You Are Not Too Busy To Read

“We get it. You’re busy. You have kids. You have a job—maybe two. You have these things you are trying to accomplish. You have to get to the gym. You have a long commute. You have all these projects around the house.”Discover the vitality of reading and how historical leaders carved out time to make it a priority, on today’s Daily Stoic Podcast.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow Daily Stoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicSee 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.

• 0:04Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a passage of ancient wisdom, designed to help you find strength, insight, and wisdom in everyday life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us, dailystoic.com.

• 0:26Ryan Holiday?

  You are not too busy to read. We get it. You're busy. You have kids. You have a job, maybe two. You have things you're trying to accomplish. You have to get to the gym. You have a long commute. You have all these projects around the house. With all this, you say, "I don't have time to read," which, of course, is ridiculous. It's not true. It's not even remotely true. Marcus Aurelius had all those same kinds of goals and responsibility. Seneca did too. You know what you don't see in their writings? Complaints about not having time to read. In fact, if anything, they chide themselves for spending too much time with their books. The fact is, people much busier than you have been prioritizing reading for centuries. They've been making wisdom a part of their daily lives, no matter what's going on in the world

• 1:11Ryan Holiday?

  or in their jobs. As Andrew Roberts, who was a great podcast guest for us a few months back, writes in his epic biography of Napoleon, "For his Egypt campaign, Napoleon took 125 books of history, geography, philosophy, and Greek mythology in a specially constructed library, including Captain Cook's three-volume voyages, Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws, Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther, and books by Livy, Thucydides, Plutarch, Tacitus, and of course Julius Caesar. He also brought biographies of Condi, Sacks, Marlborough, Eugene of Savoy, Charles XII of Sweden, and a notable French commander in the Hundred Years' War. Poetry and drama had their place too,

• 1:54Ryan Holiday?

  including the works of Homer, Virgil, and others. If Napoleon, commanding an army of some 40,000 men, could find time to read on a march of some 1,600 miles from home, you can find it too. If Marcus could read while he was ruling the world, if Seneca... Could do it while studying the law, suffering from tuberculosis while in exile in the Senate as consul, while he dealt with Nero's insanity, you can too. Leaders must be readers. There is no good life without study and practice and wisdom. Don't find the time, make the time. You're not too busy. Nobody is.

• 2:32Ryan Holiday?

  And we've talked about that great line from Harry Truman, "Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers. You just have to be." And I would urge you to try to make not just the time you spend reading greater, but what you get out of the time you spend reading to be better as well. And that's why we built the Read to Lead Challenge, which you can check out. Something like two weeks of really great Stoic-inspired reading practices, exercises from the lives of Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus, but also thoughts from folks like Napoleon and Harry Truman and others. It's really great. People have loved it. We've had thousands of people go through it over the last few years. It's really awesome. Check it out, dailystoic.com/reading. And of course, if you sign up for Daily Stoic Life, you get this course and all the others

• 3:16Ryan Holiday?

  for free, along with a bunch of other stuff. Check that out at dailystoiclife.com.