You Have Two Options | Turn Words Into Works

Ryan talks about the crossroads that we all face and how to know which way you should go, and reads this week’s meditation from The Daily Stoic Journal, on today’s Daily Stoic Podcast.→ We hope you join us in the 2022 New Year New You Challenge. It kicks off in a little over a week. It’s 3 weeks of actionable challenges, presented in an email per day, built around the best, most timeless wisdom in Stoic philosophy. Just go to https://dailystoic.com/challenge to sign up before sign ups end on January 1st! 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?

  You have two options. Just a heads up, there's only five. Five more days to sign up for the Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge. It's so funny. Every year, we see people put it off, put it off, and then everyone signs up on like the last possible day. Some people don't manage to make it in in time. So don't be one of those people. We'd love to have you join us in the Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge, which you can sign up for at dailystoic.com/challenge. But anyways, on to today's message. Every day, life puts in front of us these little crossroads, decisions about how to do things, what things to do. And often, the choice is between a hard thing and an easier thing. Should you pick up the phone and have a difficult conversation?

• 1:17Ryan Holiday?

  Or leave it to an email? Should you apologize and take responsibility? Or hope it goes unnoticed? Should you get up early or hit the snooze button? Should you read a few pages or scroll social media? Should you get your oil changed or push it off for another day? These competing options are what Stoicism is for. At all of these little crossroads, the Stoic knows which way to go, or at least Stoicism tells us where to go, tells us to go with the option that challenges you more. Stoicism is trying to steer us away from the drift of least resistance. Marcus Aurelius wrote in Meditations about holding the reins in his non-dominant hand

• 2:01Ryan Holiday?

  as both an exercise to practice and a metaphor for doing the difficult thing. Seneca would say he actually pitied people who had never experienced challenges. "You've passed through life without an opponent," he said. "No one can ever know what you are capable of, not even you." And Epictetus said that when a challenge is put in front of you, you should think of yourself as an athlete paired with a tough competitor. You want to be Olympic class? Well, he said, this is going to take some sweat to accomplish. We must take this to heart today and every day. We must get in the habit of choosing the more difficult option, seeking out the challenge, leaning into discomfort. Iron sharpens iron after all.

• 2:45Ryan Holiday?

  You'll be better for it, not only for the improvement that comes from getting to the other side of a challenge, but for the willpower you develop by choosing that option on purpose. So I'll leave you today by putting the challenge in front of you, a challenge I put in front of myself each year as well. For the last four years, we've been doing what we call the Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge. A set of 21 actionable challenges presented one per day, built around the best Stoic wisdom in this philosophy we're studying. Every morning, the email arrives in your inbox and it presents you with the choice we're talking about. Do the harder thing, you could do the challenge, or you can follow the drift of least resistance. You can open the email and leave it at that,

• 3:28Ryan Holiday?

  or you can ignore it altogether. And it's funny, we see the open rates as people go through the challenge. You can get, but we also see the people who build actively in these first three weeks of the year, the habit of choosing the more difficult option.

• 3:45Ryan Holiday?

  We can choose to pass through life without an opponent, or we can seek out stronger and stronger opponents, knowing we get better by facing them. That's how we become Olympic class. Which way will you go? That is the question. What will this year be for you? Which choice will you make? I hope you choose the Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge. Can't wait to see you in it. I'm in the Discord channel with everyone. I'm doing the challenges. I build these challenges for myself as much as you. I love doing it. Starts the year off right. Anyways, I'd love to see you at dailystoic.com/challenge. You can find out more about it.

• 4:29Ryan Holiday?

  And remember, Daily Stoic Life members get this challenge and all the other challenges for free. So if you've been thinking about signing up for that, this is a nice two birds with one stone situation. And I'd love to have you and I'll see you soon.

• 4:44Ryan Holiday?

  Turning Words into Works. 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. Marcus Aurelius spent a great deal of time on his journals. Yet, within these pages, we find him admonishing himself to throw them away,

• 5:29Ryan Holiday?

  to never read them. Why? Because he didn't want it to be an excuse from the essential tasks at hand. "The art of living will never be found anywhere but in our own efforts to be a good person." Never forget that that is the aim of Stoicism and of your own journals. It's not to fill up pages with pretty thoughts, but inspire you to take action, to turn the words, as Seneca said, "into works." And in that, we have the perfect place to end the year with the ultimate Stoic prompt, "Get active in your own rescue." And we have two quotes this week from Marcus Aurelius's meditations and then one from Seneca's moral letters. "Stop wandering about," Marcus says.

• 6:13Ryan Holiday?

  "You aren't likely to read your own notebooks or ancient histories or anthologies you've collected to enjoy in your old age. Get busy with life's purpose. Toss aside empty hopes. Get active in your own rescue. If you care for yourself at all, do it while you can." That's Marcus Aurelius 3:14.

• 6:35Ryan Holiday?

  You have proof in the extent of your wanderings that you never found the art of living anywhere, not in logic, nor in wealth, nor in fame, or in any indulgence, nowhere. Where is it then? In doing what human nature demands. And how is a person to do this? By having principles be the source of desire and action. What principles? Those to do with good and evil, indeed, in the belief that there is no good for a human being except what creates justice, self-control, courage, and freedom. And nothing evil except what destroys these things. That's Marcus Aurelius's Meditations 8:1. And then ultimately, Seneca in Moral Letters 108, he says, "All study of philosophy and

• 7:20Ryan Holiday?

  reading should be for the purpose of living a happy life. We should seek precepts to help us, noble and courageous words that can become facts. We should learn them in a way that the words become works." And ultimately, look, that's, that's the journey for me, ironically, as a writer, is that I write them, that's my job. But if I don't listen to them, if I don't get better at it, then I'm, what am I? I'm not, I'm nothing but a sophist, right? And what are you? If you read about Stoicism, if you listen to this podcast, if you follow the quotes on Instagram or watch the videos, but you're not actually getting better day to day, you're not getting better at those virtues.

• 8:04Ryan Holiday?

  Courage, self-control, justice, wisdom, right? You're not focused on applying the ideas. Ultimately, that's what matters. As Marcus Aurelius says, "We should waste no more time arguing what a good person is. Be one." As Epictetus talks about, embody the ideas.

• 8:27Ryan Holiday?

  Am I as good at that as I want to be? Are you? Right? All this stuff is pretty straightforward, pretty simple. You find yourself nodding your head to it. But then when you're tired, when you're frustrated, and when you're trying to do something that's really important to you, when things are really going sideways, well, it's hard to actually stick with them. It's hard to actually apply them. Right? But that's the whole point. That's the whole point of the philosophy. Look, I take some solace in the fact that clearly, Marcus Aurelius is struggling with that. Right? He's saying that even as an old man, right? He's telling himself, you gotta stop wandering about. Right? He's saying, you still haven't figured it out.

• 9:11Ryan Holiday?

  You gotta get active in your rescue now before it's too late. Right? So I take some solace in the fact that one of the greatest Stoics to ever live is still struggling with that, you know, many decades older than I am. But that time is tick, tick, ticking away. And those opportunities are passing this by. And so the purpose of the Daily Stoic Journal, the purpose of the Daily Stoic Podcast, the purpose of all this content. Obviously, yes, it's compelling to me as a writer. I feel a duty to bring the ideas to other people. But ultimately, what I'm really trying to work on is just be a little bit better at them day to day in my own life. What, how would I grade myself on that? I don't know.

• 9:55Ryan Holiday?

  Not as, not as high as I'd like, but higher than before. Right? Higher than if the intervention had never happened, which is ultimately, right? How we judge medicine? How we judge anything scientifically? We compare it against a control group. We compare it against a placebo. And I know how I was before. Right? I know.

• 10:20Ryan Holiday?

  What I'm capable of if I don't try, if I just sort of go the path of least resistance, if I think about what I could get away with, that's not enough. We have to be better than that. We have to push ourselves. So that's ultimately the whole purpose of Stoicism. That's the thought I want to leave you here with at the end of the year. That it's about turning the words into works. What do you have to show for it? Right? It's not about pretending. It's not about imitating. It's about action. It's about putting up the numbers, putting up the results, trying to get a little bit better every single day. I don't expect magical transformation from myself or from you. That's not possible.

• 11:03Ryan Holiday?

  This isn't about epiphany, but it is about repetition and practice, holding yourself accountable. And with that, I bid you adieu to the end of this year. I hope you can look back, reflect here as the year is winding up and see where you could have done better. Hope you can set aside some plans, some goals for the next year. And I hope you can build on the successes that you did have. That's what I'm going to try to do. And we'll be right back at this again, because we don't stop. Talk soon. Demand more of yourself in 2022. And one of the ways you can do that is by joining us in the Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge.

• 11:47Ryan Holiday?

  All you have to do is go to dailystoic.com/challenge to sign up. Remember, Daily Stoic Life members get this challenge and all our challenges for free. But sign up, seriously. Think about what one positive change, one good new habit is worth to you. Think about what could be possible if you handed yourself over to a little bit of a program. We all pushed ourselves together. That's what we're going to do in the challenge. I'm going to be doing it. I do the challenges, all of them, alongside everyone else. I'm looking forward to connecting with everyone in the Discord Challenge, all the other bonuses. Anyways, check it out. New Year, New You, the Daily Stoic Challenge. Sign up at dailystoic.com/challenge.