This Is How To Become Wise | Make Honesty Your Only Policy

Ryan explains how you should think about the process of learning, and reads this week’s meditation from The Daily Stoic Journal, on today’s Daily Stoic Podcast. List your product on AppSumo between September 15th - November 17th and the first 400 offers to go live will receive $1000, the next 2000 to list a product get $250. And everyone who lists gets entered to be one of 10 lucky winners of $10k! Go to https://appsumo.com/ryanholiday to list your product today and cash in on this amazing deal. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://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.

• 0:04Ryan 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?

  This is how to become wise. Sure, we know that a Stoic is supposed to read, but as Epictetus said, "It matters what and how you read." And as Seneca said, "It matters what you are reading for." "Are you studying the Odyssey because it's entertaining? Because you're trying to impress people? Or are you trying to learn from Odysseus?" Seneca asked to prepare yourself for the same kind of storms that he faced. It's fitting that a scene in Steven Pressfield's novel, Gates of Fire, would use a young storyteller, making the same point as Seneca. "We were made to recite the tense scene at the close of the Iliad," Pressfield has the young squire-turned-warrior explain.

• 1:19Ryan Holiday?

  "When Priam of Troy kneels before Achilles to kiss in supplication the hand of the man who has slain his sons, including the mightiest and dearest to him, Hector, hero and protector of Ilium, and then he would grill us upon it. What would we have done if we were Achilles? If we were Priam? Was each man's action proper and pious in the eyes of the gods?" Reading isn't just about pouring inputs into your brain. There has to be a filter. There has to be a back and forth. You have to continually put the information up to the test. Examine it. See how it applies to your life. Ask yourself how you might use it and what it is prompting you to think.

• 2:03Ryan Holiday?

  We become wise through this process, by asking questions, by debating with the author, even the long-deceased authors. You have to remember, Xeno said that "we become wise through conversations with the dead."

• 2:18Ryan Holiday?

  We are reading to prepare for life, to be better at this whole living thing. So we have to see everything through that lens. If you're reading passively, you're doing it wrong. You might as well just be watching television.

• 2:37Ryan Holiday?

  Make honesty your only policy. As Emperor Marcus Aurelius did not see the best of humanity, leaders never do. At court, there would have been backbiting, people who sold their friends out when they saw an opportunity to advance themselves, avarice and deceit. He especially didn't like faux attempts at honesty. His point, if you have to say, "I'm going to be honest with you here," what you're casually saying is that honesty is an exception for you and not the rule, that you're making a special effort to tell the truth here, because you usually don't. And how sad is that? It's time to think about what these little statements say about us and how to make sure that our default policy is honesty and straightforwardness.

• 3:21Ryan Holiday?

  And 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 co-writer and translator, Stephen Hanselman. I actually do this journal every single day. There's a question in the morning, a question in the afternoon, then there's these sort of weekly meditations. As Epictetus says, "Every day and night, we keep thoughts like this at hand. Write them, read them aloud, and talk to yourself and others about them." You can check out the Daily Stoic Journal anywhere books are sold. You can also get a signed personalized copy from me in the Daily Stoic store at store.dailystoic.com. The two quotes we have from Marcus Aurelius's Meditations and then from Seneca's Moral Letters go as follows.

• 4:03Ryan Holiday?

  "How rotten and fraudulent when people say they intend to give it to you straight. What are you up to, friend? It shouldn't need to be your announcement, but be seen readily, as if written on your forehead, heard in the ring of your voice, a flash in your eyes, just as the beloved sees it all in a lover's glance. In short, the straightforward and good person should be like the smelly goat. You know it." When they're in the room with you. I love that quote. That's so great. A calculated give it to you straight is like a dagger. And there's nothing worse than a wolf befriending sheep. We should avoid false friendship at all costs. If you are good, straightforward and well meaning, it should show in your eyes and not escape notice. That's from Marcus Aurelius's Meditations 1115. And then Seneca's Moral Letters 109, he says,

• 4:49Ryan Holiday?

  "It is in keeping with nature to show our friends affections and to celebrate their advancement as if it was our very own. For if we don't do this, virtue, which is strengthened only by exercising our perceptions, will no longer endure in us." Look, I think this idea that honesty is your best policy is really important. And obviously, we should cultivate a reputation for candor, for straightforwardness, for not holding back, for not being two faced. If you have an opinion, you put it out there. You don't say one thing in private, another thing in public, right? But I would say, you know, and we had Randall Stutman on the Daily Stoic Podcast and in the Data Stoic Leadership Challenge recently. And he did push back on this trend of radical candor.

• 5:32Ryan Holiday?

  You know, that often it can be an excuse for being a jerk. You know, the Stoics take their original roots from the cynics. You know, Diogenes, who sort of walks the streets of Athens, just saying whatever he thinks. But I don't particularly admire him. I see him as sort of antisocial. So I think what Marcus is saying, cultivate a reputation for straightforwardness. This is in context of the other Stoic virtues. It takes courage to be clear and to voice unpopular opinions and to say what people don't want to hear. But it also takes moderation and an understanding of justice to know what opinions to voice, how to voice them,

• 6:16Ryan Holiday?

  how not to be a jerk about them. You know, radical candor in Wall Street firms, Randall was saying, is again, often an excuse for asshole bosses to be more of a jerk. And that's not the excuse they need. We want to be both.

• 6:32Ryan Holiday?

  We want to be both straightforward as well as restrained. And I know that seems a little contradictory, but well, life is complicated and it's about balance. So when we say we want to be the smelly goat in the room, I don't think we want, and as someone who owns goats, let me tell you, man, goats can stink. I can sometimes smell my neighbor's goats. He's like a half mile away. I'll catch a whiff of it in the wind. A male goat, the sort of musk they have, man, it is repulsive. It's disgusting. I don't think that's what Marcus is saying. I think he's being a bit exaggerated. He's just saying that, you know, these, "I'm gonna be level with you, with you here." Or when we say, "I don't mean any offense," or "no offense intended," you really did

• 7:16Ryan Holiday?

  mean, you're, you can almost expect that the next words out of this person's mouth are gonna be really poorly thought out, not so nice things. And so I think we should take some time here to think about this balance. This is what temperance is really about, right? Just in the way that courage is a midpoint between cowardice and recklessness. I'd like to think that honesty is a line somewhere between omission, not saying things, and saying too many things, or something like to that regard, if you get what I'm saying. It's that, yes, we have to tell the truth, but you don't have to tell someone that you find them repulsive today.

• 8:00Ryan Holiday?

  You don't have to tell them that you really hate the sound of their voice, right? There are things you can keep to yourself. And I guess I just wanted to add a little color to this week's meditation, that being a Stoic, and there was an interesting lawsuit recently, a workplace lawsuit, where a man claimed that Stoicism was his religion, and therefore the offensive things he said at work, the way he comported himself and behaved, even some of his hygiene habits, he could not be fired for them because they were, Dawson, you're calling me right now, so hang on one second. He could not be fired for them because they were his religious beliefs. But when you really look at the remarks that he was defending, the way that he's behaving, it's true that he's actually just a jerk.

• 8:45Ryan Holiday?

  And that's not what we're talking about. So all things in moderation, including this kind of honesty that we're talking about from Marcus Aurelius, have an identifiable scent that you are an honest person, but don't be a stinky goat. Thanks so much for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Again, if you don't know this, you can get these delivered to you via email every day. Just go to dailystoic.com/email. So check it out, dailystoic.com/email.