BONUS | 11 Things Stoics Never Do

Which of these do you struggle with the most? 🎟️ 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 to The Daily Stoic Premium https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ - unlock ad-free listening, early access, and bonus content: https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ 🎥 VIDEO EPISODES https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos| Watch the video episodes on The Daily Stoic YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos: https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos ✉️ FREE STOIC WISDOM https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail | Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail 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.

• 0:00Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues: courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

• 0:15Ryan Holiday?

  If you want to be a better person, if you want to be a happier person, if you want to be a more productive person, here are all the things the Stoics want you to stop doing right now.

• 0:30Ryan Holiday?

  Number one, stop focusing on things that are outside your control. This is our main task in Life Epictetus, to know what's up to us and what's not up to us.

• 0:44Ryan Holiday?

  Number two, stop doing the inessential things. Marcus really says, "When we say no to what we shouldn't be doing, we get the double benefit of doing the essential things better."

• 0:57Ryan Holiday?

  Number three, from Seneca, "Stop being distracted by what other people are doing." He said, "You want to have a sense of the path that you're on, and he says, 'Not to be led off course by the people who are hopelessly lost.'"

• 1:12Ryan Holiday?

  Number four, from Zeno, "Let's talk more than we listen." He said, "We have two ears and one mouth for a reason." Number five, stop complaining. Marcus really admonished himself not only not to complain, but not even to complain silently to himself.

• 1:31Ryan Holiday?

  Number six, stop putting things off. Seneca said, "This is the one thing all fools have in common. They're always getting ready to start. Don't be a fool. If it's worth doing, do it now." Which leads us to the seventh. Stop acting as if you're going to live forever. Right? Marcus really says, "We could be good today, instead we choose tomorrow." This is arrogant. This is foolish. Memento mori, life is short. We could go at any moment. Stop putting it off. It's worth doing. Do it now, because today is the only thing you have for certain.

• 2:06Ryan Holiday?

  Eight, stop getting offended. Epictetus talks about how whenever we find ourselves getting upset, whenever we're offended, we have to say to ourselves, "I am complicit in taking offense. They said the thing. They did the thing." Then we told ourselves a story about it. We told ourselves that our feelings were hurt. We told ourselves that we were humiliated. We told ourselves that we were degraded. No, they said some words. They uttered some sounds. Then we decide what that means. That part of it is in our control.

• 2:38Ryan Holiday?

  Number nine, stop letting your ego make you stupid. Epictetus talked about how we can't learn that which we think we already know. When you're in know-it-all, that's the problem, because you're right, you can't know anything else. The better the ratio of listening to talking, right? The more you're going to learn, the better you're going to get.

• 2:59Ryan Holiday?

  Ten, and this is the most important, "Stop acting as if you're going to live forever. Life is short. You could go at any moment." This is the Stoic idea of memento mori, right? You could leave life right now, Marcus really says in Meditations, "Let that determine what you do and say and think." Stop putting things off. Stop taking things personally. Stop doing the things that you know you shouldn't be doing. Get after it. This is your one life. Go live it.

• 3:27Ryan Holiday?

  Eleventh, stop doing things out of anger. Stop letting anger rule your life. I'm not saying you have an anger problem. I'm just saying that anger is a problem for all of us. The Stoics talk about how often what we do because we are angry is so much worse than the thing that made us angry in the first place. Seneca talked about the silliness of returning a kick to a mule or a bite to a dog. Marcus really even talked about how unmanly it is to be overcome by your emotions, to punch a wall, or to scream at someone, or hurt someone, right? It's okay to be angry. The Stoics knew we would have these impulses, these feelings, but they wanted to make sure we didn't do things out of anger. Stoicism is about that pause.

• 4:11Ryan Holiday?

  One of the pieces of advice that Athenodorus, the Stoic teacher, gives the Emperor Augustus was to count all the letters of the alphabet before he made a decision while he was angry, right? The pause and the reflect. Let me think about this for a second.