It's Not What Happens. It's How You Bear It. | Ask Daily Stoic

It doesn't matter who you are, the facts are the same. Marcus Aurelius was Emperor. Epictetus was a slave. Two different fates, but the same reality. Most of life, most situations are out of our control. All we can do is respond to them well. All we can do is endure them.✉️ 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 See 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, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. But on Fridays, we not only read this daily meditation, but I try to answer some questions from listeners and fellow Stoics who are trying to apply this philosophy, whatever it is they happen to do. Sometimes these are from talks. Sometimes these are people who come up to talk to me on the street. Sometimes these are written in or emailed from listeners. But I hope in answering their questions, I can answer your questions, give a little more guidance on this philosophy we're all trying to follow.

• 0:50Ryan Holiday?

  It's not what happens, it's how you bear it. It doesn't matter who you are. The facts are the same. Marcus Aurelius was emperor. Epictetus was a slave. Two different fates, but the same reality. Most of life, most situations are out of our control. All we can do is respond to them well. All we can do is endure them. In December 1950, the United States was deep into the war in Korea. It seemed likely that the conflict would spiral out of control. What would happen next? What could one do? Was it hopeless? Whose fault was it? As Secretary of State Dean Aikerson struggled under this burden, he got a letter from his old friend, the foreign policy visionary, George Keenan.

• 1:35Ryan Holiday?

  It's advice that bucks you up whether you're fighting for the future of the free world or just trying to make it through high school. And here it is. "In international, as in private life, what counts most is not what happens to someone, but how he bears what happens to him. For this reason, almost everything depends from here on out on the manner in which we Americans bear what is unquestionably a major failure and disaster to our national fortunes. If we accept it with candor, with dignity, with a resolve to absorb its lessons and make it good by redoubled and determined effort, starting All over again, if necessary, along the pattern of Pearl Harbor. We need lose neither our self-confidence, nor our allies, nor our powers for bargaining.

• 2:18Ryan Holiday?

  But if we try to conceal from our own people, or from our allies, the full measure of our misfortune, or permit ourselves to seek relief in any reactions of bluster, or petulance, or hysteria, we can easily find this crisis resolving itself into an irreparable deterioration of our world position and of our confidence in ourselves. We've talked before about this kind of paradox in Stoicism. The Stoics were boldly optimistic and ruthlessly pragmatic. They always believed that they could endure the worst circumstances, and they accepted the brutal facts of those circumstances. They saw the unquestionable major disaster and the unprecedented major opportunity.

• 3:01Ryan Holiday?

  As I write in Lives of the Stoics, Zeno loses his entire fortune in a shipwreck, but by bearing this with grace and fortitude, he was able to discover a philosophy that changed the world. Marcus was the leader of Rome through a series of crises that matched Truman's: a war and a 15-year pandemic. Cato faced a republic on the brink of collapse. Seneca, Musonius, Rufus, Agrippinus, Rutilius, and Helvidius all were exiled. These were difficult moments, but they bore them well with confidence, dignity, candor, and most of all, unflappable perseverance. They might have temporarily bemoaned it, but they knew, as Epictetus knew, that becoming an Olympic class athlete takes sweat, so they stuck to it, just as you must.

• 3:45Ryan Holiday?

  I really do recommend Lives of the Stoics: The Art of Living, from Zeno to Marcus Aurelius. You see that the Stoics were just like you, just like us in this moment. They faced adversity, they faced it well, and they managed to learn real valuable lessons that they pass along to us in their writings. So you can check that out anywhere books are sold. Hope you like it. If you want to support the podcast, just check out the book.

• 4:16Speaker 01

  We should probably talk around Stoicism.

• 4:18Ryan Holiday?

  Okay.

• 4:18Speaker 01

  Because for me, I mean, in reading your other works, I know that that's kind of the foundation of baseline for so much of what it is you do. Number one, for those who don't know, what is it? Number two, and a burning question for me, how? Like, why? Like, how did this focus on philosophy and specifically the Stoics, especially for a 20-something-year-old guy, is mind-blowing to me? How does all of that come to be?

• 4:47Ryan Holiday?

  Well, to go to another sort of lesson you learn about the market is... So, I wrote "Trust Me, I'm Lying." It came out. It debuted on the bestseller list. It got a lot of attention, sold well. I did another book called "Growth Hacker Marketing," which is about sort of how startups market themselves. That did better than expected. And then, when I went to my publisher and I said, "Okay, for my next book, I want to write about an obscure school of ancient philosophy for which I did not study in school and have, you know, no credentials for," they were like, "Uh, okay." You know, they were not excited. And to be perfectly honest, they gave me less than half what I got paid for my first book.

• 5:32Ryan Holiday?

  That's not the direction you want to be going in as a creative. You don't want to be paid less as you go on. And so, and actually, I recently, I asked my editor, I had her on my podcast, and I said, "You know, what went through your mind as I came to you with this book?" And she said, "Honestly, we were just hoping you would get this out of your system. We hoped that, you know, you would write it and then you'd go back to doing what you obviously should be writing about, which is marketing books." And so, I had a sense of what I really wanted to do, and I also had a really strong sense of what the audience actually wanted. Because I'd been writing about Stoicism on my blog, and I'd studied it, and I could see that this was really actually helpful to people.

• 6:16Ryan Holiday?

  But it was a risk. I mean, a friend of mine, not a great friend, predicted that The Obstacle is the Way would sell 5,000 copies. You know, it sold over a million copies and it's in 30 languages. So there's a lesson, I learned this in Hollywood, it comes from William Goldman, the screenwriter. He says, "Nobody knows anything. At the end of the day, nobody knows anything about what's gonna work." Which means you might as well trust yourself, right? You might as well, you know, trust your gut if you've earned that trust. So I came up with the idea to do that book and there was a lot of obstacles and it ended up ironically doing well, a book about obstacles. But to me, what Stoicism is about and why it's resonated

• 7:00Ryan Holiday?

  is that it goes to the fundamental realities of what it means to be a human or a entrepreneur, a business executive, or, you know, a person alive during a pandemic. Stoicism is basically the idea that we don't control what happens to us, but we control how we respond. And so Stoicism is a philosophy built around how to respond. There's four virtues in Stoicism: courage, justice, wisdom, and self-discipline. And so I just had the sense that this really ancient set of ideas, this way of living, which dates back to Zeno, who I was telling you about, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Seneca, Cato.

• 7:44Ryan Holiday?

  Maybe you've heard of some of these figures, maybe you haven't. But these were real people who were using these ideas in a real, difficult world. I just had the, I had the sense that life is still life, things are still unpredictable. How do we, how do we deal with that? That's the journey we're all on. And so what I wanted to do was translate those ideas into a modern kind of business context.

• 8:11Speaker 01

  So I still gotta dig a little further. How? How does this happen? Like, how does Ryan Holiday wake up and say, "Stoicism, I've gotta go study this ancient philosophy. I've gotta read Meditations and I gotta understand Aurelius. Then I'm gonna not only understand it, I'm gonna go write The Obstacle is the Way, based around all of this understanding." Like, how does that happen? Was it an influence? Was it something you read? Was it a feeling you always had throughout your life? Like, what drove that? What made that grow passion?

• 8:40Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I told you about that story about Zeno, him sort of going up and asking, you know, "Where can I find someone like that?" And that was kind of the journey I was on. I was at a, I went to a conference, sort of like this one, when I was in college. And I went up to this speaker and I just said, "Hey, um, do you have any book recommendations?" Like, I just said, "Hey, what are you reading? Is there anything that might work for me?" And the speaker recommended Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. And I, I actually went back to my hotel room and I bought those books. And then I read them. Um, you know, you were joking, you're like, "Some people might be ordering these books right now." Or, you know, they were supposed to read them.

• 9:20Ryan Holiday?

  Uh, you know, life is defined by not the opportunities we're given, but the opportunities we take advantage of. Um, I think even Marcus Aurelius, um, you know, somebody loans him a copy of Epictetus, a Greek slave or a Roman slave who, who, uh, comes to study philosophy. Um, you know, he didn't have to read it, right? Like, how many books sit unopened on people's nightstands? Or, you know, sit, you know, gathering dust on somebody's bookshelf? So for me, it was the ask, but that's only like 1% of the equation. The 99 that counts is, I read the book and I listened to it.

• 10:02Ryan Holiday?

  And then I followed, that, that started me on a journey, right? And then a lot of people read something and go, "Oh, I heard about that. That's interesting." But do you really go down the rabbit hole? Do you commit? Like, are you in charge of your education? Or are you just letting things happen to you, you know? So for, for me at that age, I think it was, I had a lot of questions. I had a lot of things I wanted to learn. But I also had the drive and the discipline to really commit myself to it and to follow it where it led.

• 10:33Speaker 01

  So you, you come out and you write Optimal, right? So that was the first, I mean, as you start studying Stoicism, Optimal is the way is, is the obstacle you choose to go tackle, write that book about Stoicism. It forces you to learn even more than you probably bargained for, at least initially. What, uh, what lessons did you, did you gather in writing the book and putting that book together and going through the process? What did you learn? What did that book teach you?

• 11:01Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I think, I think one of the things I learned on, on that book, just from, from like a market, let's, let's call it a marketing and messaging standpoint. I was like, I'm fascinated with Stoicism. I've read all these books about Stoicism. I want to teach people Stoicism. So I went and I read all the books about Stoicism. Like I read the books of Stoicism, like the ancient texts, and then I read all the more modern books. And what I found over and over again, why they were so uninteresting to me, is that they were just repeating, they'd be like, and then Seneca said this, and then Marcus said this, and they, it was a lot of analysis, right? And I, I thought, but that's not, that's not why people read books. People read books for stories, right? People try to learn.

• 11:46Ryan Holiday?

  And that was actually something that I got from Robert Greene. Robert Greene's books are the laws of power illustrated by history, right? And, and so when I decided to write about Stoicism, what I, I tried a lot of things that, that didn't work first, as I, you know, experimented and tinkered until I came to the right format, was, oh, okay, the way to teach these ideas is not to explain them, it's to illustrate them. There's a reason Jesus speaks in parables, you know, there's a reason that, uh, what we remember are anecdotes and jokes and stories, not facts and figures. And so what I tried to build that book around was an illustration of the ideas.

• 12:31Ryan Holiday?

  And I think that's why it resonated. Not just in a way people didn't expect, but it resonated with people who they were like, not only have I not read any books about philosophy, they're like, I haven't read a book since high school. You know, you want your thing to be accessible. Ideally, you want to crack an audience. Like, I didn't want to write a book that competed with all the other philosophy books. That's a market like this big, right? I wanted to write a book that made philosophy interesting to people who thought philosophy was inaccessible to them.

• 13:04Speaker 01

  So if you have read, or even if you haven't read "Obstacles the Way", what are, you know, if I crack that book open, which ironically it is on my bed, my desk next to my bed, because I left it there and grabbed the other ones. So I cracked it open to prepare for these conversations. But what are the one or two takeaways that you want your reader to draw from that specific book?

• 13:31Ryan Holiday?

  He says, "Objective judgment now at this very moment, unselfish action now at this very moment, willing acceptance now at this very moment." He says, "That's all that you need." To me, that's the perfect encapsulation of what Stoicism is about, and it's actually the formula for overcoming obstacles, but it's also the formula for enduring success and for anything. It's, you know, how do you see things clearly? How do you take action, but not any action, the right action? And then also, how do you bring the determination and perseverance and grit, you know, required to triumph over the inevitable obstacles and difficulty? That's what Stoicism is about.

• 14:16Ryan Holiday?

  And so the book is split up into three disciplines, the discipline of perception, the discipline of action, and the discipline of will. And it's illustrated with stories or people who actually did that in moments that are like ones we've all experienced and then moments, you know, way beyond anything any of us have ever experienced.

• 14:43Ryan Holiday?

  That's my Memento Mori coin. I think about it all the time. I'm playing with it on my desk right now. It's something I carry always. It's probably the thing I get asked about the most when I bump into people in public. It's just been a game changer for me. I have a bunch of different Memento Mori reminders, of course, but if you want to get this one, which we make here in the US in a mint in Minnesota that's been in business since 1882, you can check it out in the Daily Stoic store. Or if you're in Bastrop, you can stop by my bookstore here, The Painted Porch on Main Street, where we sell them as well. It's a game changer. Check it out.