You Can’t Freeze Up | Turn Words Into Works

“Where this goes and what will happen is impossible to ascertain. The only certainty over the next few months and possibly years is uncertainty. But there is one thing you can bet on for sure: There will be a lot of decisions to make. A lot of things to do. It’s going to be essential that you don’t freeze up. You cannot become paralyzed. It is the surest way to defeat and failure.”Ryan discusses the importance of facing what life brings you with courage, and reads this week's meditation from The Daily Stoic Journal, on today’s Daily Stoic Podcast. We created the New Year, New You Challenge to help you create a better life, and a new you in 2021. Sign up for the challenge at https://dailystoic.com/challenge.***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 Daily Stoic: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?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Each day, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, illustrated with stories from history, current events, and literature to help you be better at what you do. And at the beginning of the week, we try to do a deeper dive, setting a kind of Stoic intention for the week, something to meditate on, something to think on, something to leave you with, to journal about, whatever it is you happen to be doing. So let's get into it.

• 0:33Ryan Holiday?

  You can't freeze up. Where this goes and what will happen is impossible to ascertain. The only certainty over the next few months and possibly years is uncertainty. But there is one thing you can bet on for sure. There will be a lot of decisions to make, a lot of things to do. It's going to be essential that you don't freeze up. You cannot become paralyzed. It is the surest way to defeat and failure. Remember to the Stoics, the essential virtue was courage. Courage doesn't mean you're not scared. Courage means you proceed despite being scared. Courage means you keep going. It means you don't get discouraged, even when things are hard, when other people are falling down around you, when it's been a

• 1:18Ryan Holiday?

  long time since you heard anything resembling good news. Cato was there when the Roman Republic was in its death throes. Marcus lived through the plague, as we have written about. Seneca and Musonius and Epictetus were exiled and witnessed Nero's tyranny and insanity. The later Stoics, from George Washington to James Stockdale, experienced extreme stress and adversity. When all this was thrown at these Stoics, they didn't freeze, they didn't despair, they found confidence in their training. They broke their very big and very complex problems down into smaller, more manageable pieces. They kept going, they stayed true, they fought, they thought about other people than themselves.

• 2:01Ryan Holiday?

  No one can tell you what the next few months will bring you. It could be surprisingly good news, or it could be worse news than we can even conceive of right now. All that we can know for sure, all that is in our control, is what we bring to what life brings us. We can't freeze up. We can't fail our ideals. We must show up with courage. We must get serious. We must be our best selves. History demands it. Our fellow citizens need it. Your philosophy has trained you for it.

• 2:38Ryan Holiday?

  Turn Words Into Works Marcus spent a great deal of time on his journals, yet within their pages, we find him admonishing himself to throw them away, to never read their pages. Why? Because he didn't want them to be an excuse from the essential tasks at hand. The art of living will never be found anywhere but in our own efforts to be a good person. Never forget that that is the aim of this writing, of this podcast. It is not to fill up pages with pretty thoughts, but to inspire you to take action to turn the words, as Seneca said, into works. In that, we have the perfect place to end the year, which is with the

• 3:21Ryan Holiday?

  ultimate Stoic prompt, to get active in your own rescue. Stop wandering about. You aren't likely to read your own notebooks, or ancient histories, or the anthologies you've collected to enjoy in your old age. Get busy with life's purpose. Toss aside empty hopes. Get active in your own rescue, if you care for yourself at all, and do it while you can. Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, 3, 14.

• 3:52Ryan Holiday?

  You have proof in the extent of your wanderings that you never found the art of living anywhere, not in logic, not in wealth, not in fame, or in any indulgence. Nowhere. Where is it, then, in doing what nature demands? How is a person to do this? By having principles be the source of desire and action. What principles? Those to do with good and evil. Indeed, in the belief that there is no good for a human being except... What creates justice, self-control, courage, and freedom, and nothing evil except which destroys those things. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 8:1. All study of philosophy and reading should be

• 4:32Ryan Holiday?

  for the purpose of living a happy life. We should seek precepts to help us, noble and courageous words that can become facts. We should learn them in a way that words become works. So here we are at the end of the year, maybe the end of the year of a year of Stoic study for you. Maybe you picked up the Daily Stoic, maybe started listening to this podcast, maybe it's another year. But the point is, it's a great time to stop and reflect and think, okay, what are the results, right? What am I getting? I sign my copies of Lives of the Stoics, which we sell in the store, or when I do signings, although I haven't done any signings because I can't go

• 5:15Ryan Holiday?

  anywhere. Deeds, not words. Because that's what Stoicism is really about. It's about applying the ideas to life, right? Theodore Roosevelt said, "I have always had a horror of words not turned into deeds." Indeed, that's something that keeps me up at night, right? I write about this stuff. I have the privilege of having this podcast and being able to philosophize as a profession, as it were. But what really matters to me is, how am I getting better at this in my own life, right? How am I getting better at applying them in my own life, with my temper, with my ambition, with my desires? How am I getting better at applying these things

• 5:57Ryan Holiday?

  in the real world? And I do, when I look back at where I was at my early twenties to where I am now, I like that trajectory. More importantly, I hope that if I'm patient, if I keep going, I like where that's going, right? The Stoics were not theoretical philosophers, and you can't be one either. This is about applying this stuff in the real world. It's about applying it in life, in your life, big and small. And, look, the last year, this pandemic, this political division, these crises we're experiencing, these have been opportunities to try these things. That's why I was so heartened by the fundraiser we did for Feeding America, where

• 6:41Ryan Holiday?

  we tried to raise, you know, $20,000.

• 6:45Ryan Holiday?

  To provide something like 200,000 meals for people who are struggling because of the pandemic. Well, together, we raised 100 plus thousand dollars or a million meals. And it was wonderful to see, oh, okay, we're talking about sympathy. We're talking about acts for the common good. We're talking about helping each other. And people really got it. Like, you guys got it. You saw what this is about. It's about doing something, right? It's not about talking about, it's about doing something. And that's something I'm, you know, I'm working on in my life. Again, it's easy to talk about generosity. It's harder to be generous when it's coming out of your wallet. But this is the work that we're doing, right? It's easy to talk about managing your temper and then you get frustrated and you go, where did that come from?

• 7:29Ryan Holiday?

  But, but how can, how can that be less and less each time? Right? So this idea of the words becoming works. How are you applying the philosophy? And I think that's maybe something to take a minute and sort of sit down and journal about and think about. How are you using this, right? How is it, how are you applying it? What action steps are you taking? What's your plan for the year? And what can you do about that plan right now? So like when we do the new year, new year challenge, right? A lot of people sign up for it, right? A lot of people open the emails. Not everyone actually does the stuff, right? Because it's when the rubber meets the road that this thing gets hard. That's when you're uncomfortable. That's when you're challenged. That's when you, when you're struggling, right?

• 8:13Ryan Holiday?

  So I really am encouraging you guys to go out there and take some action today. Start small, right? The French talk about sort of petites actions. I'm sure I'm pronouncing that terribly. I never know how to do things in other, in other languages. But the point is it's starting small. What's the small thing you can do? What's the thing in front of you right now? Right? The process, what's the littlest thing you can do? And you stack those on top of each other. Even Marcus is saying, you know, action by action, no one can stop you from that. So what's a little thing you can do today? What's a little bit of difference you can make? How can you, how can you throw away the journals? Turn off the podcast? Stop watching the videos? Not too much. I'm just saying, I'm just saying,

• 8:53Ryan Holiday?

  how can you take a break from the study and make a concerted effort to focus on the application, right? What can you do? I have a line, there's an expression, I forget where I got it, but it's in,

• 9:08Ryan Holiday?

  it's in The Obstacle's Way, "You know a workman by the chips they leave," right? Like, the sawdust on the floor is proof that a craftsman has been working in the workshop. Well, what's, what's the proof of that for you? What do you have to show, right? Could you be convicted of being a Stoic? Or could you just be convicted of studying Stoicism? And there are days when, when I, when I look at how things went, I go, I don't think I would be convicted. I don't think if anyone, you know, if you took my name off of it and you just looked at my actions for the day, would I have been a Stoic? No. And those are the days I'm trying to work on. Those are the days I'm trying to get further from. And I want, I want the actions to speak louder than the words, speak louder than the books.

• 9:52Ryan Holiday?

  Because in the end, that's the real legacy we leave. So, get active in your own rescue, as Marcus says. Get out there, prove that you mean this, and show us what you're made of. Hey, it's Ryan. Look, our New Year, New You Challenge is on sale now. It starts January 1st, which means you have to sign up now to join it. You can't put this off. Marcus Aurelius says, "You could be good today, instead you choose tomorrow." People put these things off. So let's stop procrastinating. Let's do this challenge together. You get a whole bunch of awesome stuff. You get 21 custom challenges, almost a book's worth of new content, weekly check-in calls with me, daily audio message from me, a principal 21-day calendar with illustrations,

• 10:35Ryan Holiday?

  a group Slack channel for accountability, all sorts of awesome stuff. We'd love to have you. You can sign up now at dailystoic.com/challenge. You'll be doing it alongside me and thousands of other Stoics. It's our best thing we do every year. People love it. We can't wait to have you. Sign up at dailystoic.com/challenge. But there's not much time left. Don't delay. It starts on January 1st. You can't do it after that. No exceptions. I'll see you on the other side.