The Personal Is Universal | Short Stoic Lessons From All Of Ryan Holiday's Books

Many artists—songwriters, poets, comedians, and so on—have said some version of the same idea: the personal is universal. Artists often find the more personal they get in their art, the more people tend to resonate with it. It actually helps explain how Meditations has endured for thousands of years.---And in today's video excerpt, Ryan highlights some of the most important Stoic lessons from all of his books. Check out the full video on the Daily Stoic YouTube channel.✉️ 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, including the Premium Leather Edition of Meditations.📱 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, how we can apply them in our actual lives. Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy.

• 0:28Ryan Holiday?

  The personal is universal. Many artists, songwriters, poets, comedians, and so on, they've all said some version of the same thing, that the personal is universal. Artists often find the more personal they get in their art, the more people tend to resonate with it. It actually helps explain how meditation has endured for thousands of years. We should not be able to relate to Marcus Aurelius at all. His experience was fundamentally unrelatable. There was literally a cult that worshipped him and his wife as living deities. Marcus controlled the largest army in the world. He had unlimited wealth. He could kill and torture and exile anyone he wanted. People cheered him as he walked down the street. Just the fact that he lived a long time ago

• 1:12Ryan Holiday?

  should be an unbridgeable gap between us. Yet we find a way to relate to him, because he was unflinchingly honest in his journal, and he was touching something universally human. There are two lessons here. First, if you want to make great art, be unflinchingly personal. Go to what makes you unique and you. But second, don't let that uniqueness separate you from others. On the contrary, if you want to feel less alone, remind yourself that you aren't. Your problems aren't that unique. Your nature isn't that unique. Your personal stuff isn't that unique. In fact, it is universal. We are all people struggling the same way. We are all people with the same capacities and dignity and worth. Let's celebrate that. Come together over that.

• 1:57Ryan Holiday?

  I have my...

• 2:00Ryan Holiday?

  Leather copy of Meditations here on my desk that I was actually just going through. Almost two decades ago, I grabbed the Gregory Hayes translation of Marcus Aurelius off Amazon, and that book changed my life. And now I have published my edition of that translation with all the features and perks and durability that I wanted, my old paperback, having now seen better days. And we have it for sale at store.dailystoic.com. I'll link to it in today's show notes. I wanted to make an edition of Meditations that you could put miles and miles and miles on it, that generations could pass to each other. And that's what we did with this wonderful, universal, yet so uniquely specific work of art, work of brilliant philosophy. If you haven't read it yet, this is a great edition to start

• 2:44Ryan Holiday?

  with. If you have read it and you want a really high-end copy, this is for you. Grab that at store.dailystoic.com. I'll link to it in the description. And check out Marcus Aurelius's Meditations.

• 3:03Ryan Holiday?

  Ten years ago, I left my life. I moved across the country to this house on St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans. It was a tiny little room. It cost like $800 a month. And I was going to make my start as a writer.

• 3:19Ryan Holiday?

  I didn't know how it would go. I remember pacing outside the front of this house, talking to a friend of mine. I had this idea for a book about the media system. And I remember asking if he thought it would work, what he thought would happen. And he said, "Just write it and see what happens. Just see what happens." He's like, "The worst-case scenario, you can just put it out on the internet and see how it goes." I had no idea that 10 years later, I'd have written 12 books that had sold almost 5 million copies in 30 languages. I had no idea what the future holds. I was taking a risk. And that's how all changes in our lives start, is by taking a leap, by taking a risk, by betting on yourself. And so I bet on myself. I moved in this apartment. I would take the streetcar up St. Charles every day to the Tulane Library, where I wrote in the library. I just tried to carve

• 4:03Ryan Holiday?

  out a different path in my life. It was a hard left turn. It was scary. It was intimidating. I doubted myself many, many times. But I had something that I felt I needed to say. And I had a sense that I was intended for something different in this life than than just marketing, which is why I was willing to write this book that was essentially destroying my old career. And so today, on what would now be the 10th anniversary of that book coming out a year after I wrote it, I wanted to do a video where I give you a one-minute summary, not just of that book, but all my books since then, which you can check out or not. I wanted to give you a lesson from each one that I think you can use, whether you read the book or not. And that's what we're going to do in today's video.

• 4:48Ryan Holiday?

  If America is ruled by public opinion, and public opinion comes to us from the media, from social media, well, what are the incentives? What are the systems? What are the structures? What are the biases? What are the economics of the media system? How does it really work from the inside? Because you need to know, these forces are shaping you, what you think, what you feel. And I wanted to rip the curtain back open, because I was one of those people, I was a media manipulator, that's what everyone in public relations effectively is. And so, and trust me, I'm lying, I'm showing how the media system actually works, for better or for worse, how people are manipulating you, trying to steal your attention, trying to make you think and do certain things. And if that's what I was doing with, so, t-shirts, or books, or other things, you can bet your

• 5:33Ryan Holiday?

  ass, people are trying to do it for far more nefarious purposes. And you need to understand how this works, not just to protect yourself, but also, if you have good messages, if you have good work, if you have important things that need to go out in the world, you better understand how that system works.

• 5:50Ryan Holiday?

  What's interesting about marketing is that it's basically been done the same way for like 100-plus years. The press release was invented to communicate troop movements in World War I, which is crazy. And so, I wanted to look at, not what people say marketing is, but what marketing can be. When I was looking at all these startups, I was realizing that they were having to reinvent marketing because they didn't know what marketing is. They just saw it as anything that grew the business. Facebook didn't have a marketing department, they had a growth department. And that's a transformatively different way to think about it. Growth is what marketing is supposed to do, but then, marketing is this kind of defined playbook. People think it's press releases, and printing up t-shirts, and buying billboards. And that might not be the best way to do it.

• 6:34Ryan Holiday?

  And so for Growth, Hacking and Marketing, for my own benefit, but then also for the reader, I wanted to think about what would marketing be if we thought about it today? What would we include in it if we saw it from a growth mentality as opposed to a sort of a legacy mentality? And that's what the book is. It had to take its own medicine. It started as an article and it became a Kindle single and then it became a paperback book, then it became an updated paperback book. And it's now sold something like 200,000 copies. It's in a bunch of languages. It proved itself. I've gotten to talk about it all over the world. But the idea is not what people say marketing is, not what people say public relations is, but what actually moves the needle for the business. That could be customer retention. It could also be cold calling people, right?

• 7:18Ryan Holiday?

  It could be business development, but, but let's expand the definition of what marketing is and can be to come up with a better, more applicable, a leaner definition. And that's what that book is.

• 7:32Ryan Holiday?

  You're not stuck. I know you think you are. What the Stoics wanted you to know is that yes, one path might be closed, but another remains open, right? The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way. Marcus Verliss isn't saying that nothing can ever stop you. He's saying that when you're stopped in one capacity, there remains other capacities open to you. You always have the opportunity to practice virtue, practice excellence, to change in some form or another based on what's happened. We don't control what happened, we control how we respond. That's what Stoic philosophy is about. So yes, one path can be closed, a door can be shut, but the window remains open. You know, if someone gets in your way, someone blocks you, someone prevents you, sure, that happens. But they can't stop you from being patient.

• 8:15Ryan Holiday?

  They can't stop you from practicing forgiveness. They can't stop you from going in a different direction, from changing your mind, trying something new, growing because of this, learning because of it. The Stoics say no one prevents us from accommodating, adapting, changing, integrating the experiences, the obstacles that are in our path and turning them into new paths. That's what the obstacle is, the way is. It's impossible to get stuck because we always retain our ability to choose and change.

• 8:47Ryan Holiday?

  I wanted to tattoo this on my arm. It's so important to me. Ego is the enemy. There's never been a situation I've ever been in in my entire life where I thought, "You know what would make this better? If there was more ego involved." No, ego always makes stuff worse. As Cyril Connolly says, "Ego sucks us down like the law of gravity." Does it matter how brilliant you are, how successful you are, how powerful you are? Ego will be the end of you. It will destroy what you've built. It will destroy your relationships. It destroys your connection to your audience. Ego is the enemy. It only makes things worse. Ego is the enemy.

• 9:23Ryan Holiday?

  I want to give you my all-time favorite quote from Seneca, and I actually, I opened my book, The Daily Stoic, with it. "Of all people, only those are at leisure who make time for philosophy. Only they truly live. Not satisfied merely to keep good watch over their own days, they annex every age into their own. All the harvest of the past is added to their store. Only an ingrate would fail to see that these great architects of venerable thoughts were born for us and have designed a way of life for us. Only those who make time for philosophy are truly alive." That's what Seneca is saying. He's saying, "We access all of the wisdom of the past by reading. So if you're not reading, what are you doing? You're wasting your time and you're wasting your life."

• 10:10Ryan Holiday?

  Your work doesn't have to be a flash in the pan. It doesn't have to be connected to trends or fads. You don't have to be trying to catch a wave before it crashes. Some people make work that's actually important, that's perennial, that's timeless, that's always going to be true. What I love about Marcus Aurelius's Meditations is that this wasn't even intended for publication. It's for his own private use. But it's so honest and authentic and vulnerable and real that it lasts for 2,000 years, even for a guy who didn't care about posthumous fame. When I wrote Perennial Seller, I was thinking about this idea from Longfellow, that art is long, but time is fleeting. If you're chasing what's now, you're going to miss out what's always going to be true in the future.

• 10:54Ryan Holiday?

  So when I write, try to make things that last, trying to make things that are timeless, trying to make things that are true, trying to make things that really do something for people. I don't give a shit about what's happening in the world around me. I'm trying to make something that will endure.

• 11:11Ryan Holiday?

  I wrote this book about Peter Thiel a few years ago, and he had this great line. He said, "Competition is for losers."

• 11:18Ryan Holiday?

  So like you go where you're the only one doing that thing. You don't just go to the only one, you're the only one doing that thing if you don't like that thing. You have to find the overlap of like what you're interested in, what you're excited in, and where there's not a lot of people doing that thing. Which is the funny part about Stoicism now. Now that my books have sold and they've gotten media attention and there's this big platform, it's safe. And so people are like, "Well, I want to write a book about that. I want to do a Stoic parenting book. I want to do a Stoic insert book." And then they assume that it's going to sell just like the other books, and they don't realize that they're competing with the other books. And that's actually a much harder thing than if they'd found some other niche that was fresh.

• 12:06Ryan 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 you can hear the frogs and all of this. It's moments like this, when you're actually

• 12:51Ryan Holiday?

  not working, when you're consciously not thinking, that sometimes your best work, your best ideas pop into your head. That was true for the Stoics. It's true, it's true for the great artists of all time, and it's true for you and I and normal people. 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 breakthrough of your life comes from.

• 13:21Ryan Holiday?

  So the only reason to study philosophy, the Stoics would say, was to be a better person. Philosophy wasn't this thing that you studied. It was a thing that you did. This is Marcus Aurelius. Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one. Epictetus says, don't talk about your philosophy. Embody it. There's a Latin expression. Actually, I sign copies of Lives of the Stoics, sometimes with it in English. Deeds, not words. The Latin expression is acta non verba. Do it, don't talk about it. And when I was writing Lives of the Stoics, I got to look at the Stoics from a different way. Not the Stoics as people who wrote certain things

• 14:05Ryan Holiday?

  or said certain things, but what did the Stoics do, right? Who were they as people? So Marcus Aurelius says, "The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way." That's the obstacles away. But Zeno, when he suffers a shipwreck and loses everything, it opens up this whole new path of his life. Instead of being defeated or despondent, instead of breaking, instead of giving up, he turns to philosophy, starts a new philosophy, rebuilds his life step by step, right? That's him acting out that idea, even if he never actually said that thing. So we want to study the Lives of the Stoics, not just the writings of the Stoics. And I think dipping into Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus,

• 14:49Ryan Holiday?

  but also lesser-known Stoics like Agrippinus or Zeno, Cleanthes, Chrysippus, Musonius Rufus, who's Epictetus's teacher, like, they give you a whole new way of looking and thinking about the Stoics, which is mostly in where did the Stoics live up to what they said? Did they live up to what they believed? Where did they fall short of what they believed, of what they said? And how can we learn from both the inspiration and the cautionary tale element?

• 15:22Ryan Holiday?

  ¿Por qué leemos libros? Leemos libros porque nos permite aprender de las experiencias de otros. Hay una frase genial: "Cualquier tonto puede aprender por experiencia". Prefiero aprender por las experiencias de otros. Leemos para poder encontrar donde han dejado la pista. Hice este libro de niños, El Hombre que sería rey. Mi escena favorita en el libro es cuando Rústicus da a Marcus Aurelius un libro. Y le da un libro, otro, otro y otro. Y él dice: "¿Qué tiene que ver leer libros con ser rey?" Y Rústicus dice: "A través de las páginas de un libro podemos aprender bastante fácilmente lo que los demás han ganado solo a través de gran dificultad". Eso es lo que es la lectura. Es un cortinilla. Es la única cortinilla que existe en esta vida que te permite aprender de las experiencias de otros.

• 16:08Ryan Holiday?

  No aprenda por el triste intento y error. Aprende de las experiencias de otros. Toma libros, añade tus experiencias a eso y así es como te conviertes en sabio y grande.

• 16:19Ryan Holiday?

  La pregunta famosa de Helo es: "Si no yo, ¿entonces quién?" Y luego dijo: "Si no ahora, ¿cuándo?" Y creo que esta es una pregunta estoica muy importante. Y es por eso que ves a los estoicos saltando en momentos de crisis y dificultad a lo largo de la historia del estoicismo, porque sabían que si no lo hicieran, si Cato simplemente hubiera cambiado, entonces nadie habría levantado. Si Marcus Aurelius hubiera rechazado ser el emperador porque lo que realmente quería hacer era ser un filósofo, entonces, ¿quién habría tomado su lugar? Creo que incluso Seneca se da cuenta de esto en el servicio de Nero. Él dice: "Si no hago esto, alguien peor lo hará". Y creo que esta es una pregunta clave: si no lo haces, ¿quién lo hará?

• 17:02Ryan Holiday?

  Y si todos se retiraran, si nadie se levantara, ¿dónde nos dejaría eso? Esta es la idea en el nuevo libro, "Si no tú, ¿entonces quién?" Y "Si no ahora, ¿cuándo?"

• 17:15Ryan Holiday?

  So Epictetus is a slave in ancient Rome, and he realizes that slavery is a legal status, but it's also a state of mind. So he makes this distinction between sort of being enslaved by stuff and being enslaved, like, in fact, right? So in The Girl Who Would Be Free, which is my sort of fictional kids' book about Epictetus, I actually render as a girl for a bunch of whatever reasons, but I have Epictetus's father say that we have to worry about controlling the empire between our ears, right? So there's all this stuff that Epictetus doesn't control. What other people do, what other people say, what he's allowed to do and say, but no one can control his thoughts, right?

• 17:59Ryan Holiday?

  That's what he controls or she controls. So it's a book about controlling, what actually the Stoics called the greatest empire, which is the self, the interior self, our thoughts, our opinions, all of that. So The Girl Who Would Be Free is really about that, finding freedom within captivity, finding freedom within inside constraint, finding freedom inside misfortune and adversity. That's what the book is about. Usually when I sign this one, I'll write amor fati, because it's sort of a theme in the book. It's about sort of finding what you love about your situation, what you can do inside your situation, who you can be inside your situation. So that's what The Girl Who Would Be Free is about. And I think ultimately, that's what Stoicism itself is about.

• 18:41Ryan Holiday?

  And I wanted to write a kids' book to help kids with that very idea, like I also did in The Boy Who Would Be King.

• 18:52Ryan Holiday?

  Seneca is writing this letter to his friend Lucilius, and they're talking about Stoicism, this idea that, you know, you try to get better every day, hold yourself to these high standards. You know, and at this point, he's probably in his 60s or 70s. He's been doing this a long time. And he goes, "How do you know you're doing it right? How do I know that I'm..." Doing it right, that I'm getting better. And he says, "Each day I become a better friend to myself. That's how I know I'm making progress." I think what he means is that discipline or stoicism is not this constant whipping of oneself, this constant feeling of falling short, of not being good enough. But it's a sense of like, you did your best, good job. I love you, I respect you. There's still room to grow, but there's nothing you have to feel guilty or terrible about.

• 19:35Ryan Holiday?

  And I think if you want to do this well, you want to do it sustainably, you have to understand that discipline is not a form of self-flagellation. It should not be hurtful. You should love it.