It’s About The Promises You Make To Yourself

We all make promises to ourselves—set goals, set standards, make plans. We don’t all keep them.🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast🎥 Watch top moments from The Daily Stoic Podcast on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and 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.

• 0:03Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength, insight, and wisdom in everyday 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, dailystoic.com.

• 0:30Ryan Holiday?

  It's about the promises you make to yourself. It's a famous story. It appears in all the great biographies of Theodore Roosevelt. Two of my favorites are "The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt" by Edmund Morris and "Mornings on Horseback" by David McCullough. It appears in "Discipline is Destiny," and "The Obstacle is the Way." A young asthmatic Teddy, smart but frail, is approached by his father, who tells him that although the boy has brains, he hasn't got the body, hasn't got the strength to make good on his intellectual gifts. "I'll make my body," Roosevelt said in response, and proceeded to lift weights, hike mountains, ride horses, wrestle, box, swim laps, and even learn judo. But there's another perspective on this story that we often glide over, for it was Teddy's

• 1:13Ryan Holiday?

  sister, Corinne, who witnessed the exchange between father and son. What struck her about it years later, she said, was that this was her brother's first important promise to himself. Watching him work out in the gym and on the porch of their brownstone, she was watching him fulfill that promise, keeping it to himself. And that's what the virtue of discipline is about. Self-discipline is about the promises you keep with yourself, and not just the physical ones. It's about doing what you say and not doing what you say you won't. The decision to wake up early, the decision not to reach for the bottle, the decision to show up on time, the decision to push yourself a little further even though your

• 1:54Ryan Holiday?

  body aches, the decision not to procrastinate, the decision to do your best. We all make promises to ourselves, set goals, set standards, make plans. We don't all keep them.