BONUS | 6 Stoic Rules of Arete (Excellence)

Arete. To the Greeks, it meant excellence. It was the ultimate expression of human greatness—moral, physical, spiritual. It’s what the Stoics were chasing. It’s what you’re chasing today. But how do we get there?🎟️ DAILY STOIC LIVE | Ryan Holiday is coming to a city near you! Grab tickets here | https://www.dailystoiclive.com/🎙️ AD-FREE | Support the podcast and go deeper into Stoicism by subscribing to The Daily Stoic Premium - unlock ad-free listening, early access, and bonus content: https://dailystoic.supercast.com/🎥 VIDEO EPISODES| Watch the video episodes on The Daily Stoic YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos✉️ FREE STOIC WISDOM | Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

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

• 0:00Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

• 0:15Ryan Holiday?

  These are six Stoic strategies for a life of erite. That is to say, excellence. Number one, you have to seek out discomfort. You're not going to grow. You're not going to learn. Doing things the way that you're comfortable with, keeping them the way that they are. In Meditations, Marcus Aurelius talks about practicing holding the reins in his non-dominant hand. He wanted to make himself uncomfortable, get out of his element on purpose, because that's how you get better. Number two, focus on process, not on outcomes. This sounds contradictory. Don't you want to win? Don't you want to make great stuff? Yes, of course you do. But you don't get there by focusing on that. It's insane, the Stoics would say, to tie your well-being, your sense of success, to things that are outside of your control. Instead, what a Stoic does is put your ass in the chair, do the work.

• 1:00Ryan Holiday?

  You assemble a life. You assemble a project. Marcus Aurelius says in Meditations, "Action by action, doing that thing in front of you." He says, "No one can stop you from that." Three, this is really important, ask for help. Marcus Aurelius compares us to a soldier storming a wall. He says, "If you've fallen and you have to ask a comrade for help, so what?" What I love in Meditations is all the people that Marcus Aurelius thanks at the beginning, people who helped him, people who he learned from, people whom without he would not have become who he was. It's wonderful to ask for help. You absolutely should. Don't be afraid to ask for help. That's how you get better. That's how you grow. That's how you become the person you are capable of being. Four, ego is the enemy. "It's impossible to learn that which you think you already know," Epictetus says.

• 1:44Ryan Holiday?

  Zeno talked about how conceit prevented us from growing and improving. Ego focuses on all the things that are great about us. Humility focuses on where we need to get better, what we don't know. Again, that's what Socrates was focused on, "not what he knew, but how little he knew." And in doing so, he got better and he grew. Five, embrace failure. The only way to grow, the only way to get better, is to fail, is to try things and to learn. Marcus Aurelius talks about how we're going to be Jarred by circumstances in life, we're gonna be knocked off our block. But excellence is how quick you can get back to it. It's to celebrate behaving like a human being, which is going to mean failure. Elite performance is a game of failure. It's messing up, it's failing, it's setbacks more often than you succeed.

• 2:26Ryan Holiday?

  And it's how determined, how committed you are, how quickly you are able to get back that separates the winners from the losers. And that leads us to the sixth and final one. The obstacle is the way. If you are only able to handle circumstances going your way, you're not gonna go very far. Instead, what a stove does is turn what happened to it into fuel. We say, hey, this is training me, this is helping me, this is making me get better. How can I learn from this? How can I grow from this? What is this circumstance giving me a chance to prove and to practice? Marx really said that everything that happens to us is an opportunity to practice virtue. Everything that happens to us is a chance to practice excellence. A chance to get better, a chance to try new ways of doing things, a chance to challenge ourselves.

• 3:10Ryan Holiday?

  This is an occasion we can rise to meet. That's what the greats do, they use it all, and so must you.