What You Need is a Small Crisis | Show, Not Tell, What You Know

When we stop resisting and start learning, the obstacle becomes the way.📕 Grab the 10th Anniversary Edition of The Obstacle Is the Way by Ryan Holiday at dailystoic.com/obstacle 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

• 0:14Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Hope you are well. I am just working on my talk. I'm going to be giving a talk in San Francisco and Portland in mid-June. I'd love to see you there. You can grab tickets at dailystoiclive.com. If you're not on the West Coast, you want to see me in the Midwest. Or on the East Coast, tickets are up. Chicago, Minneapolis, Detroit, Boston, DC. I'm forgetting another one. And then I'm going to be in Australia in October as well. All those tickets at dailystoiclive.com.

• 0:48Ryan Holiday?

  What you need is a small crisis. It was one thing after another for Marcus Aurelius. Floods and famines, wars and coups, disorder and destruction, matters of life and death. These crises are instructive naturally, and more specifically, opportunities for virtue. But they are also, in their overwhelming and tragic nature, often much more than we need for those purposes. No one would choose something like that. No one would choose to go through what Zelensky has gone through, or Churchill, or to trade places with Queen Elizabeth during her annus horribilis. What is valuable, however, are those small crises,

• 1:31Ryan Holiday?

  those wake-up calls, those close calls. It's these situations that are significant but hardly mortal that can make us focus, that can drive creativity and connection and clarity. They are serious, so we have to get serious. They are challenging and challenge us to rise up and meet them. They can make us better if we insist on it. In the moment, they may seem like they are great, greater than we can imagine. And yes, we might lose some things in the process. Yes, there might be some consequences. But in the grand scheme of things, we are alive. And that was never really in doubt. And if we are alive, then we can learn. It's in fact, often when we don't pay attention to and learn from these small crises,

• 2:14Ryan Holiday?

  that the world sends the big ones our way, the ones that come crashing down on us to finally get these lessons through our thick skull. When we stop resisting and start learning, the obstacle becomes the way. And obviously, that's the idea behind The Obstacle is the Way, which I wrote about over 10 years ago now, having not been through too much. I was in my early twenties when I sat down and wrote that book. And I've been through some bigger stuff since then, but the idea is about how we respond to those day-to-day obstacles and how we see them as an opportunity for growth. We have a 10-year anniversary edition, a new edition of The Obstacle is the Way available. I'll link to that in today's show notes.

• 2:58Ryan Holiday?

  If you want me to sign it, if you want to give it as a gift to someone, you can grab all that at stewart.dailystoic.com.

• 3:14Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Today's episode is from The Daily Stoic, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living. Probably annoying that I'm always saying the title, but you know what? Every time we post about this book on Instagram, people go, oh, what book is that? As if it's not the book that kicked off the whole thing. So I try to take the humility in remembering that even though I have lived and breathed this book and these ideas for a very long time, they're new to many people, and maybe they're even new to you listening right now. So you can grab the book, audiobook, physical, we have a cool leather edition. And so I'm going to bring you this entry, which starts with a quote from Epictetus's Discourses.

• 3:58Ryan Holiday?

  He says, "Those who receive the bare theories immediately want to spew them, as an upset stomach does its food. First, digest your theories and you won't throw them up," he says. Otherwise, they will be raw and spoiled and not nourishing. After you've digested them, show us the changes in your reasoned choices, just like the soldiers of gymnasts display their diet and training, and as the craft of artisans show what they've learned. Many of the Stoic aphorisms are simple to remember and even sound smart when quoted, but that's not what philosophy is really about. The goal is to turn these words into works. As Musonius Rufus, that was Epictetus's teacher. As he put it, "The justification for philosopher is when one brings together

• 4:43Ryan Holiday?

  sound teachings with sound conduct." Today, or any time when you catch yourself wanting to condescendingly drop some knowledge that you have, grab it and ask, "Would I be better saying the words or letting my actions and choices illustrate that knowledge for me?" So a couple of thoughts here as we kick this around. Number one, I think Musonius Rufus was a guy who walked the walk in addition to talking the talk. This is a guy, first off, who teaches Epictetus. I mean, he's a philosophy teacher. He's known as the Roman Socrates, a wise, powerful, important dude. And here he is teaching a slave, no discrimination, no judgment. In fact, he makes Epictetus into his greatest student. And he also teaches women.

• 5:26Ryan Holiday?

  He was very ahead of his time and writes this fascinating essay about how women are just as capable of virtue as men and should be taught philosophy and excellence. But Musonius Rufus is exiled four times. Three, we know for certain, four, we speculate about. But he deals with injustice, he deals with difficulty, he deals with adversity. All these things he talks about, he has to put into practice. Epictetus, of course, we know this without question. But what I sort of think about when I think about this quote, actually, I want to go back to something for a second, too. You know, I said that they call them the Roman Socrates. We've talked about this before, but Socrates doesn't write anything down. What he left behind was his example, right?

• 6:11Ryan Holiday?

  His example is so compelling that it makes for great writing by Plato. But Socrates is a philosopher because of how he lived, because of what he did in the room, in conversations with people, not what he, not poring over his notebooks and writing and rewriting and all of that. He was a philosopher because of how he lived. And in fact, a great Stoic Cato gives us a similar example. Epictetus himself was a teacher, yes, but he doesn't write any books. It's what he told his students and how he lived that survives down to us into a form of lecture notes. That's what Marx realist reads and that's what we have now in discourses in in Coridion.

• 6:55Ryan Holiday?

  But I just think about this with my own understanding of Stoicism. So I read Marx realist in my late teens, 18, 20 years old. And I start writing about it immediately. I was immediately regurgitating it out because it was the smartest, most interesting, thought provoking, challenging, eye opening stuff I'd ever read. But it took many, many years for the ideas to firmly take hold. Seneca talks about ideas winning firm hold in your mind. Now, the brilliance of the writing and the phrasing and the humor and the wisdom, all that immediately hits me. I get that immediately, but it takes a lot longer for it to worm its way into my DNA, into my life.

• 7:39Ryan Holiday?

  And I talk about this in the, in Right Thing right now, the, the third book in the virtue series, the justice book. I don't think I could have written that book in my twenties. I don't even know if I could have written it in my early thirties. I don't even know if I could have written it three years ago, right? It took a long time. It took hard one experiences. It took the, that's the thing about Stoicism, I guess, is one of the things I say in the afterward, is it's working on you as you are working on it. And what Epictetus is saying and what ultimately the Stoics want you to understand is that studying Stoicism, talking about Stoicism, thinking about Stoicism, reading about Stoicism, all this stuff is great. It's part of it. But first off, it's going to take time and patience.

• 8:22Ryan Holiday?

  And second, it's going to take work to turn those words into works, which is the whole point of the philosophy. It's supposed to translate down to the conduct. So interesting quotes from Marx realist about temper or about anxiety. Those hit me at 20. But it took a long time, maybe longer than it should have, but it took me a while to actually start applying that stuff, to start acting differently, to let it really get into my system. And so I would just, if you feel like you've been studying this stuff and talking about it and thinking about it for a while, and it's just, you don't know if there's a difference yet, give it time. You know, it's working on you as you are working on it. At the same time, I would say, keep working on it, right? Actually actively

• 9:06Ryan Holiday?

  try to get it in there. I remember when I was doing jujitsu, I went, one time I was working out at a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu gym in New York City, and the professor said something like, "You gotta come every day with something specific you're trying to work on, something specific you want to take out of it." I think if we think of stoicism that way too, what am I trying to get out of this? What am I really working on? What am I trying to translate into conduct today? I'm not trying to reinvent myself, change everything, but I'm trying to really get it into my system, and I want to try to act and behave differently as a result of what I'm learning here. That's what we're doing. That's what Epictetus is talking about. And that's today's message. Have a good weekend. I'll talk to you soon.