This is All You Need | The Most Secure Fortress

Ryan explains why the desire to persevere and keep going is all that we need, and reads The Daily Stoic’s entry of the day, on today’s Daily Stoic Podcast. Pre-orders are available for Ryan Holiday’s new book Courage Is Calling: Fortune Favors The Brave - check it out at https://dailystoic.com/preorderLinkedIn Jobs is the best platform for finding the right candidate to join your business this fall. It’s the largest marketplace for job seekers in the world, and it has great search features so that you can find candidates with any hard or soft skills that you need. And now, you can post a job for free. Just visit linkedin.com/STOIC to post a job for free. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/emailFollow 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.

• 0:04Ryan Holiday?

  Bienvenidos a otro episodio del Podcast Daily Stoic. El jueves hacemos doble trabajo, no solo leyendo nuestra meditación diaria, sino también leyendo un pasaje del libro "El Daily Stoic", 366 Meditaciones sobre la sabiduría, perseverancia y la arte de vivir, que escribí con mi maravillosa coautora y colaborador, Stephen Hanselman. Así que hoy os daremos una rápida meditación de uno de los estoicos, de Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, luego mi análisis y luego os enviamos al mundo a hacer lo mejor posible para convertir estas palabras en obras.

• 0:41Ryan Holiday?

  Esto es todo lo que necesitáis. Podéis imaginar a Epictetus, despejado por su destino, su libertad robada de nacimiento, su pierna rociada por un maestro sadístico, rociado para siempre. Y luego como bonus, fue exiliado de Roma. Podéis imaginar a Stockdale en las estrellas similares, matado, isolado, torturado. Habría habido momentos en los que no pensaban que podrían hacerlo. Habría habido momentos de dolor increíble, de miedo, de desesperación. Habían sido dejados flatos por la vida, privados de casi todo. Sin embargo, ambos retuvieron la única cosa que nunca puede ser tomada de una persona, la cosa que solo puede ser relinquida.

• 1:21Ryan Holiday?

  Como dicen las letras, "Corte de la noche, todo se ha ido, excepto la voluntad de ser". Recuerda lo que dijo Viktor Frankl, que no importa lo que suceda, siempre poseemos la habilidad de decidir lo que hacemos de nuestra condición. El estoico decide, mientras sigan viviendo, si continuarán. Nuestra voluntad de ser, nuestra ciudadanía interior, nunca puede ser violada por fuerzas externas. Puede ser traicionado, puede ser surrendercido, pero no puede ser rociado. Todo lo que necesitamos es eso entonces. Todo lo que necesitamos es la comprensión de ese deseo de seguir adelante, de perseverar, de comprometerse, como Stockdale hizo, que si sobrevivimos, convertiremos esto en algo. Todo lo demás puede irse, pero si eso sigue, estarás bien.

• 2:10Ryan Holiday?

  The Most Secure Fortress. Remember that your ruling reason becomes unconquerable when it rallies and relies on itself, so that it won't do anything contrary to its own will, even if its position is irrational. How much more unconquerable if its judgments are careful and made rationally? Therefore, the mind free from passions is an impenetrable fortress. A person has no more secure place of refuge for all time. Marcus Aurelius' Meditations 848. And I'm reading to you today from the Daily Stoic, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living by yours truly and my co-author and translator, Stephen Hanselman.

• 2:55Ryan Holiday?

  You can get signed copies, by the way, in the Daily Stoic store. Over a million copies of the Daily Stoic in print now. It's been just such a lovely experience to watch it. Spend more than 250 weeks, consecutive weeks, on the bestsellers. It's just an awesome experience. But I hope you check it out. We have a premium leather edition at store.dailystoic.com as well. But let's get on with today's reading. Bruce Lee once made an interesting claim. "I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once," he said. "I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times." When we repeat an action so often, it becomes an unconscious behavior. We can default to it without thinking. Training in the martial arts or combat is a deeply thoughtful study of movement.

• 3:39Ryan Holiday?

  We sometimes think of soldiers as automatons, but what they've actually built is a steady patterns of unconscious behaviors. Any of us can build these. When Marcus says that a mind can get to a place where it won't do anything contrary to its own will, even if its position is irrational, what he means is that proper training can change your default habits. Train yourself to give up anger, and you won't be angry at every fresh light. Train yourself to avoid gossip, and you won't get pulled into it. Train yourself on any habit, and you'll be able to unconsciously go to that habit in trying times. Think about which behaviors you'd like to be able to default to if you could. How many of them have you practiced only once? Let today be twice.

• 4:23Ryan Holiday?

  Stoicism is linked to what they call cognitive behavioral therapy, which, as I understand, is one of the few forms of therapy that has demonstrably proven results. And I've done my share of it as well. The idea being that the mind has sort of patterns, loops that it goes into. And every time we do this, we're reinforcing the loop. And if it's a bad loop, every time we break it, we're training the opposite. So I think today's message is really thinking about how you've trained your mind, what you've practiced, what habits you've built in, what patterns you default to,

• 5:05Ryan Holiday?

  and what do you need to work on, right? I think about what Dr. Frankl says when he says, you know, between stimulus and response, there is a space. And in that space, we choose how we need to be. But of course, that space is as big or as small as you've trained it to be, right? The person who can think, who can use that space, is someone who's self-aware, who has some control over themselves. And the vast majority of people have no space because they've trained themselves that it's stimulus-response, stimulus-response, stimulus-response. You're just sort of emotionally reactive. And that's, I don't think, how you want to live, even if it is how you are living.

• 5:50Ryan Holiday?

  So today, I just want to leave you with this idea that you train the mind like any other muscle. You train yourself. My wife and I are working on this with one of our kids. You know, your kids do something, they knock something over, they do the opposite of what you asked them to do. They fight, or they do the things they do because they're kids. And then you have a response because you don't like it, because it triggers something in you, because you're worried about them, because you don't want that glass to break, you know, whatever it is. And then the two of you, or the three of you, you get in a loop. Families have patterns, too. There's also this sort of inter-group dynamic where this stuff happens. And it becomes a feedback loop. But we noticed that our son does stuff to get attention, even though that's bad stuff that we don't want him to do.

• 6:34Ryan Holiday?

  And so we're having to see, okay, when he does it, what's our response? Because we don't, can't really control him, right? I mean, obviously, you can control your kid. But what I mean is that our actions are much more in our control and have a greater influence than just how we try to...

• 6:52Ryan Holiday?

  Force someone else to do something. So we're thinking about how do we create the incentives? How do we create the pattern? Or how at least do we not create disincentives? Or create the wrong pattern in how we react? We're trying to spend a lot of time being overly positive, really nice. Give him lots and lots of attention. So he doesn't do exactly what we don't want him to do to get attention. Just a little insight I've been thinking about is this today's entry really hit me with that. And I'm sure some of you parents can relate. The idea is the patterns. What are you practicing? What loops are you stuck in? And then how can you get in good loops where you respond to things the right way? That's also what this is all about. And with that, I'll talk to you soon.

• 7:35Ryan Holiday?

  My newest book Courage is Calling: Fortune Favors the Brave is now available for preorder. We've got a bunch of amazing bonuses. You can get signed copies, of course. I'm so proud of this book. General Jim Mattis has called it a superb handbook for crafting a purposeful life. Matthew McConaughey called it an urgent call to arms to each and all of us. I do hope you check it out. It's my first in the Four Virtues series, Courage, Temperance, Justice, Wisdom. Courage is Calling: Fortune Favors the Brave. If you want to preorder it, I'd really appreciate your support. Go to dailystoic.com/preorder.