Notice The Reminders | Always Ask Yourself This Question

“Everytime you cut your hair. Every time you trim your nails. Every time you have to replace an old shirt or a worn out pair of running shoes, take note. Take note of what they symbolize.”Ryan explains why you should embrace the reality of your mortality, and reads this week’s meditation from The Daily Stoic Journal, on today’s Daily Stoic Podcast. Blinkist is the app that gets you fifteen-minute summaries of the best nonfiction books out there. Blinkist lets you get the topline information and the most important points from the most important nonfiction books out there, whether it’s Ryan’s own The Daily Stoic, Yuval Harari’s Sapiens, and more. Go to blinkist.com/stoic, try it free for 7 days, and save 25% off your new subscription, too. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow 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.

• 0:04Ryan 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.

• 0:34Ryan Holiday?

  Every time you cut your hair, every time you trim your nails, every time you have to replace an old shirt or a worn-out pair of running shoes, take note. Take note of what this symbolizes, because in those clippings, in that thinning hairline, in that worn-out pair of jeans, is a message. Time is passing. Life has gone by. Seneca reminds us that every second that has passed belongs to death. "We are dying every day," he says. "We are dying one haircut, one t-shirt at a time." There are larger reminders, too, ones that sneak up on us. Is your car getting up there in miles? Do you have to replace your air conditioner,

• 1:18Ryan Holiday?

  the one you purchased new, with a 15-year warranty that just expired? Are the athletes you remember from draft day now up for the Hall of Fame? Seneca tells the story of coming upon some old and dying trees at his country estate, only to suddenly realize he had planted them himself. Life sneaks up on us in this way, and in that way, so too does death, which is why we practice memento mori. It's not morbid, it's helpful. What's morbid is dying, having wasted your brief time on this planet. We meditate on our mortality so we can use this incredible asset we have been given. So we take nothing for granted. So we are present.

• 2:02Ryan Holiday?

  So we can fully enjoy the moment we walk in those shoes. So we can grow while our hair is growing. So we can appreciate even the mundane task of trimming our nails. Let this be a reminder.

• 2:18Ryan Holiday?

  Always ask yourself this question. Much of what we do and say during the course of a week is completely unnecessary. Meetings, material possessions, confrontations, pursuits, pointless distractions and problems. They take us away from tranquility and purpose. And a Stoic cuts through these temptations and obligations by asking a simple question, a question that should lead you in your journal and in thinking this week. It is this: Before speaking, enacting, or buying something, just ask, is this a necessary thing? This is from today's entry in the Daily Stoic Journal, 366 Days of Writing and Reflection on the Art of Living by yours truly, Ryan Holiday. You can get it anywhere books are sold.

• 3:03Ryan Holiday?

  I do it every single morning, including this morning. And you can also buy a signed copy in the Daily Stoic store. But today's quotes, we have one long quote from Marcus Aurelius and one short one from Seneca. Marcus Aurelius says, "It is said that if you want to have peace of mind, busy yourself with little. Wouldn't a better saying be, do what you must and as required of a rational being created for public life? For this brings not only the peace of mind of doing few things, but the greater peace of doing them well. Since the vast majority of our words and actions are unnecessary, corralling them will create an abundance of leisure and tranquility. As a result, we shouldn't forget at each moment to ask, is this one of the unnecessary things?

• 3:47Ryan Holiday?

  But we must corral not only unnecessary actions, but unnecessary thoughts too, so needless acts don't tag along after them." That's our translation from the Daily Stoic and the Daily Stoic Journal. Let me give you Gregory Hayes, which I also really like. He says, "If you seek tranquility, do less, or more accurately, do what is essential, what the logos of a social being requires, and in the requisite way, which brings a double satisfaction, to do less better." Because most of what we do and say, and it's not essential. If you can eliminate this, you'll have more time and more tranquility. Ask yourself at every moment, is this necessary?

• 4:27Ryan Holiday?

  But we need to eliminate unnecessary assumptions as well, to eliminate the unnecessary actions that follow. And then our second quote from Seneca is, "I was shipwrecked before I even boarded. The journey showed me this, but how much of what we have is unnecessary? And how easily we can decide to rid ourselves of these things whenever it's necessary, and thus never suffering the loss." That's Moral Letters 87:1. So, to me, the pandemic has been a masterful teacher in this regard. How much of the things we thought were unchangeable parts of the job, fixed obligations due to this profession, or school, or whatever it was,

• 5:12Ryan Holiday?

  that the pandemic said, "Nope, all of it's flexible. Most of it doesn't need to be done at all, and most of the way that it is done can be done differently." And I feel like it's been this massive, shared lifestyle experiment. And I found that so much of what I was doing was one of the unnecessary things. So much of what I was doing and saying and thinking and being a part of was not one of the essential things. So you really need to stop and ask yourself this question. Is what I'm doing necessary? Why am I doing it? Is it just the way people have always done it? I mean, even now, as I'm getting ready to gear up for the book launch of Courage is Calling, having just been through a virtual book launch last year for Lives of the Stoics, I know I don't have to travel to a bunch of cities.

• 5:56Ryan Holiday?

  I know I don't have to do most of these podcasts. I don't have to do most of the stuff. It doesn't actually move the needle. I was just doing it because that's what you thought you had to do. And to not do it seems scary. And because everyone else was doing it, it seemed reckless not to do it, right? All the reasons we do things. But again, most of what we do and say and think is not necessary. It's not even particularly effective or well thought out. And so to question this is really important. And it's not just like, "Oh, you're privileged. You don't, you don't, you have a choice. That's why you're not doing it." It's actually not about privilege at all. In fact, it's the privileged people who can afford to do. More unnecessary things, more pointless things, right?

• 6:38Ryan Holiday?

  It's actually, at this point in my career, I had the luxury of, you know, taking a lot of time off to, let's say, do press for a book. It was actually earlier in my career that the costs of agreeing to this pointless stuff were much higher, but I wasn't aware of it. I wasn't fully understanding of the opportunity cost, how much this was taking me away from writing, how much this was taking me away from relationships, how much this was just taking me away from recovering and refreshing so I could go back to my work from a fresher point of view. And this is what I wanted to leave you with today. Take a minute, stop, ask yourself, is what I'm doing necessary? How much of what I'm doing is unnecessary? And how can I eliminate some of that stuff so I can do the essential things better? Right?

• 7:22Ryan Holiday?

  I'm doing less, but I'm doing all my stuff better now. And that's, that's part of the new normal that I'm trying to protect coming out of the pandemic, and I hope that's true for you as well.

• 7:36Ryan Holiday?

  I don't know if you can hear that, but I'm spinning my memento mori coin on my desk here, which I carry in my pocket everywhere. It says memento mori on the front, and it's got a picture of a skull, an hourglass, and a flower, life, death, time, the relationship between these three things. And then on the back, it has a quote from Marcus Aurelius that says, "You could leave life right now." And the other side of that quote is, "Let it determine what you do and say and think." The exercise of memento mori is supposed to center you, it's supposed to make you focus, it's supposed to make you focus on what's important. And that's what memento mori is about. We support Daily Stoic a little bit here by, by some of the memento mori products we sell in the store. The idea is to have a physical, tangible reminder.

• 8:18Ryan Holiday?

  I realize it's not for everyone, but I carry this with me, I touch it, I just go, I'm not going to go to bed angry about this, I'm not going to brood on that, not going to waste time with this, I'm going to say no to that. The practice has been super important to me. I think it'll be important to you. You can check it out, go to store.dailystoic.com. And then you can hear it spinning there, and as it's spinning, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.

• 8:43Ryan Holiday?

  So is time. Be well.