye on practical application and advice. We wanted to leave the reader not only with facts and figures, but a fuller sense of the essence, the aspects of their lives that teach us the most about the art of living. Because this is what I focus on when I read. The only reason to study philosophy, it's to be a better person. "Anything else," as Nietzsche would say, "is merely a critique of words by means of other words. It's empty talk." Schopenhauer called this "fencing in the mirror."

• 6:07Ryan Holiday?

  This, unfortunately, though, is the role that philosophy plays for many people in the modern world. Today, it's about what smart people say, what big words they use, what paradoxes and riddles they can baffle us with. And no wonder we dismiss it as impractical. To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, Thoreau would say. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically. That's what the Stoics were after, what we remain interested in to this day. Lights to illuminate the path. They wanted to know, as we want to know, how to find tranquility, purpose, self-control, and happiness. And that journey, whether it begins in ancient Greece or modern America, is timeless. It's essential. It's difficult.

• 6:52Ryan Holiday?

  Which is why we ask, as the Stoics ask, who can help me? What is right? What is true north? "You've wandered all over," Marcus Aurelius wrote to himself in Meditations, "and finally realized that you never found what you were after, how to live, not in syllogisms, not in money, or fame, or self-indulgence, nowhere." If philosophy is anything, it's an answer to that question, how to live. It's what we've been looking for. Would you ask what philosophy offers to humanity? Seneca asks in Letters of a Stoic, "Philosophy offers counsel." Seneca would say that this was the most powerful lesson he learned from his childhood tutor, Attalus, the Stoic, that the purpose of studying philosophy,

• 7:35Ryan Holiday?

  of reading about the great men and women who lived and died before us, of learning about the simple question that Zeno asked, the small decision that Cato made, that one passage that guided Marcus. What Seneca said he learned from Attalus was to take away from him one good thing every day that he should return home a sounder man or on the way to becoming sounder. We must heed this counsel and struggle with what Seneca described as our most important job, the act of turning words into works in the real world, to study the lives of the men and women who came before us. The same reason that Plutarch did, and he wrote about the Stoics too. He wanted to turn the lessons of their lives, their living and their dying, their succeeding and their failings, into actions in the real world.

• 8:20Ryan Holiday?

  For it is this and nothing else that earns one the title philosopher. So again, that's why I read so many biographies. That's why I love obituaries. That's why I love... Even podcasts, I love hearing these anecdotes. And I feel like the commonplace book that I keep, even the note cards that I create, and then the books that I write, are built around these anecdotes. I'm collecting these stories, these quips, these quotes, these little ideas, because then I can incorporate and build on them, not just in my writing, although that's where I use them professionally. But it's so I can use them in my life, so I can think about how they responded. And this is really an ancient idea.

• 9:05Ryan Holiday?

  I mean, it's funny, when you study Cato, for instance, and then you study the American Revolution, you realize a lot of these famous lines in the American Revolution, "Give me liberty, give me death, I regret I only have one life to lose for my country." These were quips from Cato that the founders had heard in plays or in books, and they were reusing. And so there's a reason we collect this information, why we look at these little moments, because it turns out, they actually teach big, big lessons. And that's what I wanted to remind you about today. Maybe the little quips from Zeno about how he took a prosperous voyage when he suffered a shipwreck, or Marcus Aurelius about going off and learning that which he does not yet know. Maybe that will stick with you.

• 9:47Ryan Holiday?

  Or maybe just the distinction from Plutarch about the difference between biography and life, that will stay with you. Or maybe the idea of a commonplace will stick with you. I don't know. But the idea is, we look for these little things. And Aseneca says, if we just get one every day, it adds up to something really special and really meaningful. So that's the idea. If you haven't checked out Lives of the Stoics yet, I hope you do. It's out in stores everywhere, getting a great response from people. I appreciate it. Lives of the Stoics, The Art of Living from Zeno to Marcus Aurelius. Check it out. We'll talk soon. If you like the podcast that we do here, and you want to get it via email every morning, you can sign up at dailystoic.com/email.