Stoic Lessons From 3 Cities in 3 Days

A chaotic few days on the road gave Ryan plenty of opportunities to practice what the Stoics taught. Between disrupted travel plans and visits to museums honoring Thomas Edison, Abraham Lincoln, and Rosa Parks, he reflects on integrity, courage, and how to handle whatever happens. 📚 Books Mentioned: Never Lose Another Customer Again by Joey Coleman https://joeycoleman.com/books/never-lose-a-customer-again/ Shadow Divers by Robert Kurson https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/nonfiction16?_pos=1&_sid=4d0d56834&_ss=r Taylor Branch Trilogy https://www.thepaintedporch.com/ Meditations by Marcus Aurelius https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/meditations 🎟️ DAILY STOIC LIVE https://www.dailystoiclive.com/| Ryan Holiday is coming to a city near you https://www.dailystoiclive.com/! Grab tickets here https://www.dailystoiclive.com/ | https://www.dailystoiclive.com/ 🎙️ AD-FREE https://dailystoic.supercast.com/| Support the podcast and go deeper into Stoicism by subscribing to The Daily Stoic Premium https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ - unlock ad-free listening, early access, and bonus content: https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ ✉️ FREE STOIC WISDOM https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail | Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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.

• 0:15Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I don't know when you're gonna be listening to this, but I am recording this just after getting back to Austin after a bit of a crazy period. My truck just said it's 113 degrees. So I pulled up to the bookstore, so that's brutal. It was less brutal where I was. I dropped my kids off at school on Tuesday, and I was supposed to fly to Minneapolis shortly thereafter. And as I'm dropping them off, I get a text from Delta. The flight's 30 minutes delayed, and another text, 45. Then it's like an hour and 15. And I was gonna leave a little bit early. You know, I'd probably get there almost two hours before my flight.

• 1:00Ryan Holiday?

  Took off, which is not something you need to do in Austin. One of the reasons we live here, one of the things I love about it here. It's an easy place to get in and out of. Plus, you can fly in sometimes same day. So I'm doing a talk at night, and I was, you know, my plan was I was gonna run in Minneapolis, which I love to do, just an absolutely lovely city to go running in. Actually, kind of reminds me of Austin. You run along the water. This is a little better water there in Minneapolis. You're at the headwaters of the Mississippi, basically. But I thought, you know what? Instead of being crammed later, like this flight gets delayed, and then I gotta rush to the hotel. And then I'm thinking about, you know, I'm just trying to anticipate some of my own patterns, which is like, I like to run before I talk. It helps me get regulated.

• 1:44Ryan Holiday?

  I work through what I'm gonna talk about. And I was like, I'll just run here in Austin, because I have this extra time. Then I won't get to do it where I want to run, but I'll just be less stressed later. So instead of having dead time, I'm gonna have some alive time. So go for a lovely run from my kid's school, get down, see the waters here in Austin. Then I'm on my way back. And I was like, hadn't totally thought it through, because I'm like, now I'm soaked in sweat. What could I do? I was like, oh, you know what? I'll head over to Barton Springs. I'll just jump in the water, Barton Springs, get dressed, go to the airport, got plenty of time. And then I get a text from both the airline and my speaking agent at the same time. Hey, great news. Your flight's moved up 57 minutes.

• 2:28Ryan Holiday?

  So basically, on time. And I am soaking in sweat and not near the airport. So I rushed to the airport, trying to stay calm. And then I'm having to go, okay, what am I gonna dry myself off with? Believe it or not, I don't have just a dry towel in the truck. I thought maybe there'd be baby wipes or something leftover for when our kids are little, somewhere in the glove compartment. You're pulling into the Austin Airport Garage and getting out. Some guy's coming around, you know, landing from a trip, bringing his thing. And I get out, don't have a shirt on. My shorts are drenched, don't have socks on. And he's just looking at me like, are you a member of civilization? Have you been to an airport before?

• 3:12Ryan Holiday?

  Thankfully, I had like an extra sweatshirt or something in the suitcase. And I was like, okay, I'm probably not gonna need this on this trip. This will be what I dry off on. So I dried off. I got in the stuff. I rushed through security at the airport. I made it with a few minutes to spare. And then I took a whore bath in the bathroom, as they call it, with some paper towels. And thankfully, I wasn't sitting next to anyone in the plane. I had like, you know, seat 2A or whatever, so I was by myself. And so I thought, as I'm rushing through the airport, like, you know, first, I was peeved that I was gonna be extra delayed. And then I was stressed I was gonna miss my flight. And here I am at the airport. It's like, make up your mind, dude, right? This is, I think, something that Stoicism helps us with, right? It's like, one thing happens, and you're like, oh, that's not good. I'd rather it be this.

• 3:57Ryan Holiday?

  Then it goes back to what you wanted. And you're like, oh, well, now that's inconvenient for me. I want it to be that. So I was on my way to Barton Springs. I was gonna jump in the water, and so I was all sweaty on the plane. And then they moved it up 45 minutes. So now I gotta be flexible with my flexible plans. But I made it with, I don't know, 10 minutes to spare. So I went from being frustrated I was gonna have to sit around waiting to now I'm rushing. That's just how it goes. I just tried to say, hey, look, you made it. You're going to be on the plane that is going to the place you are going. You made it. And I did. I made it to Minneapolis, caught an Uber. It was a nice, easy drive into the city, get to the hotel.

• 4:40Ryan Holiday?

  And then I had made it to Minneapolis, got a nice walk in while I was there. I had lunch at this lovely indigenous restaurant. There was like a Native American restaurant attached to the Guthrie Theater, which is right next to where we were staying. And there I was. I was reading Willacather's Death Comes for the Archbishop while I was eating buffalo bone marrow. And I just thought, this is the life, man. This is the life. I went and I did the talk. It was great here. I'll play you a little clip of the intro. I love being in Minneapolis. I went for a nice walk along the water today. I'm gonna go for a run tomorrow. I just, I love being here. I love Austin. I would live here in two seconds.

• 5:25Ryan Holiday?

  So I'm just, I'm kind of a warm weather guy. In January, the average temperature in Austin is 62 degrees. You guys know what it is here? Any, can you compete with that at all? No, it was lovely today. That's basically a nice December or February in Austin. No, I love it here. My problem is I just, I fucking hate ice. That's my real problem.

• 6:00Ryan Holiday?

  And so the people in Minneapolis were wonderful. My friend Joey Coleman and his family came to the talk. We had dinner with him after. He wrote this great book called Never Lose Another Customer Again, which you should check out. He and I had actually just bumped into each other. We were both giving a talk to Microsoft in Seattle. I don't know if you saw me in my Seattle gig, which was part of the same tour. I'd done a gig for Microsoft the day before. And he and I had a lovely chat while we hung out in the hotel lobby that night. So it's been a while since I'd seen him. That was nice, known him forever. Got up the next morning, did my long run in Minneapolis, did about eight and a half miles. Done that run in all weather, cold, warm.

• 6:43Ryan Holiday?

  This was just absolutely delightful. And then wrote some Daily Dad emails in the hotel. Those will be coming out soon, if you don't get the Daily Dad email. And then I got in the car, went to the airport, and flew to Chicago. Slept the whole flight. You know, I used to be very productive on flights. I'd do a lot of writing, reading. You know, ever since I had kids, I just immediately fall asleep. I'm like, this is my, my chance to take an uninterrupted nap, which I did. Took a nice nap on the plane, landed in Chicago, and, you know, just sort of killed some time. And then went and did my talk.

• 7:23Ryan Holiday?

  We were at this thing called the Copernicus Theater in Chicago, which was just absolutely incredible. It's called like an atmospheric theater. I think there's not very many of them in the world. I did read there might be one in New Zealand. I wonder if that's where, when I'm doing my talks in New Zealand in October, if it will be at a similar theater. Chicago was great. Almost 1,100 people came out to the talk, which was just, you know, absolutely unreal. You know, when you write about an obscure school of ancient philosophy, this is just not, not what I expected. And I'm grateful for it. I'm excited by it. You know, it's just a joy to be able to do, to be able to do this,

• 8:08Ryan Holiday?

  to be able to see you guys, the Q and A, the VIP stuff beforehand, where I get to meet, you know, 100 or so people, take pictures, and we chat about stuff. I get to answer questions, I get to send books. My favorite part of the meet and greet thing is people bring me their copies of The Daily Stoic, which they have 10 years of wear and tear on, or their copy of Meditations, which I can see, you know, looks as beaten up as my paperback copy of Meditations. Or people come, you know, a middle-aged father with his teenage son, or, you know, a mom and her daughter. Like, it's just, I love it when it's, sometimes it's the kids bringing the parents. Sometimes it's the parents bringing the kids.

• 8:50Ryan Holiday?

  I will say, it was just absolutely, oh, man. It hit me so hard. In Chicago, this, this kid got up and asked a question. He was nine, my son's age. And it was just the absolute sweetest thing. So I'll give you a backstory, and then I'll play it. I forgot my copy of Meditations in the hotel room. And I like to read from it on stage, like certain quotes, I want to get them exactly right. And so I had to take one from the merch stuff at the back of the room. I said at the beginning, look, I'll give whoever asked the best question this, this book at the end. And this kid asked a question, and let me play it for you. Hey, bud.

• 9:32Speaker 01

  Um, my parents recently divorced. They've been helping us a lot. And it's become our, our favorite thing to listen to. Sorry.

• 9:49Speaker 01

  And guys, I wanted to ask, um, what is one of your favorite books that probably not most people in the world know of? That, um, that just isn't very popular or well-known?

• 10:12Ryan Holiday?

  Uh, well, I'm sorry to hear you're going through that. I think we know who's getting the book.

• 10:30Ryan Holiday?

  Let's find one here. This one's good. Okay. And maybe this applies to what you're going through. It says, frightened of change, but what can exist without it? What's closer to nature's heart? Can you take a hot bath and leave the firewood as it was? Eat food without transforming it? Can any vital process take place without something being changed? Can't you see it's just the same with you? And just as viral to nature? He says, actually something similar to this later in the meditation where, where he says, you know, you couldn't exist without change.

• 11:13Ryan Holiday?

  Like, you didn't exist, and then you came into existence. And then, obviously, we see that as a good change. And then all sorts of other changes we, we try to beat back the currents against, like Gatsby, or we try to resist, we try to fight. Even though, years in the future will look back on whatever it is, including something painful like you're going through, and we'll see it ultimately as something formative, something that shape is, something that we're proud that we figured out how to get through and we made it through. But there's a lot here. It's a book you read over and over again. And the book that I, you know, the book that I read when I was 19 years old,

• 11:54Ryan Holiday?

  this one, is the same book that I've just opened and read a passage to you now, but I understand it differently because I'm different. The pages stay the same, but we change. And so, I'll sign this for you after. I'll open to you and hopefully it's something that stays with you, all right? All right.

• 12:14Ryan Holiday?

  It absolutely broke my heart. They came backstage after, and he was just the sweetest kid. And we hung out and talked for a bit. That was lovely. And his father sent me a nice email after. But you know who else was in Chicago, which was really cool? Rob Kurson, who I've known forever. He wrote one of my favorite books of all time, one of the greatest narrative nonfiction books of all time, Shadow Divers, which you should check out. It was funny, he and I were talking because we had the same publisher in the UK, and they just bought it and brought it back into print. And it's, for some insane reason, fallen out of print. And so, you know, we're talking about that. It has this incredible cover. I'm sure the US one is cool, too. But Shadow Divers is one of my favorites, which if you haven't read, you absolutely should. So anyways, you know, had a nice dinner after the talk, went back to the room, crashed, packed up.

• 12:58Ryan Holiday?

  And then the third and final talk. So, woke up the next morning early. I went for this run. We were staying kind of near the airport, not like in the city itself. I love running, you know, along like Michigan and Chicago, but didn't get a chance to do that. But I went running, and then I had this weird sense of déjà vu. Because I remember like eight or so years ago, I gave this talk, this is right when Ego's the Enemy had come out. So, almost 10 years ago, probably. I gave this talk to True Value, the hardware company, which is based, you know, near O'Hare. And my routine hasn't changed that much. I got up early, I went for a run. And I'm in this park, and there's just the biggest, tamest deer I've ever seen in my life.

• 13:42Ryan Holiday?

  Like, in Texas, we have a lot of deer, but, I mean, people hunt them, and so, they're skittish. I mean, I see them on the ranch. It always makes my heart jump a little bit. I love it. But they're not just big and slow and docile. And as I was running, you know, running along this sort of road, and then I turn into this park, and all of a sudden, I'm like, oh, this is the park. I was like, I remember seeing those deer here. And then, just this like, you know, big buck just trots in front of me like moments later. And, you know, all the crazy things that have happened since, all the things that have happened in my life since, you know, like, these deer are just hanging out in this park still. It remains unchanged, which I, you know, I think about. You feel like everything is front and center. Everything knows what's happening.

• 14:25Ryan Holiday?

  Everything is all being affected by everything that's happening. But it isn't. There's a great line in Malon Kandera's unbearable lightness of being, is sort of war-torn and then Cold War Europe, about how, you know, even in the worst of times, peace reigns in the cemetery. This wasn't a cemetery, it's just a nice little park, but I had a little of that feeling. And then, got on the plane, flew to Detroit, much shorter flight. And for some reason, I was in Dearborn. Like, the gig was in closer to the city, but I was staying at the Dearborn Inn, which is right next to the Ford headquarters. And just remember, like, there's a really cool museum here, right? And, of course, there was, there's the Henry Ford Museum.

• 15:07Ryan Holiday?

  He was a collector of cool stuff, historical artifacts. And so, I look at my watch. I still have to prep for my talk. I try to do a different talk, or more or less a different talk in each city. When I do these tours, I want to change it up. I want to get better at what I do. So, I always try to cycle in new stories and just not do the same thing over and over again. So, I still had to do my slides. So, I ordered lunch at the hotel, doing my slides. And then I'm like, I think I have time to go to this museum. But for some reason, there's no Uber, so I gotta walk there. Like, Ubers are taking forever. So, I walk there, I walk like a mile, get to the thing, and I'm just blown away. I mean, I'm looking at the chair that Lincoln was assassinated in.

• 15:50Ryan Holiday?

  I'm sitting in the seat that Rosa Parks refuses to get up, that sets in motion the civil rights movement. If you haven't read the Taylor Branch series on Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement, it's just a life-changing book for me. And you're just like, oh, this is where that happened. It started here. And you're struck by, like, how small it is. Like, that was my feeling. I'm just thinking, like, she was so much closer to the people that would have been staring daggers into her than I would have thought. And I said this to one of the docents who's sort of standing there, you know, protecting this sacred object. And he goes, the crazier thing is that the bus driver has to leave to go get the police. And so, she has to sit on the bus with the people who are not just mad at her for challenging segregation, but are mad at her for making them late to wherever they're going.

• 16:35Ryan Holiday?

  And just the tangibleness of that feeling was so powerful. There's some things that you can't fully understand until you experience them. And then, I walk outside to the village that's attached to the museum. First, I'm standing in front of Edison's factory. The thing I write about in The Obstacle is the Way, like, one of the first stories that I feel like as a writer, I just absolutely nailed. And that I've told in my talks forever. Actually, I recorded a little thing in front of it. Do you know what Thomas Edison said when this factory was burning down? He grabbed his son, shell-shocked, their life's work, his inheritance going up in flames.

• 17:18Ryan Holiday?

  And he said, "Go get your mother and all her friends. They'll never see a fire like this again." And supposedly, he paces up and down, watching this surreal fire, which is throwing all these weird colors and heat up into the air. And he starts to repeat that line from Kipling's If about meeting triumph and disaster all the same. And he really means this. The next day, he tells reporters, you know, "I've been through things like this before." He says, "It prevents an old man from being afflicted with ennui." Says, "It's going to prevent me from getting bored." And in fact, the final act of his life is throwing himself into the rebuilding, into more inventions, into more work. He comes to this crossroads, and instead of taking the route of despair

• 17:59Ryan Holiday?

  and disappointment and grievance, takes the route of inspiration and urgency and renewed focus. It's this Stoic idea of amor fati. You can't do anything about the fire. You can't put it out. It's gone. All of it's going to burn down. That's what technology was at the time. But you can choose how you respond. You can choose what you make of it. You can choose what you turn it into. You can choose the story you tell yourself about it. That is Stoicism. We don't control what happens. We control how we respond to what happens. We don't run away from our fate. We embrace our fate, and we allow it to make us better in ways that we couldn't have possibly ever imagined. And that happened right here.

• 18:41Ryan Holiday?

  And then, I walk over, and there's the Logan County Courthouse, the courthouse that Lincoln practiced law in. A thing I wrote about at length in the last book, in Wisdom Takes Work, about how he develops as a lawyer, and as a thinker, and as a leader. I recorded a little something about that, too. Do you know how Abraham Lincoln earned the nickname Honest Abe? It was actually as a lawyer, he earned it in that very courthouse and courthouses like it. And by the way, even though he had a sense of humor, he would have hated lawyer jokes. He would have hated the implication that lawyers are, as a rule, dishonest. In fact, he said, if you cannot be an honest lawyer, resolve to be an honest person who is not a lawyer.

• 19:26Ryan Holiday?

  For Lincoln, as for the Stoics, justice wasn't what happened in the law books or in a law court or with judges and juries. Justice was first and foremost, a personal virtue. It's your sense of integrity, your sense of fair play, how you treated other people, the standards you held yourself to. Did you keep your word? Did you treat people well? Right? Did you treat your clients well? He earns the reputation as Honest Abe because he doesn't rip off his clients. He gives them good advice. He urges them to settle, to compromise. He doesn't encourage frivolous litigation, even though this comes at the expense of his personal billable hours. The idea of being honest is a sacrosanct virtue for the Stoics.

• 20:09Ryan Holiday?

  And it's one we could all get a little bit better at practicing in our personal lives. And especially in industries where people are skeptical and cynical. Harry Truman, another great American president, had a quote from Mark Twain on his desk, like he had the buck stops here. It said, always do right. This will gratify some and astonish the rest. That's what Lincoln was talking about. Be honest, especially in a profession where people are cynical, where the standards are low. Hold yourself to a high standards. Doesn't matter what other people get away with. It doesn't matter the standards other people hold themselves to. Do the right thing because it's the right thing. Be honest, tell the truth, be a good person. That's what justice is about. Again, listening to sort of one of the docents explain what's there.

• 20:51Ryan Holiday?

  He's like, look, all this floor up by where like the benches are, you know, that was replaced. But he's like, this wood here, this is the original wood. You were walking where Lincoln paced. I just sort of stood there thinking about Lincoln pacing back and forth, waiting for his case to get called up. And I just thought, wow, this is amazing. So I got carried away there and then was pretty rushed. Had to rush back to the hotel, get ready. Turns out some of my slides hadn't saved, so I had to do them again. And then I went to Detroit where I gave what I think was the best talk of the three. Thought it went wonderful. The people there were great. It was another very cool atmospheric theater, but atmospheric and then for some reason, set in Japan.

• 21:33Ryan Holiday?

  The walls of the theater, the sort of boxes to the, to the left and the right of the stage were Imperial Japan themed. So that was, that was a little surreal, but anyways, went great. And then I back to the hotel, packed up, slept, flew home that morning. And that was the end of the trip. It was a crazy period, three days, three talks, three cities, not much margin for error. Little bit stressed going into it, especially because when I do these talks, I try to do a different talk each time. Cause I try not to recycle the same things. I don't want to do it like a script.

• 22:15Ryan Holiday?

  I want to actually say something that makes sense to those people that speaks to where my books overlap with their experience or that location. So I knew it was going to be a lot and I knew I'd feel better once it was done, but going into it, I was pretty stressed. And then almost immediately, problems arose. I know I said at the beginning, this is going to be, you know, three days, but it was a little longer than that, I guess. Because got back, went for a run, picked up my kids from school. It was like this full circle thing. Picked up my kids from school and we went to the park. There's supposed to be a splash pad, it was closed. I got a little mad, like I should have known. But for some reason, they closed the Pease Park splash pad at 2:30 in the afternoon in Texas.

• 23:00Ryan Holiday?

  Literally the time the kids would be most likely to use it and most want to use it. But we had to manage some of our expectations. My son was pretty upset with me. He takes any time you say we're going to do something and it doesn't work out, it's the breaking of a promise. But then the shoe was on the other foot because he was with his friends and he wanted to show them this like little creek down there that he spent some time in during one of his summer camps this year. And we'd walk all the way down there, it takes like a little over half a mile. And then the water was disgusting and you couldn't go in. And I go, this is what happened, but you couldn't have known. This is the same thing that I just did, but I don't think he fully got it. Anyways, it was a lovely trip, full circle. And then the reentry is always the hardest part after a couple of days on the road.

• 23:44Ryan Holiday?

  But I woke up the next day and I don't know how we missed it, but some of the kids from my boys' outdoor school and the place they go to summer camp, the kids had organized a protest against this huge data center, power plant they want to build out right next to it. That they want tax abatements for unbelievably. There are some places where the data centers, you know, like actually are making a difference to the tax base and they're helping the community. And this is not one of those for sure. And they were trying to do it Texas style, which is sort of sneakily and, and not following the rules. And so it was, it was lovely to see my kids at this protest. They marched, they made signs, they were singing songs.

• 24:27Ryan Holiday?

  One of the kids, not one of mine, but one of the nine year olds got up and gave a talk into a bullhorn and just looked around and like every parent was crying, myself included. It was just so, so powerful and beautiful. And, um, you know, if you do live in Bastrop or you live in Texas, you can reach out to the governor. You can reach out to your local reps, you can reach out to your city council. That's what we have been doing. We've been trying to show our kids that, you know, if you think something's ill advised, if you disagree with it, well, you do get a say and you're only going to get the say you speak up and demand. And that's what my kids did and I couldn't have been prouder of them. I'm so grateful to all of you who came out to the talks in Minneapolis, in Chicago and Detroit. I'm going to be doing some more.

• 25:08Ryan Holiday?

  I'm going to be in Nashville, Boston, Philadelphia, DC in November and December. I'm in October, I'm going to be in Uklund, Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne, Perth. I'd love to see you and grab tickets at DailyStoicLive.com. I'll talk to you all soon. Thanks.