What Gets The Leftover You? | Wants Make You A Servant

Ryan talks about where you should place your attention, and reads The Daily Stoic’s entry of the day. InsideTracker provides you with a personalized plan to improve your metabolism, reduce stress, improve sleep, and optimize your health for the long haul. For a limited time, get 20% off the entire InsideTracker store. Just go to insidetracker.com/STOIC to claim this deal. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://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 another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Thursdays, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from the book The Daily Stoic, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful co-author and collaborator Stephen Hanselman. And so today, we'll give you a quick meditation from one of the Stoics, from Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, then some analysis from me. And then we send you out into the world to do your best to turn these words into works.

• 0:41Ryan Holiday?

  What gets the leftover you? We're all busy. We all have things going on. Certainly Marcus Aurelius did, you know, running an empire of some 60 million people. Certainly Seneca did, not just writing his plays and his essays, but trying to corral an increasingly uncontrollable Nero. And Epictetus? All his labor was owned by someone else, and the slaves in Rome were worked hard. And yet, and yet, the Stoics thought that this was all no more than a side hustle. Our real profession, our real job, they believed, was philosophy, was the study and the practice of Stoicism. They were forever students and forever employed by it.

• 1:25Ryan Holiday?

  Seneca reminded himself that Alexander the Great, as a conqueror, decided how his territories would be distributed, that he chose what got left over, the undesirable parts. And so it ought to go for our time, Seneca said. Philosophy should not get the leftovers. Marcus Aurelius said his day job was like a stepmother. It was his real mother that he loved the most unconditionally. And she in turn. As you look at your day, as you look at your life, make sure that you have made this critical distinction, too. Make sure that you are prioritizing properly. It's the study and the practice of philosophy that we were put here for. That is our true occupation. Everything else is a side hustle. Everything else is a hobby.

• 2:12Ryan Holiday?

  Wants make you a servant. And I'm reading to you today from The Daily Stoic, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living by yours truly and my co-author and translator, Stephen Hanselman. You can get signed copies, by the way, in the Daily Stoic store. Over a million copies of The Daily Stoic in print now. It's been just such a lovely experience to watch it. Spend more than 250 weeks, consecutive weeks on the bestsellers. It's just an awesome experience. But I hope you check it out. We have a premium leather edition at store.dailystoic.com as well. But let's get on with today's reading. "The Highest Power." This is a quote from one of Seneca's most brutal and fascinating plays, The Estes, which is worth reading.

• 2:55Ryan Holiday?

  And I've talked about it in a couple of different entries of the podcast. One of my favorites, of course, with James Rom. But here's the quote again. "The highest power, the highest power is no power. If you desire, nothing." "In the modern world, our interactions with tyranny are a bit more voluntary than they were in ancient times. We can put up with our controlling boss, though we put up with our controlling boss, even though we could probably get a different job if we wanted one. We change how we dress or refrain from saying what we actually think because we want to fit in with some cool group. We put up with a cruel critic or customers because we want their approval or their business. And in these cases, these powers exist because of our wants.

• 3:40Ryan Holiday?

  You change that, and you're free." "The late fashion photographer, Bill Cunningham, occasionally declined to invoice magazines for his work. When a young upstart asked him why that was, Cunningham's response was epic. If you don't take the money, they can't tell you what to do, kid. Remember that taking the money and wanting the money, it makes you a servant to the people who have it. Indifference, to that, as Seneca puts it, turns the highest power into no power, at least as far as your life is concerned." I've said before that my definition of success is spelled autonomy. I want control over my own life. And if I don't have that, it doesn't matter how much money I have, how respected I am, how powerful I am. I'm not that powerful because I can't do what I want.

• 4:24Ryan Holiday?

  I don't control my day. My wants control my day. My needs control my day. What I've agreed to, what I've signed up to, controls my day. And I don't like that. It doesn't make me feel good and it reminds me that I'm wasting this precious resource. And I love seeing people who have to make this decision at a much, much bigger level. Rory McIlroy, actually, I think it was, he read this entry of The Daily Stoic and then he was asked to join this new golf league. And he quoted that Bill Cunningham line that he got from the book. He said, "If you don't take the money, they can't tell you what to do." You want to find what you want to do in life, the place you want to be, and then you have to be able to say no. You know, they talk about this idea of fuck you money.

• 5:08Ryan Holiday?

  Fuck you money is when you have so much money that you get to say what you really think. You know, you get to be rude about it. There's that great line in the first episode of Billions. Brian Koppelman is just such a great writer. But the line in that show, he says, "What's the point of having fuck you money if you never say fuck you?" And, sorry, I know it's a lot of cursing in this episode. But the point is, I actually don't think you need fuck you money. You just need like polite no thanks money. You just need the power of being content with what you have. There's a Stoic line we quoted on Daily Stoic. Sometimes people, sometimes don't like it. It sounds very privileged. I believe it's Seneca, he's saying, you know, poverty isn't having little, it's wanting more.

• 5:51Ryan Holiday?

  I think he's saying that obviously as a very rich, successful person. What he means is he sees the people who can't say no. Maybe he's even speaking to himself. He wanted to be in the center of things. He wanted to be in the room where it happened. He wanted to throw big parties. He wanted to have beautiful estates. And this puts him in a position where it's hard for him to say no. He doesn't have as much control over his life as you'd think someone in that position is. So the point is, Tyranny is not just slavery. Tyranny is also often self-imposed. Slavery is often self-imposed. We put ourselves on a treadmill. We put ourselves in a position of vulnerability. We put ourselves in a position of dependency because we want. We want to get this.

• 6:36Ryan Holiday?

  We want to get there. We want to have access to this. We want to be like these people. And that makes us have to agree to do certain things. That makes us need to spend a certain amount. That makes us need to dress a certain way. The people who are content with what they have, people who have enough, that's a position of real power. And I tell that story in Stillness is the Key, and we have a pretty viral video about it that, you know what? I'll just play it. We have this great story. This is one of the most viewed TikToks we've ever done. It really captures exactly what Cunningham is saying, captures exactly what Seneca is saying. The ultimate power, freedom in life, is to have enough.

• 7:20Ryan Holiday?

  There's an amazing story about Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller, who wrote Catch Twenty-Two and Slaughterhouse-Five. They're at the party of this billionaire. Vonnegut is teasing Heller, and he says, "This billionaire, whose house we're at, he made more money this week than your book will make in its entire life." And Heller says, "But I have something that he doesn't have." Vonnegut says, "What's that?" And Heller says, "I have some idea of what enough is." He says, "I have enough." This idea of enough is so powerful. Seneca, who quotes Epicureus, says, "If you don't regard what you have as enough, you will never be happy, even if you rule the entire world." Right? Enough is never enough, the Epicureans and the Stoics say, for the person who enough is too little. And if you can get to a place of enough, "What I have is good.

• 8:04Ryan Holiday?

  Everything else is extra, then everything you get is a bonus, and the rest of your life is amazing." But if you tell yourself you'll only be happy if, "If I'll feel better when," you'll never get there. The finish line will move, I promise you. Enough is enough.

• 8:20Ryan Holiday?

  Thanks so much for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Again, if you don't know this, you can get these delivered to you via email every day. Just go to dailystoic.com/email. So, check it out.