Do This. It’s Enough. | Ask Ds

As John Adams (detailed in David McCullough’s amazing biography) wrote in his own old age, “You are not singular in your suspicions that you know but little. The longer I live, the more I read, the more patiently I think, and the more anxiously inquire, the less I seem to know…” Yet, Adams, like Marcus, still found himself returning to a set of ageless, universal principles. They found themselves boiling things down to their essence, into real and practical ‘epithets for the self’ as Marcus called them. Adams came up with these three commands, which he passed down to his granddaughter Caroline: “Do justly. Love mercy. Walk humbly. This is enough…”P. S. “Summum Bonum” is a phrase from Cicero that means “The Highest Good,”which for the Stoics meant pursuing a life of virtue. “Just that you do the right thing,” Marcus reminds us, “the rest doesn’t matter.” In a world full of selfishness, corruption, and pain, we need that reminder now more than ever. It’s why we created the “Summum Bonum” medallion for you to carry around in your pocket and remember that no matter the circumstance, no matter how dire or desperate the situation, virtue is always the answer. Grab yours today!✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube See 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. We're 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?

  Do this, it's enough. Marcus Aurelius didn't just study philosophy when he was young. He didn't just pick a set of beliefs and stick with them. No, to him, philosophy was a lifelong study, a process that he committed to. That's why even as an old man, he was seen famously headed off to attend the lectures from Sextus the philosopher. And while this certainly made him quite educated and quite smart, we can also imagine something else happening after so many years of reading and discoursing and meditating. What undoubtedly happened is that as he got older, the more he learned, the closer he came to understanding Socrates's humility, the sense that the more one learns, the less certain they are, they know. As John Adams, detailed in David McCullough's amazing biography, wrote in

• 1:35Ryan Holiday?

  his own old age, "You are not singular in your suspicions that you know but little. The longer I live," he said, "the more I read, the more patiently I think, and the more anxiously I inquire, the less I seem to know." Yet Adams, like Marcus, still found himself returning to a set of ageless, universal principles. They found themselves boiling things down to their essence, into real and practical epithets for the self, as Marcus called them. Adams himself came up with just three commands, which he passed on down to his granddaughter Caroline. "Do justly, love mercy, walk humbly." "This is enough," he said. "My task is to be good," Marcus Aurelius wrote. The more you learn, the longer

• 2:18Ryan Holiday?

  you live, the more you understand that that is your job too. And doing that is more than enough.

• 2:30Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another Thursday episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. If you listened to my Sunday episode back in the fall, I had this crazy couple of days where I flew down to LA, I interviewed Arnold Schwarzenegger, I drove up to Ojai, California, I had dinner with a former podcast guest and friend, the comedian Pete Holmes. Then I did a talk for this amazing group called Mastermind Talks, Jason Gannard and his wife Candace. I have known them since they started Mastermind Talks. I went before my book Growth Hacker Marketing came out for the first time. I went the second time when Obstacle is coming out. I've been many times over the years. He's been awesome to me. So I did a long Q and A there, which is what I'm going to bring you a chunk of

• 3:14Ryan Holiday?

  today. Then I went back down, did an event with Robert Greene, flew home for the night, then flew to Seattle to do another event with Robert Greene. So I told that whole story about how you sort of stay stoic and calm amidst a crazy overwhelming travel schedule. So that was me talking about it. If you want to hear me in the middle of that craziness, that's where I am in today's episode. I did about an hour, hour and a half Q and A with a bunch of these interesting entrepreneurs from all over the world. Some are authors, some are in e-commerce, some are influencers, some are fitness people, some are, some run call centers. They're just all sorts of interesting entrepreneurs, really nice folks.

• 3:57Ryan Holiday?

  And if you haven't been to Mastermind Talks, you should. I think they're taking a break this year, but I'm sure you can get on the waitlist for next year if you're thinking about coming. Thanks to Jason for sending over the audio of this, and thanks to everyone in the audience who asked some very interesting questions. I'll be bringing pieces of that over the next couple of months, but I'll give you a chunk of some stoic themed questions right now.

• 4:27Speaker 01

  Hi Ryan.

• 4:28Ryan Holiday?

  Hi.

• 4:29Speaker 01

  Great talk today. And what I was hearing throughout a lot of it was a message of authenticity and just kind of being like your weird authentic self.

• 4:42Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 4:43Speaker 01

  And I also heard you talk about partnership revenue, you know, and advertising income. As an influencer myself, I realize that that's a great deal of how you survive as an influencer, how you pay your bills, or at least how you pay your employees' bills.

• 4:59Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 5:01Speaker 01

  And affiliates and partners, a lot of times don't like the weird. Like, they, they want to know that I'm gonna write, for example, or do a video or a podcast about biohacking or nutrition or something like that. And when I wake up in the morning and I just want to be my weird authentic self, and I think, gosh, I can do the Kevin Kelly 1,000 True Fans thing, and if I talk about whatever I want to talk about, people are gonna come along for the ride.

• 5:24Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 5:25Speaker 01

  So I'll talk about God, or education, or family, or parenting, or frigging like music, or pickleball. And I've started to do that a lot more over like the past year and a half. And partnership revenue has plummeted. Affiliates are dropping like flies. Like, all the people that would normally want me to be an influencer are running for the hills because I'm being my weird authentic self. Whereas I don't care, because like, I can live on like 60,000 bucks a year like a king in Spokane, Washington. I've got like, you know, 27 employees and my partnerships manager is like driving home in the evening to be with her baby and her two-year-old, thinking, gosh, how am I gonna feed my family tonight?

• 6:06Speaker 01

  Because Ben's talking about like pickleball instead of, you know, what this partner expects him to be talking about. Like, have you ever thought about how to deal with that?

• 6:14Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, it's a, it's a tension, for sure. I mean, I try to go like, do I own the platform or does the platform own me? Right? And so, it would be a shame if success, you know, creating whatever it is that you do... It's a shame that success is like you then don't get to say what you want or what gets you excited. At the same time, if you drive the audience away, then you know, that doesn't work either. So I, you know, you sort of, you understand what the audience is interested in, but you can't be captured by the audience. You also can't, you know, there's a, I think that's what he was saying in the Iron Maiden quote I was talking about. So you also have a deal with the audience that you're like, this is what we came here for. And so I think there's a, there's a tension.

• 6:58Ryan Holiday?

  I don't know, like the perfect way to do it. I try to create additional channels where I talk about the thing. So it's like parenting is obviously a big part of my life because I have kids. So if I hijack Daily Stoic and make it the Stoic parent, well, that's a little self-absorbed because not everyone has kids. And so they're like, this isn't for me anymore. So I spun off a second thing, like I have my personal socials, which a lot of people follow that have also followed this, but not all of them. So I try to create separate channels and then I go, you know, what's the show we're putting on here? What's the show we're putting on here? What's the show we're putting on here? But I would say one, one thing about affiliates, advertisers, et cetera.

• 7:44Ryan Holiday?

  I have found is like, I tried to think about like, okay, I'm, I have this space at the bottom of the emails. There's the, you know, pre-roll or mid-roll stuff on the pocket. There's all this space, right? And that's clearly worth something to these people. They're not, they're buying a space for a hundred dollars. They're clearly making more than a hundred dollars where they wouldn't be paying for it. Right? So there's a multiple, right? That space is worth more than what people are paying for it. Just the, the advertisers capturing that. And so one of the things that I got into earlier, Daily Stoic, not wanting to do a lot of advertising is just making stuff that I thought the audience would be interested in. And then using the space to sell my own things. Right? So like we have challenge coins and we, we have, of course, we have stuff that we make.

• 8:29Ryan Holiday?

  And so I, it's like, I sell the leftover inventory. Or obviously what you see with Substack, some of these other platforms where the people are paying for the content itself. And then, you know, they're subsidizing the people who are just getting it for free. And so I think there's, I think if you create multiple revenue streams or ways of monetizing the stuff, then you have your, first off, harder to cancel or harder to, you're more resilient if one kind of market crashes and then another's popular. So I, I think having that robustness is also good.

• 9:05Speaker 02

  Thank you so much for feeding us. Thank you. I want to ask you a question. Every publisher and agent knows right now, you're bankable. So what was, what was the thing that made your, the publisher, your very first book, say, yeah?

• 9:22Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, it was a sort of a trendy of the moment thing. That's why they were excited about it. That's a bias of publishing is they want like what's popular right now. I had a plan for how I was going to segue from that of the moment popularity to what I wanted to write about. But there was a couple of things. I had a platform that it wasn't enormous, but I had like a small email list where people really liked my stuff. And then I also had a big network of other authors who were vouching for me. I've worked for all these different authors. And so I had, I, if I didn't have a track record selling my own writing, I had a track record that I knew how to move books, right?

• 10:05Ryan Holiday?

  And so showing that, hey, this person understands that just having an idea is like 20% of the thing the publisher is buying. You know, they wanted, they knew I could deliver a book because I'd been a research assistant, right? They knew that I understood book marketing and they knew I understood marketing in general and that I had people who would help me in that process. So showing that, yeah, you're not this sort of lone wolf that no one's heard of before, you know, that you're like, hey, this is what I'm bringing with me.

• 10:39Speaker 03

  Hi.

• 10:39Ryan Holiday?

  Hi.

• 10:39Speaker 03

  A question. So one of the things that really resonated with me in your talk was like playing the long game and finding that blue ocean. But also I find like with finding the blue ocean, there's this moment of like, hey, wow, this is paradise. Or also like, is this shark infested and everyone knew about it? And I just didn't know.

• 10:53Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 10:53Speaker 03

  So what is your process in grounding within yourself of like knowing you're playing the long game versus just being stubborn and like acting out of fear of like some cost?

• 11:02Ryan Holiday?

  Right, yeah, it could be that people have already, you know, checked that space out and it's a dead end. I think, so I found something interesting with Stoicism. So there were not very many books that, first off, the Stoics weren't selling particularly well, and then there really weren't any books about Stoicism that were selling well. I saw it both as a space that, you know, having been so affected by the work, I knew it would work for, like, I knew it deserved a bigger audience. At the same time, I knew from whenever I tried to talk to people about it, that it was like immediate disinterest. Like, the word stoic in English is about as negative a connotation as you could get. Philosophy is about as, you know, impractical and inaccessible

• 11:47Ryan Holiday?

  to people as a, you know, academic concept could be, maybe other than physics, right? Like, so I bumped into that wall a bunch of times. So I understood that the reason that it wasn't popular was because of these things. So when I went to write a book about Stoicism, my first book was The Obstacles Away, the word stoic maybe appears like three times in that whole book. And most of those are at the end of the book. Like, it's a book about solving problems through which stoic philosophy is a lens for doing it. So it's not a book about stoic philosophy. It became one later when it fit into this sort of larger universe, and then the thing was popular.

• 12:31Ryan Holiday?

  But I understood that that's what I was up against. And every book that I've done since, I've started from that frame of reference, which is like, number one, people don't like books. Number two, there are already a lot of books out there that people do read, you know, like, people don't read new books. Like, so how do you get them to care about this thing? Understanding that that's like a big uphill climb. So...

• 12:52Ryan Holiday?

  It's funny, now that my books have worked, obviously, and I see the proposals, people are like, you know, this is the next Obstacle's Way. I've seen other people try to sort of get in that space. And with few exceptions, most of the other books about Stoic philosophy, ones written by smarter people than me, you know, more qualified people than me, have not sold particularly well. And I would say largely, it's not that the books aren't good, some of them are quite good, it's that they're just assuming that people are interested in this topic. And actually, the same sort of obstacles and reservations exist. And they don't, they just, like, I'm a nerd about philosophy. I would read all those books, but I am in a small minority. And so I think a lot of times, people see a big market and they go, no one's taking advantage of that. And they

• 13:35Ryan Holiday?

  don't think of why it's been left fallow or ignored. And if you can sort of step out of your own skin and think about what people's hesitations have been, you know, what are the impediments, like, what are the barriers? And then whatever you're doing is designed to get over that. I think that's a really important way to break. And you don't just go, oh, this is uninhabited. It's like, it's uninhabited for a reason. And why, how am I, how is it going to go differently for me?

• 14:14Ryan 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.