An Honest Dollar Is an Impressive Thing

"It’s not the quantity that we should care about. Something earnestly made and sold for a fair price, whether it’s millions of units or a few dozen: that’s honorable. Something earned with real effort: that’s honorable, whether it’s earned by sweeping floors or managing a company."Ryan talks about why the effort poured into your work is in certain ways more important than the outcome of your work, on today's Daily Stoic Podcast. ***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.

• 0:06Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to The Daily Stoic, where each day we read a short passage designed to help you cultivate the strength, insight, wisdom necessary for living the good life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us at dailystoic.com.

• 0:29Ryan Holiday?

  An honest dollar is an impressive thing. There's no dispute about the fact that many, if not most, of the ancient Stoics were rich. Zeno came from a merchant family. Cato's great-grandfather had been a successful farmer. Seneca was wealthy, and of course, so was Marcus Aurelius. The problem with their fortunes was not the size, it was how it was acquired. Both Zeno and Cato's wealth would have been impossible without the grueling and thankless labor of slaves. Seneca grew rich in Nero's service. Marcus Aurelius never wanted to be emperor, but, as he once told the Senate, "He did not regard himself as possessing a single dollar or even a house." To Marcus, all of his wealth truly belonged

• 1:11Ryan Holiday?

  to Rome. But still, we know now that no man should be king, that no one should sit in a palace built from the sweat and tears of millions of faceless citizens. Cleantis, one of the earliest Stoics, had no great fortune. Instead, he worked nearly all his life a series of humble jobs. He carried water for people's gardens. He crushed grain. He was a laborer by choice. When a wealthy king offered him enough money to cease these labors, he refused, so as not to be corrupted. Every dollar Cleantis earned, even if it wasn't many of them, was honestly made. Not one of them was stained by blood or tainted by injustice. And isn't this a much more impressive fortune? It's not

• 1:55Ryan Holiday?

  the quantity that we should care about. Something earnestly made and sold for a fair price, whether it's millions of units or a few dozen, that's honorable. Something earned with real effort, that's honorable, whether it's earned by sweeping the floors or managing the company. The philosopher Nassim Taleb has joked that a person possesses true wealth when the money they turn down is sweeter than the money they accept. An honest dollar is the only kind of dollar worth chasing or collecting. If only more Stoics had lived by this, or had been strong enough to, if only more of us could find the strength to do this today, how much more impressive we would all be. Obviously, we try to earn an honest dollar here at Daily Stoic, the Daily Stoic store. We thank you for the support.

• 2:40Ryan Holiday?

  We try to source mostly, almost exclusively, from US manufacturers. We try to make and sell only things that we ourselves use. We constantly try to improve every facet of the business, from packing to production to customer service. It's an honor to serve you. And of course, it's an honor to have the new book out, where we explore some of the lives we were just talking about, Lives of the Stoics: The Art of Living, from Zeno to Marcus Aurelius. Support your local bookstore, support Amazon if you want. We appreciate it. We feel a book is honest labor, certainly a lot of labor, and we love hearing that you guys read them. So, check out store.dailystoic.com. You can actually get a signed copy of the new book there, and appreciate it.