It’ll Come For You Eventually | How To Read Better (10 Rules From Ryan Holiday)

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

• 0:05Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a Stoic-inspired meditation, designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life. Each one of these episodes is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women, help you learn from them, to follow in their example, and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. For more, visit DailyStoic.com.

• 0:55Ryan Holiday?

  It'll come for you eventually. His friends were horrified. His friends hoped he would be spared. They did not understand why it had come to this. Seneca, on the other hand, was much less surprised. "Who knew not Nero's cruelty?" he said to his weeping friends when the goons came to kill him. "After a mother and a brother's murder, nothing remains but to add the destruction of a guardian and a tutor." The tragic part of Seneca's end, though, as I say in Lives of the Stoics, is that he should have known better himself. It's not like he hadn't seen Nero's character early on, but he had stayed in Nero's service. At some level, he seemed to think it would go differently for him,

• 1:39Ryan Holiday?

  that he could control Nero and use him for good, or that he was smart enough to get free in time. In fact, he was not. "Crimes often return upon their teacher," Seneca would say in one of his plays. "Enablers eventually get what's coming to them. They delude themselves about their power. They expect figs in winter," to borrow Epictetus's phrase, "expecting something utterly impossible in the nature of the person they enabled." But that's not how it works. Sooner or later, it catches up with you. When you compromise with bad people, their consequences become yours. When you tolerate what you know is wrong, out of ambition, out of fear, out of wishful thinking, you eventually pay the price.

• 2:35Ryan Holiday?

  People who read a lot all have one thing in common. They spend a lot of time reading. Speed reading is mostly a scam. If you want to read a lot of books, you're gonna have to put a lot of time into it. And not just time, a lot of work into it. There are no secrets to this. There's just hard work. But there are some rules that great readers follow. And I've gotten to meet a lot of authors and editors and publishers over the years in the course of writing my own books and, of course, running my own bookstore, The Painted Porch. So that's what I want to talk about in today's episode. Some rules for reading that great readers follow, that I try to follow in my own practice. Because it's not just enough to read. You have to read well. You have to read the right books.

• 3:18Ryan Holiday?

  And you have to figure out how to process and retain and, of course, apply what you read. Great readers quit books that suck. And I say that as an author. If you want to quit my book, it's because I didn't do a good job making you want to go from page to page to page. There's a story from Epictetus. He overhears one of his students bragging about having read all of the works of Chrysippus. Chrysippus supposedly wrote 700 books. He was a very dense, very long-winded, very complex writer. And Epictetus says, "You know, if Chrysippus was a better writer, you'd have less to be proud of." And his point was soldiering through some crappy, boring, long-winded, conceited, contradictory book.

• 4:02Ryan Holiday?

  "That's not good for you, and it's not a good use of your time." So, great readers quit books. You don't quit a book just because you're a little confused or it's too hard. But the idea is, you can quit books that aren't doing it for you. You have to know that. And I quit books all the time. Sometimes I go back to them. Sometimes I realize I was the problem and not the book. But the point is, if you're finishing every book you've ever started, you're probably not reading as many books as you could read.

• 4:29Ryan Holiday?

  You should not feel shy about beating the hell out of the books that you read. As an author, I could tell you it's a sign that someone actually really respects the book. If it's pristine, if they're taking great care of it, that means they're not putting miles on it. I'll show you my copy of Meditations. Look at this. I've had to tape the cover back on. It's filled with notes, different flags. I have marked almost every page of this book over the years. I've got, this is just one of several copies. But the point is, I'm engaging with the material and I'm showing Marcus how important this book is to me. Obviously, he's not actually alive, but I'm showing the author the ultimate measure of respect by disagreeing where I disagree,

• 5:13Ryan Holiday?

  adding where I think it doesn't go far enough, underlining where I think it's great, and then taking the book with me, right? Taking it all over. This is why I made this leather edition, by the way. You can see I'm already beating the crap out of the leather edition I made. I wanted something that could stand up even better, but I want something that can travel with me. This copy's been all over the world with me and this copy has now, in the year since it's come out, been in quite a few places, in a lot of backpacks, a lot of suitcases. It's gotten wet at the beach, it's gotten wet by the pool, I've spilled food on it. But the point is, a great reader respects the book by not respecting the book.

• 5:57Ryan Holiday?

  Warren Buffett has said that the single greatest investment that he made was a book. He bought this copy of Benjamin Graham's The Intelligent Investor when he was like 19 years old. A paperback book there was probably a dollar, $2. It's now worth $100-plus billion. That's a pretty good return on investment. But again, I think about this. I bought this copy of Meditations for, I think, like $8 on Amazon in 2006. And it's changed the course of my life. It's returned that $10 many, many times over. You wouldn't be watching this YouTube channel had I not made that investment and I gone, "Oh, there's a free copy on the internet, maybe I'll do that." No, great readers, when they see a book they like, they buy it. They don't go, "Oh, I'll wait for it to come out in paperback, or maybe I'll borrow it." No, find a way to get the book. Buy it.

• 6:42Ryan Holiday?

  Consider the books that you buy an investment, because they are.

• 6:50Ryan Holiday?

  One of the best ways to understand the present is, of course, to study the past. And when you read the Stoics and you read about the Stoics, you get insights into the timelessness, the universalness, the commonalities between human beings that help you understand what is going on in this current moment. Reading about the clash between Cato and Caesar helps you understand the different types of political ambition, the different types of politicians that are out there. Reading about the Cataline conspiracy could give you insights into the insurrection on January 6. Reading about the Antonine Plague, which Marcus Aurelius lived through, gives you insight into COVID. Marcus Aurelius has a line in Meditations that we don't think of Meditations as being a plague book, but it is.

• 7:35Ryan Holiday?

  He says, "There's two types of pestilences. There's the plague that destroys your life, there's the one that destroys your character." He was talking about the cruelty, the indifference, the selfishness that people exhibited in his own time that we saw again in 2020, 21, 2022. And the point is, you can read the Stoics, you're reading about ancient Greece and ancient Rome, you're reading about people who lived so long ago that were seemingly inconceivably different from you, and then you realize they're not at all. So we read the Stoics and we read about the Stoics, we read the period they're in, so we can understand this current moment in a less partisan, in a less politicized, in a less recency bias kind of a way. That's one of the great things about reading philosophy and history.

• 8:19Ryan Holiday?

  There's a line attributed to Mark Twain, he probably never said it, but he said something like, "A person who doesn't read has no advantage over someone who does read." A real quote from General James Mattis, one of the students and practitioners of modern Stoicism. He says, "If you haven't read hundreds of books about what it is that you do," he said, "you're functionally illiterate." So it's not just, "Hey, I read every once in a while," but have you really done a deep dive about your profession? Mattis's point about warfare was like, "A lot of people have been doing this a long time, thousands of years." And for a soldier, for an officer, not to avail themselves of that knowledge, not to dive deep into that human experience is reckless and irresponsible for the people who are depending on you. So it's not just that you read.

• 9:02Ryan Holiday?

  You should read deeply, you should read a lot, you should read broadly. The point is, it doesn't matter that you can read, that you're good at reading. It matters, are you putting the muscle to it, the time into it, and reading a lot?

• 9:18Ryan Holiday?

  One of the things Marcus Aurelius says that he gets from his philosophy teacher, Risticus, he says, is to never be satisfied just getting the gist of things. He says, you have to really understand what's going on. You have to really, really understand it. If you're just okay getting the gist of it, read a tweet, or a Wikipedia page, or watch a documentary, or TikTok. Reading, by definition, is the opportunity to fully understand something, to read it in long form. You've gotta go long, you've gotta go in-depth. Don't be satisfied with getting the gist. Read the intros, look through the footnotes, read a review of the book, right? Read a scholarly work on it also. Read the Wikipedia page about it, watch videos about it also. You want to truly understand what's happening here,

• 10:01Ryan Holiday?

  and not just be satisfied with some vague, surface-level understanding.

• 10:09Ryan Holiday?

  It's not just that you read, but how are you taking notes? How are you recording and capturing that information? These are just some of my note cards. This is my commonplace book, all the notes I have taken on books that I've read. Each one of these, like here, this is the book that I'm working on now. All of these are notes that more or less came out of books that I read. I read a lot of books, right? It's not just that you read as a Stoic, but how are you organizing, contextualizing, reworking, working with that information? Think about what Marcus Aurelius's Meditations is. It's filled with quotes, it's filled with fragments of the works from the other philosophers, lines from plays that he liked.

• 10:49Ryan Holiday?

  So how are you organizing and connecting and recording this information? So you can draw on it, that it's not just trapped in these different books that you've read. You want to get it from the books, but then get it out of the books, right? And in that process, it also helps you get it into your actual life. So this is a really important practice for the Stoics. I have a whole video on how to keep a commonplace book. I'll link to that here, you can also check it out in the description.

• 11:16Ryan Holiday?

  I read a lot, it's sort of my job. You can't write without reading. But for almost 15 years now, once a month, I send out an email with my favorite book recommendations for that month. Books that I've been reading, books that I've been going through, books that changed my life, that inspired me, that I can connect to what's happening in the world. And you can sign up right now at ryanholiday.net/readinglist.

• 11:42Ryan Holiday?

  There's that great line from Epictetus, "You can't learn that which you think you already know." The point is to read people you disagree with, to seek out things that you don't know about. You're reading to learn that which you don't already know. There's this great line from the physicist John Wheeler. He says, "As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shoreline of ignorance." One of the things I love about books is they introduce me to things that I didn't know about. If I read another book about the Civil War, which I've read so many books about, I'm always surprised to learn things that I thought I knew about and it turns out I didn't know about this whole other part of it. So, we read widely, we read deeply, but we never think we've got it. We never think we know it. We're always looking for more.

• 12:25Ryan Holiday?

  At the same time, Seneca says, "We often get way too distracted by surface level details." He was talking about even in his own time, people wanted to know where the events of the Odyssey happened. And he said, "They're getting caught up on whether it's real or not, whether Odysseus actually went through this storm or that one." He says, "Meanwhile, they've got storms going on in their own life." So, it can be interesting to get into some of these debates, but at the same time, he's saying, "The point of reading is to get the moral message, is to get the lesson out of the texts." It's good to have recall and take notes and write stuff down, of course, but you're not reading to produce a book report. You're reading for your life to apply these things to your actual life. Right? That's the whole purpose of reading, whether it's fiction or nonfiction, right?

• 13:10Ryan Holiday?

  You're reading to get lessons, to get ideas that you apply to your actual life. He says, "Far too many brains have been afflicted with enthusiasm for pointless knowledge." That's perfectly said.

• 13:25Ryan Holiday?

  It's not just that you read, but that you reread. Seneca says, "We want to linger on the works of the master thinker." Here's my copy of Seneca. You can see there's different highlighting, different pens, because I've read it more than once. And every time I read it or pick it back up, I get something else out of it. I've read this translation and then Seneca's letters here. This is a different translation of the first 65 of the letters. And so, I've read not just one translation, but multiple translations. The idea is you go back to the books. This is another Stoic idea they get from Herakles, that we never step in the same river twice. And so, it's not just reading, but rereading, because you get something different out of it each time. Like, here is my...

• 14:08Ryan Holiday?

  Copy of Gatsby, which I read in high school. This is the copy I got in ninth or 10th grade. So I read it in my teens, I read it in my twenties, I've read it in my thirties. I've read it many, many times. I was just going back over something in this book for the justice book. The idea is that each time I go back to it, the book is the same, but I am different. The world is different. And thus, we benefit by not just reading, but also rereading.

• 14:34Ryan 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.