No Amount of This Will Make You Not Small | Ask Daily Stoic

It’s pathetic, isn’t it? What some people do with power—what it reveals about them.🎙️ 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?

  No amount of this will make you not small. It's pathetic, isn't it, what some people do with power? What it reveals about them? Nero used his power to demand an audience. He forced the Roman people to indulge his whims and his mediocre talents. He used his power to cheat his way into the Olympics. He used it to banish rivals, not just to the throne, but also a poet whose talent made him feel insecure. America's current Secretary of Defense sits atop the most lethal and respected military in the history of the world. And how does he use this power and responsibility? As we talked about in a Daily Stoic video and an article, and I happen to have experienced personally,

• 1:39Ryan Holiday?

  he uses it to remove books from libraries and persecute people of different sexual orientations. He bans speakers from bases and campuses. He quarrels with professors who have served this country honorably and educated a generation of military leaders. He flagrantly violates basic security protocols out of impatience or recklessness, acting, as Plutarch said of bad leaders, "As if the primary benefit of being in a position of authority is that you yourself are above any authority."

• 2:13Ryan Holiday?

  Power is not what makes you powerful. In fact, what it often does is reveal how powerless a person is. Powerless over themselves, weak and scared at their core. You can be an emperor, or a billionaire, a celebrity, or a commander, it turns out, and still be a very small person. You can be beautiful, and to borrow an expression from Epictetus, "still be ugly if you make ugly choices." Conversely, what we admire about the greatest of the Stoics, from Cato to Marcus Aurelius to Admiral Stockdale, was not their rank or their office. It was not even their eloquence or their fortitude. No, what made them truly great was their character. What made them great was how they treated people, how they stood on principle,

• 2:58Ryan Holiday?

  how they commanded themselves first and foremost. It doesn't matter if you've got a big job if inside you remain a very small person. It doesn't matter who you have been elected or appointed to govern, if you fail to govern yourself.

• 3:19Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another Thursday episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. So, a couple of months ago, I was on a long business trip. I'd been a couple of cities. I fly into Arizona. I'm supposed to check into the hotel for like two hours. I didn't actually spend the night. This is always a complicated thing. Sometimes I do this when I'm speaking, where you actually book a hotel for two nights and you will not spend one second in the bed. They paid for the night before, and then I was supposed to be there for like an hour, two hours, get something to eat, work out, take a shower, whatever, and then go do the talk and fly out. So it's like this weird period where if you want to be in a hotel room from like 2:00 PM to 5:00 PM, you gotta pay twice. So I get to the hotel, and what do you know?

• 4:04Ryan Holiday?

  The room I paid for the night before to reserve for precisely this reason was not available. And I was tired, and I was frustrated, and I wasn't the most stoic about it. But I just said, "Guys, I don't think you understand. I paid for it for this very specific reason, so I could go to my room now." "Well, you weren't here, so we gave it to someone else."

• 4:26Ryan Holiday?

  Okay. And they said, look, how about this? We'll pay for you to have lunch in the hotel and we'll figure this out. And I said, okay, that's great. Tried to calm myself down. I was in the middle of reading a book anyway. So sat down though, I'd been traveling, I've been up since very early. You know, it's gonna go on stage in like two hours. But I sit down in the restaurant, I order a chicken Caesar salad, which is what I order most of the time when I am traveling or on the road, sitting down, eating, reading this book. And you know who sits down next to me? Brent Barry, the basketball player. Now, I grew up a Sacramento Kings fan. I loved his brother, John Barry, just huge fan, a role player on the Kings, just an amazing guy. And then I've gotten to know Brent because he was with the Spurs for a while. And I would see him at games and he was great. We'd go back and forth.

• 5:11Ryan Holiday?

  I'm sitting there, he comes in, he's having lunch with someone because the Suns' practice facility is right there. So I was frustrated that that happened. I didn't like that it happened. I was grouchy that it happened. And then the reason this dog say to practice amor fati, to not be that way, to not think you know the way it's supposed to go, is because you never know how it's actually supposed to go. And this whole delightful thing wouldn't have happened. We would, he would have been in the dining room. I would have been in my room. We would have missed each other. So I am glad that that happened. I am bringing you this Q and A that I was about to go on stage and do between me and Dean Graziosi, because he was doing a private mastermind there. It's called the Zenith Mastermind. It's actually something he does with Tony Robbins, who I've worked with before in my previous marketing life.

• 5:56Ryan Holiday?

  But he and I did a nice Q and A. And so I'll bring you some of those questions now. Enjoy.

• 6:06Speaker 01

  Is there something you're working on right now? Or something that you've discovered lately that sits front and center?

• 6:13Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I don't think there's one big thing that I'm like, this is my new thing. I'm. We were talking about this before, but I like what I do. I think one of the things that happens when you get good at something is people are always asking what's next. Right? As if you didn't work really hard to be, to have the luxury of doing the thing that you love to do. Like you have to be moving on to the next thing. I really like writing. I really love my bookstore and I really love my life and I'm trying to spend as much time in it as possible.

• 6:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:41Ryan Holiday?

  I think there's so often we're trying to get to the next thing or the next level. And what we're really rushing away from is the thing that we just worked so hard to have.

• 6:51Speaker 01

  Achieve, yeah.

• 6:51Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. Someone asked me about ambition the other day and I was saying that I'm more ambitious as a writer than ever, but I'm less ambitious as an author. By that, I mean like I'm trying to get better at all the parts of what I do that are up to me. And I'm thinking a lot less about the parts that aren't up to me. You know, once you kind of, once you kind of ring some of the bells.

• 7:14Speaker 01

  Like the writing piece compared to maybe the marketing of it.

• 7:16Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, yeah, or the, the sales and the reviews and the attention.

• 7:20Speaker 01

  Gotcha.

• 7:20Ryan Holiday?

  Right, like, once you've kind of rung some of the bells of your profession, you can kind of go two ways from that. You can, you can either go, okay, I actually have to do so much more to feel good. Or you go, oh, it was never going to make me feel good. I have to actually like doing, I like doing the thing. And so lately I've just, I've been trying to really practice being present and grateful that I get to do this thing that I, that I could barely dream that I would get to do. And so I'm kind of, that's what's lighting me up right now. It's like this.

• 7:50Speaker 01

  I love that. I love that. It's a good reminder for especially this room of high, overachievers, not high achievers, overachievers.

• 7:56Ryan Holiday?

  Well, especially because one of the, one of the strange paradoxical things about success is you get good at something, make success, and then the reward is people want you to do things other than that thing. Right, like you have all these other opportunities, these tangential or peripheral things that are close to it, but not the thing. And then you end up outsourcing.

• 8:18Speaker 01

  And sometimes they have a really nice bow on them.

• 8:19Ryan Holiday?

  Sure, of course. But you end up, you became a writer to write, and then you spend all your time not writing, you know? You loved managing people, you loved cooking, you loved.

• 8:28Speaker 01

  Right, you loved cooking and you started the restaurant and now you're bogged down with operations.

• 8:32Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, you're actually, you run the HR department of the restaurant and somebody else does the cooking, you know? But you love cooking and I think protecting, getting to do the thing, is something maybe we don't talk about enough.

• 8:44Speaker 01

  Man, if you were to write something down today, protect the thing, right? Because how often do we stray from the thing that lights us up, that gave you the emotion the first place? Dara, you're going through it right now, right? You created this because your grandfather's story and now you're raising money, raising capital, you want to go public someday. All the things that you're doing, don't forget, you know, the journey of what lights you up. Because all of us have that thing when we talk about, there's a little bit different smile. Do you ever notice how you talk about, hey, I heard you're doing 50 million, 100 million, or you sold a million books? And like, yeah, I wrote that book. And they're like, yeah, you know, the, got the operations and I got the publisher and I got to do this marketing. It's like you could tell the difference between the two. And somehow we stray away from the one that lights up our soul. Really, really good insight.

• 9:29Speaker 01

  Stoicism, what made you the daily stoic? What does that mean to you?

• 9:34Ryan Holiday?

  Well, so it's funny, you know, when I went to my publisher and I said I wanted to write a book about an obscure school of ancient philosophy, they were not that excited. And for many years, when I would talk, like, my first book about Stoicism deliberately does not use the word stoic philosophy more than a couple of times. Because my premise was, people are busy, people have problems, ancient philosophy, these ideas can be helpful in that, but nobody wakes up and is like, I need ancient philosophy. So this whole thing kind of caught me and everyone else by surprise, that people would even be talking about stoic philosophy. It was a thing that sort of nerdy academics were interested in, that's what I was interested in, but the sort of resurgence of it has been.

• 10:18Ryan Holiday?

  Kind of a surprise, but my definition, when I'm trying to define Stoicism to people who aren't, you know, not waking up and interested in ancient Greek or Latin is, you know, it doesn't matter that it was founded in the fourth century B.C., it doesn't matter what, you know, the names of these people that are difficult to pronounce are. My definition of Stoicism is this idea that, look, we don't, we don't control the world around us, but we control how we respond to the world around us. And Stoicism was this philosophy sort of tried and tested over the centuries around seeing every situation, whether that's difficult people or profound success, whether that's a natural disaster or an enormous victory, that it's an opportunity to practice virtue

• 11:02Ryan Holiday?

  or what they would call erite or excellence, that every situation is demanding from us, presenting us an opportunity to be excellent. And Stoicism is this kind of set of exercises, this way of thinking about a very specific form of excellence. The virtues of it are courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom. The idea is that every situation, big and small, when it's exactly the way you wanted it to go and exactly the opposite of how you wanted it to go, it is an opportunity to practice those virtues of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. That's what Stoic philosophy is.

• 11:35Speaker 01

  Makes so much sense. And in that study of looking backwards, it seems like an obvious question, make you realize that the human condition is just existed no matter what. Doesn't matter if you have text messages or drums.

• 11:47Ryan Holiday?

  Of course. Look, there's a famous passage in Meditations, which is the, the private thoughts of the Emperor of Rome, Mark Aurelius. And he opens book five and he's like, you know, it's early, you gotta get up, you gotta get after what you're doing. And he goes, um, but it's so much warmer here under the covers. You know, he's having a discussion with himself, like the same one that I had this morning. I woke up in Salt Lake City this morning and I knew I had to go, I wanted to go for a run before I went to the airport. And, you know, I look at my phone and it says what temperature it is. And I'm like, it's so much warmer here, right? And he says, but is this what you were put here to do, to huddle under the covers and be warm? And so here you have a man whose life should be totally unrelatable to us.

• 12:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:28Ryan Holiday?

  He's the head of an empire of 50 million people. He's worshipped as a god. You know, millions of square miles. He lives in this, you know, imperial palace 20 centuries ago. And he's like, I don't want to get up, you know, that the in and all of a sudden this time and distance and culture collapses and you realize people are people and these are the things that we've always been struggling with and that really smart, wise people have been having these same kinds of conversations with themselves that we're trying to have with ourselves today.

• 12:58Speaker 01

  Navigate through, yeah.

• 12:58Ryan Holiday?

  Totally.

• 12:59Speaker 01

  And and there's obviously a correlation of people who navigate through and have a little or a lot of success and some that struggle.

• 13:05Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, you have that conversation and then you either get out of bed or you don't.

• 13:08Speaker 01

  Or you stay in bed.

• 13:09Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 13:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:10Ryan Holiday?

  You you either stay in bed or you hit snooze. Like, there's a slightly more modern versions of it, but it's the same, the same thing.

• 13:17Speaker 01

  So, so true. Parenting, now that you're a parent, how old are your children?

• 13:21Ryan Holiday?

  I've got an eight year old and a five year old.

• 13:22Speaker 01

  That's eight and five, two boys, right?

• 13:24Ryan Holiday?

  Two boys.

• 13:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. If we talk about leadership, parenting is leadership.

• 13:28Ryan Holiday?

  Of course.

• 13:28Speaker 01

  For sure. And and many times I feel like I did well as a leader and then sometimes I walk downstairs from having a conversation or getting upset with one of my kids. I'm like, that was just a, I blew that one. I'm gonna wait 10 minutes, go back upstairs and apologize and try to set the, set it right, right? Leadership comes into all of our lives, not only in family and children, but community, business, employees, team. Has there been a personal relationship in your life that's made you look at leadership differently?

• 13:59Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 13:59Speaker 01

  Because the older I get, there's certain people come in my life and I go, wow, I think I'm looking at it completely wrong, even though this is what I do every day. I try to read a book at least once a month, but I try to do a book every two weeks, listen to it, like, and all those things. And every once in a while, there's a person or relationship or my wife or something that makes me go, wow, you've been doing this wrong, or you could do it different.

• 14:17Ryan Holiday?

  No, I think I'm a product of the mentors I've had. You mentioned Robert Greene, who was instrumental in my life. I have this other mentor, his name is George Relling. He's one of the heroes of my life. He integrates the game of basketball. He brings Michael Jordan to Nike, becomes Nike's director of basketball late in life. And he talks about this idea of, you know, we think of the coach as, you know, the leaders rallying the team, getting everyone excited, but he said it's really about self-leadership, that we have to practice self-leadership first. And he was telling me the other day that his thing is, when he gets up in the morning, he says, before I put my feet on the floor, I say to myself, George. You have two choices today. You can be happy, or you can be very happy.

• 14:59Speaker 01

  And that is so good.

• 15:01Ryan Holiday?

  And, and you know, here's a guy, he's 88 years old. When he was born, the life expectancy for a black man was 48. He's done basically double that. And he's still practicing this thing of like, hey, and this is very much down the middle of Stoicism, which is like, we don't control what's happening in the world. We don't control the weather. We don't control what other people do, but we control our mood. And if we think of happiness as about like the conditions, if we think happiness is about getting what we want, then we're gonna have to, things are gonna have to go a certain way. But if we see happiness as something that we decide, our mood as being something that's in our control, if we decide that we're gonna lead ourselves first, then we have a much better shot at that. And I think the leaders that I admire the most,

• 15:45Ryan Holiday?

  that have shaped my life the most, they're leading themselves first. There are obviously some leaders who are super successful, you know, in command of large institutions, organizations, you know, bank accounts, but they're not in charge of themselves. Right? And that's, that's a very key Stoic idea.

• 16:03Speaker 01

  Right.

• 16:03Ryan Holiday?

  That the Stoics say, no one is fit to rule who is not first master of themselves. And they would talk about, you know, Seneca's talking about this one general. He says, you know, Marius commanded a great army, but ambition commanded Marius. And his point was that this guy, for all of his power, actually didn't feel very powerful because he always needed more. He always craved more. He always had to be the best, biggest, whatever. And so I, I think the people that I admire, the leaders that have shaped my life the most, what I admire about them is sort of who they are in the kind of quiet moments where they're in command of and control of themselves. I, obviously, they're technically brilliant. They're great at what they do. But, but beyond how many people report to them,

• 16:49Ryan Holiday?

  they're kind of just in possession of themselves first. And, and George has always been a great example of that to me.

• 16:58Ryan 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.