It Started Small (Who Would Imagine It Would Make This Far?) | Matt Choi’s Daily Stoic Practice

You read a page in the morning. You think about it. You take it into your day. Maybe it helps you catch yourself before you lose your temper. Maybe it reminds you to stop worrying about something you can’t control. Maybe it gives you the push to do something you’ve been avoiding. Then you return to the next page the next morning. Thenew 10th Anniversary Edition of https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/the-daily-stoic-10The Daily Stoic https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/the-daily-stoic-10https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/the-daily-stoic-10is out NOW! 👉 Grabhttps://store.dailystoic.com/pages/the-daily-stoic-10your copy here: https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/the-daily-stoic-10 Matt Choi is a Korean American Entrepreneur, Content Creator, and Ultra-Endurance Athlete. Watch thefull episode with Matt Choi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cw0EN6A-dsY here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cw0EN6A-dsY Follow Matt Choi: Instagram https://www.instagram.com/mattchoi_6/?hl=en, TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@mattchoi6?lang=en, and YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXSSvV5QYzdOIzzOpP5xnzA/videos 🎟️https://www.dailystoiclive.com/DAILY STOIC LIVE https://www.dailystoiclive.com/| Ryan Holiday is coming to a city near you https://www.dailystoiclive.com/! Grab tickets here https://www.dailystoiclive.com/ | https://www.dailystoiclive.com/ 🎙️AD-FREE https://dailystoic.supercast.com/| Support the podcast and go deeper into Stoicism by subscribing toThe Daily Stoic Premium https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ - unlock ad-free listening, early access, and bonus content:https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ ✉️ FREE STOIC WISDOM https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail | Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email athttps://dailystoic.com/dailyemail -- Stop online threats before they become real-world attacks. Visit ironwall.com/DAILYSTOIC and request a free Risk Assessment to see exactly how exposed your executives are. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Ryan Holiday?

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• 0:42Ryan Holiday?

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• 1:04Speaker 01

  Wayfair, every style, every home.

• 1:07Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

• 1:22Ryan Holiday?

  At first, there were only a few of them. A small group gathering to hear Zeno teach on the Stoic Polkele, the painted porch in Athens, around 300 B.C. They came to discuss how to live, how to challenge each other, how to become better people. But a porch can only fit so many people. So the ideas traveled. Students became teachers. Books passed from one person to another. In Rome, Panateus shared the philosophy with Sippio and his friends. Cato practiced it in the Senate. Epictetus taught it to his students. Marcus Aurelius brought it to the highest office in the ancient world.

• 2:03Ryan Holiday?

  Over the centuries, Stoicism's influence grew and receded, but the writings kept finding new readers. In 2015, when Steve Hanselman and I were working on the Daily Stoic, the Stoicism subreddit had only a few thousand followers. Today, it has more than 800,000. More than 3 million people follow the Daily Stoic on Instagram, 2 million on YouTube, a million people subscribe to this email. The Daily Stoic has sold more than 3 million copies and is available in 40 languages. How did we get from a few people on a porch to all of this? Well, the whole point of Stoicism is that it's cumulative.

• 2:46Ryan Holiday?

  Seneca advised his friend Lucilius to take something from his reading each day, to select one thought to be thoroughly digested, something that would help him face adversity, handle his fears, live a little bit better. And just as that adds up, so too has, over the century, the number of people discovering Stoicism. Someone passes along a recommendation, someone tells a friend, someone sees a video or a post online. That was the idea behind the Daily Stoic, right? Steve and I wanted to bring these writings together in a kind of survey course of the philosophy that a person can follow every year. You read a page in the morning, you think about it, you, you take it into your day and maybe it helps you catch yourself before you lose your temper, or maybe it reminds you to stop worrying about something not in your control.

• 3:32Ryan Holiday?

  Maybe it gives you the push to do something you've been avoiding. And then you return to the next page the next morning. And that's how a philosophy becomes a practice. But also, this format supercharged the spread of Stoicism. There are probably more people reading the Daily Stoic every day, or reading the email or listening to this podcast than all the Stoics who ever existed in history. How cool is that? And, you know, here we are 10 years later and we've gone back and, and I think we've made the Daily Stoic a lot better. We revisited the book page by page after another decade of reading and writing and translating and practicing Stoicism. And we added a bunch of quotes that weren't in there the first time. We changed a bunch of the meditations, we added new illustrations, we added some bonus chapters.

• 4:17Ryan Holiday?

  We just made it better because my understanding of Stoicism is better. The words of the Stoics haven't changed, although again, we added some new ones, but what it means to me has changed. And I think the result is a much better book. You can grab the Daily Stoic 10th Anniversary Edition in signed and numbered first edition hardcovers, which we have at dailystoic.com/ds10. We also have a new edition of the leather bound. I just recorded the audiobook, which you can grab. All of that, dailystoic.com/ds10. Thank you all for your support of the book, for your support of this email, for your support of this podcast. It means so much. I did not think we would be here 10 years later, but here we are, and that means the world to me.

• 5:06Ryan Holiday?

  So I have a bunch of traveling I'm doing through the end of the year on Daily Stoic Live Tour. I just got back from San Diego. I like to stay in the places that I'm staying. I like to book places on Airbnb so I can be like a local. I not only do some of my best writing, but I learn about things that I wouldn't have known otherwise. When I was just in San Diego, I took a walk along the water, I bumped into someone who recognized me and they told me about their favorite local bookstore, which was like two blocks from where I was staying. And I never would have known about it if it wasn't for that encounter. It was cool to me to think that I have helped facilitate that experience for many, many people coming to Austin over the years. The first house that I bought in Austin, when my wife and I first moved here, we would list it on Airbnb and it helped me make the transition from my corporate life to being a full-time writer.

• 5:52Ryan Holiday?

  So if you're going to be away, you should maybe think about listing your place on Airbnb. It can be a great way to earn extra cash while you travel, can offset the cost of your trip, or maybe even go towards whatever you're doing next. You've got travel coming up, check out Airbnb. Your home might be worth more than you think and you can find out how much at airbnb.com/host. Benjamin Franklin said, "Time is money" in 1748. That was his advice to a young man. 278 years later, some of us, depending on what you do, are still spending part of every month typing receipts into a form. It's bad use of your time, that's bad use of company time. Expense reports are tedious. It's not what I want my employees doing.

• 6:37Ryan Holiday?

  Well, Ramp makes collecting and submitting expenses super simple. With Ramp, expenses submit themselves. You just text or email your receipt and Ramp categorizes codes and submits it. And when you book business travel with Ramp, they find the best flights and hotels you're actually allowed to book. You don't find out later that your company's only partially going to cover it. Ramp is the only finance platform that employees and finance teams both rave about, and companies have saved over $12 billion with Ramp. Time is money, save both with Ramp. New customers get $250 off at ramp.com/dailystoic. That's ramp.com/dailystoic.

• 7:17Ryan Holiday?

  So somebody told me you read the Daily Stoic.

• 7:19Speaker 02

  I do.

• 7:20Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, and you post about it all the time.

• 7:21Speaker 02

  I post it every single day.

• 7:22Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 7:23Speaker 02

  It's funny because I was going to joke with them, I was going to say, Ryan, I'm sure like, I've actually might have impacted some sales because people tell me that they don't buy it because I post it every day and they just watch it off my story. But equally, I've gotten many messages of people like asking about what it is and then they end up purchasing it and send me pictures. But I've been reading the Daily Stoic for the past three years.

• 7:41Ryan Holiday?

  How'd you find it?

• 7:42Speaker 02

  A mentor of mine that lived in Maryland, he first told me about the Daily Stoic and just kind of Stoicism, and he's an entrepreneur that I looked up to. And then I was at a friend's house and it was on their coffee table.

• 7:53Ryan Holiday?

  Oh, yeah.

• 7:53Speaker 02

  So it was like these signs and I just was like, you know what? It was like about to be the new year and I said, you know what? I looked at it because I'm like, oh, it's dated every single day.

• 8:01Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 8:01Speaker 02

  So obviously the concept of like learning just a little bit, I was, I never read in college and high school and I was a poor student. So for me, a lot of the challenge was, could I just read a page a day?

• 8:11Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 8:12Speaker 02

  Where most people are like, I don't have time to read, I could never read. It's like the thought of actually-

• 8:15Ryan Holiday?

  The least you can do.

• 8:16Speaker 02

  The least. And then obviously from there, I built my muscle of reading more and consuming more content, but that was the start of it. I was building my social like content at the time and I just like, I wanted that to be part of like my routine.

• 8:27Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 8:27Speaker 02

  And that just became the first thing I posted on my stories in the morning, just because I was like, yo, this is the first thing I do. Like I, before I brush my teeth, like I'm, I journal and then I read the page and it's just like, it became a part of it.

• 8:37Ryan Holiday?

  You know what's funny? So the first editions of the Daily Stoic, like it says every page. So typically the way books work is you have the title on every other page.

• 8:46Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 8:46Ryan Holiday?

  Like it'll be like title here, title of chapter here. That's like how books tend to work. Well, so the first edition of the Daily Stoic is that, every other page had the Daily Stoic. And then I would post pictures of the book and people go, what book is that? So when we read like the second edition of the book, like probably within like two months, I caught it. And now every page says the Daily Stoic on the top because people post it on social media and it's, it's become part of this thing where they're sharing it. Sure, maybe some people don't buy it because you can get it for free on Instagram every day.

• 9:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:19Ryan Holiday?

  But not really. Like way more people hear about it for the first time than that. But it's funny, like I'll post a picture of it like on Daily Stoic and it'll say, and people will, what book is that? And I'd be like, the book from the account that you're following, what are you talking? So that's the other thing is like, you realize like people aren't paying nearly a close, as close attention to you as you think they are. So you do, you mess up or you know, whatever, you have this kind of like imposter syndrome or this doubt that's really almost a form of egotism, where you think people like care about you way more than they do, and really they're just living their lives. And like, you have to like, it, it humbles you.

• 9:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:58Ryan Holiday?

  You know, you, you go- You'll do it and you'll, you'll, you'll be talking about something for months and months and months. And then people will be like, when's your new book coming out? You're like, I was worried I was talking about it too much and you've not even heard about it. You know, and so it's funny how that works.

• 10:13Speaker 02

  I think this is really what helped me with criticism as well. It's like, I remember when Gary used to say this like years back, it was like, if you actually realize that most people are living their life and that they have so much shit going on that they don't really care that much about you stuttering or a typo in the video or whatever it might be, it'll help you get over the hump of caring about what people think.

• 10:33Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 10:34Speaker 02

  Because ultimately, it's like, if, if, if something happened to me tomorrow on my flight, most people would move on with their life. As sad as that might be or sound, it's like, besides my family and my loved ones, like, most people, as much of a diehard Mad Troy fan someone might be, they're gonna have to go on, they're gonna have to move on. It's no different than Kobe Bryant, who at a larger scale is way more public figure. And I think that helped me realize, I'm like, I don't have to take this so seriously.

• 10:56Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 10:57Speaker 02

  And I think so many people do, they're like, oh my God, it has to be perfect, it has to be this. I'm just like, if you actually realize that like, that's actually what's stopping you from actually seeing what you're capable of and your full potential, like you can actually start to unmask that.

• 11:09Ryan Holiday?

  I mean, we found that with Daily Stoic, so we'll post something, I'll do super well. And you're like, wow, wow, that did like so good. And then like, we found this on accident, like somebody reposted that same piece of content like a month later. And it did more views the second time. And you're like, you thought everyone saw it. And you're like, not even a fraction of the people who are interested in seeing it saw it, you know? And that's not to say you can be lazy and you don't have to do a good job, but it's realizing, yeah, most people are really busy. And when you are, you think you're repeating yourself, in fact, like, they didn't hear it the first eight times. And the ninth time, they were like, oh, I exactly needed that. I get that with Daily Stoic all the time. People go, how did you know? Like, cause.

• 11:51Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I wrote it nine years ago, bud, like. And, and also I wrote 366 things and then scrambled them up. That's what order they're in. You know what I mean? Like, there's almost zero intentionality about the date whatsoever. The same goes for, cause we, Daily Stoic is also the email, right? It's like a new email every day.

• 12:10Speaker 02

  Those emails mirrored with this at all or it's completely separate?

• 12:12Ryan Holiday?

  So basically, so I wrote the book in 2015, it was coming out in 2016. And I just decided, I bought DailyStoic.com and I said, you know what? I'm just gonna keep it going. Someday, someone will get to the end of the book and they'll be like, how do I keep this going? And so the Daily Stoic email is one email every day. And I've done that every single day since 2016. So that's like multiple versions of this book, totally for free. But I write them, not in bulk, but I just write them all the time and then they get.

• 12:45Speaker 02

  Sent out separately, yeah.

• 12:46Ryan Holiday?

  The, the team decides like, hey, you talked about this yesterday, so the right one for today. Like there's, but I, I have no real say over like, hey, on, you know, June 3rd, it should be this entry. That, that's just totally random. But then people ascribe a lot of meaning to it. They go, oh, how'd you know? It's like, I wrote it in March. I didn't.

• 13:08Speaker 02

  I love that. I love that. But that's when you know something hits. It's like, it's for whatever reason, how, what someone's going through in that season of their life or that day, for, it, it just triggers something.

• 13:18Ryan Holiday?

  Well, we bring things to what we're reading. That's why they say you can never step in the same river twice. Like, the river is different, but you're different. Or they go, you know, when the, when the student is ready, the teacher appears, like, nothing changed. But you changed. And so now you heard the thing that you were not hearing all the times that it was in front of you before.

• 13:39Speaker 02

  Interesting. I love that.

• 13:40Ryan Holiday?

  So have you become a reader since?

• 13:42Speaker 02

  Massively.

• 13:43Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah?

• 13:43Speaker 02

  It's actually probably one of the things I'm most proud of is that I've now become, I always say it's like, I was such a poor student because like football is my identity. Now like, I'm like a student of life. So I feel like, whether it's, it's been the Daily Stoic has been a good start and then it's been a ton of books from there. And then other entrepreneurs and just people I look up to in the space. But reading and also audiobooks and like Headway, which is like kind of shortening a lot of these books, has become a major component of just like my day to day life.

• 14:09Ryan Holiday?

  Interesting. Yeah. I mean, we were talking earlier, like, there's all these things you can get better at, like you can develop. You think, you think you're not a reader and it's really, you just haven't, you weren't at a place in your life or you didn't. I see this all the time. People thought they hated books, but really they hate reading. Do you know what I mean? Like they're dyslexic or they have like, they're just maybe a bad eyesight or they can't sit still. And then something like audiobooks just opens up this whole world. Or they would have loved reading, they just have never read a book that did anything for them. And once you have that experience of like, a, a book that changes your life, that's a dragon that you chase over and over again.

• 14:50Speaker 02

  It's like the first run or like getting back into the gym, truly.

• 15:03Speaker 03

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