Daily Stoic Sundays: Four Strategies for Reading Better

Ryan talks about how you can improve your reading skill and get more from the books you love. 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.

• 0:04Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Sunday edition of the Daily Stoic Podcast. My name's Ryan Holiday. For over a decade, I've been writing and thinking and talking about Stoicism. And so each Sunday now, we're going to be rolling out a special episode that will be either me riffing on a number of topics, maybe me riffing or expanding on an article that I've written, or deep diving into an idea that I think's important, that I think you'll benefit from. So I hope you like it. Support our sponsors who make this episode possible. And of course, keep studying, keep reading, and thank you. I'm in the middle of rereading Seneca's Letters. I first read Seneca's Letters when I was in college.

• 0:49Ryan Holiday?

  I bought Letters of a Stoic, the Penguin Classics Edition. This would have been 2006, 2007. And I've reread it a bunch of times now. I'm actually in the middle of going through this one. This is a new translation for me. This is the Loeb edition. And the reason I'm rereading it is that it's been a while since I read it, and I wanted to go back to something that had been so influential to me. There's this great line, it actually appears in Marcus Aurelius's Meditations. He says, "No man steps in the same river twice." And the idea being that although it's the same book, I've changed, the world has changed, even in the 10 years, maybe a little bit, how people see Seneca has changed. And so I'm getting all sorts of new things from it.

• 1:31Ryan Holiday?

  So you can like, look at my notes here, all these different pages. Like, I folded all these pages. It's filled with writing. You wouldn't think it would be filled with writing and observations, given that I've already read it, given that I've written books about Seneca. But I'm getting something new out of it. And that's really the importance of rereading. And Seneca himself, he talks about this in one of the early letters, which I was just rereading. He talks about how he's suspicious of people who read... Only very widely, who sort of flit from book to book. He's saying that you actually have to sort of dwell on a number of master thinkers. And that the more times you read them, the deeper you go into the material, the more that sort of gets absorbed into your system and the more, ideally, this is the whole

• 2:15Ryan Holiday?

  point of reading and philosophy is to turn words into works. So if you're just accumulating as much words, as many words as possible, you're not doing it. It's about training, it's about muscle memory, it's about absorbing it into your soul. Each year, I set out with a list of four or five books that I'm going to reread in that year. Sometimes they're novels, sometimes, like this year, one of them is to reread some of Seneca's letters. I set out to reread books that I think I've either drifted a little bit away from, that I think I might have a different take from, maybe I was just so fond of, I have such fond memories of, I want to sort of reengage with. The idea is I'm actively seeking out books on a regular basis to reread, to sort of

• 2:56Ryan Holiday?

  step in that river again and see how much it's changed and see how much I've changed. This is Fahrenheit 451, you know, this is my copy, I bought this in high school, I had to read it for class. And then about three or four years ago, I was like, I haven't read that book in a while, I wonder, you know, I'm gonna reread it. And it's like, when I'd read it the first time, I interpreted it as this idea of a book about censorship, about how government censors and keeps information from the people. But I realized that I totally missed the point when I'd read it when I was in ninth or 10th grade. Actually, Fahrenheit 451 is about how we censor ourselves. He talks about how that censorship came from the bottom up. It was people not wanting to offend other people or be offended by other people that led to the book burnings.

• 3:38Ryan Holiday?

  So I kind of had an idea, this totalitarian Nazi-esque system, and it's the opposite of that, it's much closer to where we are now with this sort of political correctness that we see. And so you realize that even if you took something from a book, you might have gotten the totally opposite meaning. Or maybe, maybe what you thought then was right, but now you've changed or now things have changed. So the more you interact with material, the more interpretations you're gonna get out of it. One of my other favorite books is This is Steven Pressfield's War of Art. My copy of this book is, you know, 10, 12, 13 years old now. And it's filled with all sorts of different notations and, you know, things that I took from it. Because when I read it at 19, you know, I didn't know anything. I hadn't written anything.

• 4:22Ryan Holiday?

  It's actually a book I try to reread as I'm starting out with each new creative process. It's like a kick in the pants. It's inspirational. I'm trying to take it to a higher level with each book. So, you know, I have books that I reread each time. One of the other books I reread, I read Tolstoy's Calendar of Wisdom every year. I'm on my, I think, two and a half years in. And I'm hoping to, you know, have 100 more reads of that book, right? Each time I read it and I notice things that I missed the first time, or I notice things that I feel differently about the second time. The more you engage with the material, the more you will come away with. Epictetus is like, the philosophers were not content with mere learning, but you have to add practice and training.

• 5:05Ryan Holiday?

  Too easily we forget what we learn and it just sort of goes in one ear and out the other. And so what rereading is really about is about taking our understanding of the ideas to the next level. So I've probably read Meditations 100 times. I've probably personally typed out almost every passage in that book at one time or another. I've done it by hand. I've done it for social media quotes. I've done it for passages in my own writing. I'm just constantly interacting with this material. And the things that I took from Marcus Aurelius's Meditations when I was 19 is different than what I took from it when I was 29. And hopefully it will be very different than what I take from it when I'm 39, if I'm lucky to live that long. The text stays the same, but we change.

• 5:48Ryan Holiday?

  And so I just find something very satisfying. And even when I am rereading the same version of an old text, even noticing what I marked before, noticing what I didn't mark before, how I could have missed things. Sometimes I even sort of get glimpses or feelings of like what mood I was in when I must have read it the first time, what I was eating, like from the food that I spilled in it. It's just this deeper relationship to the material that's really, really important. In the ancient world, you gotta realize, like, they didn't have access to unlimited amounts of books. They didn't have audible subscriptions. They didn't have scribd. You know, they didn't have a library they could go to check out books. So they were forced to have a much deeper relationship with the material. These books were precious items. They didn't take for granted.

• 6:33Ryan Holiday?

  They didn't read a few pages and then move on, right? They didn't speed read through them. They dove deep into the text. They memorized them. You know, in meditations, you see even all the kinds of quotes that Marcus Aurelius is pulling likely from memory, from his deep reading of other material that he's poured over himself. And so, you know, don't be content to just read something once, but read it over and over and over again. You fully have to absorb the material. You've got to become one with it. It's got to become one with you. And then you have to change and go out and experience things, and then come back to the material and engage in that process over and over again. By the way, if you are looking to take your reading to the next level, this thing we're

• 7:17Ryan Holiday?

  talking about here, that sort of active rereading strategy, is something we talk a lot about in our reading course. You can check it out. It's the Read to Lead course from Daily Stoic. Harry Truman said that not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers. You have to be. I think reading should be an active practice. It's a skill you have to be getting good at. You have to invest in. You have to train yourself in. And so you've got some of our best strategies there, inspired by the Stoics, inspired by my practices, inspired by some of the experts we talked about. You can check that out, dailystoic.com/read. Thanks for listening to today's Daily Stoic podcast. I've got really great news. The ebook of The Obstacle is the Way is currently on sale for $199 on Amazon. It's got great stories about wisdom, how we take the things that life throws at us.

• 8:02Ryan Holiday?

  We see them not as obstacles, but as opportunities, how we make what is in the way, the way. The book is $199 as an ebook in the US right now. I'm really excited. Every time we do this, a whole bunch of new people come in. So if you haven't read the book and you want to give it a try, it will never be cheaper than this. Or if there's someone you know that would benefit from it, maybe you could gift it to them. So check that out on Amazon, or you can follow us on social media and get a link to it. But the book in the US on Amazon, $199 as an ebook. I think also iBooks and the other book platforms. So check it out.