Make A’s in a few things | A Selfish Reason To Be Good

Ryan discusses how you can get better at what you do by doing less, and reads The Daily Stoic’s entry of the day, on today’s Daily Stoic Podcast. Cometeer partners with the best locally owned roasters in the world and through their breakthrough brewing technology, provides a delicious, high-quality, balanced cup of coffee for a fraction of the price. For a limited time, you can save 20 Dollars off your first order - that’s 10 free cups on your first order, and shipping is always free - but only when you visit cometeer.com/STOICSign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://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. 📢 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 another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Thursdays, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from the book The Daily Stoic, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful co-author and collaborator, Stephen Hanselman. And so today, we'll give you a quick meditation from one of the Stoics, from Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, then some analysis from me. And then we send you out into the world to do your best to turn these words into works.

• 0:41Ryan Holiday?

  Make As in a Few Things. Just like ours, the ancient world was filled with people who had ambitious goals and trouble prioritizing them. Seneca said, "It's one of the hardest balances to strike in life. We don't want to be the person who can never sit still. For love of bustle is not industry," he said. "It is only the restlessness of a hunted mind. But we also don't want to be the person always sitting still. True repose doesn't consist in condemning all emotion, all emotion as merely vexation," he wrote. "That kind of repose is slackness and inertia." The work of the philosopher, Seneca said, "is finding the perfect balance of those two tendencies.

• 1:23Ryan Holiday?

  It's about working and relaxing, not working, and work avoidance." When I had the great Matthew McConaughey on the Daily Podcast last year, he told us the story of how he found that balance himself. At one point a few years ago, McConaughey realized that he was doing too much. He had a production company, a music label, a foundation, his acting career, his family. And the problem wasn't that he couldn't juggle at all. He could. The problem was, he said, that he was making Bs in five things instead of making As in three things. So he called his lawyer and he shut it down, the production company and the music label. It wasn't an easy production to make, and he had to carefully unwind the businesses, to be fair to the people who'd been working hard on them.

• 2:07Ryan Holiday?

  But it was the right call for him and his family. The incredible work he's done as an actor since, and now his book, Greenlights, it's a testament to that. And as Marcus Aurelius said, "When you eliminate the inessential, you get the double benefit of doing the essential stuff better." Which is why we all regularly need to do the following. Make a list of the things you're trying to juggle, pare it down to a few. Commit to making As in those few things, instead of Bs and Cs in a lot of things. Decommit from what you never should have committed to in the first place. Dedicate yourself to what's actually essential. And those five steps are the pathways to balance and success.

• 2:51Ryan Holiday?

  A selfish reason to be good. The person who does wrong, does wrong to themselves. The unjust person is unjust to themselves, making themselves evil. That's Marcus Aurelius's meditation, nine, four. The next time you do something wrong, try to remember how it made you feel. Rarely do we find ourselves saying, man, I feel great. And there's a reason that there's often vomit at crime scenes. Instead of the catharsis the person thought they'd feel when they let themselves get out of control, or when they got their revenge, they end up making themselves sick. And we feel a lighter version of this when we lie, when we cheat, when we screw someone over. So in that split second before your ill-gotten gains kick in, ask yourself, how do I feel about myself?

• 3:36Ryan Holiday?

  Is that moment when fear rises in your throat because you suspect you might get caught, was that worth it? Is this who you want to be? Self-awareness and wrongdoing rarely go together. And if you need a selfish reason not to do wrong, put yourself in touch with these feelings. They're a powerful disincentive.

• 3:57Ryan Holiday?

  And I'm reading to you today from The Daily Stoic, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living by yours truly, my co-author and translator, Stephen Hanselman. You can get signed copies, by the way, in the Daily Stoic store. Over a million copies of The Daily Stoic in print now. It's been just such a lovely experience to watch it. Spend more than 250 weeks, consecutive weeks on the bestsellers. It's just an awesome experience. But I hope you check it out. We have a premium leather edition at store.dailystoic.com as well. But let's get on with today's reading. No one suffers more than the liar, the cheat, the loser. The coward, right? It's not fun to be them. You know this. And yet, sometimes we look at what they have and we're jealous and we don't realize

• 4:42Ryan Holiday?

  how much they're suffering for that very thing. I want you to think about doing the right thing, not just for the benefit of other people, but because you know that it's punishment to yourself, right? Just because it gets you what you want in the short term, or just because it prevents you from having to feel some other pain, in reality, you are punishing yourself. And this is why the Stoics pursue the good. This is why the Stoics hold themselves to the high standards. This is why the Stoics don't care if it's illegal. They care if it's the right thing to do or not. Marx really says, just that you do the right thing, the rest doesn't matter. The rest doesn't matter, because even if it excused doing the wrong thing, even if we could get away with it, it would still be not fun for us. It would still be unpleasurable. It would still be a punishment.

• 5:26Ryan Holiday?

  You have to understand this. Do the right thing. The person who does wrong does wrong to themselves. The unjust person is unjust to themselves, making themselves evil. This is a lesson I put in The Boy Who Would Be King. Marx really plays this prank on the shepherd and his mother grabs him and he says, his mother grabs him and says, "Look, to do wrong to another person is to do wrong to yourself." This goes back to the idea of Sympathia. The Stoics believe we're all part of this whole, this hive. But I would say one last part of this, because Marx really in nine, four meditations, he says, and now I'm quoting the Hayes translation, he says, "To do harm is to do yourself harm. To do an injustice is to do yourself an injustice. It degrades you." But then he continues in nine, five.

• 6:09Ryan Holiday?

  It's not often that the little riffs connect to each other, but in this case, they clearly do, and it's a great place for us to conclude. And he says, "And you can also commit injustice by doing nothing." So when you tell yourself, "It's not my problem. It's not my fight. I'm not going to get involved." You say, "I'm not part of the problem. I'm not making this worse. I'm not guilty. I'm not doing something wrong and thus degrading myself." But by not stopping it, by doing nothing, you are in fact degrading yourself. You are making yourself complicit. You are harming them. You're harming the community. And therefore, according to the Stoics, you are harming yourself. So if you want to feel good, do good, or just stop something bad from happening.

• 6:52Ryan Holiday?

  Thanks so much for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Again, if you don't know this, you can get these delivered to you via email every day. You just go to dailystoic.com/email. So check it out, dailystoic.com/email.