Is Stoicism the Secret to a Good Life?

BUY THE BOOK! The Stoic Virtues Series by Ryan Holiday https://amzn.to/4z0bLeI Oprah is joined by bestselling author and Stoicism expert Ryan Holiday on her porch for a thought-provoking conversation about how the ancient philosophy of Stoicism can help us navigate modern life. Drawing from his bestselling book The Obstacle Is the Way, Ryan explains why this 3,000-year-old philosophy remains relevant today and how its timeless wisdom can help us respond with greater clarity, resilience and purpose to whatever life puts in our path. Ryan breaks down the four core virtues of Stoicism and the three essential Stoic disciplines offering practical tools for overcoming modern challenges. At the heart of the conversation is one of Stoicism’s most powerful teachings: We may not control what happens to us, but we can control how we respond. Oprah and Ryan are also joined by three listeners applying Stoic principles in powerful ways: an emergency room physician who relies on Stoicism to navigate medical tragedy, an entrepreneur rethinking her relationship to success and failure and a mother hoping to teach her tween daughter how to use Stoicism as a tool for resilience and emotional strength. 00:00:00 - Welcome Ryan Holiday, author of “The Daily Stoic” 00:03:20 - What is stoicism 00:04:00 - The 4 virtues of stoicism 00:06:30 - Action is the cure to predicaments 00:08:20 - The story we tell ourselves 00:13:50 - Welcome Dr. Dan Dworkis or Stoicism in the ER 00:16:00 - How philosophy relates to other labels 00:18:38 - Oprah’s favorite quote 00:20:05 - Loving what happens 00:23:10 - Why choose stoicism 00:26:50 - Can you be grounded and driven? 00:29:00 - Is stoicism relevant to today? 00:31:26 - Raising kids with a stoic outlook 00:35:30 - One daily practice 00:39:20 - Nothing is wasted Follow Oprah Winfrey on Social: https://www.instagram.com/oprahpodcast/ https://www.facebook.com/oprahwinfrey/ Listen to the full podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/0tEVrfNp92a7lbjDe6GMLI https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-oprah-podcast/id1782960381

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  People think stoic means has no emotions. I sort of define Stoicism as this idea that we don't control what happens, but we control how we respond to what happens.

• 0:10Oprah Winfrey?

  Do you think that the Stoicism's principles of ancient wisdom are relevant for our times right now?

• 0:16Speaker 00

  The popularity of Stoicism is a reaction against what's clearly not working for us and clearly making us miserable. We're all obviously just overstimulated and stressed and overwhelmed and trying to make sense of the world. There's nothing so bad that you can't learn something from it. It's in those moments that I think we're really being tested. We have an opportunity to learn what we're made of.

• 0:40Oprah Winfrey?

  I love that. Nothing is wasted.

• 0:44Speaker 00

  Unless we waste it.

• 0:44Oprah Winfrey?

  Unless you waste it.

• 0:50Oprah Winfrey?

  Hello, and thank you for joining me on the Oprah Podcast. My book club selection this past April was Go Gentle by novelist Maria Simple. And in the story that she tells, the lead character practices and teaches Stoicism. But before I read Go Gentle, the novel, I think I had a vague idea of what Stoicism was. I thought it meant grin and bear it, stuff your feelings, tough it out. But the more her character spoke of Stoic principles in the novel, the more interested I became. And then I started ordering books about Stoicism. So I wasn't just reading the novel, I was reading books about what the character in the novel was talking about.

• 1:35Oprah Winfrey?

  And then I hear this ancient philosophy is having a big comeback, even among younger people. So I invited the man who has written 15 books on Stoicism, including The Daily Stoic, and really, one of the most popular, The Obstacle Is The Way, which has sold millions of copies and has been published in 40 different languages. He is a podcaster, he is an author, and one of the leading voices behind the modern Stoicism movement. Welcome to my front porch, Ryan Holiday.

• 2:11Speaker 00

  Thank you so much for having me. This is a total honor.

• 2:13Oprah Winfrey?

  So tell us how that became an interest for you.

• 2:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, I don't think, when people think of ancient philosophy, they think, oh, this will help me with modern problems. And so I had an experience, a guest that people have been having for thousands of years, which is you pick up Marcus Aurelius or Seneca or Epictetus and you go, wait, this can't possibly be from 2,000 years ago.

• 2:35Oprah Winfrey?

  Those are all famous Stoics you just named.

• 2:37Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, there's a passage in Marcus Aurelius's Meditations that I remember reading as a college student, where the most powerful man in the world is talking about not wanting to get out of bed in the morning because it's nice and warm under the covers. And in that second, all these centuries disappear, the different cultures is totally surreal circumstances disappear. And you realize like, human beings have been struggling with the same things for all time.

• 3:04Oprah Winfrey?

  Yes.

• 3:04Speaker 00

  And actually, that's what philosophy is about. Philosophy isn't riddles and names you can't pronounce. Philosophy is designed to help you live a good life, to fulfill your potential, to get up and get after it and to deal with the ups and downs of what they would say fortune could throw at you.

• 3:21Oprah Winfrey?

  So 15 books you've written about this. What is Stoicism and how do you explain it?

• 3:27Speaker 00

  Well, I think the stereotype you mentioned is a good place to start. People think stoic means has no emotions, invulnerable. That's what we would call lowercase stoic. That's what the word means. And it was just like Epicurean means loves food, but is actually also a 2,500-year-old ancient philosophy. And so I sort of define Stoicism as this idea that we don't control what happens, but we control how we respond to what happens. And the Stoics believed that everything was an opportunity to practice virtue. And those four virtues for the Stoics were courage, temperance or self-discipline, justice, and wisdom.

• 4:07Speaker 00

  And so the idea is that life can throw a lot at you, but it can't prevent you from acting with virtue. That's something you could do in prison, you could also do as the emperor of Rome. And so Stoicism then is this sort of toolkit for dealing with a world where the vast majority--

• 4:24Oprah Winfrey?

  So it's not a religion?

• 4:25Speaker 00

  I don't think so.

• 4:28Speaker 00

  It's a way of living. And there have been, the Stoics lived in a world of the gods, and there have been Stoics since God. I think perfectly compatible with a variety of different faiths. But it's mostly a way of living, a set of ideas.

• 4:48Oprah Winfrey?

  Now, when I read Obstacle Is The Way, I was struck by how simple the idea is, and yet how radical it also becomes when you actually try to live it, that the very thing, y'all, blocking your path, might actually be the path. So Marcus Aurelius, emperor of Rome around the year 170, wrote, "What stands in the way becomes the way."

• 5:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 5:15Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah, and I had not come across that as a philosophy.

• 5:21Oprah Winfrey?

  How does what's standing in the way become the way, Ryan?

• 5:25Speaker 00

  I think what he's specifically talking about makes it very clear. So the obstacle he's referring to, because he's writing in meditations, which is just his private thoughts. So he's not saying it to us, he's saying it to himself.

• 5:36Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah.

• 5:37Speaker 00

  And he's talking about difficult and annoying people. He's saying that difficult and annoying people can get in our way, they can cause problems for us, right? Our opponents, our competitors, anyone can cause problems for us. But they can't prevent us from moving forward because they're actually presenting us a new way to move forward, whether it's patience, whether it's forgiveness, whether it's creativity or perseverance. So for the Stoics, when they say the obstacle is the way, look, sometimes you can transform what you're dealing with into some huge opportunity to move forward in a professional capacity.

• 6:10Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah.

• 6:10Speaker 00

  But always in a personal capacity, we're being challenged and tested. We're given an opportunity to practice some kind of excellence, some reach for us that maybe we wouldn't have done under ordinary circumstances. But this circumstance we're in gives us the chance to do that. That's what he means.

• 6:31Oprah Winfrey?

  So you write about persistent directed action, and you say, "Action is the solution and cure to our predicaments." How do people take action when they're stuck? When they don't know what to do? Most people don't take action because they're stuck.

• 6:50Speaker 00

  One of the Stoic philosophers, Seneca, he said that the one thing all fools have in common is that they're always getting ready to start. So we say we're gonna do it later, we say we're gonna do it tomorrow, we say we're gonna do it when things go back to normal.

• 7:05Oprah Winfrey?

  All fools have this in common. I was thinking, okay, I'm in that fool category. I'm getting ready.

• 7:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, we're working ourselves up to it.

• 7:14Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah.

• 7:14Speaker 00

  And really, we gotta get started. We gotta, what's the smallest thing? What's the next right thing that we can do?

• 7:20Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah.

• 7:21Speaker 00

  One of my favorite writing rules is just a couple crappy pages a day.

• 7:24Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah.

• 7:25Speaker 00

  You know, just get started. Don't overthink it, don't let perfection be a form of paralysis. But what can you do right now that at least makes a small positive difference?

• 7:34Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah, so even if you're tired, even if you're discouraged, you still take action no matter what.

• 7:39Speaker 00

  Well, that's what discipline is, right? Doing it when you don't want to do it, or you don't have to do it, or you have a good excuse to not do it.

• 7:46Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah. Well, one of the sentences, the first sentences that stood out for me is, "It doesn't matter what happens to us. It can be for the best if we use it to be better for ourselves and others." I think that's true. Sounds crazy, but also really challenging to apply. And in order to make it real, you organize the book around the three principles, perception, action, and will.

• 8:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 8:13Oprah Winfrey?

  Okay.

• 8:14Speaker 00

  That's how the Stoics try to approach every situation they're in. First, how do we think about this? What's the story I'm telling myself about it? What's my view on it? The Stoics remind themselves that, you know, it's not things that are the problem, it's our opinion about those things, right? How we, the story we tell ourselves about it, you know, this was unfair, this was cruel, I was humiliated. These are all subjective interpretations of an objective event. So first, how do we see this? That's really, really essential.

• 8:43Oprah Winfrey?

  Well, that's so interesting because since reading so many of your books and other people's books about Stoicism, I now ask people, I used to say, oh, say, tell me what happened. I now, I've now caught myself saying, what's the story you're telling yourself about this?

• 8:59Speaker 00

  Do you know my therapist said to me once? I said, you know, I gave some interpretation of an event, and she corrected me, and she said, no, no, no. What you make up about this is.

• 9:10Oprah Winfrey?

  Yes.

• 9:10Speaker 00

  Right? It is. And then what I make up about it is my interpretation of it.

• 9:15Oprah Winfrey?

  That's right. So what is the story you have made up about what is actually happening?

• 9:20Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 9:20Oprah Winfrey?

  Yes.

• 9:20Speaker 00

  And so Stoicism is training to be able to see things as objectively, as dispassionately as possible. Not in the sway of our initial impression, or our emotions, or our bias, or whatever pattern we have followed our whole life.

• 9:35Oprah Winfrey?

  Okay, could you give me an example, using perception?

• 9:38Speaker 00

  Yeah. Okay, first and foremost, something happens, and then we say, this is bad.

• 9:44Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah.

• 9:45Speaker 00

  Or this is unrecoverable from, you know, my reputation has been damaged. That interpretation. And stepping back and going, no, no, no, no. Somebody else might see this totally different. Or had I not known that this happened, had someone said that rude remark to you, and you just didn't hear it, or your phone deleted the email, would your life be ruined? No, it's just that you know about it, and then you have an opinion about it that is the problem. So trying to step back and see the thing first and foremost objectively. And then I think what we can get better at is going, hey, if I have the power to tell myself a negative story about this, I also have the power to tell myself a positive story about this. And that's where, when we say the obstacle is the way, what we mean is,

• 10:30Speaker 00

  hey, this is a chance for me to do something that I couldn't do under ordinary circumstances.

• 10:36Oprah Winfrey?

  So how do we, Ryan, train ourselves to see clearly when emotions are running high? How do you, so in every situation, you first do the assessment?

• 10:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:51Oprah Winfrey?

  And you sort of step back and you you don't shut down your emotions?

• 10:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:56Oprah Winfrey?

  Or do you shut down your emotions?

• 10:57Speaker 00

  I don't think you shut them down. I think the stereotype is-

• 10:59Oprah Winfrey?

  You repress your emotion. What do you do?

• 11:01Speaker 00

  Having the emotion, to me, is different than acting on the emotion.

• 11:05Oprah Winfrey?

  Ah-huh.

• 11:06Speaker 00

  Lincoln famously would get upset, as all leaders do.

• 11:09Oprah Winfrey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 11:09Speaker 00

  And he would write these letters. But then he would put the letters in a drawer and not send them.

• 11:13Oprah Winfrey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 11:14Speaker 00

  Right? You can be angry. You don't have to hit send. Because you can take a minute to think about it. So to me, Stoicism is that that reflection, that pause after the initial impression. The Stoics were talking about taking every interpretation, every view, every instinct, every impulse, and putting it to the test, going, "Hey, how am I going to feel about this later? Am I sure I'm not going to regret this? Is this actually making it better or worse?"

• 11:40Oprah Winfrey?

  So the Stoic philosophy is not to act, not to react emotionally, is to take a moment, take the whole thing in-

• 11:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:49Oprah Winfrey?

  And see, try to look at it from the perspective of what is actually happening here and not just the story I'm telling myself about what's happening here.

• 11:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's that pause between the stimulus and the thing you do.

• 12:04Oprah Winfrey?

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• 12:19Speaker 02

  Never thought of it like that.

• 12:20Oprah Winfrey?

  I love that. You've never thought of it that way before. And with intention, something beautiful happens. We recognize pieces of our own lives in theirs. We realize- That actually helps, right? We are not alone.

• 12:35Oprah Winfrey?

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• 13:16Oprah Winfrey?

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• 13:51Oprah Winfrey?

  Okay, so is the obstacle always meant to be overcome? When the obstacle is the way? Or is it meant just to be understood? I've found that, you know, when something goes wrong or is challenging, if I can ask the question, "What is this here to teach me?"

• 14:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:07Oprah Winfrey?

  "What is this here to teach me?" It eases the way and clears the path for moving forward. So are we supposed to always move the obstacle out of the way? Or are we just supposed to understand why it's there?

• 14:18Speaker 00

  I think it's all of the above. I mean, look, sometimes you face a problem or an obstacle and what's being demanded of you is persistence, perseverance, determination. You've got to knock this thing out of the way with sheer force. That's what the opportunity is. And you're going to get stronger, just like lifting weights, for having had to wrestle with this thing. Epictetus, one of the Stoics, he says, you know, "Pretend you've been, you're an Olympic athlete and you've been paired with a strong sparring partner." Like, you're wrestling with this and you're both getting better because it's hard. So sometimes it's like that. But you're right, sometimes it's actually not a surmountable obstacle. Sometimes it's just an obstacle there that's there to teach you about yourself, to teach you about the world.

• 15:01Oprah Winfrey?

  Is everything there to teach us something?

• 15:03Speaker 00

  I think there's no, there's nothing so bad that you can't learn something from it. I think that's, that is the ultimate way that we turn the obstacle into an opportunity as a learning experience, if not in our own lives. How can, if we've screwed up horribly badly, how do we at least codify what we've learned so our children can benefit from it? Or people we know can benefit from it?

• 15:27Oprah Winfrey?

  I'm so interested in this principle of living your life from the point of view of understanding what you can control and what you can't control.

• 15:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:36Oprah Winfrey?

  I'm not a Stoic, but I think I have understood that for a long time. We have a few practicing Stoics zooming in with us. Dr. Dan Dworkis is an emergency room physician from Los Angeles. Welcome, doctor.

• 15:50Speaker 03

  Hi, folks. Thanks for having me.

• 15:51Oprah Winfrey?

  How do you use these tenets of Stoicism in the ER?

• 15:55Speaker 03

  Absolutely. I mean, I really came to Stoicism through medicine.

• 16:00Oprah Winfrey?

  Wow.

• 16:00Speaker 03

  And when you work in medicine, you are exposed to this really raw, very vulnerable part of humanity, right? You're with people as they suffer. You're with them as they survive. And sometimes you're with them as they die. And there are days when you and your team, you give, you just give everything you possibly have and it's still not enough, right? And somebody dies. And you go home from that and you realize your limitations, how small you are, that there are these obstacles that there is no way around. And what do you do with that, right?

• 16:31Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah.

• 16:31Speaker 03

  So you have to find some method of a how and a why to come back tomorrow and to try harder and to do better. And so as I was wrestling with that, I really found the Stoic principles to be incredibly helpful about making meaning out of that, right? So this idea of operate where you have control or play the hand of cards you're dealt, you know, to find a way to help that lean into as opposed to away from that raw, messy humanity. So for me, practicing Stoicism became just a really critical part of how I practice and teach emergency medicine. So much so that when I wrote my book, The Emergency Mind, which is like lessons from an ER doctor on how to perform under pressure,

• 17:13Speaker 03

  I tried to think about this core concept of what is Stoicism for emergencies? And then build outward from there. So I think it's really intimately tied to crisis, whether you're the one going through it or the one trying to solve it.

• 17:26Oprah Winfrey?

  Wow. I hear you have a question for Ryan.

• 17:29Speaker 03

  I do, and I'm very thankful to get the chance to ask it. I actually read The Obstacle is the Way in between shifts when I was coming up and made a big difference for me. So thank you for that.

• 17:37Oprah Winfrey?

  That is amazing.

• 17:39Speaker 03

  One of the things I really love about Stoicism is that it's an "and" instead of an "or," right? So you can be, as you said, religious and very deeply religious and a Stoic, or you can be not religious at all and be a Stoic. You can be a teacher or an author or an ER doctor, anything, and be a Stoic, a Republican and a Stoic, a Democrat and a Stoic. And our culture these days doesn't really do "and," right? We do a lot of "or."

• 18:05Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah.

• 18:05Speaker 03

  We really want to divide people into you are this or you are that. And I think Stoicism has this real ability to unite people around this "and" concept. So my question is, what do you do with that? How do you use Stoicism to bring people to the understanding that we really can be an "and" instead of an "or"?

• 18:23Speaker 00

  I think even with the idea of like what a philosopher is, right? People tend to think of a philosopher as someone who works at a university and discourses about philosophy as opposed to he's a philosopher in the emergency room, right? Philosophy is supposed to help you do what you do and do it better. Do it with virtue, do it with courage and discipline and justice and wisdom.

• 18:43Oprah Winfrey?

  Dr. Dan is a philosopher in the emergency room. I can see that.

• 18:46Speaker 00

  It's something you put into practice that helps you with what you do. And I think if we can understand that we're all human beings dealing with that same fundamental limitation. Marcus Aurelius is the most powerful man in the world. Epictetus is a slave in the Roman Empire. They're, one is extremely powerful, one is extremely powerless. But they're equalized by the fact that the vast majority of life is not in their control. And so in that, we all have this thing in common. We're all trying to respond well to the hand we've been dealt in life. That, to me, is where we come together and where Stoicism is something that you could talk about with a professional athlete or an emergency room doctor or a parent with a toddler that's just trying to get through the sleepless nights.

• 19:30Oprah Winfrey?

  And how do you use it on a daily basis?

• 19:33Speaker 03

  It's really hard to separate it out from emergency medicine because it's really just so ingrained, right? Seneca has this great quote I love, which is, "Endeavor not to trip over something behind you," right? So you always want to keep moving forward and trying to figure out what comes next. And I think that's equally applicable if you, you know, you miss an IV you're placing and you have to go place the next one. Or on a much broader scale, you have something just truly horrible happen. That next family needs you to show up for them with the same compassion and love and care and ability as you had for the case that just went terribly wrong, right? So you have to sort of endeavor not to trip over that and to keep moving forward with it.

• 20:14Oprah Winfrey?

  Wow, Dr. Dan is a philosopher in the emergency room. Dr. Dworkis, that's wonderful. Wonderful talking to you. Thank you. Thank you for your insights. Thank you.

• 20:24Speaker 03

  Thank you both.

• 20:24Oprah Winfrey?

  Thank you. I love this quote. This is one of my all-time favorite quotes, okay?

• 20:32Oprah Winfrey?

  Life will cut you open like a knife. When that happens, at that exposing moment, the world gets a glimpse of what's truly inside you. So what will be revealed when you're sliced open by tension or pressure? Iron or air or bullshit? And you go on to say that the will is the critical third discipline. It is the one thing we control completely always. Can you speak more about this?

• 21:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, a lot of the obstacles we face are just the sort of pedestrian problems of of life, right? Traffic, travel delays, you know, you wake up sick. You've got a problem at work. And then there are those sort of deeper, more profound problems, obstacles, a cancer diagnosis, a loss of a loved one, an accident, bankruptcy, a theft, the real stuff. And it's in those moments that I think we're really being tested. And we we have an opportunity to learn what we're made of. The Stoics talked about how they they sort of pity people who haven't been knocked around by life because they don't know what they're capable of.

• 21:43Oprah Winfrey?

  That's right.

• 21:44Speaker 00

  And if you say to yourself, hey, this is me learning something essential about myself. This is a test. Will I rise to meet it or not?

• 21:54Oprah Winfrey?

  You write on page 155, "Love everything that happens, amor fati."

• 21:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 22:00Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah.

• 22:01Speaker 00

  Acceptance is tough, right? Just acceptance.

• 22:03Oprah Winfrey?

  Explain this principle because that is tough.

• 22:05Speaker 00

  Well, acceptance is sort of the the first level of it, right? The Stoics call this the art of acquiescence, understanding a lot of things are not in your control and you're going to have to come to terms with them.

• 22:14Oprah Winfrey?

  Reminds me of a quote from Eckhart Tolle in A New Earth, where he says, "Life will give you exactly what you need for the evolution of your consciousness." And how do you know it's what you need? It's because of what you're experiencing in this moment. This is the same thing, right? So you might as well just accept it.

• 22:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, and then beyond acceptance is when you embrace it and you decide, hey, this isn't something I have to go through. It's something I get to go through. This is a transformational, transcendent experience for me.

• 22:47Oprah Winfrey?

  I mean, this all sounds really good, very philosophical like, but really hard when it is your life and you're going through this stuff.

• 22:57Speaker 00

  Yes, of course.

• 22:58Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah.

• 22:58Speaker 00

  And and it was hard for the Stoics too. It's easy to write it down. It was easy for me, it was easy for Marcus Aurelius. But but the putting it into practice, the struggling with it day to day is the thing.

• 23:12Oprah Winfrey?

  Your husband just left you, you lost a job, you have a cancer diagnosis, all these things. But this is when the principles really come into play.

• 23:21Speaker 00

  And I think understanding that it's work. It's not, oh, I heard this idea once, I saw this quote, so now I get it, and now this thing isn't hard for me.

• 23:28Oprah Winfrey?

  Yes.

• 23:28Speaker 00

  It's the reminder of it day to day. If we understand what Meditations was for the most powerful man in the world, it's him reminding himself over and over again.

• 23:37Oprah Winfrey?

  By the most powerful, you mean Marcus Aurelius, yes.

• 23:39Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 23:40Oprah Winfrey?

  Emperor of Rome.

• 23:41Speaker 00

  It's this totally unique historical document, Marcus Aurelius's Meditations, one of the the great texts, great gifts of of civilization that this survives. But he says a lot of the same things over and over again because it's not for you and me, it was for him. He's reminding himself.

• 23:57Oprah Winfrey?

  He's writing to himself.

• 23:58Speaker 00

  Yes, and he's he's doing it during a plague.

• 24:00Oprah Winfrey?

  I had no idea we were going to be talking about it on my porch in 2026.

• 24:05Speaker 00

  He might be mortified.

• 24:06Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah.

• 24:07Speaker 00

  He's he's doing it through a plague, through floods, through wars, through the loss of of multiple. He attends multiple funerals for his children. It is a it is a deeply and profoundly painful life that he gets through. And he is having to work through it as we are all having to work through it.

• 24:26Oprah Winfrey?

  So he leaves all of these writings that later become what we're now discussing, Stoicism.

• 24:32Speaker 00

  It's the journal in the same way that I sit down in the morning and I go, hey, you didn't need to lose your temper like that yesterday. Don't you regret it? Why did you do that? You know better than this. It's that sort of self-talk that is trying to get you back on track. So it's one thing to know it. It's another thing to know it in the moment. And it's a third thing to get back to it when you've done the wrong thing.

• 24:56Oprah Winfrey?

  L is a business owner in California. Hi, L.

• 25:01Speaker 04

  Hi, Oprah, hi, Ryan.

• 25:03Oprah Winfrey?

  And you're practicing Stoicism. Tell us about that.

• 25:06Speaker 04

  So I'm an entrepreneur and I founded and was CEO of a baby carrier company called Soli Baby for over a decade. Now I do other things in business. I'm the host of a podcast called Down the Well with L for Moms. And my my husband and I invest in family owned businesses. But back in the early days of Soli Baby, I wrote all the emotional highs and lows of the business. And the lows were not fun. But the highs actually drove and fueled a lot of my ambition, if I'm being honest. So over time, that roller coaster was really exhausting and I wanted off. So enter Stoicism. I become a little bit of a Stoic.

• 25:50Oprah Winfrey?

  Tell us how, tell us what happened.

• 25:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, I stopped trying to control everything. I looked at the experiences that I was having as for me and released kind of the outcomes. I let my ego die in a lot of ways, which, you know, the the success of ironically like made me much more successful and a much better leader, much better CEO, much better mom. And I and I got that kind of internal steadiness.

• 26:22Oprah Winfrey?

  So what is it you actually practice every day? Is it like, do you read the Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday? Do you do you meditate? What do you actually do?

• 26:35Speaker 04

  I mean, some of that. And also, I have actually built it into my religious practice as well. So like, I see it all over the Bible, I see it everywhere. I think that these are really eternal, like, you know, lifelong principles that are really rooted in in everything. So in terms of like a daily practice, I would say, I think Ryan just had mentioned this, of really creating that space from when something happens to your reaction to that thing. I think it's as basic as that, is giving giving yourself some some space there and to respond.

• 27:15Oprah Winfrey?

  So you get a phone call you don't like, an email that is upsetting, somebody saying something that is annoying, disturbing to you, and you do what immediately?

• 27:29Speaker 04

  Has nothing to do with me. It has nothing to do with me.

• 27:32Oprah Winfrey?

  Even when it's got your name on the email?

• 27:37Speaker 04

  Right? I mean, I've I've definitely had my name on some things. For some unhappy employees and customers and and kids and all the things. But I but yeah, it is a practice. Now, I would never say that I have done it perfectly or I'm, you know, some, I don't know what a perfect Stoic would even would even look like.

• 27:59Oprah Winfrey?

  What you're sharing is that you stop, you read the thing, you take it in, you don't react, you then do what? You you say, what is this really about? Or you say?

• 28:11Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, you get back into the higher part of your brain instead of the survival brain that's saying, how?

• 28:19Oprah Winfrey?

  I've got to defend myself, yeah.

• 28:20Speaker 04

  Exactly. Of how can I align this with my highest self, with my most virtuous self, with the person who I want to be that I'm not yet?

• 28:30Oprah Winfrey?

  Do you have a question for Ryan?

• 28:33Speaker 04

  I do. So when I got off that roller coaster, definitely helped with the unnecessary suffering, creating that kind of internal steadiness. But on the flip side, I would say it has flattened just a little bit of that that like intensity and drive and motivation that that used to drive me. And and I would say like, I I wouldn't trade it back. But I'm wondering, is that a necessary trade off? Or, you know, can I remain grounded and feel deeply driven still? Or do you have to give some of that up, some of that ego?

• 29:09Speaker 00

  I do think we're trying to trade, take a little bit off the the top so we don't get so low because the lows are inevitable. And I think often in business and in life, probably more common. The founder of Stoicism, his name is Zeno. He's a merchant in the Mediterranean. And he suffers a shipwreck, he loses everything. And as he washes up in Athens, that's where he's introduced to philosophy. And he would he would joke that he made a great fortune when he suffered a shipwreck because it sent him down a different path. So we don't always know where this is going to take us. That's one of the humiliities of of not saying this is the worst thing that ever happened to us because we don't know. But what I try to think about is instead of wanting my highs to be attached to achievements, which may or may not come, or recognition which may or may not come,

• 29:54Speaker 00

  I want to attach the highs from, I just had an amazing day getting to do what I love. I just did my absolute best. I got better today. I did something that I wasn't capable of before. And so I want to take the wins, the excitement, the achievements in the things that are up to me as opposed to to waiting for somebody else to give it to me and then feeling good, but then also feeling nervous because they can take it away. Or I can do everything right and not get it. And so to me, if we can switch a little bit towards Identifying the highs with things that are up to us, not, did you get the award? Did you get the promotion? Did the deal come through?

• 30:37Speaker 00

  But instead, on the parts of it that are up to you, that's where the Stoics are going to feel better and want to, you know, celebrate is that you did what you were capable of doing. That's the win.

• 30:49Oprah Winfrey?

  I just wanted to say thank you, thank you, thank you for being so open and sharing that. Thank you.

• 30:53Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 30:54Speaker 00

  It's great to meet you.

• 30:56Oprah Winfrey?

  We live in a culture of instant everything, as you know, and everybody knows. Social media, constant, everything, cycles of cancellation, everybody's outraged, everything. Do you think that the Stoicism's principles of ancient wisdom are relevant for our times right now?

• 31:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think in many ways, the popularity of Stoicism is a reaction against what's clearly not working for us and clearly making us miserable. We're slaves to the algorithm, slaves to desire, slaves to all these things that we know, although they can be rewarding in the moment, they're ultimately very draining and empty. So I think Stoicism has been popular for 2,500 years, but it tends to be resurgent in moments where things feel like they're not working.

• 31:49Oprah Winfrey?

  That's why the interest by so many younger people.

• 31:52Speaker 00

  I think so.

• 31:52Oprah Winfrey?

  Nikki, you've been interested for a while. Nikki's a mom of a tween daughter. Hello. I hear you're always thinking about Stoicism. Why?

• 32:02Speaker 05

  I think it started deeply in 2020 during the pandemic when nothing made sense to Ryan's point.

• 32:09Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah.

• 32:10Speaker 05

  And I had to figure out, you know, between a move from Oakland, California to Orlando, Florida, you know, an incredible sort of shift that I had to make, and I had to make that mental and internal shift as well. I also was dealing with a health crisis, a breast cancer scare, and I knew that I had to make sure that I was anchored. I had to make sure that even though I couldn't control what was happening around me, I could control how I was responding to what was going on. And, you know, I think I've always been a Stoic in that way, or had a Stoic sort of leaning, because I always loved, you know, the incomparable Maya Angelou.

• 32:53Speaker 05

  And I felt like she was an absolute perfect example of a Stoic mindset. I remember her quote about, "You can be changed by what's happening to you, but you don't have to be reduced by it." And that was my goal in really leaning into Stoicism, is not being reduced by what I was going through.

• 33:13Oprah Winfrey?

  That's wonderful. Do you have a question for Ryan?

• 33:16Speaker 05

  I do have a question. As I am a mother, I have a tween, and living in Florida, living in this climate that we are all in, regardless of where you are in the world, how do we raise our children, Ryan, to have a Stoic sort of outlook, but not be disconnected or detached from their own emotions and certainly not from injustice as well?

• 33:42Speaker 00

  I think about this with my kids. It's one thing to talk about the stuff, but then what do they see me doing? How do they see me losing my cool? They're throwing a tantrum, and then I'm throwing a tantrum in response to their tantrum, and they're learning that this is what you do when you're upset, or when you're overwhelmed, or you can't express yourself well. And so I think, obviously, first and foremost, it comes down to modeling. But I think we want to, we want to teach via stories. What are the stories from history, from life, from literature that embody these ideas? And then what are the stories from our own life that we can go, hey, I've been where you've been, and this is what I did, and this is why I wish I'd done it differently? And so I think we learn from stories.

• 34:27Speaker 00

  But the idea of justice is a critical Stoic virtue. You know, Stoicism, we're talking here about resiliency. We're talking about not being so triggered, not being so upset. I think the reason we're talking about that is so we can be of use to society, right? The Stoic virtue of justice, you can't pick the other three and then not do that one.

• 34:48Oprah Winfrey?

  Right.

• 34:48Speaker 00

  It's the most essential of the virtues. It's the virtue that all the others have to be pointed towards. And so, you know, over and over again, the Stoics are talking about our obligations to the common good, to not just our children, but to all children, to the future itself. And so there is this critical ethical core to Stoicism that, while it might be popular with athletes and special forces operators and CEOs.

• 35:15Oprah Winfrey?

  Isn't that what made this book so popular, that athletes started using it?

• 35:18Speaker 00

  It was not the market I expected.

• 35:20Oprah Winfrey?

  Yes.

• 35:21Speaker 00

  But it's been, it's been interesting.

• 35:23Oprah Winfrey?

  That athletes?

• 35:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, athletes, police officers, firefighters, astronauts, fighter pilots, people in high stakes, high pressure environments, obviously are drawn to Stoicism. But so are single parents, so are, you know, kids, so are teenagers. We're all obviously just overstimulated and stressed and overwhelmed and trying to make sense of the world. So I think, obviously, that there's going to be your sort of early adopters. But ultimately, this is a thing that works for everyone.

• 35:56Oprah Winfrey?

  Have you found that it's helped you live a more calmer life, Nikki?

• 36:00Speaker 05

  I think so. You know, I think having that internal balance, having that internal rudder is what it is. So even if the situation is out of my control, which most things are, very little is in my control, I still know that I have myself. I have me, right? And that is, you know, another quote, right? "You are your best thing," right? I know that, all said and done, I have to have me and take care of me before I can do anything else.

• 36:27Oprah Winfrey?

  Well, thank you for joining us. Thank you for that. And proud of you, raising, it's not easy raising anybody, and certainly doing it in this climate, all the things.

• 36:39Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 36:39Oprah Winfrey?

  Amen. If Marcus Aurelius and Seneca and all those guys were alive right now, what do you think they'd say about our relationship to distraction and validation and all that?

• 36:51Speaker 00

  I think they would be horrified. This is not, this is no way to live.

• 36:56Oprah Winfrey?

  Nobody would believe it.

• 36:58Speaker 00

  Yeah. We probably get more information in an hour than the Emperor of Rome would get in a month. Just the sheer volume and noise.

• 37:07Oprah Winfrey?

  Like in a year.

• 37:08Speaker 00

  It's, it's not, it's not human, what we are subjecting ourselves to.

• 37:12Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah, it's too much. It's too much. So I've been collecting inspirational quotes for years. I remember 15, going home and

• 37:22Oprah Winfrey?

  literally coming from an assembly and putting quotes on the walls after hearing someone speak. But a lot of people hear the phrase, but then it's hard to actually put into practice. If there was one daily Stoic habit from this book that you believe could truly change someone's life if they commit to it, what would that be?

• 37:46Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 37:49Speaker 00

  Epictetus says, "It's not things that upset us, it's our opinion about things."

• 37:54Oprah Winfrey?

  Oh.

• 37:56Speaker 00

  And when you realize that you can decide what this is going to mean for you, you can decide whether this is something that knocks you backwards, or this is something that you use to spring forward, that that is what is up to you.

• 38:12Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah.

• 38:13Speaker 00

  You know, they say, "It doesn't matter what you bear, it matters how you bear it."

• 38:17Oprah Winfrey?

  You say in the very beginning of the book that, you know, you're celebrating the 10th anniversary of this book, but the past 10 years have put a lot of obstacles in your way. So was your practice of Stoicism put to the test?

• 38:29Speaker 00

  Always being put to the test. I mean, look, show me any 10-year period in history that didn't put people to the test. So we talk about how this is unprecedented, this never happened before. It's very unprecedented. It's very happened before. This is what, this is what history is. We are living through a historical moment, and history only looks quaint and certain in retrospect. It's always touch and go. It's always scary. It's always alarming. And so, yeah, I had two young kids. I got married. I built a business. I lost a business. You're always going through stuff. It's never going the way that you want it to go. But then, when I look back on that 10-year period,

• 39:12Speaker 00

  I see how each one of those moments was formative into making me where I am now. And I sometimes wish, and this is, I think, a very particular part of the Stoic practice, go, if I'm going to feel better about this later, why am I torturing myself about it now?

• 39:28Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah.

• 39:28Speaker 00

  Why can't I borrow that, take it on advance? Why don't I give myself the perspective of some distance and space now, instead of feeling transformed by it a decade from now?

• 39:42Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah. You learn to step into the space that allows you to have the space from it. Yeah. And recognizing, it doesn't matter what happens to us. It could be for the best if we use it to be better for ourselves and others. One of the things I really appreciated about this book is that it does not promise an easier life, because you couldn't, but it does, I think, promise a stronger sense of self, a way of meeting life as it is and not as we would necessarily wish it to be.

• 40:13Speaker 00

  Yeah. Do you want to pray for things to go a certain way? Or do you want to pray for the strength to be able to handle them however they go? Epictetus was approached by one of his students, and the student said, you know, "Tell me what to do. Tell me what to do." And he said, "That's the wrong question. You should be asking me to help make you adaptable to circumstances, to be able to meet whatever the future brings." And if we understand that we don't get a say in how the future is going to go, we only get a say in who we're going to be, whatever that is, then we're, we have a much better prescription for resiliency there than needing to be so strong that we can, we can make things be a certain way

• 40:57Speaker 00

  or be so lucky that they go a certain way. We want to be weather for, we want to be ready for whatever the weather is.

• 41:05Oprah Winfrey?

  I love that. Brian, thank you so much for reminding us that nothing is wasted. Nothing is wasted. That's what I say all the time.

• 41:13Speaker 00

  Unless we waste it.

• 41:14Oprah Winfrey?

  Unless you waste it. But not, your pain's not wasted, your setbacks aren't wasted, not even your so-called failures are wasted if you're willing to meet them with courage and clarity. Maya Angelou, she was just mentioning, used to always say to me, that one of the Stoics used to say, "Courage is the most important of the virtues, because you can't practice anything else without it."

• 41:34Speaker 00

  That's exactly right.

• 41:35Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah, yeah. Ryan's Stoic Virtues book set is available everywhere. There's a whole set. If this conversation has interested you, his bestsellers, "The Obstacle is the Way", "The Daily Stoic" are available wherever books are sold, and then there's a whole set. Thank you so much to Dan and Ellen, Nikki, for zooming in, and to all of you for joining us. We'll see you next time. Go well. If this episode of the Oprah Podcast has piqued your interest in Stoicism, right there on your screen is a QR code where you can buy Ryan Holiday's Stoic Virtues box set. It's a guide to go even deeper, drawing from the four core principles of Stoicism,

• 42:18Oprah Winfrey?

  wisdom, courage, justice, and temperance. This collection invites you to live with more intention, resilience, and clarity. You can order it right now by scanning the QR code on your screen. Order it for yourself, or it's perfect as a gift to someone you know who would appreciate it. Our listeners tell us that the podcast is resonating with you and is serving as a bright spot in your day. That means a lot to me. So here's the thing. I would really appreciate it if you like and subscribe to the Oprah Podcast on YouTube or wherever you podcast. It's just a quick tap of the subscribe button,

• 42:59Oprah Winfrey?

  and that way, you won't miss an episode in your queue. You don't have to pay anything. I know subscribe usually means you're paying something, but this time, it means you just are notified when there's something new. There are many more to come that we're excited about. So thank you for watching and listening.