You Can’t Help But Leave a Piece | Ask Daily Stoic

Every “yes” is a trade. Every obligation takes its cut. Every distraction leaves with something. 🎟️ DAILY STOIC LIVE https://www.dailystoiclive.com/| Ryan Holiday is coming to a city near you https://www.dailystoiclive.com/! Grab tickets here https://www.dailystoiclive.com/ | https://www.dailystoiclive.com/ 🎙️ AD-FREE https://dailystoic.supercast.com/| Support the podcast and go deeper into Stoicism by subscribing to The Daily Stoic Premium https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ - unlock ad-free listening, early access, and bonus content: https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ 🎥 VIDEO EPISODES https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos| 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 ✉️ FREE STOIC WISDOM https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail | 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 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.

• 0:00Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

• 0:14Ryan Holiday?

  You can't help but leave a piece. It was just a long meeting. It was a lazy period. You got distracted. You were waiting for something better. You did it because you didn't know how to say no. The excuses we make for doing things we have no business doing. As Seneca points out, we aren't paying for these excuses with the most precious resource we have, our time. Look back at those periods, those obligations you unthinkingly said yes to. And what do you see trailing behind you? It's your life. Remember, whatever it is, however long or short it is, we are giving up something we can never get back. You can never, ever leave, as the song lyrics go,

• 0:59Ryan Holiday?

  without leaving a piece of youth. And not just our youth, but our children's youth, and just as easily our golden years or any period of our brief existence. And this is why we have to be wise enough to know what's worth doing and what isn't. Why we have to be confident enough to say no, courageous enough to change course when necessary, honest enough to stop pretending the thing we're doing isn't costing us anything. Because every day we are spending time. Every yes is a trade. Every obligation takes its cut. Every distraction leaves with something. The question is not whether we will leave pieces of ourselves behind. The question is whether we are leaving them with people and places that matter.

• 1:54Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I'm going to bring you a couple of the questions that the folks at the Melbourne Town Hall asked me back in 2024. I can't wait to go back to Australia. The kids are very excited. And I hope to see you while I'm there. You can grab tickets at Daily Stoic Live. It'll be Auckland on October 13th, Sydney on the 16th, Melbourne on the 18th, Brisbane on the 20th, and Perth on the 21st. I haven't been to Perth in quite some time, so I'm very excited to go back to Perth. Anyways, hope to see you in Australia.

• 2:29Speaker 01

  Ryan, your content's brought me a lot of peace. One of the questions that I had through learning more about the philosophy of the Stoics was the phrase "know yourself" or "know thyself."

• 2:41Ryan Holiday?

  Uh huh.

• 2:42Speaker 01

  I wonder if you can maybe comment a little bit about that phrase and I guess the teachings from the Stoics when it comes to that.

• 2:49Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, that comes from the Oracle of Delphi and is adopted by Socrates as his motto: "Know thyself." Know what you don't know, know your biases, know your weaknesses, know your strengths. The idea of some semblance of self-awareness to me is a key attribute in the pursuit of philosophy. If you don't ultimately take from this a sense of who you are, your values, your weaknesses, what are you doing? Why learn the names of all these philosophers? Why learn these quotes?

• 3:34Ryan Holiday?

  Why learn these ideas if it doesn't, in the end, get you a little bit closer to understanding yourself and what you're capable of doing? That's kind of how I think about that.

• 3:46Speaker 02

  G'day, Ryan, up here. Got a queue happening up here.

• 3:49Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 3:49Speaker 02

  Question for you. There was an essay done in the 1940s by Albert Camus called "The Myth of Sisyphus", in which he finishes the essay saying, "One must imagine Sisyphus as happy," in that "the pursuit towards the heights should fill a man's heart." How much of a parallel between what Camus was talking about, which is absurdism, in which we kind of go from this sine wave between happiness to despair across our lifetime, has a parallel to Stoicism?

• 4:25Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I think there's a fair amount of overlap. One must imagine Sisyphus happy. He is detached from the outcome, the idea of ever achieving or fulfilling the thing, and he is simply doing it. And he is, on this other level, had to accept an unfair, even onerous fate, which, to me, I think, sort of encapsulates some fundamental element of what the Stoics have to do. Marcus Aurelius doesn't want to be emperor. We get the sense that it's not a thing he found particularly fulfilling or fun. In a sense, that's good.

• 5:07Ryan Holiday?

  The people who really want lots of power are usually the people you don't want to have or give lots of power to. So there was kind of an acceptance or resignation to the reality of, you know, the hand that life had played him. And then the converse of this is Epictetus, who, instead of being blessed with power and abundance and wealth of things Marcus Aurelius finds so troublesome, gets the opposite of all those things. And yet, he has to find a way to find freedom and fulfillment and peace inside that, too. And to me, there's something about the two great Stoics being on total opposite ends of the social hierarchy.

• 5:50Ryan Holiday?

  One has extreme abundance, the other has extreme adversity and difficulty. And yet, they both come to the same fundamental understanding of life and meaning. That, to me, is the essence of what Stoic philosophy is.

• 6:06Speaker 03

  Thanks, Ryan. Thank you so much for writing all the books, please. "Ego is the enemy" changed my life in many ways. And when I get angry, my kids say to me, "Marcus Aurelius is watching you, so don't let him go." So I just want to ask you, like, work-life balance is a thing which is, like, everybody talks about that.

• 6:28Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 6:29Speaker 03

  And people say that to stay happy, you need to have work-life balance.

• 6:32Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 6:33Speaker 03

  But there are professions where sometimes it is hard to achieve on many days. What are the main principles of Stoicism which those people can apply when they can't achieve work-life balance to stay happy?

• 6:47Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 6:49Ryan Holiday?

  Without that work-life balance, I think we burn ourselves out. We spin off the planet. We neglect our other responsibilities and obligations. It can be hard. I mean, Marx really said in Meditations, he's talking about how people who love what they do wear themselves down doing it. They forget to wash and eat and sleep. It's true, he says that, but he also says later, maybe correcting for that overcorrection, he says, you know, "Don't be all about business." You know, he talks about finding stillness and peace. And clearly, relationships are really important to him. So I like the idea of balance. Maybe tension is another word, that these things are in tension or in opposition for each other. And you find, you know, maybe you go too far in one direction, you gotta correct a little bit.

• 7:34Ryan Holiday?

  You go too far in the other direction, you gotta correct a little bit. To me, it's a constant sort of recalibration, especially because it's not like your family is this stagnant thing, right? What your kids need when they're two is different than what they need when they're 20. You know, their school schedule is different, their emotional needs are different. So understanding that there's kind of seasons to these things. I keep, every time I feel like I figure out the perfect schedule, the perfect, you know, list of priorities, what they want from me changes. Or, you know, how bedtime goes changes, or they wake up sick, or then they have to change schools.

• 8:14Ryan Holiday?

  So it is, to me, just a constant process of figuring it out, as opposed to having figured it out. There is no singular balance. You're just always adjusting and figuring out the scales to get closer to what, you know, you and they need in that moment.

• 8:30Speaker 04

  Maybe you will say that this question is some sort of contradictory to the nature of the socialistism, but I'm wondering, do you think that this system has the capacity to become a social movement, or even a sort of political movement?

• 8:47Ryan Holiday?

  Look, in the ancient world, Stoicism was kind of the civic religion of Rome. It was what the educated and sort of ruling classes ascribes to and understood and tried to live and act by. I think it's funny when people talk about sort of the popularity of Stoicism now. I mean, most people have never even heard of it. Most people think of it as the kind of, you know, the lowercase stoic of that, you know, has no emotions. I think there's, we're still in the very early days of all the people that could benefit from it and could apply it. I think we'd be better if more people knew it and more people tried to apply it. Obviously, that's what I'm trying to do in my books.

• 9:31Ryan Holiday?

  But mostly, I'm just trying to figure these things out for myself. And as I said, the books sort of come out as the other side of that. And what people take from them or use them, I'll leave to them.