You Have to Dye This With Your Own Color

"What has happened here is objective. A virus spread from China to countries all over the world. First to the Philippines, then to Italy and Iran, the rest of Eurasia, and beyond. While many of those countries have succeeded in flattening the curve, there are new epicenters across the globe, in the United States, Brazil, and India. States like Florida and Arizona are dealing with more virulent outbreaks than many countries."What will you do with those objective facts? Ryan offers one potential path on today's Daily Stoic Podcast.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicSee 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.

• 0:06Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to The Daily Stoic, where each day we read a short passage designed to help you cultivate the strength, insight, wisdom necessary for living the good life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us at dailystoic.com.

• 0:29Ryan Holiday?

  You have to dye this with your own color. What has happened here is objective. A virus spread from China to countries all over the world: Italy, America, Spain, the UK, Canada. There is hardly a country on the planet that is now not part of this global pandemic. Italy has thousands of cases. The US has even more. The city of New Orleans has more cases than many countries. In response, the markets have crashed. People have been laid off. Millions are stuck in their homes. The Prime Minister of Britain has tested

• 1:08Ryan Holiday?

  positive. The government of Iran appears shaky. People are bored, restless, worried, terrified. This is all very bad, yes? No, it is what it is. It is objective. What was just listed above was simply information, the Stoics would say. Context, opinion, judgment decides what we call it. But think of the pain and suffering. How could you not call it bad? Well, it's not bad compared to smallpox, which killed hundreds of thousands of people every year of the 17th and 18th century. It's not bad compared to what we would have faced

• 1:48Ryan Holiday?

  in 2003 if SARS had reached the scale that COVID-19 has. More important, the jury is still out on what all this will mean. What if it brings nations together? If we go stronger for this, then what? As David Brooks has written, "This pandemic highlights and hits society in all the places..." It has grown weakest. What if we learn from that? What if it is a transformative event that makes us better, that forces us to learn? That means we will take real steps to protect and serve future generations? What if it actually does drain that government swamp? And leaders of real virtue and character emerge in their place?

• 2:31Ryan Holiday?

  Remember what Seneca said, "A wise man dyes events with his own color." We should not just look for the helpers, as we've talked about before. We should be the help. We can make good out of this. The pandemic is objective, not up to us. But what we do in response, the meaning and change and progress that comes out of us? That's on us. More specifically, it's on you. One of the ways I think you can do a little good and certainly challenge yourself to find some meaning out of this is check out our Daily Stoic Alive Time Challenge. It's 14 days of Stoic-inspired wisdom and practices that will challenge you. Yes, that's why it's called a challenge. But I think this is great. I'm in the middle of doing it right now myself.

• 3:16Ryan Holiday?

  It will help you turn what could potentially be dead time, wasted time, into alive time, into productive time, into something that makes you better, which is what the Stoics say. We don't control what happens, we control how we respond. So this challenge will hopefully help you respond well. And $5 from every purchase goes to frontline responder charities and to food banks across the United States. So check that out at dailystoic.com/alivetime.