All That Matters Is How We Respond | No Pain No Gain

It was the great Athenian leader, Pericles, who said that there was nothing wrong with poverty. It could be caused by so many things—a business failure, the sudden loss of a family’s breadwinner, theft, even just plain old back luck. Like the Stoics, he knew that Fortune could swoop in, and, in the blink of an eye, undo years of hard work and careful planning.📕Pre-order Ryan Holiday's new book "Discipline Is Destiny" and get exclusive pre-order bonuses at https://dailystoic.com/preorder ✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and Facebook See 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 another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Thursdays, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from the book The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful co-author and collaborator, Stephen Hanselman. And so today, we'll give you a quick meditation from one of the Stoics, from Epictetus, Marcus, Rilius, Seneca, then some analysis from me, and then we send you out into the world to do your best to turn these words into works.

• 0:52Ryan Holiday?

  All that matters is how we respond.

• 0:56Ryan Holiday?

  It was the great Athenian leader Pericles who said that there was nothing wrong with poverty. It could be caused by so many things: a business failure, the sudden loss, a family's breadwinner, theft, even just plain old bad luck. Like the Stoics, he knew that fortune could swoop in and in the blink of an eye undo years of hard work and careful planning. But Pericles would not have said, as religious leaders and populist demagogues have tried to argue for thousands of years since, that there was anything special or holy about poverty. "While it wasn't necessarily someone's fault that they were poor, and so they shouldn't be

• 1:38Ryan Holiday?

  judged for it," Pericles said, "there was, quote, 'real shame in not taking steps to escape it.'" This too matches with the Stoic attitude, both about poverty and any fate fortune might throw at us. Stuff is going to happen. We are going to experience setbacks. Some of us are going to experience major setbacks in terms of where we were born, what our parents were like, how other people see members of our race or gender, and none of that is fair or says anything about who we are as people. How could it? We didn't have anything to do with it happening.

• 2:20Ryan Holiday?

  But how we respond to those situations, be it poverty, or disability, or bad upbringing, how we act as individuals, what we do in our own life, how we respond to it, is what says everything about who we are. And we can take those steps right now, right this morning, big or small.

• 2:50Ryan Holiday?

  No pain, no gain. This is today's entry in the Daily Stoic. 366 Days of Writing and Reflection on the Art of Living by yours truly and my co-writer and translator, Stephen Hanselman. I actually do this journal every single day. There's a question in the morning, a question in the afternoon. Then there's these sort of weekly meditations. As Epictetus says, "Every day and night, we keep thoughts like this at hand. Write them, read them aloud, and talk to yourself and others about them." You can check out the Daily Stoic Journal anywhere books are sold. You can also get a signed personalized copy from me in the Daily Stoic store at store.dailystoic.com. "Difficulties show a person's character," Epictetus tells us in Discourses 124.

• 3:34Ryan Holiday?

  "So when a challenge confronts you, remember that God is matching you with a younger sparring partner, as would a physical trainer." Becoming an Olympian, it takes sweat. I think no one has a better challenge than yours. If only you would use it like an athlete would a younger sparring partner. The Stoics loved metaphors from the Olympics, especially wrestling. Like us, they saw sports as both a fun pastime as well as a training ground to practice for the challenges one will inevitably face in the course of living. As General Douglas MacArthur once said, in words engraved at the gymnasium at West Point, "Upon the fields of friendly strife are sown the seeds that upon other fields on other days will bear the fruits of victory."

• 4:18Ryan Holiday?

  Everyone has found themselves outmatched by an opponent, frustrated by some skill or attribute that they have that we don't. Height, speed, vision, whatever. How we choose to respond to that struggle tells us about who we are as athletes and who we will be as people. Do we see it as a chance to learn and get stronger? Do we get frustrated and complain? Or worse, do we call it off and find an easier game to play, one that makes us feel good instead of challenged? The greats don't avoid these tests of their abilities. They seek them out because they are not just a measure of greatness. They're the pathways to it. You know, Marcus Aurelius loved to box and to wrestle, hunt.

• 4:58Ryan Holiday?

  These physical activities, his love of competition and the outdoors. It was cultivating, as MacArthur said, "the seeds that upon other fields and on other days will bear the fruits of victory, or bear stoicism, or bear the fruits of virtue," Marcus Aurelius might have said. Sports are a way to practice, to cultivate, to get after it in a safe space that hopefully you build some virtues that are transferable. Right? Even, even the metaphor here of Epictetus is that, you know, you're matched with a strong sparring partner.

• 5:42Ryan Holiday?

  If you've ever wrestled, if you've ever played against someone who's better than you, you realize, hey, this is making me better. I'm getting my ass kicked, but it's making me better. You seek that out. But how rarely we do that in life. We want things to be easy. We want them to be comfortable. We hate that challenge and boss. We hate that rival or that peer. Right? We hate the adversity that life is dealing us. We want it to go away. We complain that it happened to us. Now, it's good. It was chosen for you. It was chosen for you by a trainer or a coach that wants to get the best out of you. If you can come to think about it that way, if you can come to relish it almost for that reason, you'll be able to use it.

• 6:25Ryan Holiday?

  You'll be able to grow. Becoming an Olympian takes sweat, Epictetus says. "No one has a better challenge than yours," he says. "But only if you choose to treat it the way an athlete would treat their sparring partner, someone to learn from, someone to get stronger from, someone to..."

• 6:45Ryan Holiday?

  Work out their issues on and with, right? Teammate, collaborator, even though they're also an opponent, even though they're also punching you in the head or dunking on you, literally or figuratively, right? That's why we do this work. Competition makes you better. Resistance makes you stronger. You have to understand this metaphor. And there's no way, better way to understand that metaphor than by literally doing those things on the field. It's cultivating strong body and a strong mind. And that's the message. No pain, no gain. It's good that it's hard. It's good that they're challenging you. It's good that you're getting your ass kicked because you're going to use it and be better. So that when the real fight happens, when you're on

• 7:28Ryan Holiday?

  the other field, as MacArthur said, you can bring your best, you can do your best, you can win. It's not that life is short, Seneca says. It's that we waste a lot of it. The practice of Memento Mori, the meditation on death, is one of the most powerful and eye-opening things that there is. We built this Memento Mori calendar for Daily Stoic to illustrate that exact idea, that your life, in the best-case scenario, is 4,000 weeks. Are you going to let those weeks slip by? Or are you going to seize them? The act of unrolling this calendar, putting it on your wall,

• 8:11Ryan Holiday?

  and every single week, that bubble is filled in, that black mark is marking it off forever. Have something to show, not just for your years, but for every single dot that you filled in, that you really lived that week, that you made something of it. You can check it out at dailystoic.com/mmcalendar.