Why You Should Never Stop Studying | We Are a Product of Our Habits

Ryan talks about the importance of constantly learning that which you do not yet know, and reads this week’s meditation from The Daily Stoic Journal. If you want to become a great reader, the Stoics can help. We built out their best insights into ourRead to Lead: A Daily Stoic Reading Challenge. Since it first launched in 2019, Read to Lead has been our most popular challenge, taken on by almost ten thousand participants. Today, we’re excited to announce that, for the first time ever, registration to jointhe 2022 live cohort is officially open. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://DailyStoic.com/emailFollow 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.

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

• 0:04Ryan 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. You should never stop studying. As he recovered from his wounds, a young soldier named Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. began keeping the list in a black leather journal, all the books he had read.

• 0:43Ryan Holiday?

  Books on law, philosophy, sociology, religion, history, economics, poetry, scientist, science. He read Montaigne, Shakespeare, Hemingway, Homer, Proust, Proust, Epictetus, an astonishing book, he said, among many, many other books. And when Holmes died at the age of 93, the list held the names of more than 4,000 books. That sounds like a lot, but it's actually only a little more than a book a week over the course of his life. Seneca was right. Acquiring just a few bits of wisdom a day really adds up, not just in terms of quantity, but also in the terms of quality. Holmes would become one of America's most celebrated jurists, spending 50 years on

• 1:27Ryan Holiday?

  the bench, 30 of those years, as United States Supreme Court Justice. So yeah, you're busy. Yeah, it's hard to find time to read, I get it. But are you busier than Seneca, busier than Charles de Gaulle, than Napoleon, than Oliver Wendell Holmes, one of the great judges of the 20th century? No, you are not. Yes, you are smart, and you may well have already done a considerable amount of learning in your time on this planet. But are you wiser than Marcus Aurelius, the man who, well into old age, was still heading off to visit philosophers and teachers to learn that which he did not yet know? You are not. Learning doesn't stop. Our journey to wisdom never ends. And thus, our reading habit must be steady and consistent.

• 2:11Ryan Holiday?

  Build up your wisdom, step by step, action by action. No one can stop you from that, except for your own prioritization. And procrastination. So get to it. You'll be imagined. You'll be amazed at what it can add up to. And if you're looking to be a better reader, we designed this Daily Stoic Challenge, or a course recently called the Daily Stoic Read to Lead Challenge. As Truman said, "Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders have to be readers." That's the idea. How can you be a better reader? How can you get serious about this thing? How can you access all the wisdom that's out there in the world? How can you build a reading practice? And we built this awesome challenge. It's built off my reading practice, but also the practices of Seneca and Marcus Aurelius and all the Stoics, plus other wise figures

• 2:55Ryan Holiday?

  from history. Love to have you join us. You can sign up at dailystoic.com/reading. And remember, if you're a Daily Stoic Life member, you get the challenge for free and all our challenges. So you can sign up there at dailystoiclife.com.

• 3:11Ryan Holiday?

  We are a product of our habits. 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 and my co-writer and translator, Stephen Hanselman. I actually do this journal every single day. There's a question in the morning, a question in the afternoon, then there's these sort of weekly meditations. As Epictetus says, "Every day and night, we keep thoughts like this at hand. Write them, read them aloud, and talk to yourself and others about them." You can check out the Daily Stoic Journal anywhere books are sold. You can also get a signed, personalized copy from me in the Daily Stoic store at store.dailystoic.com.

• 3:53Ryan Holiday?

  Journaling, of course, is a critical exercise to the Stoics. It's really hard to separate journaling from Stoicism. Meditations is Marcus Aurelius journaling and talking to himself. And so today's entry comes from the prompt and the sort of meditative part of the Daily Stoic Journal for this week's. And it's all about habits. The Roman Stoics put a heavy emphasis on dealing with habitual behavior in order to make progress in the art of living. The great Roman Stoic educator Musonius Rufus, he's Epictetus's teacher, held that all the theories in the world couldn't trump good habits, and they couldn't overcome bad habits either.

• 4:33Ryan Holiday?

  Epictetus followed Musonius in this focus on habit with an eye on not reinforcing bad habits, such as anger, and finding a way to replace them with better ones. We all recognize bad habits when they see them in others, but it's harder to see them in ourselves. So this week, meditate on the habits and recurring behaviors that are holding you back, and even ask others around you for their view. And the first quote comes to us from Epictetus. He says, "Every habit and capability is confirmed and grows in its corresponding actions, walking by walking and running by running." You remember, we talked about this earlier in the week. "Therefore, if you want to do something, make a habit of it. If you don't want to do that, don't, but make a habit of something else instead.

• 5:16Ryan Holiday?

  The same principle is at work in our state of mind. When you get angry, you have not only experienced an evil, but you've also reinforced a bad habit, adding fuel to the fire." It's Epictetus's Discourses 218. Then he also says, "If you don't wish to be a hothead, don't feed your habit. Try, as a first step, to remain calm and count the days you haven't been angry. I used to be angry every day, and now every other day, then every third and fourth, and if you make it as far as 30 days, thank God. For a habit is first weakened and then obliterated. When you can say, 'I didn't lose my temper today, or the next day, or for three or four months, but I kept my cool under provocation,' then you are in better health." That's, again, Epictetus's Discourses 218.

• 6:01Ryan Holiday?

  And then, this is the funny one. He says, "What assistance can we find in the fight against habit? Try the opposite." The point is, the Stoics thought a lot about habits. They had to, right? It's not just enough to think philosophical thoughts to, to sort of have high principles or standards, but how do you make them real in your life? How do you turn them into muscle memory? Right? An athlete can watch videos, can be coached, can, can review painstakingly their swing, or their shot, or their throw. And then they're going to get tweaks and thoughts, but then that has to become habit. That has to become part of the routine. That's why they sit in the gym and take, you know, a thousand free throws or a thousand jump shots.

• 6:46Ryan Holiday?

  That's why they practice doing this or that, so that under immense amounts of pressure, under the stresses of life in the game, they can revert back to that training. They can do what they need to do. And I love this little expression from Seneca about how bad habits, the old way of doing it, first we weaken it, then we obliterate it. You don't just magically do the new thing. You weaken it. And he's saying, one way to weaken it is to try the opposite. You know, it's like you have a piece of paper with a crease in it or a bend in it. You can fold it the opposite way and it kind of flattens it out. I just think that's an interesting way of thinking about it. But look, habits make the man, right? The habits that you do, the things you habitually do day in and day out, this is what we're talking about earlier in the week, that's who you are.

• 7:31Ryan Holiday?

  Who you say you are, who you want to be, who cares, right? Who the habits you habitually do, the choices you regularly make, that's what make you who you are. That's what make you beautiful. As we also talk about from Epictetus, we are a product of our choices, our routines, our habits. As a writer, how does it work? You create a routine, you create a structure, you follow it every day, work comes out the other side of that. It's not about fits of inspiration. It's not about genius. And I think this is true for all crafts that one seeks out to master. It's about habit. But I've also found even as a parent, if you want to do good, if you want to manage this or that, you create habits, you create routines, you create structures, and then you stick to it.

• 8:15Ryan Holiday?

  That's the key. So habits, we are a product of our habits. The Stoics believe that. And I hope you are working on your habits. You can check out the Daily Stoic Habits Challenge at dailystoic.com/habits, which you get free if you're a Daily Stoic Life member. But the point is habits will make you happier. They will give you a better life. I'm not saying they're easy. They're very difficult, but habit is everything. And it's also the hardest thing, but let's keep working on our habits.

• 8:49Ryan Holiday?

  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. 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.