Don’t Be Replaced | Test Your Impressions

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

• 0:02Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Each day, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, illustrated with stories from history, current events, and literature to help you be better at what you do. And at the beginning of the week, we try to do a deeper dive, setting a kind of Stoic intention for the week, something to meditate on, something to think on, something to leave you with, to journal about, whatever it is you happen to be doing. So let's get into it.

• 0:42Ryan Holiday?

  Don't be replaced.

• 0:46Ryan Holiday?

  He had started out as a journalist, a poor, starving artist, a man who loved craft, who didn't need much, provided he had a few pencils and a notebook and something to write about. But after the success of "The Sun Also Rises", Ernest Hemingway, like so many successful artists, he changed. The editor Samuel Putman had drinks with Hemingway not long after the book came out. "It did not take me long to discover that the somewhat shy and youthful reporter whom I had met in Chicago had vanished," he observed. "In his place was a literary celebrity." In his meditations, Marcus Aurelius writes of his worry of something similar happening to him. "He had seen what being emperor had done to his predecessors, and he wanted to escape being Caesarified, being changed by the purple cloak of absolute power.

• 1:31Ryan Holiday?

  It was a fight," he said, "to be the person that philosophy tried to make him, especially with all the trappings of success and fame around him." Hemingway remained a talented writer, but became more and more of an asshole as his career went on. He cheated on all his wives. He bullied friends. He talked behind their backs. He believed his own myths and legends. He became a bloated version of himself. Nobody wants that. "All of us are in danger of being imperialized," to use a phrase from one of Marcus Aurelius's translators. That's the Gregory Hayes version. "We need to stay humble. We need to fight to maintain ourselves, even as others puff us up and flatter us. Can't believe the marketing. We can't be stained by our success or corrupted by our power. It's a bad look, and it's also a loss."

• 2:16Ryan Holiday?

  Hemingway lost the better version of himself. Marcus Aurelius didn't.

• 2:30Ryan Holiday?

  Test your impressions. This is from this week's entry in the Daily Stoic Journal. 366 days of writing and reflection on the art of living, which I myself just worked on this morning. I do the journal every morning. "One of Epictetus's key teachings was all about testing our impressions, any experience, perception, or circumstance that was in front of us. And he uses a key verb to emphasize this practice 10 times in discourses and once in the opening of the Incredian. And the word carries the meaning of the assayer, one who tests fine metals and coins to verify their authenticity. In one of the most memorable uses, Epictetus compares our need to test impressions to what is done with coins

• 3:13Ryan Holiday?

  and how the skilled merchant can hear a counterfeit coin cast upon a table just as a musician would detect a sour note. So this week, go through the process of assaying everything that comes before you, assuming it all to be counterfeit or misleading until we can prove otherwise." And you know, it's funny. I think I've really first wrapped my head around this idea of to assay or the word assay, because at Cerro Gordo, you may have heard my interview with Brent Underwood, who's one of my longtime, I guess he was formerly my intern. And this great guy who works at Brass Check is one of the partners, and he's helped build Daily Stoic and someone I talk to on the phone almost every day. And a few years ago, he bought this ghost town in the mountains of Southern California called Cerro Gordo.

• 3:56Ryan Holiday?

  And he's been trying to sort of turn it into this like resort. And he's lived there for the whole pandemic. But anyways, when I went out and visited, he showed me this building and it's called the assay office. So the miners would pull this silver out of the ground in the ore or whatever. And sometimes they, I don't know exactly how it works, but they would take it to this office. And this is where like the guy with a brain, the dispassionate observer, the money man, would would test it and let them know like just what they found, how rich it was, how valuable it was, what percentage it was this or that or this. This was like the the filter through which all the rocks pulled out of this mining town were filtered through. And and just because you thought it was valuable, it didn't matter unless the assay office came through and said boom, boom, boom, and stamped it and gave you,

• 4:41Ryan Holiday?

  you know, another funny little. The thing is that the brothel was located immediately next door. So you'd find out you'd just become a rich man and then, of course, you go do your business. But the idea is you have to put everything to the test. And that's what Epictetus is saying. He says, "When it comes to money where we feel our clear interest, we have an entire art where the tester uses many means to discover the worth, just as we give great attention to judging things that might steer us badly. But when it comes to our own ruling principle, we yawn and doze off, accepting any appearances that flash by without counting the costs." That's from Discourses 120. And then he says in 2.18, "First off, don't let the force of an impression carry you away. Say to it, 'Hold it up a bit and let me see who you are and where you are from.

• 5:26Ryan Holiday?

  Let me put you to the test.'" And then in Incoridian, he says, "From the very beginning, make it your practice to say to every harsh impression, 'You are an impression and not at all what you appear to be.' Next, examine it and test it by the rules you possess, the first and greatest of which is this: Whether it belongs to the things in our control or not in our control, and if the latter, prepare to respond, it is nothing to me." So, look, if you went and got your rocks tested at Saragord and they found out to be worthless stones, you wouldn't be like, "But I want them to be what they are. I'm going to continue to pretend," right? You wouldn't spend money that you just found out you don't actually have. So this process of testing one's perceptions and one's facts is a really essential part of the process.

• 6:08Ryan Holiday?

  You can't just go through life pretending things are what they are or taking them at first glance because there are so many factors at play, from cognitive biases to your upbringing to just misleading appearances. You have to put everything to the test. You have to see things as they actually are. And this process of assaying everything that's in front of you is a key Stoic exercise, and I hope you can build on this practice this week. Slow down, take a minute, put it to the test. See if it's real or counterfeit. See if it's what everyone else wants you to see. Or, as Marcus Aurelius says, "See what is really there."