We Are Better Than Before | No Blame, Just Focus

Before, you were scared. Before, you were soft. Before, you were dependent. Before, you were so many things.📔 Pick up your own leather bound signed edition of The Daily Stoic! Check it out at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/📖 Preorder the final book in Ryan Holiday's The Stoic Virtues Series: "Wisdom Takes Work": https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/wisdom-takes-work🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast🎥 Watch top moments from The Daily Stoic Podcast on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast✉️ 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.

• 0:05Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a Stoic-inspired meditation, designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life. Each one of these episodes is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women, help you learn from them, to follow in their example, and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. For more, visit DailyStoic.com.

• 0:55Ryan Holiday?

  We are better than before. Before, you were scared. Before, you were soft. Before, you were dependent. Before, you were so many things. But after? After the breakup, after the bankruptcy, after the pandemic, after those rough couple of years? Now, you are capable of so much more. You are stronger. You are braver. You are more independent. Did you pick up a couple scars along the way? Was it painful and exhausting? Sure, of course. And you never would have chosen to go through it. But you did. And now, you are better for it. Seneca had pity for people who'd never gone through things.

• 1:38Ryan Holiday?

  "It is good," he said, "that we have been knocked around and bruised and bloodied in the ring. It has taught us what we are capable of. It's made us capable of more." So the next time you are going through something hard, next time you feel like you have been beaten down, remember, this is where strength comes from. This is how we grow. This is how we become more than we were before. You are not just enduring. You are becoming.

• 2:17Ryan Holiday?

  No blame, just focus. This is today's entry, August 4th, in the Daily Stoic. "You must stop blaming God and not blame any person. You must completely control your desire and shift your avoidance to what lies within you, your reasoned choice. You must no longer feel anger, resentment, envy, or regret." Epictetus's Discourses 3:22. Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for resistance to the brutal apartheid regime in South Africa for 27 years. For 18 of those years, he had a bucket for a toilet, a hard cot in a small cell, and once a year, he was allowed a single visitor for 30 minutes. It was vicious treatment meant to isolate and break down the prisoners.

• 3:02Ryan Holiday?

  And yet, in spite of that, Mandela became a figure of dignity within the prison. Though he was deprived of many things, he still found creative ways to assert his will. As one of his fellow prisoners, Neville Alexander explained to Frontline, "Mandela always made the point, 'If they say you must walk fast, insist on walking slowly.' That was the whole point. We are going to set the terms." He pretended to jump rope and shadow box to stay in shape. He held his head higher than the other prisoners, encouraged them when times were tough, and always retained his sense of self-assurance. "That self-assurance is yours to claim as well. No matter what happens today, no matter where you find yourself, shift to what lies within your reasoned choice. Ignore as best you can the emotions that pop up, which would be so easy to distract

• 3:46Ryan Holiday?

  yourself with. Don't get emotional, get focused." What I always find so amazing about the stories of Nelson Mandela, Reuben Hurricane Carter, a Epictetus, a James Stockdale, is not only how they managed to comport themselves, the dignity and poise and resistance and fortitude they underwent in the prison, which was incredible and feat of human survival. But I, as I get older and I've experienced things and I've been slighted or wronged, frustrated. I'm even more impressed with how they behaved after. The forgiveness that they offered, the lack of resentment or bitterness that they carried, the way they brought people together.

• 4:32Ryan Holiday?

  They could have come out of the prison like Bane in Batman, right? It could have been the origin of a villain story, right? But it was the opposite of that. You think even Martin Luther King, you think of the horrible things, you know, wait, you think of Gandhi, you think of how unjustly they were treated, how people took things from them. Years that they would never get back, time with their family they would never get back, broke down their bodies in the way that Epictetus experienced under torture, or Stockdale experienced under torture. You think of John McCain not being able to lift his arm a certain way for the rest of his life. They were deprived of so much, but they, they chose not to see it that way. Hurricane Carter famously doesn't ask for reparations after he leaves prison.

• 5:17Ryan Holiday?

  He doesn't even want to admit that that had been taken from him. He was in control. And I just think of the incredible poise and strength and pride and all the stoic virtues. And I'm putting pride in there deliberately, like their carriage, their, this is who I am. You cannot break me. I decide. That to me is just the essence of Stoicism.

• 5:40Ryan Holiday?

  I hope none of us are ever tested in such a way. And I hope Stockdale is the only one who tests Epictetus's theories in the modern world, in the laboratory, so to speak, at that level. But each of us, we have a period in a, in a marriage, or we have a bad boss, or maybe is how you think about the pandemic, but we have these periods of our life where we were subjected to something that we didn't like. And we could be angry about it. We could sow division afterwards about it. We could get even for it. But instead, we focus on our reason choice. We focus on being good and decent. We don't hang on to anger or resentment or envy or regret, as Epictetus says. But we maintain that dignity.

• 6:22Ryan Holiday?

  We don't perpetuate the same injustices that were perpetuated upon us. And we show, as Marx really says, that the best revenge is to not be like that, to be better, to make a better world where hopefully something like what we just went through doesn't happen again, or at the very least, doesn't happen because of anything that we say or do.

• 6:47Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. I just wanted to say we so appreciate it. We love serving you. It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple of years we've been doing it. It's an honor. Please, spread the word. Tell people about it. And this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say thank you.