Go Out And Do This Today | A Strong Soul Is Better Than Good Luck

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

• 0:05Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a Stoic-inspired meditation, designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life. Each one of these episodes is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women, help you learn from them, to follow in their example, and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. For more, visit DailyStoic.com.

• 0:56Ryan Holiday?

  Labor Day was first proposed by Matthew Maguire, a labor union secretary in 1882 in New York. It is, he said, "a tribute to the contributions workers have made to the strength, prosperity, and well-being of our country, and the idea that they deserve to rest for that work." The Stoics were hard-driving, no-excuses, disciplined folks who, despite their acceptance of slavery in the ancient world, would still have appreciated this idea. "The mind must be given relaxation. It will rise improved and sharper after a good break," Seneca wrote. To use the analogy of farming, a field that isn't given a break, where crops are not rotated, will quickly lose its fertility, and so too will a mind and a body that's overworked.

• 1:40Ryan Holiday?

  So by all means, take your much-deserved break today. We are human beings, after all, not human doings. Life will be long, if you're lucky, and you have much great work in front of you. If you break down early, wear yourself out before your time, where will that leave you? Where will that leave us? In a way, overwork is selfish, no matter how much the workaholic claims they are doing it for other people, because it deprives them and the world of that later fertility. It causes needless breakdown and injury. As Seneca observed, "constant work gives rise to a certain kind of dullness and feebleness in the rational soul." Nobody likes a person who is all business all the time. So go out today and live today. Rest from your labor. Come back better for it.

• 2:24Ryan Holiday?

  Come back improved and sharper for it. That's the idea. This is your holiday. Take it.

• 2:42Ryan Holiday?

  A strong soul is better than good luck. Here I am, reading today's September 1 entry from the Daily Stoic. "The rational soul is stronger than any kind of fortune," Seneca writes in Moral Letters 98. "From its own chair it guides its affairs here or there, and is itself the cause of a happy or miserable life." Cato the Younger had enough money to dress in fine clothing, yet he often walked around Rome barefoot, indifferent to assumptions people made about him as he passed. He could have indulged in the finest food; he chose instead to eat simple fare. Whether it was raining or intensely hot, he went bareheaded by choice. Why not indulge in some easy relief? Because Cato was training his soul to be strong and resilient.

• 3:26Ryan Holiday?

  Specifically, he was learning indifference, an attitude of "let come what may", that would serve him well in the trenches with the army, in the forum, in the senate, and in his life as a father and a statesman. His training prepared him for any conditions, any kind of luck. And if we undergo our own training and preparations, we might find ourselves similarly strengthened. Right? The Stoics undergo a hard winter training, to borrow Epictetus's phrase. And the point of that training, whether it's the physical training that Cato is doing, whether it's dressing awkwardly in your worst clothes, as Seneca was talking about, you're trying to cultivate an inner citadel of strength, a fortitude, a sense of preparedness,

• 4:09Ryan Holiday?

  so that you can, as Epictetus would later say, "meet whatever situation happens and go, 'Ah, this is what I've trained for. I got this. I know I'm capable of withstanding this.'"

• 4:22Ryan Holiday?

  We've talked a lot about physical training here. And that practice for me, the working out, getting up off the couch when I don't want to, jumping in the cold water when I don't want to, lifting the weights when I don't want to, running a little bit further when I'd rather be home, taking the longer way on the run than the shorter way, trying to speed up a little bit, trying to get up the hill faster, whatever it is, this is cultivating that strength so that when things are difficult, you got it, you've trained for that. But it's of course, not just the physical training. I think about my philosophical training and my maturity as a human. I was like, this is going to be training for whatever else happens in life. Right?

• 5:04Ryan Holiday?

  And also, this is precisely what I've studied history for, what I studied Stoicism for, what my wife and I have worked on together, what I've worked on in therapy, what I've worked on every place in my life, it was for something like this. And also the sense that this itself would be training for future adversity and difficulty. There's a Frederick Douglass quote, maybe it's not totally accurate, some people doubt that he said it, he says, "It's easier to create strong children than repair broken men." And I think that's what Seneca is saying here about adversity. And you think of the adversity that Seneca goes through in his life, has tuberculosis young, has to spend 10 years in convalescence as a child in Egypt of all places.

• 5:49Ryan Holiday?

  I talk about this in Lives of the Stoics. If you don't know Seneca's life story, it's pretty incredible. On the way back, his uncle is killed in a shipwreck. Seneca makes his legal debut, is going places, and then he's exiled on these trumped up charges, he loses a child, he's called back, but he's called back, he's in Nero's court. Obviously, things are difficult working for Nero.

• 6:13Ryan Holiday?

  You know, it's one thing after another for Seneca, up until the end, when he's forced to, you know, die by his own hand at Nero's demand. But Seneca had trained for this. Even Tacitus, who's not a fan of Seneca, goes like, it's very clear that in that difficult moment, it was something he'd thought about, worked on, prepared for. That's who you want to be. You want to be strong. You want to be able to bear what comes. It might be physical training, like running for a marathon. It might be something like, hey, I crank the shower cold. Or it's the reading you're doing, the conversations you're having, the community that you're building, the relationships that you're building, the exercises you're walking through in your mind. All of this is training you, preparing you, putting yourself in a position so you can succeed,

• 6:57Ryan Holiday?

  whatever happens, so you can be strong enough in that moment and not need to be repaired afterwards. That's what we're doing here. That's, to me, kind of the mission of Daily Stoic. That's the preparation my own philosophical practice is about. And it's served me well the last couple of years. I hope it's served you well. And I hope the training and work you're doing now sets you up to be served well in the future. Enjoy. Talk soon.

• 7:25Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. I just wanted to say we so appreciate it. We love serving you. It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple of years we've been doing it. It's an honor. Please, spread the word. Tell people about it. And this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say thank you.