Nobody Won Afraid Of Losing | Ask DS

Courage is the mother of all virtues, Aristotle said, because in a world that’s not virtuous, it’s a brave thing to go out there and do what needs to be done. Ask DS: What does Ryan do with his journals once they are full? How can Stoicism be practical and relevant in today’s environment? Does Ryan try to teach Stoicism to his kids? (check out Daily Dad for more on this!) What is the best intro book to Stoicism? How does the concept of Antifragile intersect with Stoicism? 📕 Grab signed editions of the Stoic Virtues series: Courage is Calling, Discipline is Destiny, and Right Thing, Right Now at https://store.dailystoic.com/🎟 Ryan Holiday is going on tour! Grab tickets at ryanholiday.net/tour✉️ 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, 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. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

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

• 0:02Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. Well, on Thursdays, we not only read the daily meditation, but we answer some questions from listeners and fellow Stoics who are trying to apply this philosophy just as you are. Some of these come from my talks, some of these come from Zoom sessions that we do with Daily Stoic Life members, or as part of the challenges. Some of them are from interactions I have on the street when there happened to be someone there recording. But thank you for listening, and we hope this is of use to you.

• 0:44Ryan Holiday?

  "Nobody won afraid of losing. It might not work. It could go very badly. You could be laughed at. You could take a financial hit. You could come in second. You could fail. You could even die. But is life without risk possible? Could you possibly hope to make it through the world?" - to borrow a powerful rhetorical question from Meditations. "Could you possibly hope to do this without encountering any of these setbacks?" Of course not. And this is why courage is such a critical virtue to the Stoics, because life demands it. You cannot do anything, go anywhere, be anyone without it. The greatest Stoics were defined by their ability to go out there and do what they thought needed to be done,

• 1:28Ryan Holiday?

  despite the incredibly unlikely probability of success. Cato went against Caesar. His daughter Portia did the same. George Washington, in that winter of discontent at Valley Forge, drew on that exact example, putting on Addison's play about Cato to inspire himself and his men. Stockdale had every reason to think he would not survive, that he would not triumph over his captors, but he never gave in. "We will not always win in life, but we will never win without an ability to face loss, without the courage to proceed anyway."

• 2:02Ryan Holiday?

  Be not afraid, be brave. Courage is the mother of all virtues, you could say. And in fact, Aristotle did say this because in a world that's not virtuous, it's a brave thing to go out there and do what needs to be done. The first book in the Stoic Virtue Series is Courage is Calling. It's about that. Will you answer the call? And then this is followed by Discipline is Destiny. And then I just finished the next book in the series, Right Thing Right Now. You can head over and grab those at stuart.dailystoic.com. You can get them anywhere books are sold. Since you're listening to this right now, maybe you like audiobooks. You can grab audiobooks of them as well. Anywhere audiobooks are sold. Check them out.

• 2:50Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I'm going to bring you a Q and A today from a talk I did way back in November of 2020. To flash forward a little bit, by the way, I will be in Australia. The last couple of days of July and August, doing dates in Sydney and Melbourne. And then in November of 2024, I will also be in Canada and Europe. You can grab all those dates at ryanholiday.net/tour. But I was doing a virtual offsite. This was back in COVID days, talking about obstacle and stillness. And they had some, some great questions on journaling. Then someone was asking me how Stoicism can be practical and relevant in today's environment.

• 3:33Ryan Holiday?

  Some folks asked me about my exercise routine, how I teach these Stoic principles to my kids, and a great introduction to Stoicism. So that's what we'll get into today. And I hope to see you, not virtual, in person, either later this month in Australia or in Europe and Canada in the fall. Grab those dates at ryanholiday.net/tour.

• 4:03Speaker 01

  So if you're journaling free form daily, it's not the first time I've been introduced to the concept, but so I know a little bit about it, but how, how many journals do you go through and what do you do with them?

• 4:13Ryan Holiday?

  So I don't do anything with them because the value of them is the, the act, the process. These are not sort of records for history. These are not, you know, you know, drafts of things I'm writing. It is the time with the journal that is the upside that is that I get it having finished, not reviewing it later for the most part. But I do, I actually use three journals and this might be too much for any one person, but I think each one of the ideas might independently be valuable. So the first journal I use, it's at my house, I can't show it to you, but I have this little journal, it's called the one line a day journal. And this is one of the ways I picked up the habit.

• 4:57Ryan Holiday?

  It's a journal and it has five sections on each page. The idea being you write one thing about each day as the day happens and then you have five years of what you did on that day. So I love, like, I was writing in it this morning and it was like, oh, I was finishing a chapter in my most recent book on this day 12 months ago. Like, that's cool. Right? So the one line a day is like, I think, a really easy way to start journaling and they make a bunch of different ones. There's like the one line a day journal for mothers and for college students and, you know, there's all different ones like that that are cool. But then, then I just do some free form journaling, like in a blank journal, I just talk about what I'm thinking, what I'm going through.

• 5:42Ryan Holiday?

  Sometimes I log like my workout or I just kind of, it's just whatever I want. It's just a few minutes on the page. And then the third one I do, I made a journal a few years ago called the daily stoic journal that gives you a question that you respond to in the morning and at night. So the, the other form of journaling, and I'm not trying to, to sort of pimp my own, is like, there are all sorts of great journals out there that have prompts. And so if you have trouble journaling, finding a journal that gives you something to... Talk to yourself about a question to answer, that can be a great way to to form that practice.

• 6:22Speaker 01

  Thanks. Sorry for the digression, everybody, but I've always been curious about journaling. It's like meditating. I've tried it. I'm still wrestling with it because I have a hard time getting there and I'm still early, still early days in it. So, super small question now, Ryan. This is probably a yes or no. You ready?

• 6:40Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 6:41Speaker 01

  How can Stoicism be effective, be practical, be relevant in today's environment, economic uncertainty, social and political divisiveness? I'll just keep it simple and end there.

• 6:57Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I so I used to joke, I would say, you know, you think these ideas are are so distant. But the reality is, you know, the Stoics were, the ancients were going through divorce and they were trying to make money and they they had civil, they had all our problems plus the plague. The idea that that the distant past was so different than ours is really ridiculous. And and I think really, when you read the Stoics, I mean, Book Five of Meditations, speaking of what we were talking about, the opening passage in Book Five of Meditations is Marcus Aurelius having a discussion with himself about not wanting to get out of bed in the morning. And he says, oh, but it's so warm here under the covers.

• 7:38Ryan Holiday?

  And you're like, this is, he is me and I am him. Like, we are the same, you know? So we tend to think of history as the thing in the past, but, you know, we are living through history and it gives you a sense of, you know, people are people and things have always been this way.

• 7:53Speaker 01

  What is your typical workout?

• 7:55Ryan Holiday?

  Um, I usually, uh, so I try to run, swim, or bike every single day. So I try to do one of the three. I usually try to do some sort of endurance thing. I like, I like working out. I like CrossFit. I like those kinds of things. But I, as a writer, I think, you know, the sort of solitary, long chunk of time, doing one intensely focused thing is, it usually has the best benefits for me.

• 8:22Speaker 01

  Do you try and teach these principles to your young children? And how is that going?

• 8:27Ryan Holiday?

  I do. They're a little young for it specifically, so we're not quite there.

• 8:34Ryan Holiday?

  You know, I think, I was just thinking about this the other day. When you really go back to the ancient literature, there's not really such thing as like children's stories. They were just stories. It's only, you know, later that we've decided that all children's books have to be about dragons who eat pizza. And, you know, talking teddy bears and stuff. There used to be sort of fables and sort of epics that poems that you would teach lessons to kids. So I spent a lot, like, a lot of the sort of bedtime stuff we do is, is like poetry or, or, you know, speeches or, you know, Aesop's fables, stuff like that.

• 9:12Speaker 01

  Best intro book to Stoicism?

• 9:15Ryan Holiday?

  I'm a, I'm a little biased. I mean, if you want to read, if, let's do it this way. If you want to read the actual Stoics, like the original, like one book by a Stoic, I think Marcus Aurelius, the Gregory Hayes translation is the most accessible. I did a book called The Daily Stoic, that is one page of Stoic philosophy every day. But I also do a free email version of it, which you can get at dailystoic.com. So I think it can be hard to just say like, hey, I'm going to learn about a whole school of philosophy. I think doing it in a really digestible way, like as a page a day or an email a day or a podcast episode a day is another pretty good way to do it.

• 9:54Speaker 01

  I think I just tell folks, and again, no one's making money on me doing this, but The Obstacle is the Way is the first of Ryan's books that I read of that trilogy. Someone on the line actually gifted me The Daily Stoic, which is where I sort of got started on, on your work. And that was incredible. One of the things I like about your writing is it's incredibly accessible. Now, you said earlier that in part is because that's how Stoicism is structured. Yeah. But it's also the way you present it, because these are old cats and old things about old times. But, but the thing that struck me as so surprising is, as you said, how relevant so much of their teachings and experiences are to today's world.

• 10:39Speaker 01

  And you actually

• 10:41Ryan Holiday?

  Put it together in a way that really is quite understandable and accessible, and it's quick reading, and I would, I would recommend it. So, one of our colleagues asked how the concept of anti-fragile over your right shoulder intersects with Stoicism. Yeah, it's a great question. So, Nassim Taleb is, is actually a, I've gotten to know him over the years. He's a, you'll, you'll see the Stoics sort of interspersed throughout his work. So, I certainly don't think they're inconsistent with each other. I, I think the idea of anti-fragile and, and the, the, the idea and just the phrase, "The obstacle is the way," are essentially saying the same thing. You can be worse for what's happened, or you can be better for what's happened. And anti-fragile just means you're the kind of thing, as he says, that gets stronger

• 11:26Ryan Holiday?

  from disorder, or from difficulty, or from challenges. And I think a person who lives the idea that the obstacle is the way, that what stands in the way is the way, that everything you experience is an opportunity to get better, to practice virtue, I think that's essentially saying the same thing. I think Nassim's background is much more in, in finance, and, and, you know, he has sort of a mathematical analysis for a lot of what he's talking about. I tend to just look at history and go, "Look, almost every great person has been through some sort of adversity or difficulty in their life. It's inevitable, running a business, running a family, being a human being, that things will not go your way. Murphy's Law, what can go wrong will. So, are you going to be wrecked by those things?

• 12:08Ryan Holiday?

  Are those things going to, you know, create opportunities for you? If, if it's the latter, you'll get better. If it's the former, I don't think you're going to last long."

• 12:20Ryan 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.