Who Is Calling You To Greatness? | Be Stingy With Time

Ryan discusses the importance of reminding yourself of the greats throughout history, 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: 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.

• 0:33Ryan Holiday?

  Reading is the most important thing you can do, and it's one of the best habits to build into your life. I wouldn't be here talking to you if I hadn't built a reading habit early in my life. But of course, it's hard to find time to read. And a lot of times, you're just trying to get to the core of the idea and then move on. And that's why Blinkist is here. Blinkist is an app that will provide you with summaries of the most important nonfiction books. Look, I'm not saying you use Blinkist as a shortcut. I think it's a great way to tackle big ideas, to tackle books, to pair along with actually reading it, or to decide whether it's a book you're actually gonna read. Right now, for a limited time, Blinkist has a special offer just for our audience. Go to blinkist.com/stoic to try it free for seven days,

• 1:17Ryan Holiday?

  and you get 25% off your new subscription, too. That's Blinkist, B-L-I-N-K-I-S-T. Blinkist.com/stoic to start your free seven-day trial. And you'll also get 25% off, but only when you sign up at blinkist.com/stoic.

• 1:34Ryan Holiday?

  Who is calling you to greatness? If you walk into the locker room of any college program in America, you'll see the numbers and names of athletes who went on to play in the pros. If you walk into any stadium or arena in the world, you'll see the numbers and the jerseys of the all-time greats hanging from the rafters. If you went back in time many centuries ago and walked into the home of any prominent Roman, you'd find the marble busts of great men and women. If you walked through their cities, you'd have found temples and buildings dedicated to many of those same men and women. If you'd stepped into Montaigne's study in the 1500s, you'd have found carved in the ceiling beams quotes from the Stoics and the Epicureans and other wise philosophers. Why go through the trouble of doing this? Why do individuals spend their hard-earned money

• 2:18Ryan Holiday?

  having statues commissioned and signs put up? Because it's about creating a culture. It's about creating a real tangible sense of greatness in the rooms and streets that they and their athletes, or students, or soldiers spend time in. It was about creating a call to something higher or better. Marcus Aurelius would write about how nothing makes us better than hearing or reading or seeing the reminders of people we admire and the insights they came up with. Demosthenes would talk about the purpose of memorials. It wasn't just to honor the dead or their accomplishments, but to spur their descendants to follow in their examples. The question for you today is whether you're putting out that call in your business, for your team, in your home. Are you putting up the evidence, putting up examples that are hard to live up to?

• 3:01Ryan Holiday?

  Are you calling yourself and your people to greatness? On my desk, I have our bust of Marcus Aurelius, and I have our other bust of Seneca, which you can check out in the Daily Stoic store. Actually, I've had a bust of Marcus Aurelius on my desk through writing all of my books, starting with The Obstacles, The Way. I love it. I've got her prints on the Daily Stoic prints on the wall as well. The idea being, who's calling you to greatness? What examples are you following? And how are you putting these virtues up for display? Check those out in the Daily Stoic store. Be stingy with time. One of the most common sayings we hear, and you might have said this yourself, is that life is short.

• 3:42Ryan Holiday?

  And it is, but as Seneca remarked, it's pretty long if you know how to use it. And the first step to that is not giving so much of this time away to other people. Being miserly about our time is a powerful exercise, which can keep us from squandering the one truly non-renewable resource. What in your life consumes a lot of time for no good purpose? What amusements or desires consume our time without giving us a good return?

• 4:15Ryan Holiday?

  As you review that list, make a commitment to doing something about it. Life is short, after all, and you don't have much to spare. 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.

• 4:59Ryan Holiday?

  Seneca says, "Were all the geniuses of history to focus on a single theme? They could never fully express their bafflement at the darkness of the human mind. No person would give even an inch of their estate, and the slightest dispute with a neighbor can mean hell to pay. Yet we easily let others encroach on our lives. Worse, we often pave the way for those who will take it over. No person would hand out their money to a passerby, but how many of us, but how many of us hand out our lives? We're tight-fisted with our property and money, and yet we think too little of wasting time, the one thing we should all be the toughest misers about." That's Seneca on the shortness of life.

• 5:41Ryan Holiday?

  "It is not that we all have too short a time to live," Seneca says, "but that we squander a great deal of it. Life is long enough, and it's given in sufficient measure to do many great things if we spend it well. But when it's poured down the drain of luxury and neglect, when it's employed to no good end, we're finally driven to see that it is passed by without us even recognizing its passing. So it is. We don't receive short life; we make it so."

• 6:16Ryan Holiday?

  Or as I've also heard it rendered by Seneca, it's not that life is short, it's that we waste a lot of it. And this all comes from his wonderful essay on the shortness of life, which you should absolutely read. It's a very powerful essay. It's worth rereading a couple of times a year, to be quite frank. But I was thinking about this recently. I'd serve two good examples. Number one, I'm trying to get this television delivered. And anyone who's been trying to buy furniture or televisions or anything recently knows just how messed up the supply chains and logistics are. But anyways, it was supposed to come and then it didn't come. So I messaged the people and then it was supposed to come the next day. So I messaged the people and then they were supposed to message.

• 6:58Ryan Holiday?

  Then again, then I had to contact Amazon about it. And then they said they were going to do it, but I got passed. Anyways, I'm spending time after time after time. And then at some point, someone promised me a $200 credit on this TV, which is, you know, free $200, not bad. But it occurred to me that one, I'd already objectively spent more than $200 of my time on this thing, like what an hour of my time is worth. But also, if you just asked me, hey, would you spend $200 more on the TV and not have to go through this? I would have taken that option as well. And I had to, I'm having to, I had to wrestle with,

• 7:42Ryan Holiday?

  how much energy am I going to spend trying to get this $200 credit? It may or may not ever exist. The TV from these people may or may not ever deliver to chase down. And so, of course, if someone stole $200 from me, I'd be very upset. Right? If they'd overcharged me $200 for this TV, I'd have been upset. But I'm willing to spend $200 of my time to either get this credit or to get this TV, right? And that's what we do. We waste our time. We, we value money and property, as Seneca is saying. But time is this like thing that we assume we have an unlimited amount of, because no one, I don't know, it's just crazy. And then I think about this with the bookstore, which I,

• 8:27Ryan Holiday?

  I love it. I'm so proud of, but people come by and they want to say hi, you know? And I think sometimes people think it's rude that I won't run downstairs to see everyone that's that's here. And I can't do that, right? Because not only do I have work, but um, if I did that for every single person, I would never have time. I'd never have, I'd use up all my time. I could spend almost the entire day doing that. And so when Seneca talks about being a miser, miser, if you're not familiar with that word, miser is like someone who's tight-fisted with money. It's like a cheap person. But he's saying you have to be cheap with your time. You can't give it away.

• 9:08Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, you should be kind and and treat people well and not be rude about it and not be self-absorbed. But you have to be a bit of a miser with your time because you you're gonna have to hurt people's feelings or not give them everything they want. When you say no, you're gonna have to say no sometimes. And that's not fun. But I always try to remind myself, who, when I'm saying no to one person, I am also saying yes to something else. And conversely, when I'm saying yes to some inquiry, I'm also saying no to someone or something else, right? And that's just the struggle that we're on. And if you have kids, if you have a spouse, if you have work that's important,

• 9:52Ryan Holiday?

  if you have potential you're trying to fulfill, if you're just trying to get better at yourself, it's gonna mean being tight-fisted with your time. It's gonna mean saying no to people. And that's just how it goes. That's just how it goes. And so I would urge everyone to take a minute, value, try to think about what an hour of your time is is worth, right? Try to think about things that you can take off your plates and get that time back. But then think about what you are frivolously spending your time on, and if that's worth it. What are the rote tasks, the things that you do, the things that you go, ugh, you put off and you dread doing them?

• 10:33Ryan Holiday?

  What are those things? Why are you still doing them? Do you need to be doing them? And at the end of your life, when you go, man, that flew by. I wish I had just one more day to do X, one more hour to do X, right? Are you going to look back and be like, well, I am, I am glad that I spent X many hours doing this. Think about your commute, right? How many hours you're going to spend doing that? Think about how many hours you spend in meetings. Think about how many hours you spend on ridiculous trivialities, right? I think what, what I like to point out with Senator's thing about neighbors is like, yeah, if your neighbor's encroached on your

• 11:15Ryan Holiday?

  property, you would object. But if your neighbor came over and just wanted to gossip about nonsense, you would indulge that, right? And that's not a good idea. Have to be miserly with your time. Not selfish, not, not, not cruel, not indifferent to other people's time, of course, but, but a bit miserly with your own time. And be stingy with it, as they said. And I'll cut this episode short. So I'm not, not taking up too much of your time, but you get the point. 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.