Love What Your Nature Demands of You | Stake Your Claim

The world needed Marcus Aurelius to become the person we admire and study today. This required conscious and consistent effort on his part. You’re no different. And you know it. Make 2026 the year where you finally bring yourself closer to living your best life. No more waiting. Demand the best for yourself. The Daily Stoic New Year New You https://join.dailystoic.com/nyny26/ challenge begins January 1, 2026. 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 |dailystoic.com/life https://dailystoic.com/life/ 📓 Check out The Daily Stoic Journal: 366 Days of Writing and Reflection on The Art of Living by Ryan Holiday: https://store.dailystoic.com/products/the-daily-stoic-journal-signed-editionhttps://store.dailystoic.com/ 🎥 Watch the video episodes on The Daily Stoic YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos: https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos 🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast/?hl=en: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast ✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail 🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/ 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, and Facebook 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.

• 0:05Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a Stoic-inspired meditation, designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life. Each one of these episodes is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women, help you learn from them, to follow in their example, and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. For more, visit DailyStoic.com.

• 0:56Ryan Holiday?

  Each morning you wake up and life presents you with an opportunity. It's an opportunity to show up, to make a difference, to become the best version of yourself. But then, what do you do? You hit the snooze button. You stay under the covers a while longer. You get a late start on the day and suddenly all your plans get pushed back. You chastise and berate yourself. You'll start to feel like you'll never catch up, like the potential life you envisioned for yourself will remain elusive, out of reach. Almost 2,000 years ago, Marcus Aurelius was the emperor of Rome, the most powerful man on the planet. And he faced this exact dilemma. He found himself making excuses that it was nice and warm under the covers, as he told himself.

• 1:40Ryan Holiday?

  "So you were born to feel nice?" he writes in meditations, "instead of doing things and experiencing them?" He looked outside himself to the birds, the plants, the ants, all of which were going about their individual tasks, putting the world in order as best they can. So what was his problem? Why couldn't he get out of bed in the morning and do the same? "You don't love yourself enough," he said, "or you'd love your nature too and what it demands of you." And you could say that each year presents the same opportunity, right? A chance to show up, to make a difference, to become the best version of yourself, to do what you need to do.

• 2:23Ryan Holiday?

  The world needed Marcus Aurelius to become the person we admire and study today. It required conscious and consistent effort on his part. It required him to challenge himself, demanded that he woke up each morning and got to work on his individual tasks, putting the world in order as best he could. You are no different and you know it. You have the ideas, you've made the plans, but you haven't acted. So let's do it now. Now is the best time to start, not Monday, not when life feels easier or more convenient. If you wait for the perfect moment, it'll never come. Someone has to take control of someone, and that someone is you. The question remains, how? Well, we created the Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge to answer just that,

• 3:04Ryan Holiday?

  to help you create a better life, a better you, to help you show up and challenge yourself today. Since August, me and the Daily Stoic team have been developing these challenges, one per day, built around the best, most timeless Stoic wisdom. It's 21 challenges in a row to kick off a new you in a new year. And this year's challenge is new stuff designed to help you stop procrastinating, learn new skills, conquer insecurities, be more generous, appreciate the world around you, become the best version of yourself. And these aren't pie in the sky theoretical discussions, which the Stoics loathe, but clear, immediate exercises and methods you can start right now. We'll tell you exactly what to do, how to do it, why it works. We'll give you strategies for maintaining this way of living, not just for the rest

• 3:48Ryan Holiday?

  of the year, but hopefully for your whole life. Because this version of you, the one that you know is there, is what the world needs right now, just like the dancer was born to dance, the social climber for status, the miser for money, you were born for something too. Is helping others less valuable to you, Marcus writes, not worth your effort? You know the answer, you know what you're capable of. You know you weren't born under the covers to stay nice, to let another year pass by not being what you're capable of being. And the Daily Stoic 2026 New Year, New You Challenge starts on January 1st. Don't procrastinate, don't put it off. I want to see you in there. I'm going to be in there with you. You can sign up right now at dailystoic.com/challenge.

• 4:39Ryan Holiday?

  Stake your claim. This is from this week's entry in the Daily Stoic Journal, 366 Days of Writing and Reflection on the Art of Living by yours truly and my colleague, Stephen Hanselman, who I also wrote the Daily Stoic with. You can actually get signed copies of the Daily Stoic Journal in the Daily Stoic store at store.dailystoic.com, or we've got copies here at the Painted Porch, my bookstore in Bastrop, Texas. We like to collect the sayings of great writers or of leaders we admire. They often become mantras for us on the path to life, providing guidance and assurance. But as Seneca reminds us, truth hasn't been monopolized. We need to spend some time and effort each

• 5:20Ryan Holiday?

  week formulating our own wisdom, staking our own claims based on our study, practice, and training. And that's what the Daily Stoic Journal and this podcast has always been about, reflecting on Stoic wisdom and adding our own to it. Seneca urged us to blaze our own trail and to take charge and stake our own claim. Well, let's do that. Let the pages in your own journal, your own writing, reflect the insights you've learned through your own experiences. Let the inspiration you've taken from the Stoics help you create your own exercises, reminders, and perspectives. Then we have two quotes from Seneca and one

• 6:01Ryan Holiday?

  from Marcus. The first from Seneca's Moral Letters, "It's disgraceful for an old person or one in sight of old age to only have the knowledge carried in their notebooks. Zeno said this. What do you say? Klianthe said that. What do you say? How long will you be compelled by claims of another? Take charge and stake your own claim, something prosperity will carry in its notebook." That's Seneca Moral Letters 33:7. And then in 33:11, Seneca says, "Won't you be walking in your predecessor's footsteps? I surely will use the older path, but if I find a shorter and smoother way, I'll blaze a trail there. The ones who pioneered

• 6:41Ryan Holiday?

  these paths aren't our masters, but our guides. Truth stands open to everyone." Hasn't been monopolized. And then Marcus Aurelius Meditations 3:5, he says, "Don't act grudgingly or selfishly or without due diligence." Or be a contrarian. Don't overdress your thoughts in fine language. Don't be a person of too many words or too many deeds. Be cheerful, not wanting outside help or the relief that others might bring. A person needs to stand on their own, not be propped up. I mean, obviously, this is something I think a little bit about. As a writer, a popularizer of Stoicism, I rely quite a bit on the ideas from the Stoics. That is what the Daily Stoic

• 7:23Ryan Holiday?

  is. And it's funny, I'll see comments from people, they'll say like, well, you're just quoting other people. What do you have to say? But then, of course, when I say what I have to say, if I don't make enough nods to the Stoics, people go, well, who's this guy? You should just read the originals. And so it's a delicate line that I walk. But I think it's analogous to the line that we all walk, which is smarter, wiser people came before us. And they said, they picked so much of the low hanging fruit. But we have to, I think, use kind of the Austin Kleon approach of steal like an artist, take from here and there and there and there. And it's in the taking and the synthesis and the arrangement that we make something new.

• 8:05Ryan Holiday?

  For instance, it's funny, now I watch people talk about the relationship between Stoicism and Amor Fati, but I know I'm the one that made that connection explicit and popular because it was something I was introduced to when I was a research assistant on Robert Greene's book with 50 Cent. And he talks about the idea of Amor Fati. And it struck me just how deeply connected that idea was with Stoicism. And it's something I integrated in my own books. And that became popular. Now it's, I see people going, hey, you know, the Stoics never really said Amor Fati, that's from Nietzsche, not from the Stoics. I know, but I made the connection. And so the idea then of relying on these ancient ideas, but

• 8:48Ryan Holiday?

  not relying so much, or too much, not being dependent on them, using just the right amount. But also understanding you can't listen to this. I mean, I think it was Klianthes put together one of his books and he quotes so much from the play Medea that he said, this is Klianthes Medea. He included almost the entire book in all the quotations that he'd use. And I guess at some point, if I keep doing this, I'll have quoted from every single passage from Marcus Aurelius. But the arrangement that I do it in is different. The reading I have is different and my interpretation might be different than your interpretation, which might be different than the interpretation that even I myself might have made a few years ago.

• 9:32Ryan Holiday?

  So we put our own spin on these things. We make them our own, right? And to not do that, to not do that is also a shame. I think it was Nastim Taleb, again, I'm quoting, but he says, "Most of the quotations you make should be of people you disagree with." Now, I would disagree with the idea of most, but the point is if all the quotes that you have, that you use, that you write down are just ones that you accept, that you agree with, you're probably not being critical enough. You're not challenging enough. And so I want to push you to do that, too. You shouldn't agree with everything the Stoics say. You certainly shouldn't agree with everything that I say. You should be blazing your own path. And that's something I think about even as I'm doing marginalia in the sides of the

• 10:17Ryan Holiday?

  books that I read is like, am I just unthinkingly agreeing with everything I said? Or I think it's better if the reading process is a bit of an argument. If you agree with everything that I say, that means probably you're not thinking enough for yourself, but also it means I'm probably, you know, not being courageous enough in what I say. I'm not pushing the envelope enough. I'm not being honest or vulnerable enough. So you gotta be comfortable both quoting and carving your own path. You gotta be comfortable agreeing as well as disagreeing. And it's in- How all that shakes out that we have our original voice. And Seneca does say that,

• 11:01Ryan Holiday?

  again quoting, noting the irony. Seneca says something like, how do you prove that you really understood these masters? It's by putting their thoughts into your own words. And you see that illustrated in the Stoics, the sort of constant allusions or reframing or tightening of sort of Stoic mantras or ideas in one's own voice, one's own expression. And to me, that's partly what journaling is. I'm writing the ideas down, writing them down in my own voice, putting my own spin on them, staking my own claim, as Seneca says. As we wind up this year and we go into the new year, I hope you can put a stamp on this new year. You can stake out your own claim, claim your own

• 11:44Ryan Holiday?

  original voice. And that's what Stoicism is about. And I'll talk to you soon.

• 11:54Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. I just wanted to say we so appreciate it. We love serving you. It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple of years we've been doing it. It's an honor. Please spread the word, tell people about it. And this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say thank you.