How to Get the Most Out of Reading (A Stoic Guide)

To be a great reader, it's not enough that you read. It's how you read. In this episode, Ryan shares time-tested reading habits of the ancient Stoics (Seneca, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and more) that you can use to get the most out of your reading, find books with the potential of changing your life, think more critically, and digest books above your level. Watch this episode https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbf5H-AQxso on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbf5H-AQxso 🎟️https://www.dailystoiclive.com/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 toThe Daily Stoic Premium https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ - unlock ad-free listening, early access, and bonus content: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 athttps://dailystoic.com/dailyemail -- Stop online threats before they become real-world attacks. Visit ironwall.com/DAILYSTOIC and request a free Risk Assessment to see exactly how exposed your executives are. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

• 0:00Ryan Holiday?

  So I woke up this morning, as I do every morning, thanks to my 8Sleep. I've loved my 8Sleep for years. The new 8Sleep Pod 6 is officially available. 8Sleep can result in up to 34% more deep sleep and a 32% average increase in sleep quality scores. And the 8Sleep's sixth generation of the Pod is a smart mattress cover that now truly fits on any size mattress. The hub is 50% smaller than the previous versions. Its thermal engine is 20% faster. And the new cover has nine times the biometric sensors of the Pod 5. And now with AI in the autopilot, it learns your patterns and adjusts every single night. The Pod 6 starts at $1,999.

• 0:45Ryan Holiday?

  That's the lowest price 8Sleep has ever offered. And you can use code DAILYSTOIC right now at 8sleep.com/dailystoic for up to $200 off the Pod 6. And you'll get 30 days at home to try it. Free returns if it's not for you. I read a lot, a couple hundred books a year for the last two decades, give or take. And I think because I have a bookstore, because I'm a writer, the question I get asked a lot is like, how do you read so much? But whenever I get asked that, I can't help but think it's the wrong question because it's not really about quantity, it's about quality. The question is, how could I be a better reader? How could I get more out of the books that I read? And as it happened, the Stoics, who were all great readers, had a lot to say about this. And that's what we're going to talk about in today's episode.

• 1:30Ryan Holiday?

  Strategies from the ancients about how to read more, yes, but most importantly, how to be a better reader and how to get more out of the books that you read. It's really important that we understand this is not about quantity, it's about quality. There's so many ways that you could just stuff more books into your brain. You could read audiobooks on high speed. You could take some speed reading course, which is usually a scam. You could skim, you could read lots of really short books. But it's not about getting to a number, right? It's about reading great stuff. There's an exchange between Epictetus and one of his students. His student's bragging about having read all of Chrysippus. And he said, you know, if Chrysippus was a better writer, you'd have less to brag

• 2:15Ryan Holiday?

  about. Chrysippus wrote something like 700 essays and books. Not all of them were good. So I think it's really important that we see the books that we're reading not as trophies that go on the shelf, not as bragging rights, but as a really important, even sacred activity, where we're trying to get the best stuff into our brain. I don't try to rush through other things that are pleasurable and important. No, I do them slowly. I do them seriously. I take them seriously because they matter. Seneca says, too many people have been affected with the pointless enthusiasm for worthless knowledge. And he talked about how actually what you want to be doing is lingering on the works of the master thinkers, taking it slowly, taking it methodically.

• 3:00Ryan Holiday?

  Also, let's talk about rereading books, right? Going back to the idea over and over and over again until you really get it. Epictetus would say, you know, I can't call someone hardworking or even well-educated just because I know that they are reading. He said, I have to know what they are reading. It's just absolutely important. It's not a game of quantity, it's a game of quality. I do read a lot because I get more time to do it than most people. But if you're going to take the time to do something, let's take the time to do it right. When Epictetus is saying that it's not that you're reading, it's what you're reading, I think we can add to that. It's also how you're reading, and I don't just mean the speed. I mean, are you taking notes? Are you looking things up? Are you an active reader?

• 3:45Ryan Holiday?

  You should be disagreeing, you should be underlining, you should be going down the side roads, you should be exploring the ideas that the person is introducing you to. So the Stoics were diligent readers, they were curious readers, they were deep thinkers. They didn't just stay at the surface, they weren't passive, right? Reading is a conversation and you have to be an active participant in that conversation. The big mistake people make is they only read stuff they agree with. They only read authors that they like. And that might be comfortable, but it keeps you the same. Seneca talked about how we should read like a spy in the enemy's camp.

• 4:27Ryan Holiday?

  And it's interesting that the philosopher Seneca quotes the most in his writings is Epicurus, ostensibly his greatest philosophical rival. Admiral Stockdale, the fighter pilot, is sent in his late 30s to Stanford University. And it's there at Stanford that he is introduced to Stoic philosophy that does change the course of his life. But actually, the biggest thing that sets him up for success, that saves him when he becomes a POW, is a course he takes at Stanford at the height of the Cold War called Comparative Marxist Thought. He reads all the communists in their original. He reads Marx, he reads Lenin, he reads Stalin. This was controversial stuff in the early 1960s. Even his parents were worried about him.

• 5:11Ryan Holiday?

  Would he get radicalized? Would his brain get broken? But he's doing exactly what the Stoics are saying. He's literally reading like a spy in the enemy's camp. Then when he is subjected to communist interrogation techniques, when they try to break him, he knows their ideology better than they do. You have to read books that challenge you, read books that make you uncomfortable. The history books you're reading are fun and reassuring, you're not reading history, you're reading propaganda. The books you should pick up should open your worldview, should get you to see things that you didn't see before, get you to see things differently than you saw before. You should understand your own country, you should understand your industry, your profession. You should understand all of it differently as a result of the authors that you seek out.

• 5:54Ryan Holiday?

  You don't have to agree with them all the time, but you should be reading people that challenge you. And you might think as someone who writes and studies Stoicism that I mostly read the Stoics. No, I've also read Epicurus. I try to read philosophers who disagree with the Stoics. I also want to open my mind to the Buddhists and the Confucians. And I've read the Bhagavad Gita. I'm actually actively seeking out people other than the Stoics more often than I'm reading from the Stoics, because this not only opens me up to new things, but it helps me understand what I agree with and like about the Stoics even more. And look, when we talk about challenging books, we don't just mean ideologically challenging.

• 6:36Ryan Holiday?

  Like, what I love to dive into is like a big biography. There's Turner's Grant, Hamilton, it's Mark Twain book, this series on the Civil Rights Movement by Taylor Branch's epic. Robert Greene gave me this series on Winston Churchill, you know, a couple thousand pages cumulatively as a wedding present. One of the series I'm proudest of reading, not just Robert Caro's The Power Broker, but a series on Lyndon Johnson. This is a year's worth of reading for most people. It took me months to get through these books. And it's not even all the way through Lyndon Johnson's life yet.

• 7:19Ryan Holiday?

  The last book, The Passage of Power, it stops when Vietnam is starting. But the point is, you should tackle big, ambitious, audacious books, books that are going to take weeks to get through or months to get through, books where you lose your bearings, right? Read Russian literature, read those epic novels, read the things that are challenging to read because they are just feats of time and energy and stamina. Read books above your level, read books that ordinarily you'd need a college professor to walk you through. Just like when you lift heavy things, it makes you stronger. When you read books that are hard and difficult and challenging, you get better. And I think this is true for the Stoics also, like, I believe Marcus Aurelius is the easiest Stoic to start with.

• 8:04Ryan Holiday?

  Probably one of the harder Stoics to read is Musonius Rufus, which we have here, not enough Stoics have read. Then, of course, there's Cleander and Chrysippus. There's little snippets that we have of different Stoics. You can read Diogenes's book, The Lives of an Eminent Philosopher, where he has biographies of the different Stoics. Like Epictetus, it's easier to start with the Incredian, which is sort of a summary of his teachings, but then you got to go to the discourses. And the discourses are tough. But one of the things I think that's interesting about Stockdale, who was so moved and changed by Epictetus, is he said that while he's on his last three carrier deployments, he was reading not just Epictetus and not just the Stoics, but he was reading The Odyssey and the Iliad, because Epictetus had said that students needed to be familiar with

• 8:49Ryan Holiday?

  those works too. So you read one book and you get a hold of it, and then, well, what are the influences on that author? And then you want to go deeper and deeper and deeper. So pick those challenging, difficult books because you get stronger for wrestling with them.

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• 10:27Speaker 01

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• 10:42Ryan Holiday?

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• 11:27Ryan Holiday?

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• 11:39Ryan Holiday?

  I love books about ships. I love books about shipwrecks. I thought this book would be amazing. It's called The Imperial Cruise. It's about this trip that Theodore Roosevelt sent his vice president on to explore and then pacify the Philippines. And you know, it was okay. I didn't hate it, but I made it, I made it 50 or so pages in and I just said, you know what? This isn't working for me. Great readers know when to quit a book. My favorite rule is 100 pages minus your age. I've roughly made it there. My 97 year old grandmother should have quit this book earlier if it wasn't working for her. Why do we quit books? Because life is short, the Stoics would say. Memento mori. Seneca talks about how nothing should take your time

• 12:22Ryan Holiday?

  without giving you an adequate trade in return. Right? If you're not learning something, if it's not challenging you, if you're not growing in some way, stop reading. Pick up another book, right? Life is too short to read bad books. I think the Stoics would be very clear about that. So be okay, be empowered quitting a book that's not working for you. You can always come back to it later. And there have been books that I didn't think were right for me. I didn't think were good for me, that later turned out to be not just perfect, but profoundly influential, exactly what I needed in that moment. So don't be afraid to quit bad books. This is my copy of Best and the Brightest, which I just read for this book that I'm reading on.

• 13:04Ryan Holiday?

  And you can see I marked up literally almost every page. But this is actually the second time I tried to read this book. Because the first time I bought this copy and it didn't really do it for me. I made it 100 and, oh, here's where I quit. I quit on page 189. So it wasn't right for me at the time. I didn't say, oh, he sucks. I'll never read that guy again. I read some of his other books too. This just wasn't what I needed to read at this moment, but this was what I needed to read at this moment. And so you quit books, but you can always come back to them. The Stoics would say we never step in the same river twice. These are the same books. Nothing has changed. But I changed in the interim period and that's what counts.

• 13:51Ryan Holiday?

  So I was showing you that I fold pages of these books. Why do I do that? This is the note card system that I learned from my teacher, Robert Greene. So I read books. I'm an active reader. I'm taking notes. I'm folding pages. And then what I'm doing, I'm transferring the information from this book to my note cards. These note cards are how I organize my own writing, the books that I'm writing. But I also have one of these just for life advice. I have one for parenting. I'm always trying to collect information that will be of use to me. General Mattis, former Secretary of Defense, four-star general in the Marines, carries Marcus Aurelius's Meditations with him on 40 years of deployments.

• 14:33Ryan Holiday?

  He gets advice as a young man from the philosopher Eric Hoffer. He meets Eric Hoffer at a book signing and Eric Hoffer says, "Make sure you write down everything interesting that you find. That's what you have to do as a reader. That's what you have to do as a person. Keep a commonplace book. Collect the thoughts, the wisdom, the ideas that strike you so you can access them easily." Marcus Aurelius's Meditations, in a way, is his commonplace book. It's the things that he read. It's the things he was reading. It's the things that struck him and stayed with him that he's recording. And we're lucky enough, all these thousands of years later, to be able to access that. Your kids will be grateful to you if you do this. Your grandkids will be grateful to you. But most importantly, your future self will be grateful.

• 15:18Ryan Holiday?

  There are stuff I find in my note cards and the pages that I've marked in books that turn out to be exactly what I needed personally or professionally. Years in the future, I could not have imagined it. But if I hadn't taken the time to make the notation, to make the note card, I never would have been able to find it again. The Stoics wanted you to be a great reader. Seneca talked about how through reading, through philosophy, we annex all the wisdom of the past into our lives.

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