The Good News About Wisdom

"The bad news is that wisdom doesn’t come easily. The good news is that it is cheap. Or at least, cheaper than it has ever been before."Ryan talks about the world of wisdom that's available for you to peruse if you choose, 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 @DailyStoic: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?

  The good news about wisdom. The bad news is that wisdom doesn't come easily. The good news is that it is cheap, or at least cheaper than it ever has been before. In Cleanthe's day, paper was so expensive that he supposedly saved money by recording Xeno's teachings on the blade bones of Oxen. We don't have that problem today. Paper is cheap. Books are cheap. "Today you can buy the dialogues of Plato for less than you would spend on a fifth of whiskey," the writer Louis Lamour once observed, "or Gibbons' Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire for the price of a cheap shirt." He couldn't have known that soon enough these books would be available for free on the internet, too. And yet, as much as prices have fallen from then or from Cleanthe's time,

• 1:14Ryan Holiday?

  one thing remains unchanged: the amount of time it takes to read those books, just how difficult it is to really understand them and to apply their teachings to your life. Wisdom remains, as always, a long journey and not for the faint of heart. Do you have what it takes? You have the money. Everybody does. But do you have the commitment? Do you have the drive? Do you have the habits and the systems necessary to process and pursue wisdom? Because if you don't, it doesn't matter how cheap it is. You'll never be able to afford it. If you are looking to invest in this pursuit of wisdom, if you want to be a better reader, of course, obviously, I would urge you to check out my books. But our Read to Lead course for Daily Stoic is there. It's actually free if you sign up for Daily Stoic Life,

• 1:58Ryan Holiday?

  or you can just buy the course as a one-off. But the idea is that to be a leader, you have to be a reader, and there is a way to read and to do it well. You can check that out at dailystoic.com/reading.