This Is Your Main Job | The Real Power You Have

We must remain good. We must remain sane. This is our job.📓 Pick up a signed edition of The Daily Stoic Journal: 366 Days of Writing and Reflection on The Art of Living: https://store.dailystoic.com/🎟 Ryan Holiday is going on tour! Grab tickets for London, Rotterdam, Dublin, Vancouver, and Toronto at ryanholiday.net/tour✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and 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.

• 0:42Ryan Holiday?

  This is your main job. It might not seem like much, but it may well be the hardest thing to do in the world. When tensions are high, when political dysfunction spills out into the streets, when anger and frustration abound, when misinformation and extremism and utter nonsense pervades, when cruelty and meanness become acceptable, when the system is falling apart and the center looks like it may not hold. Your job is simple. Don't become a lunatic. Don't let it infect you. Don't let it make you lose your mind. Marcus Aurelius had to do this in the terror of the plague. He had to do this during a coup attempt. Think of Cicero during those civil wars. Think of Chrysippus telling himself that the whole point of being a philosopher was not to join in with the mob and the rabble.

• 1:26Ryan Holiday?

  They were holding out. It's not that they were disengaged. They were very engaged. It's that they strove not to be consumed by the passions that had wrecked their society. Lincoln had to strike a very similar balance. He knew that slavery was wrong. He knew that a good chunk of people were hell-bent on destroying the country. He also knew that he could not afford anything other than calmness, foresight, and clarity. He could not lose his humanity. He could not lose his mind. And neither can you. As we said recently, we can't let bad times turn us into bad people. The winds may howl, but we must not be swept away. We must remain good. We must remain sane. This is our main job. And look, your other main job is to vote. Go vote.

• 2:09Ryan Holiday?

  Don't be a lunatic. Don't be infected. Make a smart, educated, stoic decision. You might be saying, who are you talking about? You know who I'm talking about. Make the right decision. Do the right thing. Think of Marcus Aurelius's celebration to Antoninus, what he learned from him, what he felt Antoninus embodied. And then tell yourself, who's the opposite of that in almost every way? That's today's message. I'll, I'll, I'll leave it there.

• 2:45Ryan Holiday?

  The real power you have. And this is from this week's entry in the Daily Stoic Journal, 366 Days of Writing and Reflection on the Art of Living by yours truly, Ryan Holiday. You can pick this up anywhere books are sold. I use this journal myself every single day. And you can also pick up a signed copy at store.dailystoic.com. There is fleeting power and there is real power. Fleeting power can be taken away while real power is in our minds and our bones. The former tends to be along the lines of wealth, fame, high position, and the leverage that all those things give us over others. The Stoics thought that this kind of power was inferior to the real power that each

• 3:28Ryan Holiday?

  person possesses, the power of our minds to reason and make judgments and choices based on the real worth of things. You can have both kinds of power too, but only if you keep the first kind of power subject to the kind of power that the Stoics actually cared about. So Chrysippus, who I talk about in Lives of the Stoics as well, he says, "This is the very thing which makes up the virtue of the happy person in a well-flowing life, when the affairs of life are in every way tuned to the harmony between the individual divine spirit and the will of the director of the universe." Then Epictetus says, "Don't trust in your reputation, your money, or position, but in the strength that is yours, namely your judgments about the things that you

• 4:10Ryan Holiday?

  control and don't control. For this alone is what makes us free and unfettered, that picks us up by the neck from the depths and lifts us eye to eye with the rich and the powerful." That's Discourses 326. And then Marcus Aurelius in Meditations 1219 says, "Understand at last that you have something in you more powerful and divine that causes the bodily passions and pulls you like a mere puppet. What thoughts now occupy my mind? Is it not fear, suspicion, desire?" Something like that. I think the fact that we can talk about Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus as peers, even though one was utterly powerless and the other possessed all the worldly power there was, is an amazing illustration of

• 4:55Ryan Holiday?

  what Epictetus is saying. When he says, "For this alone is what makes us free and unfettered, that picks us up by the neck from the depths and lifts us eye to eye with the rich and the powerful." And in fact, you know, Epictetus works in Nero's court. He is a slave of one of Nero's high-ranking officials or secretaries. And in Epictetus's writing, we get a sense, we get him really realizing and trying to communicate later to his students that like, he realized that as a slave, he had a better life than many of these people, that he was freer. He watches at one point, somebody sucking up to Nero's cobbler, like the guy

• 5:36Ryan Holiday?

  that makes Nero's shoes, is getting flattery because the person wants to get closer to the emperor. And Epictetus realizes that that person who's doing that is of course freer and richer and more privileged than Epictetus in essentially every way, but is then voluntarily debasing themselves, is a slave to their need for power, or recognition, or money, or whatever it is, that person is willingly a slave. And Seneca in that same court talks about this. He says, you know, "Nothing is more shameful than this sort of form of voluntary slavery. Nothing is more shameful than these people who are

• 6:17Ryan Holiday?

  addicted to a mistress, to their estates, to being, you know, the most famous or popular person in Rome." And so I just, I think it is a powerful statement that amongst the Stoics, some of the most powerful and influential and inspiring were the least powerful and recognized. Cleanthes is a manual laborer, but he's considered a peer of Hercules because of his ability to endure things, because of his judgments, because of his incorruptibility. Marcus Aurelius was not the greatest conqueror of the Roman emperors, but he's one of the most impressive because he conquered himself, right?

• 7:00Ryan Holiday?

  He possessed the throne, did not possess him. And so this idea of being free, of chasing the real power, which is power over oneself, power over one's wants, power over one's opinions, power over one's actions, power over, you know, those impulses that might drive you to do this or that, that's real power. There's a line in one of Steven Pressfield's books where Alexander the Great is taunting this philosopher, and he says, "What have you done? I have conquered the world." And philosopher says, "I have conquered the need to conquer the world." And I think Pressfield is saying the same thing the Stoics are saying, the same thing that Epictetus is saying.

• 7:42Ryan Holiday?

  He's probably drawing on Diogenes the Cynic, but that, that there is a level of power above the level of raw power that people chase and debase themselves with. So that's your question, your thing to think about today. What kind of power are you chasing? What are you pursuing? Are you really as powerful as you think you are? Or does power have power over you? Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. I just wanted to say we so appreciate it. We love serving you. It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple of years we've been doing it.

• 8:27Ryan Holiday?

  It's an honor. Please spread the word, tell people about it. And this isn't to sell anything, I just wanted to say thank you.