Here’s Where They Hide Money

Ryan talks about the value in knowing how to read books and apply them to your life. If you want to become a great reader, the Stoics can help. We built out their best insights into ourRead to Lead: A Daily Stoic Reading Challenge. Since it first launched in 2019, Read to Lead has been our most popular challenge, taken on by almost ten thousand participants. Today, we’re excited to announce that, for the first time ever, registration to jointhe 2022 live cohort is officially open. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/emailFollow 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. 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.

• 0:32Speaker 01

  They still hide money in books. When George Raveling was a young boy, he was in the kitchen of his grandmother who raised him. "Why did the slave masters hide their money in books, George?" she asked him. "I don't know, Grandma," he said. Her answer? "Because they knew the slaves wouldn't open them. There's a reason it was illegal to teach slaves to read. There is a reason that every totalitarian regime has burned and banned books." The answer sounds like a cliche, but it's true. Knowledge is power. The converse is even more true. A lack of knowledge is weakness. It engenders supplication, and it makes resistance harder. From this early lesson, George Raveling came to see that reading was actually a moral duty.

• 1:16Speaker 01

  To not read, to remain in ignorance, was not only to be weak, it was to ignore the people who had fought so hard, who had struggled at such great costs to read and to provide for future generations the right and the ability to do so. It was to spit in the face of Frederick Douglass, of Booker T. Washington, and of course, of Martin Luther King Jr., who Raveling had gotten to know. But it is worth pointing out today that money is still hidden in the pages of books, though for slightly less nefarious reasons. How many people want to get better? How many people want to be successful? How many people wish they could get out of this cycle of mediocrity that they are in? Well, the solution, the secret to doing that, is there, on the shelf. But how many people bother to take it down and look at it?

• 2:01Speaker 01

  Marcus Aurelius talks about going "straight to the seat of intelligence." Well, that's what books are. Epictetus found freedom from slavery long Before he was legally free, how? In the writings of the Stoics, in the words of Musonius Rufus, "We read because it makes us powerful. When we don't read, we are weak, easy to manipulate, less than what we are capable of being. It's in our self-interest to read. There's money in it, but it is also our moral duty."

• 2:33Ryan Holiday?

  And if you're looking to be a better reader, we designed this Daily Stoic Challenge, or a course recently, called the Daily Stoic Read to Lead Challenge. As Truman said, "Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders have to be readers." That's the idea. How can you be a better reader? How can you get serious about this thing? How can you access all the wisdom that's out there in the world? How can you build a reading practice? And we built this awesome challenge. It's built off my reading practice, but also the practices of Seneca and Marcus Aurelius and all the Stoics, plus other wise figures from history. And this is a live course. It's going to start on Monday, May 17. We all move this course together at the same time. Registration is now officially open,

• 3:14Ryan Holiday?

  but registration will close on Sunday, May 16 at midnight. That's your last chance to join us all as part of this cohort, participate in the sessions with me. So sign up at dailystoic.com/reading.