You Took The Job

The Emperor Hadrian’s life sometimes felt, as it does for all leaders, like an endless demand for favors. Letters came from across the empire asking for this and that. The Senate, the courts, his own family–everybody always seemed to need something. Naturally, he struggled under this burden. Naturally, he tried to create barriers and boundaries so he could do his job…and maintain some level of sanity amidst all the requests.💪 Visit store.dailystoic.com/pages/leadership to sign up for in the Daily Stoic Leadership Challenge before September 25th.✉️ 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.

• 0:03Ryan 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?

  You took the job. The Emperor Hadrian's life sometimes felt, as it does for all leaders, like an endless demand for favors. Letters came from across the empire asking for this and that. The Senate, the courts, his own family, everybody always seemed to need something. And naturally, he struggled under this burden. Naturally, he tried to create barriers and boundaries so he could do his job and maintain some level of sanity amidst all the requests. Once, on an imperial tour in some distant province, a woman darted out from the crowd and blocked his path, asking for help with some now-forgotten issue. Hadrian tried to put her off. "I haven't got the time," he said, attempting to move past her. "Well, stop being emperor,"

• 1:15Ryan Holiday?

  then the woman shouted after him. Hadrian paused, turned back, and helped her. She was right. This was his job, after all. And it can be so easy to forget this, to feel imposed on, even resentful of it. But guess what? You did take the job. You get the perks. You don't get to shirk the responsibilities. Marcus Aurelius sometimes struggled in the mornings, as we've written. He wanted to stay under the warm covers. He did not want to rise up and tackle the overwhelming correspondence and meetings and demands that awaited him. But he talked himself through it. He reminded himself that that was the job, that that was what duty and nature demanded of him. And so must we.

• 1:56Ryan Holiday?

  This is the kind of leadership that I am trying to work on myself. It's one of the things we talk about in the Daily Stoic Leadership Challenge, which I think is one of the best things we've done. We actually got some advice from a two-star general in the Air Force. So you can listen to that as part of the challenge. One of the best interviews, I think, that we've done. Lots of great lessons in there. And there's a reason so many people have taken and loved the challenge. It's a six-plus-week course on leadership, but it's really digestible. It won't overload you, and it'll give you actual tangible stuff you can use. I can't wait for you to check it out. Go to dailystoic.com/leadership, or you can check out the Leadership Challenge at store.dailystoic.com, and I'll link to it in today's show notes.