Pod Insights The Daily Stoic Premium (🔓) What American Legacy Company US Steel Can Learn From Stoicism About this episode When Ryan was asked to give a talk to the leaders of one of the most foundational companies in American history, the United States Steel Corporation, he drew inspiration from Marcus Aurelius’ examinations of fire - how it melts whatever material is thrown into it in order to create fuel and heat - to put together a speech that illustrates how the Stoic virtue of Courage can be converted into success at the highest levels of industry.✉️ 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.📱 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
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:04 Ryan Holiday? Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Sundays, we take a deeper dive into these ancient topics with excerpts from the Stoic texts, audiobooks that we like here or recommend here at Daily Stoic, and other long-form wisdom that you can chew on on this relaxing weekend. We hope this helps shape your understanding of this philosophy, and most importantly, that you're able to apply it to your actual life. Thank you for listening.
0:47 Ryan Holiday? Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another weekend episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Back in April, I did a talk, I didn't get to go out in person, but I gave a talk to US Steel, a great American company in the sense that it goes way, way back in American history, in American industry. Actually, my father-in-law worked at California Steel for many, many years. But it's always interesting to talk to leaders in different fields, right? When I'm writing about Stoicism, I'm not thinking, hey, this is going to work for executives in the steel business. Just I'm not thinking, hey, it'll resonate with special forces operators or professional athletes or librarians.
1:31 Ryan Holiday? But actually, what I'm trying to do with Stoicism is talk about how it pertains to you, what you do, real people doing real stuff, as the Stoics were. And obviously, the Stoics were familiar with steel, a slightly less tech-driven process for making it back in Marcus Aurelius's day. But, you know, his images and metaphors of fire, for instance, you know, how a strong enough fire melts whatever you throw into it and turns it into fuel and brightness and heat, and in this case, forges and toughens up the steel that we use to gird our buildings and build our cars and airplanes and all sorts of fancy stuff.
2:13 Ryan Holiday? So this is me talking to 100 or so senior executives talking about courage at US Steel. And I'm excited to share the audio of that with all of you right now.
2:35 Speaker 01 Ryan Holiday is one of the world's best-selling philosophers.
2:37 Ryan Holiday? Ryan Holiday is absolutely my new favorite author of the moment. Why don't you say hi to the Vayner Nation and for the couple of them that don't know who you are? I dropped out of college when I was 19. I was the research assistant to Robert Greene. I became the director of marketing at American Apparel shortly after that.
2:51 Speaker 02 To paraphrase Steven Pressfield, today's guest is one of the greatest thinkers of our generation.
2:57 Ryan Holiday? Life is very, very brief. We do not know how long we're going to be here.
3:01 Speaker 01 Best-selling author, Ryan Holiday. Ryan, good to have you here. Please explain to folks what we're talking about here.
3:07 Speaker 03 A celebrated writer, blogger, marketing specialist, life advisor, cattle rancher, and personality, all his own Mr. Ryan Holiday.
3:20 Ryan Holiday? Sometime around the year 160 AD, Marcus Aurelius, who trained his whole life to be the emperor of Rome, gets a bit of terrible news. Soldiers from the far eastern ends of the empire have brought back a plague, a virus. And this pandemic ripples through Rome, and it overwhelms Rome in every capacity you can imagine. It's public health, it's hospitals, civil unrest, people are scared. It's a devastating global pandemic that goes on not just for a year or two, but for more than a decade. And if this was the only crisis that Marcus Aurelius experiences, he probably would have counted himself lucky. In the course of his reign, he experiences not only the plague, but a coup, historic flooding,
4:04 Ryan Holiday? spends nearly a decade at war, Rome's borders are constantly invaded. It's basically one thing after another for this guy. An ancient historian writes that Marcus does not meet with the good fortune that he deserves. He says, "Almost his entire reign was involved in a series of troubles", which Marcus probably would have thought was an enormous understatement. It was one damn thing after another for this guy, which might sound familiar. That's how you might describe the last couple of years for America, for the world, for each of us as individuals. Not only have there been these enormous global events, had there been these local events, but then all of us are just trying to make it through the world where we have sick relatives,
4:49 Ryan Holiday? we have kids who are struggling in school, maybe we have financial problems. We're all going through something, right? It's one thing after another. But to the Stoics, who we're going to talk about today, the fact that we don't control so much of what happens in life is actually not a bad thing. The Stoics would say it's an opportunity. For the Stoics, the idea was that each and every situation we face in life is an opportunity to practice virtue, to practice excellence. In his famous meditations, Marcus Aurelius would write that "the impediment to action advances action; what stands in the way becomes the way." And he says that, yeah, things are gonna block our path, things are gonna cause problems for us.
5:31 Ryan Holiday? But he said, "We always have the ability to accommodate and adapt, to convert what life has dealt with us to our own advantage, that we can turn obstacles into fuel," he says, "in the way that a fire digests whatever you throw on top of it and turns it into flame and heat and brightness." And so for the Stoics, this idea that everything is an opportunity, it's not necessarily the situation as you would like it to be, but it is an opportunity to practice virtue. And so that begs the question, what is virtue? When people hear this word virtue, they tend to think of it in a very loaded moral context, which it partly is. But for the Stoics, there's actually four virtues. I have them tattooed on my wrist here. The four Stoic virtues are courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom.
6:15 Ryan Holiday? And that's what I want to talk about today, how everything that's going on with US Steel, everything that's happening in your lives is an opportunity to step up and be your best self, to practice the virtue of erite, or excellence, as the Greeks would call it. Everything is an opportunity to rise to the occasion and be what you are capable of being in that moment, be what you are called to be in that moment. The first of the virtues for the Stoics is this virtue of courage. And courage typically is rendered in the imagery as a lion, but the idea of courage being the virtue upon which all the other virtues depend, because fear is an ever-present part of life.
6:59 Ryan Holiday? We can imagine Marcus Aurelius in the depths of that pandemic, on the battlefield, as he's nursing a sick child. We can imagine all the things that make him feel afraid. Someone once pointed out to me that the most repeated phrase in the Bible is "be not afraid." It's also a phrase that appears in all of the ancient historical works quite a bit. Fear and courage is something that appears in The Odyssey dozens of times. The idea is that the world is scary, the world is unpredictable. And these fears, they loom large over us. They intimidate us. They make us feel like we don't have what it takes. So fear is this ever-present thing, but it's also a thing that almost invariably makes the hard things of life harder.
7:44 Ryan Holiday? You think in the early days of the Great Depression Franklin Roosevelt is elected and he gives his famous speech, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." What is he specifically referring to there? He's speaking to a banking crisis. Yes, America's economic situation was not good. Yes, banks were falling apart. But the thing about a bank run is it's the fear that it's only going to get worse, the fear that society's fabric is tearing itself apart, the fear that you have to get what you can and hide, right? This is a terrible emotion that makes things worse. The Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, he has this great line. He says, "There's no problem so bad that you cannot make it worse also." When we think of the Stoics, we think of that word stoic, which seems to mean to have no emotions.
8:28 Ryan Holiday? That's not what it is at all. The Stoics are good at domesticating their emotions, processing their emotions so that in high-pressure, high-stakes situations, they don't freak out, they don't make things worse, right? And that's what fear does. Fear often makes things worse because we overreact, we freeze up, we shut down, and we don't get to work on what we have to get to work on. And that's what courage is. Courage is the ability to sublimate that fear, to push it down, to put it aside, and then tackle what we have to tackle. Now, look, there's no question that the situation before us is always going to be unpredictable and uncertain, but the next couple of years, they're intimidating, they
9:12 Ryan Holiday? pose problems, they pose almost certain difficulties, what the economic environment is going to be, what the political environment is going to be, what our social environment is going to be, the technological environment is going to be. All of this is uncertain. And so it's natural to be a little bit intimidated or scared by that. But that's not going to help you deal with those things. There's a great story I like about Ulysses S. Grant. This is early on in his career. He's having to cross through Texas where I'm talking to you from now. It's a long journey across Texas. And Ulysses S. Grant comes from the Midwest, a place where at that point there was no wolves. And as they're crossing through Texas, they begin to hear this howling. And now Grant's travel companion is from Texas and he sees that Grant is quite scared of this.
9:56 Ryan Holiday? And he says, Grant, how many wolves do you think that is? And Grant said, he thought it was hundreds of wolves. The howling was was constant. It was coming from all over the place. It sounded like an enormous pack of wolves. And Grant, not wanting to seem scared, right? Says, I don't know. And tries to guess a low number. He says, I don't know, 20, 25. And finally, they come upon the place where the wolves were and they they spot them. Grant later writes, there was two wolves, right? The the wolves, this is a thing that coyotes and wolves can do. They can throw the sound of their voice. They they have a reason to be able to want to sound like there are more of them than there actually are.
10:38 Ryan Holiday? And Grant said, from this was a lesson that I took with me all of my life, particularly in my political career. He said, there's always fewer of them when they are counting. And his point was that sometimes what we're afraid of, what we feel looms in the future, what we feel is surrounding us and thus making our situation impossible or hopelessly outmatched. That this is our mind playing tricks on us. This is our ears playing tricks on us. And that when you get up close with something, when you look at it, instead of looking away because you are scared about it, but you get up close with it, you study it, you go, what are companies that have been in situations like this before? Look at the history of our company, our 100 years in business. Have we faced dire times? Of course. And guess what?
11:23 Ryan Holiday? We got through them. And what lessons did they learn getting through them? And how can I apply that to the situation that I am in now? So part of getting through fear of overcoming fear of having courage is about familiarity. We talked about Chris Hadfield earlier. One of the things Chris Hadfield said is that astronauts are not actually braver than other people. He said, they're just meticulously prepared. They've trained for this. John Glenn, when he orbits the Earth, is His heart rate never goes above a hundred because he'd been trained in high-stress situations over and over and over again. And this is true for special forces operators. This is true for police officers. This is true for firefighters and EMTs. They've practiced being in high-stress situations before and they know they can handle it.
12:05 Ryan Holiday? Well, the good news about the last couple of years is that it's put us in a number of high-stress situations, right? We've been through tough things. We know we can survive. We know we have what it takes. We learned lessons from when we freaked out in the past and how that didn't suit us well. So instead of turning away from what intimidates you, instead of pretending it doesn't exist, you have to do what the Stoics say, which is hold it up and put it to the test. Look at it. The Stoics talk about how a counterfeiter could bang a coin against a table and know whether it's fake or not, right? They can, they have, they've developed an ear for the metal. Just as we have developed the ability to discern things over the years through our experiences, through what we've seen and gone through, we should have the ability to
12:47 Ryan Holiday? take what intimidates us, what unnerves us, what we're scared about, and put it to the test. Think about what parts of it we need to take seriously. Think about what parts of it are overblown. Think about what parts of it are messing with our head and then know what we need to do because we all have something that we are put here to do. I'm fascinated with the story of Florence Nightingale, one of the most heroic figures of the 19th century. She saves hundreds, thousands of lives in battlefield and in hospitals. But this calling, this destiny that she reaches, it takes her a long time to get there. By one count, it takes 18 years from her first inkling that she wanted to be a nurse, that she could revolutionize medicine and sanitary conditions. It takes her 18 years.
13:32 Ryan Holiday? And what holds her back? It's not financial means. She comes from a wealthy family. It's not acumen. She learns and studies in a number of hospitals. She's afraid of what other people will think. She's afraid at that point of what a woman's role was supposed to be. And so her parents hold her back and her sister holds her back and other people's opinions about her holds her back. But one of her biographers writes, "It's not until she cuts through these bonds that she realized that she had been tied down with straw all along." Other people's opinions hold us back, right? Marcus really says that. Fascinating. We all love ourselves more than other people, but we care about other people's opinions more than our own. That's why we don't speak up. That's why we don't say something.
14:18 Ryan Holiday? That's why we're afraid to go for a promotion. That's why we're afraid to propose a new idea. That's why we're afraid to dye our hair a color we'd like to dye our hair. We don't want to get a reputation for being difficult. But really, historically, it's the people who are difficult, the people who are innovators, the people who are unique, the people who were themselves that make all the difference. Think of John Lewis, a civil rights activist. Talks about causing good trouble, right? Good trouble is the person who doesn't do things the way they've always been done, but questions, but doesn't mind turning things over. It doesn't mind trying things in a new way. There's a story about Margaret Thatcher, the Prime Minister of England.
15:01 Ryan Holiday? She's applying for a job after college. She trained to be a chemist. And she can see as she's interviewing that the interviewer is writing something at the top of the paper. And she can actually see the paper. And she sees that the man is writing, "This woman is much too difficult to work here." She can read that upside down. Imagine how devastating and frustrating and how wrong it is to hear something like that. And yet, in a sense, the man was right. She was too difficult for that job. She had bigger things in store for her. She had bigger impact than she'd be able to have. So as we think about fear, we want to think about it as something that holds us back from being what we're capable of being, doing what we are capable of doing, and seizing the opportunities that are there for us to seize.
15:45 Ryan Holiday? And what makes Marcus great is his willingness to push past that fear, to not be ruled by that fear. And so it will go for us and for your company. Is fear going to be something that holds you back? Is fear going to be something that allows you to see the path that you need to go to move forward? The next virtue is the virtue of discipline, or temperance, or moderation. This is typically rendered as a man sprinkling water into wine, diluting the wine. The other image I like is the image of the charioteer. They've got this powerful beast in front of them, and they have to be able to control it. They have to be able to direct it. And this is an art and a science. Discipline and courage are, of course, related.
16:28 Ryan Holiday? And in fact, Aristotle would illustrate the virtue of courage through the virtue of discipline. He would say that the opposite of cowardice is recklessness, right? He would say that there's a spectrum. So you have recklessness on one end and you have cowardice on the other. But in the middle there is courage. Obviously, this pertains to your line of work quite clear. Someone who is afraid is not going to do very well, but also someone who doesn't care about safety, who doesn't think about safety precautions, who takes unnecessary risks, right? They may be faster in the short term, but in the long term, they endanger not only themselves and other people, but the business itself. So, discipline is about order. It's about strength.
17:13 Ryan Holiday? It's about systems. It's about doing the right things in the right time, the right way. There was a line actually inscribed in the mantelpiece of Sir Henry Royce, founder of Rolls Royce. He said, "Whatever is done rightly, however humbly, is noble." Another way I've heard this said is, "How you do anything is how you do everything," right? Caring about the small details, being on top of everything, following the systems, running through the checklist, treating the little things as just as important as the big things. This is, of course, everything. I've been lucky enough to speak to a number of professional football teams, including the New England Patriots. And one of the things that I heard that stuck with me for a long time is that Tom Brady
17:57 Ryan Holiday? was not actually obsessed with winning. Tom Brady was obsessed with getting better. And it's this distinction that makes him the greatest of all time, that makes him able to endure for all of these seasons, to win in so many different ways with so many different athletes. Obviously, being competitive is important, but the problem the Stoics would say with competition is that you're often measuring yourselves against other people. You're often looking at things that you don't control. The obsession with getting better, on the other hand, is something that's up to you. So you're running a race not against other people, you're running a race always with yourselves. I think about this with my books. Obviously, I want to sell a lot of copies.
18:40 Ryan Holiday? Obviously, I want them to appear high on the bestseller list. I like to win awards. I like people to tell me that I did a great job. But ultimately, these are things that are not up to me, right? These are things that I don't control. So instead, as an author, I think about what I do control. I try to get myself to a place where the book is successful when I turn it in, not when it comes out, right? That I put everything I could into it, that I held myself to the highest standards, that I didn't hold anything back, that I didn't leave anything on the table, that I didn't cut any corners. And while I'm quite hard on myself, actually, though, on a day-to-day level, I just think about making a positive contribution.
19:24 Ryan Holiday? There's a great writing rule that says, just a couple crappy pages a day. Now, I would never publish crappy pages, but the point is, if you are obsessed with perfection, that is another way to say that you are paralyzed, because you can't be perfect, but you can be always getting better. So what I think about is, did I sit at my computer today and make a positive contribution? Did I put words on the page? Did I get closer to where I am trying to go? If I got closer, then I did my job. If I made a positive contribution, then I did my job. Some days, I'm gonna make huge contributions. Some days, I'm gonna make little contributions. But if I make a contribution every single day, eventually, I will get where I am trying to go. I follow this process.
20:08 Ryan Holiday? I trust this process, because I've been through the process many, many times. I know that there are days when it doesn't feel like it's coming together. I know it feels like days where I'm not doing enough. But I know that if I don't quit, if I keep showing up, if I keep trying to fine-tune here, get a little better here, make a positive contribution here, there, eventually, I get to a rough draft. And then with editing, that rough draft can become a second rough draft, and a third rough draft, and a fourth rough draft. And eventually, with enough notes, and enough input, and enough work, eventually, that gets to something publishable.
20:53 Ryan Holiday? And there was a moment on this book, on Discipline is Destiny, where I really did doubt the process. But I found I write these note cards to myself. And I found a note card where I'd said to myself, "You are going to doubt yourself. You must trust the process. Show up every day and a published work will come out of the other side." That the work is a byproduct of the process, right? Do I show up? Do I care about the details? Do I do what I need to do? Then I will get where I need to go. And it just happens that this is also the approach that has produced bestsellers, that have produced books, that have sold millions of copies. It's that I show up every day. I do the work. I don't think about the results per se. I think about the parts of the results that are in my control, which is whether I made a positive contribution.
21:37 Ryan Holiday? Because ultimately, the results of the market, or a public opinion, or in comparison to your competition, while these are important, they're not fully in your control. There's a great story about a Greek leader that I love, who was seen as threatening by many of his Greek colleagues. So they give him what they thought was a degrading job. They assigned him to be the head of the sewer system. And they thought, "Oh, this is going to be humiliating. This will be the end of his career. They've banished him to this backwater." But instead, he does such a good job. He's so focused on it. He takes it so seriously that it actually becomes one of the most prestigious positions.
22:21 Ryan Holiday? It becomes the position that other people in the future later want. And he has this great line, and he says, "It's not the job that makes the person. It's the person that makes the job, right? How you do anything is how you do everything. It doesn't matter ultimately what the external results are. It matters who you were, what the team was, what the group was, the intention the thing was done at the time that makes the thing great." And so when we think about discipline, it's the commitment to this. It's the consistency of this. It's the day-to-day-ness of this that makes for great people, that makes for great work. Organizations that makes for great movements and ultimately a great man and women.
23:03 Ryan Holiday? And then the next virtue is the virtue of justice, the scales of justice. But it probably says something about where we are as a culture that when people hear justice, they think the legal system or they think social justice. Now, these things, of course, are very important, but to the ancients, this virtue was even simpler. It meant doing the right thing. It meant doing it right now. In Meditations, Marcus Aurelius says, just that you do the right thing, the rest doesn't matter. It's when we make excuses, we think, oh, doing the right thing is going to be expensive. Or we say, oh, I'm going to do it later. We think it's somebody else's responsibility. We make this distinction that gets businesses and teams into trouble far too often. We go, it's not illegal, right?
23:46 Ryan Holiday? Does it matter if something, when you are parsing whether something is strictly legal or not, you're already going down a dark and dangerous road. The virtue of justice is about doing the right things for the right reasons, whether or not the rewards are going to be there. Marcus Aurelius in his Meditations, he talks about the common good, something like 40 times. He says, our job is to be good and do good for other people, right? People on our team, people in our company, people in our community, people in our country, people of the world, right? So think about the commitments that you guys have to safety, right? You're doing the right thing because doing the wrong thing has consequences for other people and their family.
24:30 Ryan Holiday? I think about your environmental stewardship, right? That we, that the decisions we make as a company, as people, as consumers, that has impact and implications for generations to come, right? We can't just think about what we're doing in a vacuum. We have to think about how our choices affect other people. We think, we have to ask ourselves, what would the world look like if everyone was about to do what we're going to do? And so the virtue of justice is tied up in ideas, of course, of honesty, of transparency. There's a story about a Greek leader who was remodeling his house. And the architect comes to him and says, hey, for a little bit more money, I can give you complete and total privacy. And the leader looks at him and he says, I'm going to give you twice as much money
25:14 Ryan Holiday? and I want you to give me no privacy. He says, everyone should be able to see what I'm doing. He was saying that the obligation of leadership, of success, is transparency and clarity.
25:27 Ryan Holiday? Right? When we think about our supply lines, when we think about how we treat or pay our employees, when we think about how we respond to mistakes, how we address problems in our company or in industry, think about transparency, we think about honesty, we think about holding ourselves to a high standard. There's another story about a Greek leader who runs into a young man in town who's with someone and when he sees the leader, he blushes. And the leader says to him, you know, you probably shouldn't spend time with people who make you blush when you are seen with them. And his point was that we probably shouldn't do things that we wouldn't want our customers to find out, that we wouldn't want regulators to find out, that we wouldn't want our bosses to find out, right?
26:11 Ryan Holiday? The transparency, the little person on your shoulder, assuming that you are being watched, assuming that sunshine laws can surface this information to the public. We want to make our decisions with that in mind, but ultimately, we want to make our decisions with the future in mind. There's a great expression I like, I think it's also a Greek expression, and it says, "The world is good when people plant trees in whose shade they will never know." Long-term and the short-term trade-offs of the decisions we make, the environmental choices that we make, of the standards we hold ourselves to, of the investments that we make, right? In the short term, maybe this affects productivity, maybe this affects quarterly earnings,
26:55 Ryan Holiday? maybe this affects profitability, right? But that doesn't mean that there aren't costs to ignoring those things too. And they're paid for by your children and your grandchildren, they're paid for in rivers and streams and trees. And all of us look back at decisions that our own industry, that our own ancestors made, that were good for them in the short term and bad for us in the long term. And conversely, when we spend time in national parks, or we swim in pristine rivers, or when we spend time in parts of restored or pristine wilderness, or we experience the safety regulations in the car that we're driving, this is the benefit of hard decisions that people made in previous generations,
27:37 Ryan Holiday? that we have to have the courage and the discipline and the ethics and the commitment to make here in the present moment. And the final virtue of Stoicism, the fourth and final virtue, is the virtue of wisdom.
27:52 Ryan Holiday? Or knowledge, or truth. One of my favorite quotes of all time comes from Pete Carroll, great basketball coach at Princeton, whose father worked for 30 years in the furnaces of the Bethlehem Steel Company. And he said that what his father would told him and his sister every single day before he went off to do this very difficult work, he said, "Look, son, this is a world where the strong take from the weak, but," he said, "the smart take from the strong." He said, "You've got to use your brain." That's what this final virtue is about, the virtue of knowledge and of learning and of using your head. There's a great story about Marcus Aurelius. It's late in his reign, he's been through all of these troubles, he's learned quite
28:34 Ryan Holiday? a bit as a leader along the way, and he's seen leaving his palace in Rome, and one of his friends stops him and he says, "Marcus, where are you going?" And he says, "I am off to see Sextus the philosopher to learn that which I do not yet know." And the man is amazed, he says, "Here's the most powerful man in the world, the smartest man in the world," he said, "taking up his tablets and going to school." It's a shame, you know, we tell our kids that, you know, there's a difference between school and education, but for how many of us did our education end when we left school? In fact, that's the unintended message we send our children, that education is something we graduate from. We don't. We have to be lifelong learners. Epictetus, one of the great Stoics, says, "Remember that it's impossible to learn that which you think you already know.
29:18 Ryan Holiday? If you think you've learned everything, in a sense, you're right, it makes it harder for you to keep learning, to keep growing." What physicists know, they have this great metaphor, they say, "As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shoreline of ignorance." We should be constantly exposed to the things we do not yet know, the things that we could be better at. "Every person we meet," Emerson says, "is better than us at something." And if we focus on that, if we learn from that, we will constantly be getting better. We have to stay a student always. That's what wisdom is. Socrates is considered the wisest man who ever lived. Why? Because he was aware of his areas of ignorance.
29:59 Ryan Holiday? Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, goes to see the oracle of Delphi as a young man, and the oracle tells him, "You will become wise when you begin..." To have conversations with the dead. And he struggles with this for many years. What could that possibly mean? It's only later in a bookstore that it hits him. Books, books are how we have conversations with the dead. No matter what you're going through as parents, as professionals, as leaders, as citizens, as human beings in the world, there are books about this. And we have to avail ourselves of this knowledge. Why learn from experience what we can learn from the experiences of others? And if we stay a student, if we push ego away, if we lock in on where we can get better,
30:41 Ryan Holiday? on how much there is left to know, if we seek out mentors and teachers to guide us, right, to help us get to that next level, that's the positive contribution we can make every day. Learning something, acquiring something, seeing something in a new way. We have to remain as always perpetual students of our craft, of human nature, even of being a parent. That's what my new book is about. The idea of finding something to get better at each day as a parent. We have to become and remain perpetual students, always of all things. So those are the four virtues: courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom. And I opened this by telling you about the hard time Marcus Aurelius had, that there
31:23 Ryan Holiday? were floods, that there was a plague, that there was war, there was unrest. It's one thing after another. And I told you that historians lamented the unfairness of all this. They said that Marcus didn't meet with the good fortune that he deserved, right? That this was the philosopher king who, whose talents would have been better spent in times of prosperity and peace, that he got dealt a bad hand. But it's more complicated than that. That same historian said, yes, Marcus does not meet with the good fortune that he deserved. Just as it would be wonderful if our times were more stable and peaceful and easier.
32:00 Ryan Holiday? But he said, "I, for my part, admired Marcus Aurelius all the more." He said, "Because amidst unusual and extraordinary circumstances, he remained in command of himself and of the empire." And so it goes for us. These difficult times that we are in are also opportunities. They're shaping us. They're giving us the chance to be great. Marcus Aurelius, in a different moment, dealt a different hand, perhaps isn't the Marcus Aurelius that we come to admire, that wasn't as great as he ended up becoming, right? So, yes, this isn't how we want things to be. This isn't how we would choose for things to be. And yet, it is an opportunity for eritae, for excellence,
32:43 Ryan Holiday? to be brave, to be disciplined, to be honest and fair and good. And most of all, and this is the most important one, to always be learning and growing. These last couple of years have taught us so much. They've given us opportunities to try things that we wouldn't have tried under ordinary circumstances, right? They showed us how connected we all are to each other and how the decisions that somebody makes all the way over here trickles down and impacts us all the way over here. And they showed us the necessity of endurance and strength and commitment, and most of all, of conquering fear and getting up each day, doing what we need to do, of never flagging, of never failing,
33:27 Ryan Holiday? and of always moving forward and always trying to get a little bit better. Thank you so much for having me. It's an honor to speak to you. Such a prestigious and long-lasting company such as yours. And maybe that's a place to stop. Your company has been here for over a century. Think of what your colleagues and predecessors have been through. Think of what you have been through in the last couple of years. And that should give you a wonderful example of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom, something to learn from, something to lean on, and something to arm you to me, whatever tomorrow brings you.
34:14 Ryan Holiday? Thanks for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Just a reminder, we've got signed copies of all my books in the Daily Stoic store. You can get them personalized, you can get them sent to a friend. The Obstacle is the Way, He Goes the Enemy, Stillness is the Key, the leather-bound edition of the Daily Stoic. We have them all in the Daily Stoic store, which you can check out at store.dailystoic.com.
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