This is the Secret to Real Wealth | Impossible Without Your Consent

“What is the point of reading? ’To me,’ Fran Lebowitz tells Martin Scorsese in the new ‘Pretend It's A City’ docuseries, ‘[reading] is just a way of being immensely rich. This may be the reason I never cared about money. Because as soon as you can read, you are incredibly rich.’”Ryan explains why reading is the key to a rich life, and reads The Daily Stoic’s entry of the day, on today’s Daily Stoic Podcast. This episode is also brought to you by FitTrack, the best way to calculate your body’s composition accurately, reliably, and consistently. Every FitTrack smart scale uses advanced algorithms to offer insights into 17 different metrics indicative of bodily health. The Dara Smart Scale syncs with the free FitTrack App so all of your health insights are saved in one place. Go to fittrack.com/stoic to take 50% off your order, plus get an additional 30% with code BUILD30 at checkout. ***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow Daily Stoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicSee 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, and 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?

  This is the secret to real wealth. What is the point of reading? To me, Fran Lebowitz tells Martin Scorsese in his new documentary, Pretend It's a City, "Reading is just a way of being immensely rich. This may be the reason I never cared about money," she said, "because as soon as you can read, you are already incredibly rich." It's true, there are, of course, rich people who don't read. But like Harry Truman's famous quote, "There are very few people who read who are not rich, be it in wisdom, imagination, or happiness." Although it's also true that books are pretty much the single best investment a person can make, which is why most people who are financially successful are readers.

• 1:26Ryan Holiday?

  As Seneca said, "To read is to annex all the ages of the past into your own. To study philosophy is to acquire the thing which plenty of kings and titans have never had, an understanding of what the good life is like." So why do we read? Because it's fun, because it's part of philosophy, because it gives us one of the best forms of relaxation. It lets us communicate with the greatest minds to ever live. It lets us be friends with them, too. It gives us answers to our problems. Reading makes us rich in more ways than one.

• 2:01Ryan Holiday?

  Impossible without your consent. This is today's entry from the Daily Stoic. "Today I escaped from the crush of circumstances, or better put, I threw them out, for the crush wasn't from outside me, but in my own assumptions." Marcus Aurelius's Meditations 9:13. "On tough days, we might say, 'My work is overwhelming,' or 'My boss is really frustrating.' If only we could understand that this is impossible. Someone can't frustrate you. Work can't overwhelm you. These are external objects, and they have no access to your mind. Those emotions you feel, as real as they are,

• 2:46Ryan Holiday?

  they come from the inside, not from the outside." The Stoic use the word "hypolipsis", which means "a taking up" of perceptions, of thoughts, and judgments by our mind. What we assume, what we willingly generate in our mind, that's on us. We can't blame other people for making us feel stressed or frustrating us any more than we can blame them for our jealousy. The cause is within us. They are just the target." Credit for today's entry must go to my wife. I remember early on in our relationship, we were arguing about something, and I was mad. And she said, "Why are you mad?" Or I was complaining, or whatever it was. But I just said, "You're frustrating me.

• 3:31Ryan Holiday?

  When you're doing this, it's frustrating me." And she said, as spouses often have the way of being able to do, she said, "I can't frustrate you. That's you. I'm just doing something, and you're deciding that it's frustrating you." My wife likes to joke that in our relationship... One of us is a stoic and the other writes about Stoicism. And she's right. I think part of the reason I write about Stoicism is that it doesn't necessarily come naturally to me and I have to sort of think my way through it. But it's true. And the example that we used in this entry, the idea that you would never blame someone

• 4:11Ryan Holiday?

  for making you jealous, but like that, we blame someone for making us angry or making us feel less than. Or we blame other people for our emotions, but not all our emotions. And the truth is, our emotions are our problem. I like that expression, you know, when someone says something, you go, "That sounds like a you problem." And really, our emotions are our problem. The Eleanor Roosevelt line, "No one can make you feel inferior without your consent," similar to the idea of Epictetus, you know, when you find yourself getting upset or offended, realize you're complicit in taking the offense. And this is true for any of the emotions that we feel. We're choosing to feel them, they're on us. I'm not saying you just stuff your emotions down, you pretend they don't exist, but what

• 4:56Ryan Holiday?

  I'm saying is you can't blame other people because it's not their fault. It's on you. So what are you going to do about it? How are you going to process it? How are you going to understand what part of that is being triggered by some younger part of you? How have your experiences led up to this moment? What blame do you have in this equation? Focus on that because it's the part that you control. And by focusing on it, it's frankly the only part you're really going to be able to make a difference on. People can't make you angry. People can't make you frustrated. There's another great book, actually, from the sober community called "You Can't Make Me Angry." It goes both ways, right? It's like, no, you can't make me angry, but really, no one can make you angry. And so I think this is something to work on. It's really something to think about.

• 5:40Ryan Holiday?

  Remember, no one can frustrate you, no one can make you angry, no one can make you jealous. You feel those things. Situations can't make you anxious, can't make you worried, can't make you stressed. That is also on you.

• 5:55Ryan Holiday?

  This is why we made our Daily Stoic Read to Lead Challenge. It's one of the things that I'm most proud of that we've done. It's my reading practice combined with the Stoic reading practice, combined with Harry Truman's reading practice. It's how to read to lead. As Truman said, "Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders have to be readers." I want you to read. I want you to be a better reader. I want you, as Marcus Aurelius learns from Rusticus, not just to be satisfied with getting the gist of things. So check out our Read to Lead Challenge. Go to dailystoic.com/reed. And of course, you can get it for free if you're a Daily Stoic Life member, which you can sign up for at dailystoiclife.com.