This Saved Ten Lives | Routines are Fragile... Try These 10 Stoic Practices Instead

🌍 To make a donation, go to GiveWell.org📕 Right Thing, Right Now is out now! To purchase your own copy, head here: https://store.dailystoic.com/✉️ 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 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, how we can apply them in our actual lives. Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy.

• 0:29Ryan Holiday?

  This saved 10 lives. A man is walking through the streets of Amsterdam, and he hears a scream and a splash. It's cold. He's going somewhere. He's not sure what he heard, so he ignores it. But with time, the horrific, inescapable conclusion becomes undeniable to him. Someone had leapt or fallen into the canal, and he could have saved them. From his indifference came the death of an innocent person. This, of course, is the plot of Albert Camus' The Fall, his haunting 1956 novel about a Paris defense lawyer's fall from grace. Yet this fictional tale was also an allegory. Hadn't millions

• 1:11Ryan Holiday?

  of Europeans, including many on those very streets of Amsterdam, turned a similar blind eye to the plight of the Jews just a few years earlier? Is it not also a message that resounds today? Millions of people die every year of entirely preventable illnesses and accidents. Millions just perished in a pandemic, some percentage of them needlessly so. Were others and their leaders a little more willing to do something other than shrug their shoulders? They could have been saved. In Meditations, Marcus Aurelius chastises himself for the injustices he is guilty of. "Not things he did so much as the things he didn't do. And you can commit an injustice by doing nothing," he writes. Marcus was a great leader and by all accounts,

• 1:54Ryan Holiday?

  a good person, yet like all of us, he could have done more. And it was this at the end of his life that haunted him. It will probably haunt you too. You could do more, you know, you should do more. But where do you start? You say to yourself that if someone went into the water near me, if someone was starving near me, I would help them. But they are a plane flight away, a country away, and you so easily could do something. Givewell.org estimates right now that for $3,000, you can save a human life in Nigeria. According to the World Health Organization, something like 200,000 people die in Nigeria alone each year of malaria, a largely treatable and preventable mosquito borne illness. Just a few thousand dollars buys enough monthly courses

• 2:39Ryan Holiday?

  of preventative malaria medication to save one person. There are 1 million subscribers to the Daily Stoic email and tens of thousands more listen to the podcast each day. A significant percentage of these people could afford on their own to save a human from death right now. How crazy is that? A few could afford to save many humans and the rest could come together, chipping in a little bit each to collectively do the same. This is something that the Stoics did not talk about enough. The way that a singular person could make a difference, but also the way that people working together can do even more. We have all sorts of tools and insights that allow us to do this more effectively and efficiently than Marcus Aurelius could have ever even imagined. We should not turn away from that.

• 3:23Ryan Holiday?

  We should lean into it proudly and loudly to be able to say, I saved someone's life. In Right Thing Right Now, Good Values, Good Character, Good Deeds, and the new book, I tell the story of Rabbi Harold Kushner, who had a ritual before writing each day. He'd take out his checkbook and scrawl out a small donation to one of the charities that he and his wife supported. It was his way of doing something for someone else before he sat down to do his work. Today, Right Thing Right Now comes out. And I guess I could have written another promotional ask for the book or I could be talking about. But instead, I decided in Kushner's spirit, I would make an offering. I'm not writing a check, but I did fill out the form on givewell.org's website and I donated enough money to save 10 lives. So by listening to this, you help make that happen.

• 4:08Ryan Holiday?

  And by following with a donation of your own. You can make even more of it happen. You can head over to GiveWell today and make a donation to the malaria consortium. You just choose it from the dropdown menu, and your donation will fund the anti-malarial medications that people need, medication that will make an immediate impact on the life of someone. It won't be some pie in the sky theory of justice. You'll be doing the right thing right now, and that's what a stoic does. GiveWell.org. Thanks to everyone who supported the book. Thanks for listening to the podcast, and I hope you can head over and do that. Make the Stoics proud. Make me proud. I'd appreciate it. Talk soon.

• 4:55Ryan Holiday?

  Almost everyone great has a practice. They don't wake up and wing it. They have a practice. They have a system. There's an order or a routine to their life.

• 5:08Ryan Holiday?

  Routines are everything. Seneca says that a life without design is erratic. And he said, it's a shame. You look around in Rome, he says, it's funny, if you had asked the ordinary Roman who's leaving their house, like, where are you going? What are you doing? What's your plan for the day? They wouldn't know. They're just kind of winging it. How a lot of us go through life, and it shouldn't surprise us that we're inefficient, that we waste time, that we get distracted easily. We don't have enough structure or systems in our life. 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. I'm a big follower of routine. I've also talked a lot here on The Daily Stoic about

• 5:49Ryan Holiday?

  my daily routine. But in today's episode, I kind of actually want to blow that up, because there is something a bit fragile about routine. Any parent can tell you this. You have your routine, you have your structure, you have the way you like to do things, and then you have kids and your life is blown up. Not just blown up once, but blown up every day, because you wake up and your kid is sick. You wake up and you thought they had school, and it turns out it's a snow day, or it's a teacher work day, or it's spring break, or they didn't sleep last night, or they decided to fight you. The idea that you're going to do The same thing, the same way, every day, it doesn't work, right? Whether you're a professional athlete or a stay-at-home mom. What you need is a kind of flexibility. And that's what I want to talk about today.

• 6:32Ryan Holiday?

  As I have evolved and gotten older with the Stoic idea of routines, I think about it less as a routine, more about routines, plural. And I think less about this system, and I think more about practices. What are the bedrock practices? The things I try to do every day, but I'm much more flexible, formless, as Robert Greene says, about the order that I do them in. So that's what we're going to talk about today. Some bedrock Stoic practices to do every day in whatever order you manage to make possible.

• 7:08Ryan Holiday?

  You get up early. You just, you have to get up early, even though you don't want to. Marcus Aurelius says, "What were you made to stay under the covers and be warm?" No, you were put on this planet to do something. Dante says, "Under the blankets is no way to fame." You get up early and you do something. You go for a run. You write in your journal. You sit quietly and watch the sunrise. You meditate. I don't care what you do. But a Stoic gets up early. They own the morning because owning the morning is a critical part of owning the day.

• 7:41Ryan Holiday?

  The first thing I do actually is journal. I take a few minutes to sit down and put my thoughts on paper. This is what Marcus Aurelius was doing in meditations. You can imagine why the most powerful man in the world, who had very few people to confide in, very few people he could complain to, very few people who could possibly even conceive of or understand what he was dealing with, would need the space, the white space of the paper, to work through what he was doing. So I sit down and I just talk about what I want to do, what I'm struggling with, what's been going on. Sometimes it'll just be recording some things that I did the day before. Again, just to sort of get the mind going. And then, you know, the thoughts tend to pour out,

• 8:24Ryan Holiday?

  "Oh, you're worried about this. Well, does this really matter?" Right? The Stoics felt like what we were doing in this journaling is putting our thoughts to the test. So often, we have thoughts, we have impressions, we have needs, we have anxieties. And they make sense, but only because we haven't fully articulated them. And by writing them out, we often see that they're incorrect or not fully comprehensive, or in fact, they're preposterous, right? And by having a tiny bit of distance between us and our thoughts, can we get perspective? So I do the journaling. I use a couple of different journals. Sometimes I do it on note cards. I just take this time, it's quiet time, just for me, that I do my journaling. Anne Frank, in her famous diary, she has this great line, and it's one of the reasons

• 9:09Ryan Holiday?

  I always do this journaling, once a day, ideally in the morning. She says, "Paper is more patient than people." So instead of dumping or vomiting these thoughts over on the first person you see in the morning, or the first phone call you have in the morning, you've done it on the page. And it may be that some of those thoughts actually do need to be articulated to someone else, they do need to be worked out, but a good chunk of them don't.

• 9:35Ryan Holiday?

  Nietzsche said that only ideas had while walking have any worth. I don't know if that's strictly true, but I do know I've had a lot of really good ideas walking. And that's just like an extra benefit. I mean, you're outside, you're active, ideally you're not on the phone, maybe you're with people that you care about, you're present, you're doing what human beings were evolved to do over thousands and thousands of years. So I try not to let a single day go by without walking. It rests, it relaxes the mind, it centers me. I try to start the day with a walk, I try to end the day with a walk, because as Seneca says, "The mind must be given over to relaxation to take wandering walks."

• 10:16Ryan Holiday?

  It's part of the philosophical process, it's part of my daily routine, and it should be part of your daily routine, too.

• 10:26Ryan Holiday?

  So you're either a reader, or you're not. It's not that you can read that matters. What matters is that you do read. One of the practices that I like to do is not just read books when I have time, or whatever, I like daily books. Obviously, the Daily Stoic is a page-a-day book, but this is actually a really fascinating genre of Books. I don't read the Daily Stoic. That would be weird, but I do read a bunch of daily books. One of my favorites is Tolstoy's Calendar of Wisdom. It's just a page a day from one of the smartest, wisest guys ever. Actually, he says in this book, I don't get it. How do people not want to communicate with the wisest and deepest thinkers who ever lived?

• 11:10Ryan Holiday?

  Which is what reading is like here. This book is Tolstoy's favorite quotes and ideas. Just every day a little meditation. It's called the Calendar of Wisdom. Daily thoughts to nourish the soul. And it was largely forgotten. It was suppressed by the Soviets after his death. And then never really reached the audience that it could. It's actually one of our most popular books in the painted porch. This is a year with Rilke, which is another daily book that I really like. Obviously, the Daily Dad, which is my daily parenting book. Where's the Daily Laws? This is Robert Greene's. Like people go, where should I start with Robert Greene? Or how could I be meditating on Robert's ideas of mastery, strategy, understanding human nature better?

• 11:54Ryan Holiday?

  Well, like instead of reading all those books, basically the way to think about this book is it's Robert Greene's, you know, several million words of published writing compressed into a kind of a greatest hit. So sometimes I like to just start the day by seeing what Robert would teach me or say to me. There's a book called The Daily Drucker, which I have around here somewhere. This is the courage to see daily inspirations, just a passage from great literature every day. This is obviously the Daily Stoic email. This is like all the emails that we sent out in 2021. So that's a daily read. Oh, here's, uh, this is funny. Steven Pressfield, who wrote The War of Art, like The War of Art is a book that changed my life.

• 12:37Ryan Holiday?

  Turning Pro changed my life. I guess flip it open and read a random passage. Or Pressfield put together this awesome passage of a teaching a day from the author of The War of Art. This is pretty cool. It says for Ryan Holiday, who gave me the idea. But there's just, you know, just something for, for you every single day here. And I'm not even scratching the surface of all the different books that are in this genre. Find a daily passage or a daily book about something you're interested in. There's ones about the Quran, there's ones about the Bible, there's the Daily Zen. There's so many amazing daily books out there. But my real message is that you should read every single day. We should always be reading.

• 13:18Ryan Holiday?

  But one way to do that, one practice is like find some kind of daily read or daily book that gives you a tour of an idea. So you're not just reading it once, but you're returning to it, you're meditating on it each day. It's giving you something to think about. It's forcing you to think about it every single day. I think this is an essential practice and I hope you've partaken in it.

• 13:45Ryan Holiday?

  You want to seek out little challenges in life, activities, practices that force you to push against the limitations where your body's telling you, where your mind's telling you, no, you're done, you can't go any further. You realize that that's not fully the truth, right? Your mind starts to wander when you meditate and you can pull it back. You're practicing that control. You get in the cold plunge and your body tells you, you gotta get out. It's too freezing and you realize you push through and actually you come out feeling invigorated or better. In Meditations, Marcus Aurelius talks about washing off the dust of earthly life. We know the Romans had bathhouses, they had cold plunges, they would alternate between the hot and the cold. It's hard to be anything but present when I'm sitting here in this cold plunge. This is a plunge, cold plunge. It's just one of the absolute best decisions I've made.

• 14:28Ryan Holiday?

  And then getting in it every day, try to do about 11 or so minutes a week. That's one of the best decisions that I make every day. If you want to embrace all the benefits, mental, physical, spiritual of a cold plunge, you gotta check out Plunge. It's the one I have here at my house. And Plunge is offering $150 off your order right now. Just use code DAILYSTOIC150 at checkout.

• 14:53Ryan Holiday?

  The rule for successful people, for great writers, artists, creators, it comes from the poet William Stafford. He says, "Do the hard thing first." And he's saying, "Don't procrastinate, don't put it off, don't try to do piddly stuff, work your way up to it." He says, "No, you tackle the hard thing first." That's what I do in the morning. I tackle the writing first. Before I check email, before I get sucked into social media, before I have meetings, before I can come up with, or life can make up excuses to not do that thing. Edison said that we pick up the heavy end first. That's the idea. You do the hard thing first. And then, once you've done that, once you've crossed it off, once you've made progress on that, not only will you have momentum for the rest of the day, but even if you don't, you've already won.

• 15:38Ryan Holiday?

  You've already made a dent in things. So that's the rule for this morning. Do the hard thing first.

• 15:47Ryan Holiday?

  It's very easy for your day just to get filled up, right? To get filled up with stuff. There's a passage in one of Seneca's essays where he's talking about, you know, these busy Romans who are just running around town all day. And he said, "But if you ask them, like, what are they actually doing? Would they have a good answer?" Right? It's easy. He calls this sort of busy idleness. "I could very easily find my days just getting filled up with email, getting filled up with phone calls, getting filled up with errands, getting filled up with just stuff, right? But I know that I'm not doing my job, that I'm not moving the ball forward. I'm not doing a chunk of what's called deep work every day." This is a phrase from the great Cal Newport, who I've had on the podcast before and I've known forever.

• 16:32Ryan Holiday?

  Cal's basically saying that for knowledge workers, the ability to focus, to lock in, to have large uninterrupted blocks of focus is like the most essential thing that you can do. For me, I try to do that really early. So my morning routine, you know, it's waking up early, it's walking, it's journaling, it's spending time with my kids. Then I try to get here and I try to spend like one to two to three hours of uninterrupted... Work, work, not administrative work, not responding to stuff, catching up on stuff. But that's like the writing stuff, which is the main thing that I do. That's the thing that I can't outsource. I can't fake. I can't do when I'm tired at the end of the day. I can't do in little five-minute increments.

• 17:17Ryan Holiday?

  I have to give myself over completely to it. I have to focus. I have to stop being bounced around, as Marx really talks about, and I have to only be doing that thing. And so as you think about your day, as you think about your schedule, what is the uninterrupted focus time? And how do you have chunk of that? When I interviewed James Clear, he talked about, he just said he needs a couple of magical hours every day. That's a great phrase. What's the couple magical hours that you schedule? I think ideally in the morning, but you know, maybe you're someone who those magical hours is 10 to midnight or midnight to 2 a.m. I don't know. I don't really care. But the point is you need to have uninterrupted blocks of magical time, of deep work, of focus,

• 17:58Ryan Holiday?

  where you are locked in and you're actually doing what it is that you do.

• 18:07Ryan Holiday?

  It's funny, the biggest book project I ever sold, I wasn't trying to think of my next project. I wasn't trying to make money. I was actually on a hike with my family, with my kids. I had one in a backpack. My wife was holding the other. We were outside, we were out in nature. I wasn't thinking about work at all. And suddenly the idea for my next series, actually a series of four books popped into my head. And I've been working on that now for two years. It was lucrative, but more than that, it was creatively fulfilling and challenging. It's all these things. And that came because I took a few moments of stillness. I decided to go on the hike. I put work aside and as it happened, work popped into my head. I'm out looking at the sunset on my farm and can hear the frogs and all of this. It's moments like this, when you're actually not working, when you're consciously not thinking,

• 18:51Ryan Holiday?

  that sometimes your best work, your best ideas pop into your head. That was true for the Stoics. It's true for the great artists of all time and it's true for you and I and normal people. So you gotta have time for stillness and reflection and peace. Seneca talks about taking wandering walks, about giving the mind over to relaxation. It's more important than you think. And in fact, it may be where the biggest creative, and in fact, it may be where the biggest breakthrough of your life comes from.

• 19:19Ryan Holiday?

  It doesn't matter if you're cold or tired, if you're hungry or well rested. It doesn't matter the situation at all, Marx really say. It's just that you do the right thing, since the rest doesn't matter. That's your job. The Stoics say your job is to do right. That's what the virtue of justice is about. There's no excuses, there's no explanations. The Stoics' virtue was the main thing. That was what we were put here to do. It doesn't matter what other people do or say. Marx really writes to himself in Meditations. My job is to be good, also to do good, to help other people, to be a force for good in the world, to leave this place better than you found it. That's the ultimate habit. That's the habit that trumps all the other ones. And it's something you have to let guide and inspire all your actions and choices.

• 20:02Speaker 01

  For too long, we've been in the cities.

• 20:05Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 20:05Speaker 01

  And cities are designed to mask you from our mortality. Here on the ranch and farm, within nature, you are hitting up against that razor's edge. Everything is trying to survive, trying to live. Something dies and something else eats it.

• 20:19Ryan Holiday?

  We know the longhorn skulls that are on the wall in the bookstore. So we bought the place and then the neighboring guy had the cows. He was like, do you want to buy my cows? So we got these cows immediately after we got them. They all started dying of old age. And we called the vet and the vet's like, okay, I could come out like next week. Be like $250, I'll like put it down. He's like, you have a gun, right? You should take care of it. Do I want to let this thing suffer for an additional week while we wait for the vet?

• 20:43Speaker 01

  Right? Not only is being in charge of your choice making about your own life and how you be, it's also about what you take responsibility for. You took charge of that situation to be a protector, to be compassionate.

• 20:56Ryan Holiday?

  I hope you like this video. I hope you subscribe. But what I really want you to subscribe to is our Daily Stoic email. One bit of Stoic wisdom, totally for free to the largest community of Stoics ever in existence. You can sign up at dailystoic.com/email. There's no spam. You can unsubscribe at any time. I love sending it. I've sent it every day for the last six years and I hope to see you there at dailystoic.com/email.