Surprise People Like This | Powerful Life Lessons From Epictetus

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

• 0:02Ryan 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. On Tuesdays, we take a closer look at these Stoic ideas, how we can apply them in our actual lives. Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy.

• 0:29Ryan Holiday?

  Try to surprise people this way. Cato was a rich and powerful man. He came from a family that for generations had been rich and powerful in a caste society with all the privileges and norms that that entailed. And yet, Cato dispensed with most of this, at least in how he went about his day. He didn't dress in fancy clothes, he didn't support a large entourage. He liked to walk the streets of Rome, meeting his fellow citizens, being of use and helping them. As a politician, Cato traveled across the empire, again, without a large baggage train or advanced party to make sure he was treated with the respect accorded to his official position. Sometimes, arriving before the rest of his group, he would arrive in a small town and sit and wait, often without being recognized, sometimes

• 1:14Ryan Holiday?

  quietly enduring snubs or indignities from people who had no idea who he was. When his identity became known and that treatment suddenly changed, Cato would smile and remind them that not all future visitors would be Catos, not every Roman would be so understanding or low maintenance. Needless to say, this was all very surprising. One of Rome's greatest men, walking barefoot and bareheaded without fear or favor, a representative of Rome's great imperial might, being kindly and patient and respectful and prudent, this just didn't happen. Cato could have gotten away with so much worse. Indeed, he was entitled legally and culturally to all sorts of pretentiousness and deference.

• 1:57Ryan Holiday?

  Perhaps your job affords you similar privileges. Perhaps you are used to being treated a certain way. The measure of who you are is how lightly you wear these honors, how approachable you are. Be the kind of person that surprises people. They were so nice, I was so surprised at how easy they were to deal with. Be the kind of person that surprises other people with how interested you are in them, how much respect you treat them with, how little use you have for formalities or status symbols. You'll be amazed at the kind of respect this affords you in the long run, and how surprising this really is.

• 2:41Ryan Holiday?

  It's one of the most remarkable pairings in all of human history. The only analog I can think of is, is the time that Abraham Lincoln invited Frederick Douglass to a dinner at the White House. But the idea that Marcus Aurelius, the most powerful man in Rome, the emperor, his favorite philosopher would be a slave named Epictetus. And how does Marcus Aurelius get introduced to Epictetus? The same way that many of us in the thousands of years since have been introduced to him. Marcus Aurelius credits his beloved philosophy teacher, Risticus. He thanks him for, for everything that he gave him. He says, "For teaching me to read attentively, to not be satisfied with just getting the gist of things." And then he says, "And for introducing me to Epictetus's lectures and loaning me his own copy."

• 3:22Ryan Holiday?

  Almost 2,000 years ago, Risticus says, "Hey, you gotta check out this guy, Epictetus." And Risticus may have, in fact, studied under himself. Epictetus had been banished from Rome along with all the philosophers a generation or so before. And he sets up shop as this influential teacher and thinker. And that's how it comes to Marcus Aurelius, the philosopher king. Epictetus lives in the time of Seneca. He was in the same court. He would have seen Nero's administration from a very different angle. And this is something very powerful that we get from Epictetus. Epictetus doesn't have control of his body, doesn't have control of his wages or his freedom. And yet he looks around in Nero's service and he sees these very rich people who are ambitious.

• 4:06Ryan Holiday?

  Who are afraid, who are sycophants, who are addicted to pleasure. And, and he realizes that he might be freer than them. He sees a man sucking up to Nero's cobbler, trying to curry favor with the emperor by being overly complimentary to the man who makes his sandals. And Epictetus realizes that this guy is the real slave. Both of them are. He says, "You make yourself a slave to slaves." And so Epictetus has this very interesting understanding of what freedom is. For him, freedom is not a legal status. For him, freedom is how much control you have over your urges, over your decisions, over your actions, within the confines of your reality, right? That the emperor may be less free than Epictetus.

• 4:48Ryan Holiday?

  Epictetus understands that people who are whipsawed by their emotions, by their anxieties, by their fears, by their desires, by their ambitions, are not free. And so he has this definition then of freedom. He says, "Look, there's some things that are up to us, there's some things that are not up to us." This is the essence of Stoic philosophy, this, this dichotomy of control. And that comes to us from Epictetus. The Serenity Prayer, if you've ever heard it, ultimately traces its way back to this Greek slave. Epictetus eventually did become free and became a wonderful teacher of philosophy. He himself was instructed by a great Stoic named Musonius Rufus. And Musonius Rufus didn't have a cushy life either. He'd been exiled four times. So it's from Epictetus, we really get the idea of Stoicism as a philosophy of resilience,

• 5:30Ryan Holiday?

  of being able to look at whatever life throws at you, Epictetus says, and go, "This is what I trained for." And in fact, to see the obstacles and difficulties of life as something that life is throwing at you to train with. He says that when you face something difficult, when something doesn't go the way that you want it to go, you say to yourself, "Life has spared me with a strong sparring partner." He says, "This is how I become Olympic class material." And Epictetus becomes Olympic class as a result of what he goes through, which is not just slavery, but torture. He walks with a limp for the rest of his life because he'd been tortured by his master. So Epictetus knew difficulty, he knew pain, he knew loss, he knew injustice. And yet, what you hear in his lectures, what you see in his thinking, is a guy who's not

• 6:13Ryan Holiday?

  fazed by it, a guy who's, who was certainly bowed. And disabled by it, but not broken by it. No one could touch the spirit inside of him, the strength inside of him. And this is why Admiral Stockdale, who would spend seven years in the Hanover Hilton as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, so resonates with Epictetus's writings and how guided him and those fellow prisoners through that immense gauntlet that is this human experience. So from Epictetus, we learn how to deal with adversity and obstacles and difficulty. We learn to focus on what's in our control. We learn to make the best of the situation that we're in. And most of all, we learn that philosophy is not something you talk about, that you read about, it's something you do. He says, don't talk about your philosophy, embody it.

• 6:57Ryan Holiday?

  He says, a weightlifter doesn't show you their shoulders, they show you what they can lift. And that's what Stoicism was to him, a thing that helps you lift more, that helps you handle more, that makes you stronger, more adept, more skilled. He said, we're like an athlete. We don't label throws, good or bad, we catch it and throw it back. Life is this game and our job is to hit it back, to throw it back, to catch it, that everything's a catchable ball in its, its own way. And Epictetus didn't just talk this talk, he walked this walk, as essentially no one else ever has. And that's why it's so resonated with Marcus realist, because although Epictetus is on the very other end of the sociological spectrum, both he and Marcus are constrained. Both of them are dealing with something that they didn't choose. Both of them have a heavy burden on their shoulders.

• 7:40Ryan Holiday?

  For Marcus, it's extreme success, for Epictetus, it's extreme adversity. But they both saw this as a sparring partner, they both saw this as an opportunity to step up and be great. And that's how we have to think of Stoicism, what we, it should teach us. Running through Epictetus's philosophy is the idea of intellectual humility. And you can get the sense he was bumping up against, you know, the sort of best and the brightest of young Roman life. So a lot of egotistical kids, a lot of kids who'd been coddled, a lot of kids who thought they were geniuses. But he says, look, it's impossible to learn that which you think you already know. He says, it doesn't matter that you read, it matters what you read, it matters how you read. He says, don't just tell me that you've read books.

• 8:23Ryan Holiday?

  He says, show me what you have learned by thinking better. And he says, look, to get better, right? You have to be willing to look not good. He says, if you wish to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid. Not only can you not learn what you think you already know. If you're not willing to admit that you don't know something, right? If you're not willing to ask questions, if you're not willing to be bad at something, you will never get good at that thing. You will never get better. And I think this pertains to another important thing where Epictetus is saying, look, when you're grounded in life, when you know what's important, when you only focus on what you control, you don't care what other people think. You don't look outside yourself for approval. You don't care what your teacher thinks.

• 9:08Ryan Holiday?

  You don't care what your classmates think. You don't care what anyone thinks. You're focused on yourself. Epictetus has a great line that I think captures both how we're supposed to think about Stoic philosophy, but also what his writings serve best. And I actually have it on the back of the Daily Stoic Journal. He says, "Every day and night, keep thoughts like these at hand. Write them, read them aloud, talk to yourself and others about them." So, we want to think of Stoic philosophy, and particularly the writings of Epictetus, something you return to, you riff on, you're incorporating into your life, into your own thinking. And if you've read Meditations, and I have another video about that, Marcus Aurelius is doing this.

• 9:48Ryan Holiday?

  In fact, several quotes and exercises that survived to us from Epictetus come to us through Marcus Aurelius, who was so intimately familiar with Epictetus that he's citing and quoting him from memory. And there's an exercise that Marcus learns from Epictetus that he quotes specifically in his Meditations. He says, "When you tuck your child in at night, say to yourself, 'They will not make it till the morning.'" This wasn't because both Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius didn't care about their children. They were practicing the Stoic art of memento mori, that life is short, that we could go at any moment. And they were reminding themselves of this specifically with their family, because we can't take them for granted. He's basically saying, "Why are you rushing through this? Why are you not being present?" And so because of the adversity that he went through, because of how fragile he must

• 10:32Ryan Holiday?

  have seen life as, Epictetus gives Marcus Aurelius, and thus us centuries later, a reminder to not take a minute for granted, to know that we could go at any moment, to live life that we have in whatever form we have it. That memento mori, life is very short. "How much longer are you gonna wait?" Epictetus says, "Till you demand the best of yourself." And we're lucky that he had a- A student named Arian who records these lectures that survives to us. That's known as the Discourses. And then it's shortened into a thing called the Incoridion, which just means a handbook. Actually, there's a weapon connotation there that it's something you have for self-defense. That survives to us in these two forms. And that's what ultimately made its way from Epictetus to Risticus to Marcus Aurelius. And now hopefully to you.

• 11:17Ryan Holiday?

  Somebody pressed Epictetus on me when I was 20 years old. And now I am pressing Epictetus on you.

• 11:27Ryan Holiday?

  Every day I send out one Stoic-inspired email totally for free. Almost a million people all over the world. If you want to take your Stoicism journey to the next level, I would love for you to subscribe. It's totally for free. You can unsubscribe at any time. There's no spam. Just go to dailystoic.com/email. Love to see you there.