There Is Hope Within Despair | Ask Daily Stoic

Despair is so easy, even reasonable in moments like this. The Stoics knew that feeling well. 📖 Preorder the final book in Ryan Holiday's The Stoic Virtues Series: "Wisdom Takes Work":https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/wisdom-takes-work 🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast/?hl=en: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast 🎥 Watch top moments from The Daily Stoic Podcast https://www.youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast: https://www.youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast ✉️ 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 https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/,Twitter https://twitter.com/dailystoic,YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic,TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@daily_stoic?lang=en, andFacebook https://www.facebook.com/dailystoic 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.

• 0:05Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a Stoic-inspired meditation, designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life. Each one of these episodes is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women, help you learn from them, to follow in their example, and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. For more, visit DailyStoic.com.

• 0:55Ryan Holiday?

  "There is hope within despair." Can be hard, especially right now, to feel good about anything. There is dysfunction, there is conflict, there is outright lawlessness, there is corruption, there is cruelty. What is working well? Not the economy, not the government, perhaps not even your own business or your own day-to-day life. Despair is so easy, even reasonable, in moments like this. And the Stoics knew that, feeling well. Seneca in the time of Nero, Epictetus chained to slavery, Cato watching the Republic fall, Marcus Aurelius at the beginning of the end of the empire. But they did not despair. They did not give up. They knew that there was hope within despair.

• 1:40Ryan Holiday?

  Where? Marcus Aurelius notes that it was within us. "It did not matter how much dung you threw on top of an underground spring," he noted, "fresh water was still there." He said, "We needed to dig for it. If we want to live in good times," he said, "the solution is easy. Do good things." Hope is there. It is within you. It is up to you.

• 2:10Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another Thursday episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I was out for a walk last night. I was taking the dog for a walk. The sun was setting, the weather had cooled off, and I was eating a plum cot. Do you know what that is? It's like a combination between a plum and an apricot. And it was so good. Meat is a little epicurean to me. It just occurred to me. I was like, I don't think Marx really knew anything better than this. I mean, he might have been incredibly rich. He might have been incredibly powerful. He might have believed he was, you know, had the divine right of kings. I don't know. But it was pretty amazing. And it's those simple pleasures, too. And when I said, you know, epicureanism,

• 2:52Ryan Holiday?

  that we sort of gave Epicurus a bad rap. He wasn't a hedonist. He took delight in these small pleasures. And then the thing I thought about as I'm enjoying this is I said, when I get home, am I gonna have another one of these? And I thought, you know what? No, I'm not gonna feel good if I have another one of these. So I didn't. Anyways, that has nothing to do with the Q and A today. I was down in Palm Springs back in June, right before we left for Greece for a trip. And I gave a talk at this conference. It's called Freedom Fest, sort of, I would say libertarian, they say nonpartisan, but I would, I would say it's, it's more sort of the libertarian right. I don't necessarily

• 3:34Ryan Holiday?

  agree with the politics of the folks there. I have no problem, though, going to places and talking to people who are not going to be super inclined to agree with me. I ended up talking about how the founding of America was built around the idea of liberty, yes, but it went in concert with the idea of responsibility and virtue. Anyways, I did a little Q and A after on why Stoicism still matters. Daniel Richards was the moderator, asked a lot of lovely questions. I think you'll like this. I'll bring you some of this. And then next week, I'll bring you the rest of it. We'll, we'll break it up a bit. In any case, here we go.

• 4:23Speaker 01

  You have made a 2,000-year-old philosophy feel urgent and relevant and useful for millions of people. How the heck did you do that?

• 4:33Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, needless to say, my publisher was not super excited when I came to them after writing a couple of marketing books and said that I wanted to write about an obscure school of ancient philosophy. But I knew that it had worked for me, and I knew that it was interesting. And I also knew that if you can understand where the audience is, and you can be real honest about that, you can do the work to try to bring them where you want them to be. And so, you know, I think I understand most people wake up and don't think, you know, what I really need today is ancient philosophy. But as it happens, the ancients were not that different than us, and they dealt with problems that feel shockingly modern when you read it. And so, I feel like my work as a writer, I'm not translating from Greek and Latin into English.

• 5:17Ryan Holiday?

  I'm translating from academic philosophy and jargon and the preconceived notions that people have about philosophy. I'm translating it from that to where people are. So what I do in my books is I tend to take stories from history, pop culture, business, sports, and I use them to illustrate the ideas, and then those ideas make sense to people. So it's really about understanding that what lights you up is not what necessarily lights the audience up, and then you've got to do the work of explaining that actually it's just because they haven't learned it the same way that you have, or they haven't seen the things that you have. And that's what gets me excited. It's taking things that maybe don't seem interesting and make them accessible and

• 6:02Ryan Holiday?

  exciting and urgent.

• 6:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's fantastic. So I'm also a marketer by trade.

• 6:06Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 6:07Speaker 01

  And so, there's a lot of discussion in marketing, obviously, about the audience or the customer. Did you have an audience in mind when you went into this, or did you discover an audience along the way?

• 6:15Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I mean, your your audience is always partly yourself. Sure. And in the in the eighties and nineties, there'd been some books that sort of had popularized Machiavelli and Sun Tzu to like the Wall Street crowd. So so it's always helpful to have sort of a comp title like, hey, I want to be this for that. So I had some sense. And so I was thinking like, the business world might be the first place. That's where I was coming out of myself. And then, you know, it sort of I saw with the first book, it started to resonate with sports and in the military and then in different communities. So it's really about, I think, how do you make the? And I do think about as I'm writing, do I have examples that cover a wide swath of different professions, personalities, experiences?

• 6:59Ryan Holiday?

  Like, one thing you won't find in my books is me. Like, I don't go, hey, so yesterday I was talking to my friend Steve, and this is the problem we had, and this is how I use stoicism to solve it. That just strikes me as super boring and not that compelling. So what I'm doing is, as I said, I'm drawing from things that people have heard of. I want to tell stories that maybe the names have a little bit of resonance, or they saw it on TV and they remembered that. But I have a I'm actually showing something that's going on a little bit beneath the surface. So the way I I think about it is like, diversity here is not so much about like quotas or anything like that, or affirmative action. Diversity here is you want every potential kind of person to see themselves in your work.

• 7:43Ryan Holiday?

  So it's it's it's not just a justice thing, although I do think that's actually essential. I it's more like, I don't want it to only speak to dudes. I don't want it to only speak to people who love sports. I don't want it only to speak to military circles. So I'm I'm picking a breadth of examples and stories and situations that everyone's gonna see themselves in it. And I'm trying not to exclude because I want it to include, you know, anyone that that I think could benefit from it. Yeah.

• 8:14Speaker 01

  I do find it interesting that in so much of your work, there is so little of you

• 8:17Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 8:18Speaker 01

  in it. One of the things we talk about when we're marketing ideas is before you even consider audience, as you noted, your audience has to be yourself to some degree, but you also have to have this really deep passion for what you're doing. Like, it has to be, it has to come out of you and exude and be authentic. And you said your publisher wasn't super excited about Stoicism. Like, how did, how did that come about for you? It doesn't seem like it was just a random, "I'm gonna pick Stoicism."

• 8:40Ryan Holiday?

  No, no. I was introduced to it when I was in college. I went to a conference like this and I asked, actually, Dr. Drew, he was one of the speakers, and I went up to him after and I said, "Hey, you know, have you read anything interesting recently?" And he said, "You know, I've been reading the Stoics." And that, as it happens, is how Stoicism has been spread for something like 25 centuries. It's like, "This worked for me, maybe it'll work for you." And what I think I've done is just make that process a little bit easier, a little bit more accessible. Here's what Stoicism has to say about overcoming obstacles. Here's what Stoicism says about, you know, creating stillness in a crazy world. Here's what Stoicism says about discipline. So I'm kind of breaking it up. The Stoics were, you know, somewhat disjointed and all over the place, and we only have fragments of what

• 9:22Ryan Holiday?

  they said and believed. So I knew that it had worked for me. It was exciting to me. And my first book had been a marketing book. I did one more marketing book, and I sort of sold what became The Obstacle's Way, in between there. I thought it would resonate. I thought it was something I was excited about doing. I didn't want to be just going around talking about marketing for the rest of my life. I wanted to talk about something more substantive. But I, you know, I think you would like to think that everyone's gonna see the potential, the potential market. They're all gonna support you and advocate for you. My publisher's been great, but, I mean, when I went to them with what was then my second book for, you know, to do about Stoicism, I think they offered me, you know, significantly less than half I'd gotten offered for my first book. So it was a, it

• 10:07Ryan Holiday?

  was a big step down. That was, that was their objective analysis of what that idea was worth. But it was worth more to me, and I was excited about it. And I thought, you know, the downside is what? Nothing. Upside is it could work. And it did work. And so you have to understand that it's gonna be an uphill battle for a while, and it's gonna be... Against a headwind for quite some time. And you know, now, now I get, you know, requests to blur books about Stoicism from other people that I, you know, would not have been possible 10, 15 years ago when I was going out with the obstacles to the way. But that's great. That's success. You know, that, that, I wanted Stoicism to be more popular. It always takes longer than you would expect, even when you take that law into account.

• 10:48Speaker 01

  Do you hear that, all of you? It takes longer than you expect.

• 10:51Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 10:52Speaker 01

  So, so stick to it. One thing I find really remarkable about your work is how approachable it is. It's very digestible and easy to read for either the novice or the, the someone, someone who's more studied in the ideas. The emails, the tweets, the newsletters, the books, the journaling, sort of, and how it all works together. How was it sort of discovering that system for you? Like, was it a lot of trial and error?

• 11:16Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I, I, I learned from one of the masters, we're talking about wisdom. Obviously, the idea of an apprenticeship is not so in vogue anymore, but that's how I learned. I was a research assistant to an amazing writer named Robert Greene, who wrote The Forty Eight Laws of Power, who, by the way, did this version of what we're talking about himself first. He took, you know, these seemingly obscure texts from ancient history and medieval history and all over the world, like all these, you know, and he, and he made it accessible and practical to the point where I'm pretty sure The Forty Eight Laws of Power is the most requested book in the federal prison system, and it is by and large the most shoplifted book every year, all of which is quite an endorsement. Uh, it, it is. It's quite an endorsement to the accessibility to that book.

• 12:00Ryan Holiday?

  These are people who are not shoplifting other books on a regular basis. So I learned from him, the art of story and crafting, and I learned the, the process from him. But then, uh, obviously, I've also just been doing it a long time. The Daily Stoic email started in 2016. I was going to be one bit of Stoic wisdom every single day. I think it started with about 10,000 people, which is, you know, from all my different platforms, and it now goes out to almost a million people every day. But that's a result of me writing an email every single day for, you know, going on nine years. That's nine free books. You know, that is a lot of engagement with the audience.

• 12:43Ryan Holiday?

  Seeing like seeing what works, seeing what doesn't work. Just the the the stage time of doing it over and over and over and over again. I feel like I'm I'm just getting the hang of podcasting or YouTube videos or even public speaking. You know, you you can be serviceable if you're decent at the beginning. And there's things you can do to sort of get up to speed. But it takes, you know, thousands of hours to get good at a thing. That is hard.

• 13:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:15Ryan Holiday?

  And it's making things accessible is one of the hardest things that there is. Or else everyone would do it.

• 13:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, I forget who said it, but they said, excuse the length of this letter. But if I had more time, I would have written you a shorter one.

• 13:26Ryan Holiday?

  Totally. Yes. And the other thing is anyone that does it well tends to make it look easy.

• 13:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:31Ryan Holiday?

  So you see someone with a huge YouTube following or a big social media follow. Look, sometimes these people have been, you know, blessed by the algorithm and there's not really much there there. But but a lot of times it is, you know, just incredible amounts of of repetition and experience and trial and error, seeing what works and you sort of hone a sense of of of how you do what you do.

• 13:58Ryan 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.