You Don’t Want To Rule The World | You Don't Have To Have An Opinion

We talked about this recently, but ruling the world is not great. The evidence bears this out. In Lives of the Stoics, we tell the story of a haunting meeting between Posidonius and Marius, when Marius, during his seventh consulship of Rome, was on his deathbed. Marius was powerful but pathetic, his success having destroyed his soul, stripping him of happiness and the possibility of peace. Marcus Aurelius would have known this story. In Meditations he takes pains to remind himself that the cost of becoming Alexander the Great is not worth it—that few survive it. Power and wealth, they change a person. Command is lonely and isolating, disorienting and corrosive. These are not environments conducive to virtue. They are not fantasies…they are nightmares. We are lucky that destiny has not made us sovereigns, even in modern times (just ask King Charles what his childhood was like). But we are still ambitious, still have dreams of extreme wealth and power and influence. As if it actually serves the people who get it well—as if it doesn’t rip their families apart, doesn’t consume their every waking moment with dread or busyness. Marcus Aurelius would have given anything to have had a life even half as normal as yours, half as stressful, burdensome, corrupting as his. You are so lucky…and yet here you are, dreaming of things that would ruin it.-In today's Daily Stoic excerpt, Ryan reminds us that not all things are asking to be judged you, to let whatever is not in our favor become irrelevant. This kind of selective discipline is what the stoics practiced. They practiced having the ability of having absolutely no thought about it. You can grab the leatherbound edition of The Daily Stoic here. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, 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.

• 0:03Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Friday, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from The Daily Stoic, my book, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Heart of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful collaborator, translator, and literary agent, Stephen Hanselman. So today, we'll give you a quick meditation from the Stoics with some analysis from me, and then we'll send you out into the world to turn these words into works.

• 0:38Ryan Holiday?

  "You don't want to rule the world." It seems like it would be incredible to have that power, to wield that kind of influence, to possess that kind of wealth. It seems fun, honestly. But we talked about this recently. Ruling the world is not great. The evidence bears this out. In Lives of the Stoics, we tell the story of a haunting meeting between Posidoniaus and Marius, when Marius, during his seventh consulship of Rome, was on his deathbed. Marius was powerful but pathetic, his success having destroyed his soul, stripping him of happiness and the possibility of peace. Marcus Aurelius would have known this story. In Meditations, he takes pains to remind himself that the cost of becoming Alexander the Great is not worth it, that few survive it. Power and wealth, these things change

• 1:22Ryan Holiday?

  a person. Command is lonely and isolating, disorienting, and corrosive. These are not environments conducive to virtue. They are not fantasies, they are nightmares. We are lucky that destiny has not made us sovereigns, even in modern times. Just ask King Charles what his childhood was like. But we are still ambitious, still have dreams of extreme wealth and power and influence, as if it actually serves the people who get it well, as if it doesn't rip their families apart, doesn't consume their every waking moment with dread or busyness. Marcus Aurelius would have given anything to have had a life even half as normal as yours, half as stressful, burdensome, corrupt, and it is his. You are so lucky, and yet here you are, dreaming of things that would ruin it.

• 2:14Ryan Holiday?

  You don't have to have an opinion. This is the February 9th entry from The Daily Stoic. I'm holding hardcover edition, The Daily Stoic, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living. Of course, there's the audiobook, there's the ebook, there's the leather edition you can check out. But today's entry is built around one of my all-time favorite quotes from Marcus Aurelius. This is Marcus Aurelius's Meditations 652. He says, "We have the power to hold no opinion about a thing and to not let it upset our state of mind, for things have no natural power to shape our judgments." Here's a funny exercise.

• 2:57Ryan Holiday?

  Think about all the upsetting things you don't know about. Stuff people might have said behind your back, mistakes you might have made that never came to your attention, things you dropped or lost without even realizing it. What's your reaction? You don't have one, because you don't know about it. In other words, it is possible to hold no opinion about a negative thing, but you need to cultivate this power instead of wielding it accidentally, especially when having an opinion is likely to make us aggravated. Practice the ability of having absolutely no thoughts about something. Act as if you had no idea it ever occurred, or that you never heard of it before.

• 3:38Ryan Holiday?

  Let it become irrelevant or non-existent to you. It'll be a lot less powerful this way. In the Gregory Hayes translation, which is one of my favorites, he says something like, "Things are not asking to be judged by you." And I love that. It's something that I've tried to inform my parenting strategy, like, I don't have to have an opinion about stuff, things can just be. If somebody else likes it, have you heard that expression? Don't yuck someone else's yum. But I think what really hit me about this strategy from Marcus, one of the first times I really got it. Is when I was working in American Apparel, things were always crazy. There was so much office politics, always arguments, always fights with people. You always had to be paranoid.

• 4:21Ryan Holiday?

  And anyways, I was in some back and forth email exchanges, someone back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. And then I replied and I didn't see that they had replied. And like a couple of weeks later, I somehow came across it. Like I was searching for something in my email and then that reply came. Immediately, the whole exchange came flooding back and I clicked it and it, you know, the exchange was over. I was in the right. I had won. I had thought we'd put it to bed. I thought they just hadn't replied and that had been the end of it. And then I saw this upsetting reply. Right. And what struck me in that moment was, I was happier before I knew about the stupid reply, which changed nothing about the actual event, except it just made me now feel differently about the whole thing. I was just like, oh yeah, I had no opinion about this before because I didn't know that it existed. And that's what

• 5:05Ryan Holiday?

  shaped me writing that entry. And so this kind of selective ignorance or tuning stuff out is actually, I think, a really important Stoic strategy. I mean, look, it would be better to be the kind of person that just naturally has no opinions. And, and maybe Marcus got there. We did an email about this for Daily Stoic not that long ago. Maybe Marcus got to a place later in life, in old age, after years of practicing Stoicism, where you could just see upsetting things and just not have an opinion about it. Maybe. Or maybe he first practiced the ability of not expressing those opinions. And then maybe he also practiced tuning out things that he knew were likely to be upsetting or annoying or depressing

• 5:48Ryan Holiday?

  or whatever. And this freed him up. So in the bigger things, he could practice that skill. Right. Of going, oh, if it makes them happy, cool. Right. Or, you know, what's happening right now in the political world, right? Like, it'll work itself out in the sense that someone will win the primary and then there'll be a general election. But the day to day-ness of the events, right? Having the opinion on every up and down, every scandal, every event, every horrible thing that's said. It's not doing anything. The events themselves don't need you. They don't care about you. You're not impacting them by having the opinion. So tuning those out, pretending like they didn't happen. So you're focusing on what does matter because there are some things that you do need

• 6:33Ryan Holiday?

  to have an opinion on that do matter, that, that are up to you. Let's focus on those and let's ignore the rest. Right? Put things to bed, turn away, let them do what makes them happy or floats their boat. When it matters, of course, that's when you lock in, that's when you focus. But you can have so many fewer opinions. And if you had fewer opinions, you'd almost certainly be happier, get along better with us, get more out of others, be able to do more. Right? Epictetus says, it's not things that upset us, it's our opinion

• 7:11Ryan Holiday?

  about things, right? The things are objective. And the ability to focus on only what matters, to have fewer opinions about the things that don't matter, especially random people being wrong on the internet, or every latest trend, every hot thing of the moment, every frustrating thing of the moment. This just isn't where you should be focusing your energy and it's not great for anyone. It's not great for the world. It's not great for you. So practicing fewer opinions, that's what we should be focused on this week, this month, this year, this lifetime, fewer opinions, that is the path to peace, that's the path to accomplishments,

• 7:54Ryan Holiday?

  achievements, serenity, tranquility, impact. Focus your opinions where they matter. Leave things that don't matter as they are, or until they do. That's my message for today. Talk to you soon.