Turn The Colors On | These 14 Small Mindset Shifts Will Change Your Life

Like any normal person, part of Marcus Aurelius did not want to wake up, especially early. No, he wanted to “huddle under the blankets and stay warm,” he would say. It was nicer there. Easier there. But another part of him knew he wasn’t created to feel nice, to have it easy. “I have to go to work — as a human being,” he said, hauling his feet up and onto the floor. This is the internal back and forth so many of us have every morning. Not Arnold Schwarzennegger though. “My rule in the morning is, ‘don’t think,’” he said on a recent episode of the Daily Stoic podcast. To prevent the internal back and forth, the negotiating, the rationalizing, the justifying, Arnold recommended, “Make it a rule where you say, ‘Okay, there are certain things that I would do before I start thinking…I’m going to work out before I start thinking.’ Don’t think. Just go. Get out on a walk. Get on that bicycle. Get to the gym.”--And in today's Daily Stoic video excerpt, Ryan outlines 14 small mindset changes. For the most part, we can’t change the world. We can’t change the fundamental facts of existence–like the fact that we’re going to die. We can’t change other people. So one way to think about Stoicism itself then is as a collection of mindset shifts for the many situations that life seems to thrust us in. Indeed, Seneca’s Letters, Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, and Epictetus’ Discourses are filled with passages, anecdotes, and quotes which force a shift in perspective.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee 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.

• 0:02Ryan 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. On Tuesdays, we take a closer look at these Stoic ideas and how we can apply them in our actual lives. Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy.

• 0:26Ryan Holiday?

  Turn the colors on. Like any normal person, part of Marcus realist did not want to wake up, especially early. "No, he wanted to huddle under the blankets and stay warm," he said. "It was nicer there, easier there." But another part of him knew that he wasn't created to feel nice, to have it easy. "I have to go to work as a human being," he said, hauling his feet up and onto the floor. This is the internal back and forth that so many of us have every morning. Not Arnold Schwarzenegger, though. As he said on a recent episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast...

• 0:58Speaker 01

  The rule is don't think. And so, because I feel like a lot of people, when they get up, their mind starts wandering. It's a natural thing. We all do that.

• 1:08Ryan Holiday?

  Overthinking.

• 1:09Speaker 01

  But if you make it a rule where you say, "Okay, there's certain things that I would do before I start thinking, and that is, I'm gonna work out for an hour."

• 1:18Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:19Speaker 01

  So now, if the mind tells you, "Man, you know, the day is okay. I mean, what the hell, it's Sunday. No one will know. I mean, let's just go and have some pancakes instead, and it's just to kind of reorganize you a little bit," you say, "Wait a minute. What did I just do? I thought. And I promised myself I'm not gonna think, and you will feel good." And that's the key thing people should always know. When you physically, if you feel good physically, and you can do wonderful things physically...

• 1:52Speaker 01

  Then you feel mentally much better about yourself.

• 1:55Ryan Holiday?

  The day starts in black and white, Arnold continued. You're tired, you're not thinking clearly, you're groggy, your to-do list gives you anxiety. The Stoics talked similarly about the connection between the mind and the body. "We treat the body rigorously," Seneca said, "so that it will not be disobedient to the mind. We move the body to turn on or up the colors of the mind. When you wake up, don't think, just get moving, get active, get the body going, turn the colors on."

• 2:44Ryan Holiday?

  So to me, that's a transformational, life-changing, mind-blowing way to think about life. It's to connect more deeply with them, to remind himself what's truly important. And one of the fascinating things about Marcus Aurelius's meditations is how often he returns to this very theme.

• 3:01Ryan Holiday?

  For the most part, we can't change the world, but we can change ourselves. And specifically, the Stoics would say, can change how we think about the world. And that's really what Stoicism is. It's a philosophy, really, it's a set of thinking exercises, perspective shifts, that allow you to see things differently and thus allows things to go differently. I'm Ryan Holiday. I've written about Stoic philosophy now for almost 15 years. Talked about it everywhere, from the NBA to the NFL, special forces, sitting senators. That's what we're going to talk about today. Some of the best Stoic mind shifts, from Marcus Aurelius's medications, to Seneca's letters, to the life of Cato, to the example of Zeno. These are going to be important exercises from the Stoics.

• 3:42Ryan Holiday?

  The Stoics tried to apply, but if you apply, it can allow you to change yourself and the world.

• 3:51Ryan Holiday?

  Poverty isn't just having too little. This is one of the insights from Seneca. He's saying that it's not just having too little, although having too little is a problem and we wouldn't want to make light of that form of poverty. But he says poverty is also not having enough. And Seneca would have met extremely wealthy and rich people. Marx, Rilis would have met extremely wealthy and rich people. I myself have met many, many rich people, but they don't feel rich, not just because they have extravagant tastes, they're insatiable, but also because they're comparing themselves to people who have more. So it doesn't matter if you have a billion dollars. If you wake up and go, but I'm only 30th on the Forbes list and these people have more, or not even financially, these people get more attention than me. These people are more respected than me.

• 4:35Ryan Holiday?

  These people have more fun than me. This comparison makes us poor because we don't have a lot compared to what we wanted. We don't have a lot compared to what we used to have. We have a little compared to what we could have, or we have a little compared to what other people have. And so when you realize that there are impoverished rich people, it should change your perspective. It should free you to realize that having more and more and more is not likely to solve your problems. It's not likely to feel good if you don't feel those things now, when by the way, you have enough.

• 5:11Ryan Holiday?

  Marcus Rilis in Meditations says, "The things you think about determine the quality of your mind. Your life is dyed by the color of your thought." That's such a perfect way to put it. He's saying like, if all you look for is the bad in people, all you're gonna see is the bad in people. If all you see is darkness and awfulness and evil, that's what your world is gonna look like. And it's funny, right, that Marx has this reputation. Book two of Meditations, he's saying like, "The people today you're gonna meet are annoying and obnoxious and jealous and all this," right? And it seems like Marx is doing exactly what he's saying not to do. But then he goes, "Look, these people just don't know any better. Their souls are cut off from truth," he said. He says, "You're made to work with them. Nothing can implicate you in ugliness." So the Stoics are saying that what we think about,

• 5:54Ryan Holiday?

  what we look for in this world determines what we're gonna be able to see. And that is the discipline of Perception, that's the power that we have. Our mind dies what our life will look like. It's the lenses through which we look at the world. If we look for beauty in the mundane, as Marcus does repeatedly throughout meditation, we'll see that. If we look for the evidence of goodness in people, if we see our obligation to help and to work with them, we'll see that. If you decide to see agency and power in yourself in every situation you're in, you'll find it, even in the darkest, hardest circumstances.

• 6:31Ryan Holiday?

  Anxiety isn't this thing that you eliminate, that you avoid. It's something that's inside you. In Meditations, Marcus really writes, "Today I escaped my anxiety." And he corrects himself, he says, "Actually, wait, no, I didn't. I discarded it because it was within me." And when you shift, you go, "Yeah, the airport is not making me anxious. This other person is not frustrating me or stressing me out because they can't do that to me. They are outside me. I am doing it to myself. It's my expectations that are the problem. It's my inability to accept things that is the problem. It's not your parents that are frustrating you. They're just doing what they do, just like the airport is doing what it does." And so, understanding that we're the source of the frustration,

• 7:12Ryan Holiday?

  it's a little frustrating, yeah, but it's also very freeing because it means we can stop it. It means that we can choose to discard it, as Marcus really said. And that's actually one thing that I realized during the pandemic, right? I was traveling less, I was doing less, and yet I still had this anxiety. And of course, there was some anxiety because what was happening in the outside world was a bit crazy. But it was realizing that I was the common thread amidst all of these so-called causes of anxiety. It was me.

• 7:42Ryan Holiday?

  I was probably nineteen or twenty years old and I was talking to Robert Greene, the greatest authors of all time, forty laws of power. And I was thinking about becoming a writer and I had some time left on my contract at the company I was working. And he said, "Look, what is this next year gonna be for you?" He said, "Is this gonna be a lifetime or dead time?" And what he meant by that was, was I gonna just gonna burn out this year of the contract? Was I just gonna sit there? Or was I gonna spend every minute of that? Year, becoming better, reading better, reaching out to people, building relationships, trying new things, experimenting. And he was totally right. That year, after I told myself in my head that I was gonna quit, but before I put in my notice, is one of the most productive

• 8:23Ryan Holiday?

  years of my life. I've had so much done. I have relationships to this day that came out of that experience. And most of all, what I took was that that sort of difference between alive time and dead time and how essential it is. Look, when you're stuck in traffic, is that going to be alive time or dead time for you? You're stuck at the airport, are you gonna sit there and order a pizza? Or you're gonna walk around the terminal, listening to a podcast? Are you gonna make a phone call that you've been putting off? Or you're gonna sit down and write that article or that book that you've told yourself? You're gonna write, what are you gonna do with time when you are not as much in control? That is the critical question.

• 9:00Ryan Holiday?

  One of the big Stoic shifts is realizing posthumous fame is worthless, right? Marcus Aurelius was incredibly famous in his own lifetime. They built statues of him. These statues were in people's houses. He was the head of an empire of millions and millions of people. He would have known that the deeds of other emperors and conquerors had lasted throughout history. But he also stops himself and goes, wait, they're not around to enjoy this. You know, what good is it to Alexander that Alexandria is still named after him? In fact, in Meditations, Marcus Aurelius says, Alexander the Great and his mule driver, they both died, both entered the earth in the same way. His point was that, how many people remember? Just a couple emperors before him. He says, who remembers now the

• 9:43Ryan Holiday?

  name of Vespasian? And he lists not just the emperor, but influential advisors, the celebrities of that time. And he says, they're all forgotten. And his point is, is not just that most of us, even the famous people, even people like Marcus, are inevitably forgotten, right? We might be talking about him here in this video, but most people just know him as the old guy in the movie Gladiator, if anything at all. But he says, also, he says, the people in the future are not magically gonna be smarter or better than the people are now, right? So this idea that you're gonna be vindicated by the future is also an empty and a silly hope. And again, even if you are vindicated in the future, it won't do you any good. Because you won't be around to enjoy it. So do what's right now because it's right because you want to do it.

• 10:25Ryan Holiday?

  Don't do it because you're trying to build this legacy for the future. Don't defer the love of your family. Don't defer being present. Don't defer your health, right? Because you're striving to make this thing that's going to last for eternity. It won't. And even if it does, what good will that do?

• 10:47Ryan Holiday?

  You take away power over events by expecting them, Seneca says. It's what catches us off guard, what we refuse to prepare for, what we refuse to think about. That's what lands heaviest. So the Stoics practice premeditatio warmum so they're prepared. So they can take advantage in advance of the opportunity to plan, prepare, to be resilient, to stiffen themselves up so the blows of fate don't land unexpected and unnecessarily hard.

• 11:14Ryan Holiday?

  There's a tax on everything, the Stoics would say. There's that expression about death and taxes. Well, Seneca says it's not just that there's the taxes that the government levies on you, but there's all sorts of taxes in life. Delays are a tax on travel. Haters are a tax on putting things up on YouTube. There's a tax on money too, right? The more successful you are, the more you end up having to pay. But Seneca says we have to learn how to pay the taxes of life gladly. Not just because most of the taxes in life are progressive in the sense that the more good stuff you have, the more fees and problems that come alongside it, but also because it is a fact of life. And so when we see that these taxes are a fundamental part of our existence, we accept them. Sure, do we try to mitigate them as best we can? Of course.

• 11:58Ryan Holiday?

  But we accept that there are taxes on life. And then the more good things we have, the more success we have, the more money we make, the more taxes we're going to have to pay.

• 12:10Ryan Holiday?

  One of my favorite lessons from Epictetus, he says, it's impossible to learn that which you think you already know. Whenever I'm around people that are much better than me at something, when I'm like embarrassingly bad at something, I have no fear or shame about asking really stupid questions. If I'm remotely unsure about something, I'll ask. I don't care if I look stupid, which is actually another... Another really important lesson from Epictetus, he says, "Look, if you want to improve, you have to be content to look stupid or foolish. You have to be willing to be embarrassed, or to be awkward, or be uncomfortable with something, or you can't get any better." So I'm not afraid to ask questions. I'm not afraid to look like an idiot. I'd rather look like an idiot than chop off my hand, or have something fall on me, or screw it up. So that's how I think about it. I'm not afraid to ask dumb questions.

• 12:55Ryan Holiday?

  People suck. It's just a fact. And one of the fascinating things about Marcus Aurelius's meditations is how often he returns to this very theme. He opens the book with a catalog of the kind of people you're gonna meet in the day. Frustrating people, jealous people, stupid people, dishonest people, aggressive people. It's just a fact. Even his famous passage about how the obstacle is the way, the impediment to action advances action, you know what he's talking about? Talking about difficult people. He's not saying you write them off. He's not saying you cut them out. He's not saying you give up on humanity. He's saying that difficult people aren't an opportunity to be kind, to be patient, to be good, to get the most out of them. The obstacle is the way, even, is about this very idea. Difficult people exist, and we have to put up with them, and figure out

• 13:38Ryan Holiday?

  a way to work with them. And we have to rise to the occasion of the people that we interact with.

• 13:47Ryan Holiday?

  People don't seem to understand this one really important thing. It's that you have a superpower. You have the power, Marcus Aurelius says, to have no opinion. He says, "Remember, events, things are not asking to be judged by you. You don't have to have an opinion about this," he says. "You can just see it as it is. You can think nothing of it. You don't have to label it. You don't have to put it in categories. You don't have to say it's fair or unfair, positive or negative, smart or dumb. Just accept it as it is." Though Stoics tried to see the world as objective, tried not to insert opinions or judgments on top of things, because this is the path to peace, it's the path to wisdom. And of course, being agnostic in this way allows you to get to work doing what you need to

• 14:30Ryan Holiday?

  do, rather than wasting your time labeling, judging, and having opinions about stuff that is not up to you.

• 14:40Ryan Holiday?

  Epictetus says every situation has two handles. One will bear weight, the other won't. So what are you going to grab this by? How are you going to choose to see it? How are you going to choose to try to carry it? It's the same thing, a different perspective. Life is like that. We can look at it one way, or we can choose to look at it another way. We can choose to look at something as an obstacle, or we can choose to look at something as an opportunity. We can see chaos if we look close. We can see order if we look from afar. We can see disadvantage if we look at it one way. We could see advantage if we look the other. We can see obstacle from this perspective, opportunity from the other.

• 15:22Ryan Holiday?

  Marcus talks about how things can get in the way of what we're trying to do. Our actions can be impeded. But we have this superpower. We have this ability that we can always accommodate and adapt and adjust. He says, "The mind adapts and converts to its own purposes, obstacle or acting." What the hell does that mean? Well, he says, "The impediment to action advances action with stance and the way becomes one." This is Stoic philosophy, this idea that the obstacle is the way. Basically, what it meant for the Stoics was that every situation, big ones, small ones, fortunate, unfortunate ones, good ones, bad ones, positive, negative, every situation was simply an opportunity for us to step up and be excellent for practice virtue.

• 16:03Ryan Holiday?

  It's strange that the Stoics have this reputation for being unfeeling, for being emotionless, because actually, four of Seneca's best and most moving pieces of writing are actually known as his consolations, these letters that he's writing to friends, in one case to his mother, people who have lost someone, right? And he's consoling them in their grief. That's what it's about. And I actually read these essays whenever I've lost someone or I'm trying to comfort someone who's lost someone. They're great. Anyways, the part that hit me the most, he's writing this letter to the daughter of a friend who has died. And he's saying, "Look, your father loved you very much, loved you more than anything in the world. What do you think he would want from you right now?" Of course, he wouldn't want you to be happy that he's dead and be touched that you miss him and care about him. But would he want his

• 16:49Ryan Holiday?

  "To make you miserable, to make you bereft with sadness and filled with pain." No, it's the exact opposite. He'd want you to think about him and be happy, to remember good times, to be filled with joy. Right? That's what he would want. And so, of course, we're always gonna feel grief when we lose someone and when we think of someone we lost. But to remember what they would want us to remember is such a wonderful little insight about grief. And it's such a good insight to the Stoics, too, because if the Stoics were unfeeling and didn't have emotion, Seneca would just say, "Get over it. Don't feel it." But that's not what he's saying at all. Instead, he came up with this great way of thinking about it.

• 17:28Ryan Holiday?

  I'm looking here at this cemetery in New Orleans. Obviously, every single person in it died. Eventually, death happened to them. But Seneca wants us to remember that death was happening to them always. All 61, or 80, or 90, or 17 of the years that they were alive, they died every second, every minute, and then eventually, that stopped happening. So to me, that's a transformational, life-changing, mind-blowing way to think about life. Not that death is something in the future that happens once, but that death is something that's happening always. And every second, every minute that passes, every year that passes, now belongs to death. It's as dead as any of the people in this cemetery. You'll never get it back, which is why you should live it, embrace it, and don't waste it while you have it.

• 18:11Ryan Holiday?

  Every day, I send out one Stoic-inspired email to hundreds of thousands of people all over the world. If you want more Stoic wisdom in your inbox, you can sign up at dailystoic.com/email. It's totally free. You can unsubscribe at any time. We'd love to have you. dailystoic.com/email.