Forget Your Dreams. Do This Instead. | Our Duty To Learn

The key to life, Epictetus said, was not to dream for things to be a certain way but to dream for them to be the way they were. To be grateful that you had the fate you had.💡 We designed our How To Read Epictetus (A Daily Stoic Guide) as a personal field guide —part book club, part masterclass, part daily practice. It’s designed to help you not just read the words of Epictetus, but live them—to turn his timeless wisdom into real change in your own life and the lives of those around you. And if you get the guide before July 26th, you’ll receive a private invitation to an exclusive LIVE Q&A with Ryan Holiday, where he’ll go deep on all things Epictetus, Stoicism, and how to apply these ideas right now, in today’s world. Head to dailystoic.com/epictetuscourse to learn more and get your book, guide, and bundle today!📚 Pick up The Greatest Empire: A Life of Seneca by Emily Wilson and The Odyssey translated by Emily Wilson at The Painted Porch | https://www.thepaintedporch.com/📔 Pick up your own leather bound signed edition of The Daily Stoic! Check it out at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/📖 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🎥 Watch top moments from The Daily Stoic Podcast on YouTube: 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, 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.

• 0:05Ryan 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.

• 0:56Ryan Holiday?

  Forget your dreams, do this instead. Epictetus was born into slavery, and he spent the next 30 years in that institution, the Romankind, which meant he was considered property, had no rights, could be abused or killed without legal consequence. He wasn't even given a name. Epictetus just means acquired one. He was tortured. And when Epictetus finally found freedom, he was almost immediately exiled by a tyrannical emperor. You know in Les Mis where she sings about how the dream she dreamed was so much different than the hell she was living? That was basically Epictetus's real-life story. He was treated like an animal, designed to be used up and cast aside. And while no one would say that Epictetus was the lightest

• 1:40Ryan Holiday?

  or the most fun of the Stoics, considering what he went through, his writing and his philosophy could have been, perhaps should have been, a lot darker. He had every right to be bitter, every right to be angry, every right to be a nihilist. After all, the world he lived in was nihilistic and cruel and dark. But instead, Epictetus was funny. He was inspirational. He was strong. We have a Daily Stoic video that focuses on some of his keys to resilience. But one of the main reasons he wasn't broken by his experience was a simple Stoic insight. "The key to life," he said, "was not to dream for things to be a certain way, "but to dream for them to be the way they are. To be grateful that you had the fate you had, to be the best you are capable of being inside that."

• 2:22Ryan Holiday?

  If anyone ever had an excuse to give up, to grow cynical, to hate the world, it was Epictetus, but he chose something different. And so can we. No matter what we're going through, we always have the power to respond with virtue, with humor, with grace, with wisdom. That's real strength. And that's real freedom.

• 2:50Ryan Holiday?

  Our Duty to Learn. This is today's entry, July 7th, in the Daily Stoic, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living. "This is what you should teach me, how to be like Odysseus," Seneca writes in Moral Letters 88:7, "how to love my country, wife, and father, "and how, even after suffering a shipwreck, "I might keep sailing on course to those honorable ends." And I write, "Many schoolteachers teach the Odyssey all wrong. They teach the dates. They debate whether Homer was really an author or not, whether he was blind. They explain the oral tradition. They tell students what a cyclops is, or how the Trojan horse worked."

• 3:32Ryan Holiday?

  Seneca's advice to someone studying the classics is to forget all that, the dates, the names, the places. They don't matter. What matters is the moral. If you get everything else wrong from the Odyssey, but you're left understanding the importance of perseverance, the dangers of hubris, the risks of temptation and distraction... Well, then you really learned something. We're not trying to ace tests or impress teachers here. We are reading and studying to live, to be good human beings always and forever. Of course, there's an entertainment element to something like The Odyssey, or really any great book. That's why it's survived for thousands of years as a text. There's literary value as well. You'd study it as a writer.

• 4:16Ryan Holiday?

  And by the way, my favorite translation of The Odyssey is this one by Emily Wilson, who's also Seneca's biographer. If you haven't read The Greatest Empire by Emily Wilson, you absolutely should. And you should read her newer-ish translation of The Odyssey, which I quite, quite enjoyed. And I actually carry both of them in the bookstore. It's perennial. It stands the test of time. All of which is to say, I also love how perennial Seneca's example is, right? Like, I'm sure you remember the pedanticness and the boringness with which you dissected texts in English class or whatever in, in high school. It's like quizzes. What year did this happen?

• 4:59Ryan Holiday?

  And what is the name of so-and-so's father in insert novel, right? They're trying to test whether you read it or not, as if just reading it is the accomplishment. No, you have to internalize the ideas, the lessons that the author was trying to teach. You have to understand it and translate it into insights as a human being, not recite trivia from it. And sadly, that's what so much mediocre education focuses on. They get us to memorize things. I think this is funny, too. This is like the knock on like kids who've been raised in this digital era about how they don't remember things, they can just Google it. What matters is that they remember the gist of the insight, not like the dates and places.

• 5:44Ryan Holiday?

  Screw that, right? Like, does it actually matter to you in a tangible way, whether Napoleon was a real person or a literary character, right? No, the insights that you can learn from his life, the strategic lessons, of course, even if they were fictional, would obviously the fact that they are real makes them more worthy of study. But my point is, like, you don't study Franco-Prussian battles unless you're going to become a general or something. You study them to learn about hubris, to learn about celerity and hustle, to learn about creativity and courage, right? To also learn about overreach and stupidity and the power of alliances, right? We study history to learn those things.

• 6:26Ryan Holiday?

  Like, again, you mispronounce Chrysippus, or, you know, sometimes I'll refer to Epictetus as a Roman slave, and someone will give me an angry email, "Actually, he's Greek." It's like, okay, but he lived in Rome and was owned by a Roman. I think we're getting into a rather pointless conversation. What matters is what you learn from Epictetus and his example, right? I bet if you'd asked Stockdale, if you said, "Oh, you know, the Roman slave Epictetus," he wouldn't have been like, "Oh, I think he's Greek," right? No, what he took from Epictetus was the power of the courage and the fortitude and the strength and the lessons, and that's what he applied there in the Hanoi Hilton. That's why we're studying the Stoics, and that's how we learn.

• 7:09Ryan Holiday?

  This is how I try to teach my kids. This is what I try to study. The trivia is not important, right? The trivia is not important. What matters is internalizing the moral lessons. Epicurus would say that vain is the word of the philosophers, does not heal the suffering of man. I would say vain are most facts that you're not going to apply and use, not even in your work, but to be a better human being. That's the purpose of this study. That's the purpose of this philosophy. That's what I try to talk about here on this podcast, and it's a wonderful reminder, again, from a really smart person. Seneca was brilliant. He knew lots of facts. He knew all those things about the Odyssey. But what he really wanted to learn how to do, what the study of his life was, was how to be like Odysseus.

• 7:53Ryan Holiday?

  Although I think when you read Emily Wilson's translations, you're also reminded how not to be like Odysseus, because I saw in her translation that he was much more of a flawed character than perhaps I'd felt early on in my readings of that wonderful poem slash play. Again, is it a play? Is it a poem? Who gives a shit? What matters is what you do with it. And I do urge you to read it and read it for the right reasons. And read all the things that you read for the right reasons, just to become a better human being in the world.

• 8:29Ryan 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.