Rule The Empire Between Your Ears | We Reap What We Sow

Epictetus, who was a slave, looked around at Nero’s court and saw rich and famous men who were less free than he was. Because they spent all their energy trying to get more than what they had, because their happiness was tied up in what other people thought, because their fears were based on things that were not up to them. In The Girl Who Would Be Free (our fable based on the life of Epictetus), Epictetus’ father says that to be great, we first have to focus on “the empire between our ears.” He’s referring to our thoughts, our emotions, our urges, our desires, our fears…our own choices. In The Girl Who Would be Free, Ryan Holiday’s beautifully illustrated, all-ages fable, we learn how Epictetus went from a slave to one of the most influential philosophers of all time. This book, along with The Boy Who Would Be King, are great for helping explain Stoic philosophy to your kids. You can pick up signed and personalized copies here.---And in today's excerpt from The Daily Stoic, Ryan reminds us to detangle ourselves from toxic uncontrollable situations. As Seneca quotes "Crimes return to their teachers" giving us insight on treating people how we want to be treated.✉️ 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. On Friday, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from The Daily Stoic, my book, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Heart of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful collaborator, translator, and literary agent, Stephen Hanselman. So today, we'll give you a quick meditation from the Stoics with some analysis from me, and then we'll send you out into the world to turn these words into works.

• 0:40Ryan Holiday?

  "Rule the empire between your ears. It'd be nice to be the head honcho. It would be cool to be the owner. It'd be nice to look out over a vast bit of territory and say, 'This is all mine.' This is the fantasy. This is the ambition that drives so many of us, that drove so many in the ancient world, too. But as the Stoics noted, when we pursue power, control, or money, we end up neglecting what's right in front of us. Epictetus, who was a slave, looked at Nero's court and saw rich and famous men who were less free than he was, because they spent all their energy trying to get more than what they had, because their happiness was tied up in what other people thought, because their fears were based on things that were not up to them. In The Girl Who Would Be Free,

• 1:22Ryan Holiday?

  our fable based on the life of Epictetus, Epictetus's father says that to be great, we have to first focus on the empire between our ears. He's referring to our thoughts, our emotions, our urges, our desires, our fears, our own choices. You have to understand that if we rule this, then we are the head honcho, then we are the owner, then we do control and amends territory. We're more powerful than many emperors, many conquerors, and many billionaires. We're as free as it's possible to be." I'm actually just so proud of that book, The Girl Who Would Be Free. I did The Boy Who Would Be King early in the pandemic. I did The Girl Who Would Be Free later in the pandemic. The idea was like, how do I tell the story of Stoicism?

• 2:06Ryan Holiday?

  For all audiences, but I was really writing to my, my own two young boys. And the books have been really, really cool and, and people have loved them. I was just signing a bunch of copies downstairs at the painted porch. You can grab them there or you can go to store.dailystoic.com. I think we have a deal where if you buy the signed copy of one, you get the other one like 75% off, something like that. I'll link to that in today's show notes. Check them out. We reap what we sow. This is the October 27th entry in the Daily Stoic.

• 2:47Ryan Holiday?

  Crimes often return to their teachers. This is from Seneca's play Theestes, which is a dark, disturbing play, to put it mildly, but a fascinating read. It's ironic that Seneca would have one of his characters utter this line because as we know, for many years, Seneca served as a tutor and mentor to the Emperor Nero. And while there is a lot of evidence that Seneca was in fact, a positive moral influence on this deranged young man, even at the time, some of Seneca's contemporaries found it strange that a philosopher would serve as the right-hand man to such an evil person. They called him the tyrant teacher. And just as Shakespeare taught in Macbeth, bloody instructions which being taught return to plague the inventor.

• 3:32Ryan Holiday?

  Seneca's collaboration with Nero ultimately ends with the student murdering the teacher. And it's something to think about when you consider whom you work with and whom to do business with in life. If you show a client how to do something unethical or illegal, might they return the favor to an unsuspecting you later? If you provide a bad example to your employees, to your associates, to your children, might they betray you or hurt you down the road? What goes around, comes around, is the saying. Or karma, the notion we have imported from the East, teaches us a similar idea. Seneca paid the price for his instructions to Nero. And as has been true throughout the ages, his hypocrisy, avoidable or not, was costly.

• 4:17Ryan Holiday?

  And so too will yours be? There's a great tweet that came out March 12th, 2019.

• 4:25Ryan Holiday?

  That I that I think of often, it says, me reaping, ha, ha, fuck, yeah, yes. And then it says, me re, it says, me sowing, ha, ha, fuck, yes. And it says, me reaping, well, this fucking sucks. What the fuck? And then there is, of course, the other famous tweet that says, well, well, well, if it isn't the consequences of my own actions. As the expression now goes, right? Fuck around and find out. That's what happened to Seneca, right? Seneca rolled the dice, thought he could feed the monster, thought he could constrain Nero. He was exactly like a lot of the figures that I talked about in my podcast episode with,

• 5:10Ryan Holiday?

  with Tim Miller, the, the right wing political operative who watched how, who, who saw so many people convince themselves, said these sort of minor savior complexes, that they were very important, they were important enough, they could constrain Trump, or get something out of him, that it would be good for them in the short term. It always comes back to bite us, right? The consequences of our actions come back to us, crimes return to their teachers. You reap what you sow. And this was the biggest mistake of Seneca's life. It's a mistake I've made in my life. I thought I was different. I thought the rules wouldn't, you know, I thought it was different. I thought I could make it work.

• 5:55Ryan Holiday?

  I thought I was making a bargain that would work out, and it didn't. It never does. So we learn from the Stoics, not just what they tell us, what they teach us, what they write about, but the mistakes that they made in their life, right? Marcus Aurelius, his example shows us, hopefully, something about being a better parent. Seneca teaches us, you know?

• 6:19Ryan Holiday?

  Who to work for, who not to work for? How to detangle ourselves from clearly toxic, unresolvable, toxic, unchangeable situations. Seneca never, unfortunately, speaks about this explicitly or explicitly enough. He just sort of hints at it at his plays. But we can learn plenty from this example, and it's why I put it in The Daily Stoic. And it's just a reminder: crimes return to their teachers.