This Is How You Learn

"It was Seneca who told us how to learn from history and literature. Ignore the facts and figures, he said, focus on the moral lessons. Focus on what the characters can teach you about life. Plutarch, the great moral biographer of history, would take this lesson to heart. Unlike the biographers of our time, who publish big, thick books filled with footnotes and postmodern digressions, Plutarch was obsessed by what we could learn from the figures he wrote about."Ryan discusses the lessons you should be taking from the biographies you read in today's Daily Stoic Podcast. Preorder Lives of the Stoics, Ryan's new book, and receive one of the wonderful preorder bonuses that's available: http://dailystoic.com/preorder***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicSee 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, where each day we read a short passage designed to help you cultivate the strength, insight, wisdom necessary for living the good life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us at dailystoic.com.

• 0:29Ryan Holiday?

  This is how you learn. It was Seneca who told us how to learn from history and literature. Ignore the facts and figures, he said. Focus on the moral lessons. Focus on what the characters can teach you about life. Plutarch, the great moral biographer of history, would take this lesson to heart. As a little coincidence, his grandson was Marcus Aurelius, his philosophy instructor. Unlike the biographers of our time, who published big, thick books filled with footnotes and postmodern digressions, Plutarch was obsessed by what we could learn from the figures he wrote about. He wanted to look at Caesar's brilliance and his fatal ego, just as he wanted us to admire Cato's austere self-discipline

• 1:11Ryan Holiday?

  alongside his intractability and failure to compromise. He wanted to get to the essence of great men and women so that he might inspire us to follow in their footsteps. For neither is it histories we are writing, he said, but lives. Nor is there by any means display of merit or vice in the most outstanding actions, but often a trivial matter as well as a remark and some sort of joke. And remarks and jokes have offered a better illustration of character than clashes with the countless casualties in the biggest battalions and the sieges of cities. And it's on this model that I based Lives of the Stoics, The Art of Living from Xeno to Marcus Aurelius. While there is so much to learn from someone like

• 1:53Ryan Holiday?

  Seneca's letters, there is just as much to be learned in the way he lived. The remarks that Seneca made under the threat of death or while he was sent to exile have more sincerity in them than all of his polished essays and plays. And so it goes with Marcus Aurelius. What he did as emperor is just as important as what he meditated on the private pages of Meditations. And what of Zeno and Cleanthes when most of their writings didn't survive? All we have is their example, and we should study it. So for the last two years, I have been hard at work on Lives of the Stoics with my co-author, Steve Hanselman, who I collaborated with on The Daily Stoic, which put this very podcast and all the things you've consumed from me into motion. We poured over hundreds of ancient

• 2:38Ryan Holiday?

  texts and modern scholarship to bring you 26 biographies of the most important and most interesting Stoics. It's the only time and place they've ever been all put in one volume. They've never been as readable or as accessible as they are in this book. We study the lives of these men and women for the same reason that Plutarch, who happened to write about the Stoics himself, did, so that we can learn and follow in their footsteps. Lives of the Stoics: The Art of Living from Zeno to Marcus Aurelius is now available everywhere books are sold. For preorder, you can call at your local indie bookstore, you can do it on Amazon, you could do it on BNN. We've got all sorts of preorder bonuses, including a limited run of signed copies available at barnesandnoble.com. Go to

• 3:22Ryan Holiday?

  dailystoic.com/preorder for access to that. It's a huge help to the author if you preorder the book. It's how the publisher decides how many copies to print. It waits where the book debuts on a bestseller list. How many copies Amazon or your local bookstore will order has just a huge impact. So if you've gotten anything out of these emails over the years, if I can ask you a favor, please check out the new book, Lives of the Stoics: The Art of Living from Zeno to Marcus Aurelius. I'm really proud of it. It's going to take your study of Stoicism to a new level. You'll get a ton out of it. Check that out. dailystoic.com/preorder for the preorder bonuses. Preorder it anywhere books are sold,

• 4:02Ryan Holiday?

  and follow the instructions on dailystoic.com/preorder to redeem those bonuses. Thank you. Enjoy the book. Talk soon.