There Is No Better Time Than Now | Ask DS

At last the day came and you made a New Year’s resolution that would get rid of the whole base evil. And then the next year came around and you were doing the same old evil thing. Can you remember the surprise and disappointment that gripped you when you discovered that…after all that you had done through your resolutions to get rid of it—the old habit was still there? And out of amazement you found yourself asking, “Why could I not cast it out?”So we’ll leave you today by putting a challenge in front of you. For the last four years, we have been doing what we call the Daily Stoic New Year New You Challenge—a set of 21 actionable challenges, presented one per day, built around the best, most timeless wisdom in Stoic philosophy. These aren’t pie-in-the-sky, theoretical discussions but clear, immediate exercises and methods you can begin right now to spark the reinvention you’ve been trying for. We’ll tell you what to do, how to do it, and why it works. From these challenges, you will:✓ Learn to stop procrastinating and avoiding the change you truly desire✓ Build new habits that form a strong foundation for change✓ Abandon the harmful habits that are dragging you down✓ Strengthen your character, becoming a more virtuous version of yourselfAnd above all: You will find out just how much you are capable of. Every morning, the email arrives in your inbox, and it presents you with a choice. You can do the harder thing, you can do the challenge. Or you can follow the drift of least resistance—you can open the email and leave it at that. Or worse…you can ignore this call right now and not sign up at all. Which way will you go? In today's Ask Daily Stoic, Ryan talks stoics and answers questions in part 2 of 3 Q&A for 60 students at The United States Military Academy (USMA), also known metonymically as West Point or simply as Army. West Point is a United States service academy in West Point, New York. It was originally established as a fort, since it sits on strategic high ground overlooking the Hudson River 50 miles (80 km) north of New York City. It is the oldest of the five American service academies and educates cadets for commissioning into the United States Army. The 2024 New Year New You Challenge officially begins on Monday, January 1st. Stop delaying. Head over to dailystoic.com/challenge and sign up NOW! Let’s go.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, 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.

• 0:06Ryan 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. While 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.

• 0:52Ryan Holiday?

  "There is no better time than now. We all have vices, we all have flaws, we all have things we know we want to change. But what happens? Nothing happens." This is true for everyone, even Martin Luther King Jr. "One day, King said, 'We tell ourselves, 'I'm going to rise up and drive this evil out. I know it's wrong, it's destroying my character and embarrassing my family.' But then," he says, "at last the day came, and you made a New Year's resolution that would get rid of that evil. And then the next year came around, and you were still doing the same old thing.'" Can you remember the surprise and disappointment that gripped you when you discovered that? "After all that you had done through your resolutions to get rid of it, the old habit was still there," he said, "and out of amazement, you found yourself asking, 'Why should I not? Why could I not

• 1:37Ryan Holiday?

  cast it out?'" Seneca reminds us that all fools have one thing in common: they're always getting ready to start. They're always getting ready to change, and then, and then, and then. They never do. They never do the work. And rooting out evil in your life takes work. Same with losing five pounds, quitting smoking, breaking the smartphone addiction, drinking less, reading more. And to that end, it's worth repeating Epictetus's question, "How much longer are you going to wait before you demand the best for yourself? You must stop delaying. You must get started today, right now. A new year is upon you. Is there a better time than now? No, there is not. So let's go. And look, for the last five years, I've been struggling with my own issues, as I think everyone has. And I come around to the New Year's and I try to make a commitment.

• 2:22Ryan Holiday?

  I try to challenge myself to actually do something about the things that I want to change. And that's where the New Year, New You Challenge came, the Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge. It's 21 actionable challenges, one per day, built around the most timeless wisdom in Stoic philosophy. They're designed to help you do what King was talking about, what Epictetus was talking about, rising up, driving out the bad, taking action to become the person you're capable of being. It's not theoretical stuff, but real, practical exercise, stuff you actually have to do. And yes, challenges that are hard. That's the point. That's what we're trying to start the year off with. And I'd love to see you do that with me. I'd love for us together to be reflecting a few months from now, a year from now and go, "I did it. I cast it out." I'd love for you to join us. You can sign up right now at dailystoic.com/challenge.

• 3:06Ryan Holiday?

  Or if you're thinking about doing Daily Stoic Life, you can join that and you get this challenge for free as part of that membership. So I'd love to see you either in Daily Stoic Life, at dailystoiclife.com, or just do this challenge. Start small. Don't make it more complicated than it needs to be. dailystoic.com/challenge. I'll see you in there.

• 3:37Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. So back in March, I gave a talk at West Point, virtually. I spoke to this mass media and American politics class, which I was very honored to do. They'd actually assigned my book, Trust Me, I'm Lying, which is inconceivable to me that back when I was writing that book in my little apartment in New Orleans, Louisiana, that it would be part of the curriculum at the preeminent military school in the world.

• 4:05Ryan Holiday?

  Basically, all of this would have been unreal and unbelievable to me. And so in today's episode, I'm bringing you a chunk of that Q and A with some of the cadets. And I hope you enjoy. It's always a privilege for me to talk to the young men and women in uniform or soon to be in uniform. And I've always liked talking to college classes. So here's me talking Stoicism, media, politics, a bunch of stuff that's all happening in the world. I hope you enjoy this little chat.

• 4:38Speaker 01

  Back on your website from earlier, I remember seeing temperance, moderation, self-control. It's like, oh, discipline, that's, that's a new word. So that's, that's interesting to kind of know, like, that's kind of how it's morphed.

• 4:51Ryan Holiday?

  Well, in, in the, the preferred translation of Marx, really, I said, I love the Gregory Hayes translation. He tends to render it as self-discipline, or sometimes does. And so, you know, that was a decision that ultimately I made. And, and there was a bunch of different ways I was going to title or present that book. You know, I was going to talk about self-discipline, or that's what was going to be the packaging, or I was, there's a, there's an Eisenhower quote that I love that's in the intro of the book, but he says, "Freedom is better defined as the opportunity for self-discipline." Right? And, and to me, that captures what the virtue of sophrassine, or discipline, or self-discipline is really about, that it's the things that you can do, but choose not to. Right?

• 5:35Ryan Holiday?

  Military discipline is, I think, different than the virtue of discipline. The discipline that is imposed on you, right? Or, or drilled into you is of course, very important. Is it the same as, as the virtue of discipline? I don't know. My, my argument in the book is that we're talking about, about the, the discipline that you enforce on yourself. And oftentimes, when I sign the book, I, I underline just the word self, because I think it's so easy to think of discipline as this sort of standard to which we hold the world and ourselves, as opposed to what I think it rightly is, which is the standard that, that we hold ourselves to. This going back to the, the very basis of Stoicism, the dichotomy of control. You control yourself, you don't control other people.

• 6:20Ryan Holiday?

  And so, discipline is a virtue that, that primarily emanates from, from inside the house, so to speak.

• 6:27Speaker 01

  And it's interesting, like, because thinking about how Marcus Aurelius, he has these lines, I forget where it is, but he's saying, you know, when someone is mean or rude, you know, that's, that's just their job, like, that's their fate, which is very different than from like how he reflects on his own sort of, what he seems to think of as like failings or struggles.

• 6:54Speaker 01

  In terms of like my students with the, you know, as their learning discipline, you know, sort of that, that, that external discipline force on them, what might they take from, from like the virtue of discipline and sort of carry forward?

• 7:10Ryan Holiday?

  Well, to go back to that idea from Marcus, I think Marcus's best line about this idea is, tolerant with others, strict with yourself, right? And I think that's, that's a great way to think about it. As far as the discipline that we, we are instructed in or taught in or pick up as part of our profession, I'm not saying there's no value in it. There's of course, an immense amount of value and especially when you're young, this is part of how you are trained in things. So it becomes a muscle memory. You're, you're being taught to do something that's perhaps not natural or not the, the way that most people act or think, because what you're trying to do is inherently not natural. Right? Military discipline is there to support you and edify you

• 7:55Ryan Holiday?

  in the most unnatural moments that there are, right? Whether we're talking about combat or moments of, of sort of stress or very high stakes. And so being instructed in that virtue early on, being taught the discipline, you know, it becomes sort of a part of you. I, I learned to write as the research assistant for another writer. And that discipline, that practice, the way that my mentor, Robert Greene, did that is today, the way that I do it. Now I, I now have the ability for that to be self-discipline as opposed to external discipline. And I have the ability to tweak and adjust and put my own spin on things. But I'm still more or less following the same practices that I learned when I was 19, 20, 21 years old

• 8:38Ryan Holiday?

  about how writing works, how reading works, how thinking works, how research works. You, you learn these things early on, you pick up habits until they become just sort of part of who you are.

• 8:49Speaker 01

  You know, sort of thinking about the, the discipline and then, um, you know, them in particular as, as soldiers who, uh, I believe 80% is the number that go into combat arms from West Point and that can be quite, um, you know, life or death struggles where, where split second decisions, um, really make a difference. Uh, in terms of like stoicism, what, what, what might that sort of help them?

• 9:15Ryan Holiday?

  Well, you know, I, I spoke at the Naval Academy a few months ago and, and right as I was coming up there, I was reading Walter Lord's incredible biography or, or sort of, I guess it's not really a biography, it's a narrative nonfiction book, but one, he's one of the great nonfiction writers of all time. He wrote a book about the sinking of the Titanic and then he wrote a book about the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Pearl Harbor one being called A Day of Infamy. And, and he has this section in the book where this guy, I'm forgetting his name, he had literally just graduated from the Naval Academy and he's on his first posting on a ship in Pearl Harbor and, uh, you know, they're being bombed, they're sort of trapped below deck, you know, taking cover and the guy that's on the deck,

• 9:57Ryan Holiday?

  you know, shooting the machine gun is, um, you know, is, is killed and he has to send someone up to fill that spot. And he says, you know, in an instant, I understood everything they were teaching us at Annapolis, the training and the drills and the gold braids and the plebe week. And, you know, all, he was like, I understood it in an instant because he asked these people to go and they went, right? Like he, he was sending them into the worst environment you could possibly send a person in to fill in for a person who had just been killed in a surprise attack that no one yet even fully understood on a ship that was

• 10:38Ryan Holiday?

  literally on fire. And so, you know, in that moment, he understands the discipline, right? And, and I think we can understand this in more casual situations in our life, you know, we, we, we practice things, we prepare things. And so we can, in moments of stress or difficulty, big or small, we want to be able to say what Epictetus said the purpose of philosophy was. He says, you want to be able to say in any and every situation, this is what I trained for. That's what philosophy is about. That's what Stoicism was about. So Marcus Aurelius is suddenly thrust into absolute power where he's worshipped as a god. And he says to himself, you know, no role is so well suited to philosophy as this one. He's basically saying, this is what you trained for. And it's why it's one of the exceptions where

• 11:23Ryan Holiday?

  that absolute power does not corrupt absolutely. And so we can think about this in military situations, you know, you can think about this. I was driving here today and my, my seven-year-old was acting insane. And, you know, I had to say to myself, you know, what good is this philosophy you're studying if you're going to lose your temper at a scared child? Right? And so the whole point is this is what you trained for. This is what it's all about. Whether you're, you know, having to go, you know, over deck in the middle of a surprise attack, or you're, you know, you're just trying not to get upset by the traffic that you're stuck in, or you're trying not to, to, you know, react in a self-destructive fashion after you just got passed over for a deserved promotion. You know, this is what the philosophy is really about.

• 12:07Speaker 01

  One letter we read by Seneca, he talks about the sort of external habits of like sleeping on the ground, wearing dirty clothes, not getting haircuts, stuff like that. And so he's talking about like, the sort of the physical habits that, that people might show. Do you think, like, does modern Stoicism have, or do you have any sort of habits like that that stem from the mental?

• 12:34Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. So that practice from Seneca, I think it's really important. You know, he's not being blasé about poverty. The reason Seneca is practicing this poverty, he said, was to, to be able to say to himself, is this what you're afraid of? And so later, I mean, I think it's too late in Seneca's case, but later, when he has to go to Nero and say, you can have it all back. You can have, you can confiscate my entire fortune, but this is, this is beyond the pale for me and I'm out of here. That's why Seneca was practicing those things, right? So he wasn't afraid. And I interviewed, in this room, I interviewed Congressman Adam Kinzinger, who was an Air Force veteran who did multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. And we were talking about, you know, the fear that so many congressmen and women

• 13:19Ryan Holiday?

  have or had about losing their job, about not being a congressman or congresswoman anymore, or a senator anymore, and how that prevents them from doing what they obviously know is the right thing. And for him, his point was, you know, if I'm going to be willing to, he says, you know, send men or women into combat, life or death situation, I have to be willing to risk my job when I think that that's... But that is a... I can imagine, risk, like, his practice risking his life is formative in the ability to risk your job. I'd love for that to be a more transferable skill than it was. It doesn't seem like the combat veterans have always done the right thing over the last couple of years politically.

• 14:01Ryan Holiday?

  But the idea of practice these, practicing these things physical, I'll give you an example. I told you at the beginning of this that I wasn't feeling really good. I got a horrible bout of food poisoning, which I woke up with on Saturday. And like, I had a talk last night that I had to do in person that was too late to reschedule or cancel. And part of what I thought about was like, look, when I get up and run, I don't feel like doing it, right? It's hard. But I know that there's like the limits in my head and what I feel in my body and what I'm actually capable of. And that this is going to be 40 minutes on stage, I can easily do that. And I might pay for it later, as we often do with exercise or physical activity. But like, I know what I'm capable of. And I know that I have cultivated

• 14:42Ryan Holiday?

  the muscle that does the thing you're capable of, but uncomfortable with doing. And I think that's a big, big part of the still of practice.

• 14:49Speaker 01

  I'm sure all of, all of us can relate to the running.

• 15:00Ryan Holiday?

  Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it. And I'll see you next episode.