It’s a Beautiful Tradition | The Sphere Of Choice

Some time around the year 141 CE, Junius Rusticus gave Marcus Aurelius a gift. “The remembrances of Epictetus,” as Marcus would refer most gratefully to the book Rusticus gave him, “which he supplied me with out of his own library.”How well-worn this copy must have become! As Marcus would say, Rusticus had taught him to never be satisfied with just “getting the gist” of things he read, but encouraged him to read deeply, repeatedly, and forcefully. Considering how many times Marcus quotes Epictetus from memory in Meditations, it’s likely that he treated this copy of Discourses like a bible, returning to it time and time again. Perhaps it is even this book that Marcus was referring to when he half-seriously said he needed to ‘throw away [his] books’ because they were consuming all his attention. Certainly, it would have been one of the books Marcus was seen reading as the rest of Rome eagerly watched the gladiators fight.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, 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.

• 0:02Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Each day, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, illustrated with stories from history, current events, and literature to help you be better at what you do. And at the beginning of the week, we try to do a deeper dive, setting a kind of Stoic intention for the week, something to meditate on, something to think on, something to leave you with, to journal about, whatever it is you happen to be doing. So let's get into it.

• 0:35Ryan Holiday?

  It's a beautiful tradition. Sometime around the year 140 AD, Junius Rusticus gave Marcus Aurelius a gift: "The remembrances of Epictetus," as Marcus would refer to this gift most gratefully, "which Rusticus supplied me out of his own library." How well-worn this copy must have become. As Marcus would say, Rusticus had taught him to never be satisfied with just getting the gist of things that he read, but encouraged him to read deeply, repeatedly, and forcefully. Considering how many times Marcus quotes Epictetus from memory in meditations, it's likely that he treated this copy of Discourses like a Bible, returning to it time and time again. Perhaps this is even the book that Marcus was referring to half-seriously

• 1:19Ryan Holiday?

  when he said he needed to throw away his books because they were consuming all his attention. Certainly, it would have been one of the books Marcus was seen reading as the rest of Rome eagerly watched the gladiators fight below. We can imagine that Seneca's copies of Zeno and Clianthes and Chrysippus and Epicurus must have been similarly well-worn. "You must linger among a limited number of master thinkers and digest their works," he advised Lucilius, "if you would derive ideas which shall win firm hold in your mind." A generation after that, someone was introducing Epictetus, then no more than a slave to the works of Musonius Rufus. You could go back further still and sit in a

• 1:59Ryan Holiday?

  bookstore and watch Zeno washed up from a shipwreck being introduced to philosophy by way of the works of Socrates. More recently, before the Vietnam War, James Stockdale had almost that exact experience as Marcus when he was given a copy of Epictetus by one of his professors at Stanford. Soon after, in a three-year span, Stockdale spent three seven-month missions in the waters off Vietnam. He was flying in combat near daily. But on my bedside table, he said, no matter what carrier I was aboard, were my Epictetus books. So for thousands of years, that's what the Stoics have been doing, how their books were intended to be used, to be kept at hand. And as it happens, this is the tradition that the

• 2:43Ryan Holiday?

  Daily Stoic has been lucky enough to tap into. We thought it was pretty remarkable that despite more than 2,000 years of this Stoic tradition, no one had ever put the best of the Stoics in one book, let alone one that was easy to carry and read and study. It's been incredible and humbling, I have to say, since its release in 2016. It's now sold millions of copies in more than 30 languages. It's been more weeks on the bestseller list than any other book about Stoicism ever. And what I love the most is seeing that almost every week, it's one of the top 20 most-read books on Amazon, meaning people are picking it up every day. And so, in celebration of that, every year,

• 3:25Ryan Holiday?

  Amazon and my publisher and all the ebook vendors, they discount The Daily Stoic, the book, to $1.99 as an ebook. You can grab that right now anywhere ebooks are sold. And also, if you're more of a physical person, which I am, and yours is falling apart, we have a really cool leather edition, which you can grab as well at store.dailystoic.com. The point is, Stoicism is designed to be a daily practice, part of our daily routines. It's not a philosophy you read once and magically understand at the soul level. No, it's a lifelong pursuit that requires diligence and repetition and concentration. Pierre Hidot called this "spiritual exercising." And that's one of the benefits of the page-a-day format. It's putting one important thing up for you to review, to have at hand, to

• 4:10Ryan Holiday?

  digest, not in passing, not sporadically, but every single day over the course of a year, preferably year in and year out. And if Epictetus is right, and it's something you're supposed to keep at hand at all times, that's why a collection of greatest hits presented daily was so appealing. So here we are, beginning 2024, and I hope you'll give The Daily Stoic a chance in print, or as a discounted ebook, or the leather edition. And I hope you'll pick up journaling with the Daily Stoic Journal or some other notebook. And I hope you take your favorites and you make your own greatest hits and your own steady plan of the Stoics that you keep and carry with you wherever you go this year. Because if 2024 is anything like 2023, you're gonna need it. I'll link to the $1.99 discounted copy of the Daily Stoic ebook here and you can grab

• 4:55Ryan Holiday?

  everything else at store.dailystoic.com. Happy New Year, everyone. I'll talk to you soon.

• 5:23Ryan Holiday?

  The Sphere of Choice. If the first step is to discern what is or isn't in our control, the second step in Stoic philosophy is to focus the energy on the things we have a choice about. The Stoics viewed the soul as a sphere that, when well tuned, well directed, was an invincible fortress against any trial or circumstance. Protected by our reason, this sphere of choice was like a sacred temple, and it is the only thing we truly possess in this life. We are the product of our choices, so it is essential that we choose well. This week, consider and reflect on the choices you have about your emotions, your actions, your beliefs, and your priorities.

• 6:05Ryan Holiday?

  Keep this thought at the ready at daybreak and through the day and night. There is only one path to happiness, and that is in giving up all that is outside your sphere of choice, regarding nothing else is your possession, surrendering all else to God and fortune. Epictetus, Discourses 4:4. Who then is invincible? The one who cannot be upset by anything outside their reasoned choice. Epictetus, Discourses 1:18. The soul is a sphere true to itself. It neither projects itself towards any external thing, nor does it collapse on itself. But Instead radiates a light which it shows itself the truth of all things and truth in and of itself.

• 6:49Ryan Holiday?

  Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 1112. Well, here we are, we were talking about this last week, you know, you only have so many energy points, you only have so much, so many resources. How are you going to spend them? Are you going to spend them on what's up to you? Or are you going to spend them on what's not up to you? Are you going to emote about things and pretend that that makes a difference? Or are you going to spend your energy trying to do something about this thing that you found so upsetting? Right, so I think people think that Stoicism is about resignation. It's not. It's about allocation, right? It's resigned to the things that make no difference, where you can make no difference.

• 7:30Ryan Holiday?

  But it's very focused, intensely focused on the areas that you can make a difference, right? So you could despair about larger, you know, political trends in your country because you're one person and you're, you know, at odds with the majority. But maybe you can make a difference with your family, with your community. You could run for school board or mayor or something like that, right? What can you do as the individual? That's not to say the Stoics aren't interested in collective action. I'm just saying, I'm going to focus my energy where it's going to make a difference. And as a Stoic, I'd be indifferent to the things where I can make no difference. Where can you make a difference? I think it's tempting as a writer, right? Because our jobs as writers are to have opinions about things.

• 8:15Ryan Holiday?

  That's a really dangerous way to go through your life, thinking that the world gives a shit about your opinion, right? And that having the opinion is the thing that matters. And it doesn't matter, right? What matters is what you do, what are the actions, right? We ended the year with the idea from the Stoics about turning words into works. Well, what are you providing? Where are you putting your resources? And are you putting them towards where they have?

• 8:40Ryan Holiday?

  Efficacy, right? So a Stoic is resigned in some sense to, look, I'm not going to get involved in that nonsense. I'm not going to waste time regretting the past either. What I'm going to try to do is move forward. What I'm going to try to do is move ahead. What I'm going to try to do is make some change where I can make some change. And, and yeah, I'm going to be indifferent to the, the things where that's not true. And that's what we're talking about here, right? That's what the sphere of choice is about. And it's an easy thing to forget. And that's why Epictetus is saying, keep it ready in the morning. Think about it throughout the day and think about it at night. He's saying there's one path to happiness. It's giving up the things that are outside your sphere of choice. Focusing on what else is in your possession, surrendering everything else.

• 9:24Ryan Holiday?

  So it's being zen about the things that are not up to you. But there's a kind of invincibility in that zen, right? Because if it wasn't something that was up to me, I'm not going to, I'm not going to get upset by it. Remember Marcus saying, you don't have to have an opinion about this. You don't have to get upset, but you should be upset about your own choices. Why did I do that? Why didn't I do that? Why did I, you know, why did I make this mistake? Why did I do this thing again that I told myself I was going to stop doing? Focus on you, focus on your choices, make good choices. That's how you exert control over the world. Something I, you know, I remind myself, you see what's going on in the world and you can despair. You can feel sad or you can go, look, I've got two little kids in my house who I'm responsible for.

• 10:08Ryan Holiday?

  The biggest multi-generational impact I can have is in raising them well. And then I go, and this is something Seneca failed. It's like Seneca spent all these years beating his head against the wall, trying to change Nero. He's affected far more people, had far more impact in his writing, where, which he did control. So I go, okay, and look, I, I'm not going to, you know, yell at some, some person I know on social media for being silly and have the impact on one person, but I, I am going to sit down and write about this or talk about this on the podcast in a way that, that can reach a lot of people, right? Let's stay in our lanes. Let's do what we can do. Let's try to make a difference where we can. And if we all do that cumulatively, that is. Is collective action and that does have a big impact.

• 10:53Ryan Holiday?

  This is a short lesson today. It's a straightforward one, but it's so hard. And that's why Seneca is saying you've got to remind yourself constantly throughout the day, I'm going to focus on what's in my sphere of choice. That's where I have impact. I'm going to focus on allocating my energy properly, not going to waste it on regret, not going to waste it on bitterness, on resentment, on anger, on fear, on worry, on hope. I'm going to focus on what I control. I'm going to make a difference there. So that's what still does.