BONUS | You Can't Let The Setbacks Win

When jarred by circumstances, Marcus Aurelius writes, we have to revert back to ourselves. We have to come back to the rhythm. We have to intervene. We can't let the challenges win. Let’s not write the year off just yet. The Daily Stoic New Year New You https://join.dailystoic.com/nyny26/ challenge is opening back up for a limited time. Learn more and sign up today at dailystoic.com/challenge http://dailystoic.com/challenge. 👉 Get The Daily Stoic New Year New You https://join.dailystoic.com/nyny26/ & all other Daily Stoic courses for FREE when you join Daily Stoic Life |https://dailystoic.com/life/dailystoic.com/life http://dailystoic.com/life 🎥 Watch the video episodes onThe Daily Stoic YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos:https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos 🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast onInstagram https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast/?hl=en:https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast ✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email athttps://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 https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/,Twitter https://twitter.com/dailystoic,YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic,TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@daily_stoic?lang=en, andFacebook https://www.facebook.com/dailystoic See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help you bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

• 0:14Ryan Holiday?

  You can't let the setbacks win. You had big plans. You had earnest intentions. You were really gonna get after it. You were going to do things differently. It was gonna be a dry January for you. It was gonna be a January filled with workouts and better eating. You were gonna pick up your guitar again or finally quit smoking. What happened? You got sick. Your kids got sick. Work got crazy. You got distracted by the events in the news. And the result was you kept on being, as Marx really said, "the person you've always been," even though you were being mauled and degraded by the life you were living. That's okay, right? It happens. Stoicism is not about perfection.

• 0:59Ryan Holiday?

  Life is gonna interrupt. Things are going to challenge us. Things are going to happen. We're not always gonna follow through on what we said. But when that happens, we can't just resign ourselves to our fate. We can't just accept mediocrity or monotony or settling because we got off track, right? When jarred by circumstances, Marx really writes in Meditations, "we have to revert back to ourselves. We have to come back to the rhythm. We have to intervene. Can't let the challenges win. We have to challenge ourselves to get better." And by the way, I experienced this myself. As I said, the first two weeks of the year were crazy for us with the flu and strep throat and then the other strain of the flu. So we're gonna be doing another session of the 2026 Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge, right? The year got off to a rocky start. Stuff happened that was outside your control

• 1:44Ryan Holiday?

  or you fell behind or whatever it was. Well, you can still revert back to yourself. You can take control. You can decide right now you're gonna get back on track. You're gonna stop waiting. You're gonna make those changes. And that's what the Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge is all about. It's designed to help you do precisely that, to push you, to challenge you, to help you do what you need to do. And if you want to do that with thousands of Stoics all over the world, myself included, I would love to have you in the Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge. You can sign up right now at dailystoic.com/challenge.

• 2:19Ryan Holiday?

  And if you join Daily Stoic Life, or if you are a Daily Stoic Life member, you get this challenge and all our challenges that we do throughout the year, plus our courses, plus a bunch of other awesome stuff, totally for free. So you can sign up there at dailystoiclife.com, or just go to dailystoiclife.com/challenge and I'll walk you all through it. I hope to see you in there.