Come Back To The Rhythm | A Stoic Idea Worth Tattooing On Your Body

Marcus Aurelius wasn’t perfect. With so many responsibilities competing for his time and attention, he was guilty, as we all have been, of letting his good habits slide. The question is: What do we do when this happens? Today, Ryan discusses how Marcus kept his habits in check and how you can, too, as well as the Stoic idea that influenced his newest tattoo, which he got from Andy Pho. Andy is the owner of Upside Tattoo, and he opened a new shop in Hutto, TX in 2022. Follow Andy on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andypho/We’re launching Session 2 of the New Year New You Challenge on February 1st! Enroll now to secure your spot or gift it to a friend.✉️ 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, including the Premium Leather Edition of the Daily Stoic Journal.📱 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, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. On Tuesdays, we take a closer look at these Stoic ideas, how we can apply them in our actual lives. Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy.

• 0:25Ryan Holiday?

  Come back to the rhythm.

• 0:29Ryan Holiday?

  Marcus Aurelius wasn't perfect. With so many responsibilities competing for his time and attention, he was guilty, as we all have been, of letting his good habits slide. Why else would he remind himself to keep returning to philosophy if he didn't occasionally find himself reverting to the old ways and the bad habits? There he is, in meditations, reminding himself to return to a simple diet after he caught himself overdoing it a little, reminding himself to get up early and get a move on his obligations, perhaps after sleeping away one too many mornings. Of course, he needed reminders to reengage with those good habits he let slack. All human beings do. Despite our better judgment and best intentions, life has a nasty habit of getting in the way,

• 1:14Ryan Holiday?

  sending us on accidental hiatuses from our hobbies, our good habits, and our resolutions. Then what? Well, some of us start to feel guilty and ashamed about it. We tell ourselves it's proof that it's impossible, that it won't work, that we can't change or grow. We reach a point where we think we might hang it up for good and abandon it entirely. When what we should do is what Marcus said. He said, "When jarred unavoidably by circumstances, revert at once to yourself." And don't lose the rhythm more than you can help. You'll have a better grasp of the harmony if you can keep coming back to it. The thing about the rhythm is that it doesn't get lost. Only we do. The beat goes on, the right path stands open. We just have to come back to it.

• 1:59Ryan Holiday?

  We have to pick it up again. It doesn't matter how badly we've messed up, how much we've stumbled. It's still there. It's open for us. It's not exactly waiting for us, but it continues on, ready for us whenever we choose to rejoin. Maybe that describes how your new year has gone. You had high hopes and higher standards, but you lost it already. Well, here's a way back. We're actually relaunching the Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge, which I have myself gotten so much out of. Typically, the New Year, New You Challenge, it starts on January 1. It's the first three weeks of the year. But this year, we heard from a ton of people, they came back late from vacation, or they procrastinated, they changed their mind, or they lost the beat. And they asked if we could bring it back for one more go in January,

• 2:44Ryan Holiday?

  which we are doing. And we'd love to have you join us for one week only. You can sign up and immediately start the 2023 Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge at your own pace. All the Q and As have been recorded and edited and time stamped. It's three hours of me riffing on a bunch of these important ideas. Plus, as I said, three weeks of challenges that will make you better. The first one is something I've already made a bunch of decisions because of this year. And I've just been loving the different things, the prompts every day. I'm off to do my, my challenge today. I'll hint it, you're supposed to go visit something very, very old in town. So I'm heading over to a cemetery across town,

• 3:26Ryan Holiday?

  where I believe the, the oldest dating gravestone is something from the 1700s, which is pretty cool. I would love to have you join the challenge. You can do it now, learn new skills, you'll be more disciplined, you'll challenge yourself this year, and hopefully it will help you come back to the rhythm. Heard a bunch of great feedback on it already. I've met all these people in the Q and A, but I would love to have you join us. Someone was telling us there, it's going to be sad when it ends. I'm going to be sad that it ending, so I'll probably just do it again. And I would love to have you join us. You can sign up at nyny23.com to take it, or you can just go to dailystoic.com/challenge. Registration will close on January 31st, so don't procrastinate. Come back to the rhythm, let's do it now together.

• 4:11Ryan Holiday?

  The Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge, Round Two. If you've fallen off, let's come back to the rhythm, and I'll see you all there.

• 4:26Ryan Holiday?

  The greatest thing in the world would be to know exactly what to do in every situation. Epictetus was asked by a student, "What should I do?" And he said, "Don't ask me what you should do. Ask how to be made adaptable to circumstances." I'm Ryan Holiday. I've written a number of books about Stoic philosophy. I've spoken to the NBA and the NFL, sitting senators. But I'm also just a regular human who tries to apply Stoic philosophy in my actual life. And there's a couple of key Stoic practices that are basically true in each and every situation that I try to constantly be reminded of so I can apply whatever I'm doing, whoever I'm with, whatever is going on. I actually have them tattooed on my arms. In today's episode, I want to walk you through those tattoos, why these mantras, which in Sanskrit means sacred utterance.

• 5:11Ryan Holiday?

  Why I have these reminders on me, what they mean, how I apply them, and how maybe you can apply them in your own life. And actually, I just got a new Stoic tattoo today. A great Stoic tattoo artist here in Austin, Texas. His name is Andy Fo. He just set up a new shop in Hutto, which is about 45 minutes from my bookstore here. He came out and gave me a Four Virtues tattoo on my wrist here. So I'm going to show you what that tattoo process looks like. But I also want to show you why I have these reminders and what they mean to me.

• 5:40Ryan Holiday?

  The impediment to action advances action, but stands in the way becomes the way. Basically, what he's saying is that each and every situation you face in life is an opportunity to practice virtue or practice excellence in some form. Perhaps not the excellence we wanted, perhaps not what we intended to do, but nevertheless, an opportunity to step up, to grow, to learn, to change, to adapt, to be the kind of person that Stoicism wants us to be.

• 6:09Ryan Holiday?

  After I got "Obstacles, the Way," which is when I was writing my first book on Stoic philosophy, the next book I did was "Ego is the Enemy." And when "The Obstacle is the Way" came out, it started to do very well. My career was taking off. I'd always been this kind of young kid who was ahead of my years, who was successful, who was doing well. People wanted me to go places. I was being written about. Things were going well, but I was very cognizant of the fact that ego, as Cyril Connolly famously said... Sucks us down like the log gravity. Epictetus famously says, you cannot learn that which you think you already know. Ego being this thing that gets in the way between you and what you're capable of being, between you and doing your best, between you and relationships, between you and objective reality. And so I wanted to reminder, particularly as my career trajectory continued upwards,

• 6:52Ryan Holiday?

  that I wasn't special, that I wasn't important, that I needed to focus on the process, I needed to do the work, I needed to ignore results entirely and focus, as Epictetus says, on what I control, which is what I put in. In Meditations, Marcus Rilis talks about how when you tie your success to what other people say or do, that's insanity. Sanity is tying it to your own actions, to your own sense of self, to your own values.

• 7:18Ryan Holiday?

  Sometime in the summer of 2019, I was working on the third book in that trilogy, which was Stillness is the Key. Stillness being when I think about what makes me happiest, when I do my best work, I'm not frantic, I'm not busy, I'm connected, I'm locked in. In Meditations, Marcus Rilis talks over and over again about being present. Stoics and the Epicureans have this word ataraxia, not being disturbed internally or externally, being able to tune out what's going on around you and lock into what's in front of you. Marcus Rilis uses the image of the rock in the ocean, the waves are crashing over it, but it stands still. And he says, eventually, the waves fall still around it. And I know that seems more like an eastern idea, although it's funny because the obstacle is the way. There's also a Zen expression, the obstacle is the path. These mantras are

• 8:03Ryan Holiday?

  universal. They appear in all the different Stoic schools, even in religions. Be still and know that I am God, right? Like, slow things down, lock in, tune out what's going on around you. So you can imagine, this is the summer of 2019, stillness comes out, I'm just finishing up the tour, going back to normal life, the pandemic happens, the world becomes both very still and very busy and noisy and scary all at the same time. What we all had to do was reevaluate our lives, reevaluate our habits, reevaluate what was important, find a way to be at peace and focus on what we control within that insanity. And so one very, very minor downside of the pandemic was that I couldn't go get A tattoo for the next series I was starting, which is the Four Virtues series.

• 8:46Ryan Holiday?

  The Four Virtues, actually, I have them here on the bookstore. Courage, temperance, justice, wisdom. These are the cardinal virtues, actually, of Christianity and of Stoicism. And when I think about the obstacle is the way. When Marcus says that everything is an opportunity to practice virtue, that's what he's talking about. Every situation, even if it's not what you planned, even if it's not what you wanted, even if it's not what you expected, it's a chance for courage. It's a chance to learn. That would be wisdom. It's a chance for temperance, self-discipline, moderation. Often, it's an opportunity for justice, to make things better for other people, to see what other people need, to do what is right. So I wanted a vivid reminder of that. Actually, the Daily Stoic logo, you've probably seen in our logos, it is the images of the Four Virtues. Sophia for wisdom, which is an owl. A lion for courage.

• 9:30Ryan Holiday?

  The scales of justice for justice. And then a man sprinkling water into wine, diluting wine. That's the image of temperance or moderation. One of the weirdest parts of obstacle and stillness and ego and then the stuff I've talked about, I've done videos about this memento mori, mor fati, is I hear from people who those ideas so resonated with them that they got their own tattoos. The book hit them at a time they needed something or that idea was something they needed a reminder of. And I've seen pictures from people all over the world that have sent these in. And it's been a cool, unique experience. You know, some people have a negative opinion about tattoos. For me, the tattoo is for me. As I was sitting down with Andy, he wanted to put it this way, because that's typically how you would do it, so you could show other people. But the tattoo, as I was saying, I'm like,

• 10:15Ryan Holiday?

  no, the tattoos, these are reminders for me. These are mantras that I repeat. I'm getting them in my skin, so I can't forget about them. I can't make excuses about them. I can't pretend I don't know. I do know, they're right there. But I've seen all these cool tattoos from people all over the world. So if you're thinking about getting a Stoic tattoo, I think you should. Obviously, rules, laws, health issues aside, but the reminders have been incredibly helpful for me. And they've helped me do what Stoicism is meant to do, which is not be abstract, not be theoretical, but it's something you actually apply and use and do.