These Are The Luckiest People | Take A Walk

Ryan talks about how your actions have a multigenerational impact, and reads this week’s meditation from The Daily Stoic Journal. InsideTracker provides you with a personalized plan to improve your metabolism, reduce stress, improve sleep, and optimize your health for the long haul. For a limited time, get 20% off the entire InsideTracker store. Just go to insidetracker.com/STOIC to claim this deal.✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/Follow 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.

• 0:02Ryan 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.

• 0:33Ryan Holiday?

  Look, the Stoics practiced the art of memento mori. They know that life is short and unpredictable, but that doesn't mean they're trying to die faster, right? Marcus Aurelius has a doctor. He wants to live as long as that's possible, as long as that's within his control. And if you're looking for ways to extend your lifespan, or slow down the aging process, the key to that is in your blood. And that's why today's sponsor, InsideTracker, provides you with a personal plan to improve your metabolism, reduce stress, improve sleep, and optimize your health for the long haul. Created by leading scientists in aging, genetics, and biometrics, InsideTracker analyzes your blood, your DNA, and your fitness tracking data, like from a smartwatch or smartphone, to identify where you're optimized, where

• 1:16Ryan Holiday?

  you're not. You'll get a daily action plan with personalized guidance on the right exercise, nutrition, and supplementation for your body. And you can add their product, Inner Age 2.0, to any plan for a definitive calculation of your true biological age, to see how you're aging from the inside out. For a limited time, you get 20% off the entire InsideTracker store. Just go to insidetracker.com/stoic. That's insidetracker.com/stoic. I'm waiting on my DNA results right now to see about the changes that I'm going to make in my life. And I'm excited to see what you all come up with by trying InsideTracker at insidetracker.com/stoic.

• 2:01Ryan Holiday?

  You can get 20% off using that landing page.

• 2:11Ryan Holiday?

  These are the luckiest people. By the way, Happy Father's Day, everyone. Just a reminder, we do another daily podcast and daily email over at Daily Dad. If you're a parent, a parent to be, if you know someone that is a parent to be or a parent, I'd love for you to recommend the Daily Dad. You can follow the Daily Dad podcast by searching it on your favorite podcast apps or click the link in today's episode page, or you can sign up for the email, one of my favorite things to write, at DailyDad.com. Marcus Aurelius was cursed by fate in many ways. There were wars, there was palace intrigue, there were floods, a pandemic. He grieved the loss of his father, then several children, and then he outlived his wife.

• 2:54Ryan Holiday?

  As the ancient historians noted, he did not receive the good breaks he deserved. And still, he was the luckiest man in the world. In what way? In that, as Marcus writes in Book One of Meditations, the gods gave him Antoninus as a ruler and a father. The ancient world was a brutal, violent place. The entire history of emperors and kings was basically an endless parade of heirs getting rid of other potential heirs. And yet, despite this precedent, despite being given the unenviable job of preparing a boy to replace him, Antoninus broke the mold and facilitated one of the great mentor relationships in history. More than not assassinating his rival, Antoninus committed fully to shaping and guiding

• 3:39Ryan Holiday?

  the young boy towards greatness, a kind of greatness that stretches the imagination. And what exactly did Antoninus teach his stepson? In Marcus's own words and meditations, he learned the importance of compassion and hard work and persistence and altruism and self-reliance and cheerfulness and constancy to friends. Marcus said also that he learned how to keep an open mind and to listen to anyone who can contribute, how to take responsibility and blame, how to put other people at ease. He learned how to yield the floor to experts and use their advice, how to respect tradition, how to keep a good schedule, how to never get worked up. Antoninus taught Marcus how to be indifferent to superficial honors and to treat people as they deserved to be treated.

• 4:24Ryan Holiday?

  It's quite a list, isn't it? But better still that the lessons are, as we recently talked about, embodied in Antoninus's actions. There is no better way to learn than from a role model. And there's nothing luckier than getting to be in the constant company with someone that we would one day like to be like. And as any parent knows, there is no better gift than the opportunity to be for our children what Antoninus was for Marcus. As we talked about over at Daily Dad, it is here that we can have true multi-generational impact. We can embody the principles we write and read about here. We can use this philosophy in guiding the example we set for them. We can be the person we want them to be. We have to. And as I was saying, I really love doing Daily Dad.

• 5:09Ryan Holiday?

  It's my favorite thing. It's going to be a book soon enough, just teasing that here. But in the meantime, I would love for you to sign up for the Daily Dad email, dailydad.com. It's called Daily Dad because I'm a dad. It's not just for dudes, I promise. I talk about parenting generally. I talk about the lessons I've learned from the ancients that I am learning from my own kids and a bunch of other stuff. I'd love for you to sign up, or you can just listen to the Daily Dad podcast, just add it on Spotify or Apple, iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'd love for you to check it out. Daily Dad and the Daily Dad email at dailydad.com. Happy Father's Day, everyone. I hope you're spending some time with family and friends. And be good to your kids, as we said. That's how we have multi-generational impact.

• 5:55Ryan Holiday?

  Take a walk. 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.

• 6:34Ryan Holiday?

  Seneca believed that we should take frequent wandering walks because constant work will fracture our minds. As a writer, he would have agreed with the novelist Helen Dunmore, "A problem with a piece of writing often clarifies itself if you go for a long walk. So take some good time this week to take some walks and watch the dullness and feebleness depart. Enjoy the scenery, enjoy being away from your work. Make them part of your morning and evening writing routine. Return with a stimulated mind that's ready to journal about and follow the philosophy you know. You think that it's taking a break, but really you end up smarter and clearer than you were when you left." And that's

• 7:17Ryan Holiday?

  from this week's entry in the Daily Stoic Journal, "366 Days of Writing and Reflection on the Art of Living," by me, Ryan Holiday, which you can pick up signed versions of in the Daily Stoic store. And as Seneca says, "We should take wandering walks so that the mind might be nourished and refreshed by the open air and deep breathing." That's in his essay "On Tranquility of Mind." But Marcus Aurelius says, "Pass through this brief patch of time in harmony with nature and come to your final resting place gracefully, just as a ripened olive might drop praising the earth that nourished it and grateful to the tree that gave it growth." That's Meditations 448. And then Seneca again in "On Tranquility

• 8:00Ryan Holiday?

  of Mind." "The mind must be given relaxation. It will rise improved and sharper after a good break, just as rich fields must not be forced, for they will quickly lose their fertility if never given a break. So constant work on the anvil will fracture the force of the mind, but it regains its powers if it is set free and relaxed for a while. Constant work gives rise to a certain kind of dullness and feebleness in the rational soul."

• 8:28Ryan Holiday?

  I actually just posted this the other day. I was saying, there's no problem so bad that taking a walk can't at least help you solve a little bit of it. And I also feel like I've never regretted deciding to get up and take a walk. My morning routine is built around it. As I've said before, I don't touch my phone in the morning, strap my kids in the stroller and we go for a walk. It's about a mile and a half to the mailboxes at the end of the road, little P O boxes for everyone there. And we've done this hundreds and hundreds of times now. It occurred to me that since my kids were born, I've probably walked, ridden or run several thousand miles with them. And this, this distance we covered,

• 9:13Ryan Holiday?

  it's not just good for health. It's not just, you know, getting out and getting sunlight, but it's, it's refreshing. It's quality time together. It's time not spent struggling with some work thing. And yet I almost invariably return with something to write down, with something I remembered I need to do during the day, with some sense of purpose and energy for the day. And during the pandemic, we got so into these walks, not only do I do the one in the morning, then I sometimes do walks on phone calls during the day around, around the Daily Stoic offices and the Painted Porch bookstore here in Bastrop, Texas. I love walking through these little southern towns. It's always beautiful and shady because

• 9:55Ryan Holiday?

  they planted the trees so long ago. But then we usually go for a walk after dinner. Sometimes our kids take a popsicle or, you know, my wife and I have a piece of chocolate. During April and May, we like to pick blackberries on the walk, but we just, we walk around, we, sometimes we watch the sun come down, you know, we watch the deer run, or we look at the cows or pet the donkeys. Sometimes we bring the donkeys carrots, although most of the time our kids eat the carrots before we get there. But, but the point is, this time outside is wonderful and it's philosophical and it's refreshing and it's one of the most important things that I do. So I hope you will take some walks today. It's one of the

• 10:37Ryan Holiday?

  best exercises you can do. It's also one of the best forms of exercise for your mind. So take a walk. The Stoics demand it.

• 10:49Ryan Holiday?

  You know, the Stoics in real life met at what was called the stoia, the stoia po kilé, the painted porch in ancient Athens. Obviously, we can't all get together in one place because this community is like hundreds of thousands of people and we couldn't fit in one space. But we have made a special digital version of the stoia. We're calling it Daily Stoic Life. It's an awesome community. You could talk about like today's episode, you could talk about the emails, ask questions. That's one of my favorite parts is interacting with all these people who are using Stoicism to be better in their actual, real lives. You get more Daily Stoic meditations over the weekend just for the Daily Stoic Life members, quarterly Q and As with me, cloth-bound edition of our Best of meditations, plus a whole bunch of other stuff, including discounts, and, this is the best part, all

• 11:34Ryan Holiday?

  our Daily Stoic courses and challenges totally for free, hundreds of dollars of value every single year, including our New Year, New You challenge. We'd love to have you join us. There's a two-week trial totally for free. Check it out at dailystoiclife.com.