Don’t Be So Tough | Always Ask Yourself This Question

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

• 0:03Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Each day, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, illustrated with stories from history, current events, and literature to help you be better at what you do. And at the beginning of the week, we try to do a deeper dive, setting a kind of Stoic intention for the week, something to meditate on, something to think on, something to leave you with, to journal about, whatever it is you happen to be doing. So let's get into it.

• 0:44Ryan Holiday?

  Don't be so tough. There's no question that the Stoics were tough. Marcus Aurelius lived with chronic pain. Epictetus did too, after having made not so much as a sound when his master cruelly broke his leg. Both Seneca, who suffered asthma his whole life, and Cato bravely faced painful deaths. And countless other Stoics endured exile and loss and injury. So yes, the Stoics were tough. But people get this philosophy wrong when they think that to feel pain or want to avoid pain is weak. The writer Derek Thompson, responding to a certain masculine antipathy towards COVID safety protocols early on in the pandemic, called this COVID Stoicism. Now, he happened to be conflating Stoicism

• 1:27Ryan Holiday?

  the philosophy and Stoicism the word. But that's sort of the point. Lots of Stoics do this too. They don't want to look stupid, so they won't wear a helmet. They don't want to acknowledge trauma or emotion, so they stuff it down. They don't want to be vulnerable, so they close their hearts to other people. They don't want to admit they made a mistake, so they keep on making it. It's ironic. A fear of looking weak ends up making them very weak. We all do some version of this. We're too tough for our own good, too tough to change, too tough to protect ourselves, too tough to get help, too tough to learn, too tough to grow, too tough to be strong. And so we inevitably grow weaker as a result. Maybe not so weak that we become vulnerable to the whims of fate, but certainly enough that we risk never achieving our full potential and doing the things we were put on this

• 2:12Ryan Holiday?

  earth to do.

• 2:19Ryan Holiday?

  Always ask yourself this question.

• 2:24Ryan Holiday?

  Much of what we do and say during the course of a week is completely unnecessary. Meetings, material possessions, confrontations, pursuits, pointless distractions and problems. They take us away from tranquility and purpose. And a stoic cuts through these temptations and obligations by asking a simple question, a question that should lead you in your journaling and thinking this week. It is this: Before speaking, enacting, or buying something, just ask, is this a necessary thing? This is from today's entry in the Daily Stoic Journal, 366 Days of Writing and Reflection on the Art of Living by yours truly, Ryan Holiday. You can get it anywhere books are sold. I do it every single morning, including this morning.

• 3:09Ryan Holiday?

  And you can also buy a signed copy in the Daily Stoic store. But today's quotes, we have one long quote from Marcus Aurelius and one short one from Seneca. Marcus Aurelius says, "It is said that if you want to have peace of mind, busy yourself with little. But wouldn't a better saying be, 'Do what you must and as required of a rational being created for public life? For this brings not only the peace of mind of doing few things, but the greater peace of doing them well. Since the vast majority of our words and actions are unnecessary, corralling them will create an abundance of leisure and tranquility. As a result, we shouldn't forget at each moment to ask, is this one of the unnecessary things? But we must corral not only unnecessary actions, but unnecessary thoughts too, so needless

• 3:54Ryan Holiday?

  acts don't tag along after them." That's our translation from the Daily Stoic and the Daily Stoic Journal. Let me give you Gregory Hayes, which I also really like. He says, "If you seek tranquility, do less, or more accurately, do what is essential, what the logos of a social being requires, and in the requisite way, which brings a double satisfaction, to do less better." Because most of what we do and say, and it's not essential. If you can eliminate this, you'll have more time and more tranquility. Ask yourself at every moment, is this necessary? But we need to eliminate unnecessary assumptions as well, to eliminate the unnecessary actions that follow.

• 4:36Ryan Holiday?

  And then our second quote from Seneca is, "I was shipwrecked before I even boarded. The journey showed me this, but how much of what we have is unnecessary? And how easily we can decide to rid ourselves of these things whenever it's necessary? And thus never suffering the loss." That's Moral Letters 87:1. So to me, the pandemic has been a masterful teacher in this regard. How much of the things we thought were unchangeable parts of the job, fixed obligations due to this profession, or school, or whatever it was, that the pandemic said, "Nope, all of it's flexible. Most of it doesn't need to be done at all.

• 5:18Ryan Holiday?

  And most of the way that it is done can be done differently." And I feel like it's been this massive, you know, shared lifestyle experiment. And I found that so much of what I was doing was one of the unnecessary things. So much of what I was doing and saying and thinking and being a part of was not one of the essential things. So you really need to stop and ask yourself this question. Is what I'm doing necessary? Why am I doing it? Is it just the way people have always done it? Again, most of what we do and say and think is not necessary. It's not even particularly effective or well thought out. And so to question this is really important. And it's not just like, "Oh, you're privileged. You don't, you don't, you have a choice. That's why you're not doing it." It's actually not about privilege at all. In fact, it's the privileged people who can afford to do

• 6:03Ryan Holiday?

  more unnecessary things, more pointless things, right? It's actually, at this point in my career, I had the luxury of, you know, taking a lot of time off to, let's say, do press for a book. It was actually earlier in my career that the costs of agreeing to this pointless stuff were much higher, but I wasn't aware of it. I wasn't fully understanding of the opportunity cost, how much this was taking me away from writing, how much this was taking me away from relationships, how much this was just taking me away from recovering and refreshing so I could go back to my work from a fresher point of view. And this is what I wanted to leave you with today. Take a minute, stop, ask yourself, is what I'm doing necessary? How much of what I'm doing is unnecessary? And how can I eliminate some of that stuff?

• 6:47Ryan Holiday?

  So I can do the essential things better, right? I'm doing less, but I'm doing all my stuff better now. And that's, that's part of the new normal that I'm trying to protect coming out of the pandemic, and I hope that's true for you as well.

• 7:05Ryan Holiday?

  Thanks so much for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. If you don't know this, you can get these delivered to you via email every day. Check it out at dailystoic.com/email.

• 7:26Ryan Holiday?

  Thanks for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast.