Stoic Lessons From The Worst Day In The World

Everything went wrong. But Ryan stayed calm. A real-time Stoic stress test, and a reminder that philosophy is for days just like this. 📖 Preorder the final book in Ryan Holiday's The Stoic Virtues Series: "Wisdom Takes Work":https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/wisdom-takes-work 📚 The Four Stoic Virtues: Justice, Temperance, Wisdom, Courage, are timeless keys to living your best life. The Daily Stoic is releasing a limited collector’s edition https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/stoic-virtues set of all four books signed and numbered, with a title page identifying these books as part of the only printing of this series. PLUS we're including one of the notecards https://ryanholiday.net/the-notecard-system-the-key-for-remembering-organizing-and-using-everything-you-read/ Ryan used while writing the series. Pre-order the Limited Edition Stoic Virtues Series https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/stoic-virtues Today! |https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/stoic-virtues 🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast/?hl=en: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast 🎥 Watch top moments from The Daily Stoic Podcast https://www.youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast: https://www.youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast ✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail 🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/ 📱 Follow us: Instagram https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/,Twitter https://twitter.com/dailystoic,YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic,TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@daily_stoic?lang=en, andFacebook https://www.facebook.com/dailystoic See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

• 0:04Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Weekend Edition of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Sundays, we take a deeper dive into these ancient topics with excerpts from the Stoic texts, audiobooks that we like here or recommend here at Daily Stoic, and other long-form wisdom that you can chew on on this relaxing weekend. We hope this helps shape your understanding of this philosophy, and most importantly, that you're able to apply it to your actual life. Thank you for listening.

• 0:43Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. You know, the day it started so good and it ended beautifully as well. But somewhere in the middle, it turned into an unmitigated disaster. Somewhat, but only somewhat hyperbolically. I'm calling today's episode "Stoic Lessons From The World's Worst Day." And I understand it wasn't anywhere near the world's worst day, which is, of course, I think also itself a little bit of a Stoic exercise. But we'll talk about that more later. Let me take you back to the beginning. Earlier this week, I got up early before the sun was up, before my family was up,

• 1:25Ryan Holiday?

  let the dog out, got dressed, put on my headphones, and took the dog out for a walk on the dirt roads where we live. I watched the sun come up. We were moving. Who was I listening to? I think I was listening to Tyler Chiders. It's this great song called "Universal Sound." Just vibing, I come home, cook the kids breakfast, get them ready for school, not for school. I take them to summer camp in Austin, drop them off at 8:00. And then I go for a run in one of my favorite places in Texas, McKinney Falls State Park. I'm running through the woods. You know, it's early morning.

• 2:07Ryan Holiday?

  But it's shaded and you're running over waterfalls. You're running on these dirt trails sort of carved out of the forest. There's cedar and oak and ruins of an old farmhouse. I have a lovely about six or so mile run. Washed myself off in the river a little bit, splashed some water on my face. And then I get in the car and I, I drive to the airport. Everything is going well up until this point, except as I'm driving to the airport. I check my flight number in Delta and here we are delayed at least 30 minutes. Now I have a tight travel day.

• 2:47Ryan Holiday?

  I don't normally travel this way, but the alternative was spend two nights in Louisville, Kentucky for one hour of work. I was doing a talk to a group there in the evening and I could spend two nights away from my family or I could drop my kids off at camp this way and go straight to the airport. Am I somewhat sympathetic to the person who was going to have to sit next to me or did have to sit next to me on the plane? And after that they were sitting next to someone who went running. But no, I went for the jog first because I knew it was going to be a crazy day. And exercise helps me regulate. So I was trying to be proactive. I knew that once I landed, I was supposed to land in Cincinnati. A driver would take me about 90 minutes into Louisville and then I'd have about two, two and a half hours.

• 3:31Ryan Holiday?

  I could take a shower in the hotel room, get ready, go over my slides and then go down to the conference center and give my talk. So I knew that was going to be tight and I decided, you know what? I'll get the run done in the morning. So I went for this beautiful run on the trails, headed to the airport and then already the delays start. Oh, great. Okay. So there's still enough time on the last speaker so they can push the event a little bit. I'm not going to cause problems. Get to the airport. I'm just going through security. Actually, things are still going decently well. There's no line, clear pre-check. The Austin airport's under construction, so all the clear and pre-check sort of security is all crammed into one in the middle. It can get pretty overwhelmed. I go show my boarding pass, whatever.

• 4:15Ryan Holiday?

  And then I go to take my AirPods out, to put them in the AirPod case. And I notice it's not in my pocket. I thought I'd felt them in there, but no, that was my sunglasses and the car key. So I forgot my AirPods case in. The car and I checked my phone and yeah, that's where it is. The AirPods and the case are separated. I go, oh, great. This is whatever. Thankfully, I have a backup pair of just regular headphones in there, you know, for when they inevitably die. I go through security. I grab some breakfast tacos. I sit down, delayed again, delayed again, and it's starting to pile up. So I call my speaking agent. I go, guys, I think we got to get on another flight. Then I'm starting to get nervous. This isn't going to work. And so they start scrambling and looking because it keeps getting delayed.

• 4:59Ryan Holiday?

  It's the plane I'm supposed to be on has been sitting still in Cincinnati. It's supposed to fly to Austin and then fly back to Cincinnati. It's just been sitting there and it's every few minutes. Delta's texting a new updated another 30 minutes, another 30 minutes. And when they're exactly 30 minutes, do you know what that means? It means they have no idea what the fuck's happening and they are just stringing you along. So it's going to be at least two and a half to three hours of waiting. So you think you're going to get there at a certain time. You think you've got a plan and a backup plan, but I just didn't know how many more delays were in front of me at that moment. So I go back to the car and get the AirPods. And then I'm walking back and my speaking agent calls me and he is Zach.

• 5:44Ryan Holiday?

  I work at this company called Vayner who's great. He goes, hey, have you gone through security yet? And I go, no. And he goes, hang on, we might be having you drive to Dallas. I go, drive to Dallas? He says, yeah, you're probably going to have to drive to Dallas, which is about three hours and 20 minutes exactly. You can catch this 2:30 PM flight to Louisville directly. And that might get you there. I go, okay, but you know, that's exactly like, we got a few minutes to decide here. And he goes, okay, let me check one more thing. And then as we're on the phone, he goes, oh no, good news. The flight just took off from Cincinnati. I think it's going to be better for you to stay. He goes, let me, let me check. I go, okay. You got like three minutes because the time is ticking down. It's going to take, I got to get gas.

• 6:27Ryan Holiday?

  I've never flown out of the Dallas airport from like my own car. It's an unfamiliar airport to me in that way. He goes, okay, you know what? Scratch the Dallas thing. Go through security. So I start going through security. Cincinnati flight actually didn't take off, false alarm, still on the runway. Doesn't look like it's going anywhere soon. And now the Dallas route is logistically impossible. Is there any way to get there? I've got about a thousand people are going to see me talk in Louisville. They've already paid, the event's built around it. It is, you know, not great. So I sit down and I go, look, you figure it out. I'm going to sit here and I wrote some daily stoic emails, wrote a daily dad email. Started researching for the book that I'm working on.

• 7:13Ryan Holiday?

  This is the alive time, dead time for me, right? This is the, I think, one of the first stoic lessons. Actually, the first stoic lesson was don't get rattled. And we should have gone with the bird in the hand. I probably just should have driven to Dallas. One of the hard parts in crises or high stress situations is you got to make a decision and stick with it. The problem is when you second guess. And hope was a little blinding there to the speaking folks. Turned out it hadn't actually said that it had taken off. It was taxiing to take off, but it was bullshit. So I should have done the Dallas thing, but I didn't. So now I'm back at the airport. I'm going to use this time. So I sit and I write, eat, hang out, call my wife. As it happens, one of my son's friends from school, I noticed this little kid in the back. Like, oh, hey, I know who that is.

• 7:57Ryan Holiday?

  Talked to the mom a little bit, just, uh, you know, doing my thing as they are scrambling and scrambling. And then what happens? Someone on my team quits on the brass check team. No one is pleased. So now we've got this employment issue. I have to talk to a lawyer to get the final paperwork done and it's stressful. Is this going to end amicably or not amicably? Who's at fault? Samantha and I are having some tense conversations about it, which isn't fun. I think we do a pretty good job sort of going, hey, no way. We're on the same team here. And I think we, we handled that, but that was stressful and not fun. Just things are going wrong left and right, delay after delay after delay. And now my agent is scrambling.

• 8:41Ryan Holiday?

  Can I fly somewhere in the remote vicinity of Louisville and take a helicopter? Or are there private options? Which, you know, I hate doing. I hate doing it because it's bad for your brain, like to fly private. Flights, the ego, it's not good to have a pilot taking just you around. But it's also not good from an environmental standpoint. It's like every piece of trash. I've ever picked up the solar panels on my house, everything environmentally conscious I've ever done in my life is immediately eradicated the second you step on a private plane. That's how inefficient they are. But, you know, I have a contract and we have, we have made a promise. I've given my word, I will be at a place, we're scrambling to have to do that.

• 9:26Ryan Holiday?

  Looks like helicopters are out at the last minute. But if I can catch this last minute Southwest flight to Nashville, I can then take a car from Nashville to the private airport in Nashville and then a small plane can take me from Nashville to Louisville. So that's the option. I make the Southwest flight. I get recognized in line by a very nice guy who lives in Nashville. But meanwhile, I'm on the phone with Samantha and Brent, my partner. What do we do about this? We gotta wrap this up, you know, handling this, this exit, which is, you know, gonna be a nightmare for a bunch of different reasons. To say nothing of the fact that we need someone in this role and we have been through a lot of people in this role in a short amount of time.

• 10:11Ryan Holiday?

  So there's frustration there. I'm trying to be nice to this friend, trying to focus on whether I'm going to make my flight, trying not to let my anxiety about making the flight and making the gig exacerbate the employment situation. Get on the flight. I'm too tired to fall asleep and too strung out on the stress to fall asleep. So I just sign tip-ins for Wisdom Takes Work. I have about 800 of them in my suitcase. Grab some and I just, again, a lifetime, dead time, stuck on this plane, just gonna sign them. So I'm signing the tip-ins, which by the way, you can preorder, dailystoic.com/preorder if you want signed numbered first editions, signed in high-stress situations, just like this one. Those will get bound into the books and the books will go out in October and will almost

• 10:56Ryan Holiday?

  certainly sell out of them as we have with Courage is Calling and Discipline is Destiny and Right Thing Right Now. So preorder those now. It's the number one thing you can do to support authors that you like, just FYI.

• 11:19Ryan Holiday?

  Land in Nashville and the driver texts, "Go down to baggage claim, you'll see signs." Do they say what signs or where I'm supposed to go? No, they do not. So now it's a whole thing about finding the driver. I do find the driver. She's a lovely lady. She drives me about five minutes down the road. I get to the airport, I walk in. So basically it's like a 35, 40 minute flight. And if I change on the plane, run off the plane to the car, take it to this event center, I can basically walk from the car onto the stage, give the talk and the people will have only been waiting like 15 minutes or something like that. Like, so basically I can just make it.

• 12:04Ryan Holiday?

  Get there, give them the tail number of the plane. And they go, okay, it'll just be a minute. And I go, okay. And I walk over to grab some water. And then I come back and he goes, sir, there's a problem with the plane. Call the broker. Are you fucking kidding me? There was some mechanical issue that is going to take an indeterminate amount of time to fix. So, you know what? I'm going to use this time, I'll get dressed here. So go into the bathroom of the small private airport and I get dressed. I've got my speaking clothes. Now, again, I still have not showered from my run this morning. And I did, I guess I took a whore bath in the truck at the airport in Austin with baby wipes.

• 12:48Ryan Holiday?

  But now I've been traveling, it's several hours later. This is not the ideal freshness you want to be bringing to a performance. No, usually I like to shower and shave and get cleaned up. I have a chapter in discipline about like sort of presentability. It's not for them, it's for you. The freshness is for you. The spit and polish is for you. So I do the best I can. I come back out and now the pilot's there and he goes, hey, sir, look, there's a mechanical issue. We're working on it. We've had someone come out, going as fast as we can. I think we fixed it. But it's going to be at least 30 or so minutes before we're cleared. He goes, but you should be able to make it, right? And I go, well, what time do you think I need to be there? And he's like, oh, I don't know. And we start to go through it.

• 13:33Ryan Holiday?

  And now I'm going to be late from the private plane that they've booked at great expense. And I didn't even conceive, of course, which is on me. This is pre-Meditation Malorm. Of course, this travel can be delayed and be just as inconvenient and frustrating as, you know, your Spirit Airlines flight. Things go wrong everywhere. It doesn't matter how much money you have. It doesn't matter how well you plan. Things go wrong. Metal tubes that are hurled through the sky are miracles, but they are fragile miracles. And so I just have to wait. I have to accept this, call my wife, do a little repair from our argument earlier, get dressed. And then I just, you know, I just sit there and people watch the absurdity of this airport I'm at.

• 14:19Ryan Holiday?

  I can hear the employees talking. The private airport's pretty busy because people are flying in or flying to Coldplay concert. Just the absurdity of a private plane to attend a concert is a life I do not understand. But then again, what I'm telling you is pretty absurd. I will just say, I was not paying here and I would not have paid out of my own pocket, could not have paid out of my own pocket. The pilot comes back after 30 minutes and goes, hey, we fixed most of it. Here's the thing, do you need to use the bathroom? I go, no, I just went to the bathroom. And he says, no, no, on the plane, the lavatory is one of the technical issues. I go, are you fucking kidding me? It's a 30 minute flight. Do not delay this any longer to fix the bathroom. I do not care. And he goes, oh, okay. Well, then we can be ready to go in a few minutes.

• 15:04Ryan Holiday?

  We just got to get, you know, a van to take you down to the plane. I go, dude, I will sprint to the plane. There's people waiting for me. This is defeating the whole purpose. And then I have to catch myself and I go, sir, do what you gotta do because I do not want you rushing fixing a plane. I do not want you thinking that I'm going to be upset and call your boss or going to cause trouble for you. This is why private planes probably crash is that there are angry, entitled customers. So I say, look, take your time. Do what you need to do. Just please get me there safely as soon as you can. Says, you got it. Wait for the little van because apparently the plane is now in the hangar on the other side of the airport. Get in the plane and give me the safety briefing.

• 15:49Ryan Holiday?

  Sit down, starts walking me through the snacks. I don't care about the snacks, I just have to get there. We take off, although first we sit on the runway because now it's busy. Things have backed up. It's ticking and ticking away and it is now well past the point I should have landed in Louisville. And we have yet to even take off. Eventually we do take off. I sit and I read, I'm reading Elaine Weiss's book Spell Freedom about the sort of schools that trained the civil rights activists. She wrote a wonderful book called The Women's Hour, which I have loved. I had raved about it, informed part two of Right Thing Right Now. Got some reading in, again, a live time, dead time.

• 16:32Ryan Holiday?

  We land finally in Louisville. Drivers on the tarmac, get in the car, drive about 20 feet, come to a complete stop. There is an ambulance sitting in front of the gate to leave. I don't know if there's a medical emergency. I don't know if it's a backup ambulance, but now we have to wait for this ambulance to do its thing. Again, tick, tick, tick, ticking away. This is just going on and on and on. Finally, the ambulance moves, we make our way to the venue. I'm texting the people doing the talk. Hey, I'm on my way, I should be there in 13 minutes. All I have to do is go to the bathroom, because again, couldn't go on the plane. All I gotta do is take a piss and I am ready to go on stage. They go, awesome. And then you know what they said?

• 17:17Ryan Holiday?

  They said, do you have your slides, by the way? Do you have a flash drive for your slides? Now, I send these in the day before, two days before, they have the slides. This is not the time to be discussing the slides. I go, no, you guys definitely have them. The team already sent them over, but here they are again, just in case. I went through my email, I texted it to them. Okay. Pull up 12 minutes later, get out of the car. Very nice, running with my bags and they go, and what about the slides? I go, what do you mean, what about the slides? I just told you, you already have them and I sent them to you again 15 minutes ago. Okay, well, we'll figure it out. Rushing upstairs, get there, they're miking me up.

• 17:59Ryan Holiday?

  Event organizer comes over, okay, there's a band on the stage they've been stalling. They're about to play your video. So they play an intro video and then they say, then the band is going to play 20 seconds of Iron Maiden's The Trooper. Pretty cool. And then you go on and I go, okay, what about the clicker? He goes, clicker, you don't have any slides. I go, I definitely have slides. I've talked to so many people about this now. What are you talking about? I can't go up without the slide. That is the talk. And then the band starts to play Iron Maiden. So I have a choice in this moment. Do I want to hit pause for this audience again? Do I want to cause more problems? Or when we talk about the obstacle being the way we mean it's in moments like this where you are forced outside of your comfort zone that you either step up or you don't.

• 18:44Ryan Holiday?

  And I said, you know what? I'm gonna do it without slides. You try to figure it out on your end. I'm going to do what I can do. And I get up there and I have to give 30, 40 minute talk, extemporaneously, off the cuff, no slides. Now, look, the slides are partly for me, right? So I can know what I'm saying, but they're, they're also for the audience. If I'm going to give a talk with no slides, I'm going to give a very different talk that has to be much more performative and vivid because I don't have reminders, visuals behind me. Now, I'm not prepared to do that because I prepared a very specific talk for this group with images. But I decided to say, hey, technical difficulties happen. The question is, am I prepared? Am I able to roll with that? And how?

• 19:27Ryan Holiday?

  Given that this has been a disaster after disaster after disaster, it can't get any worse than it currently is. I'm going to roll with it. I'm going to see what I can do. So I give the talk and I think I do pretty good. About halfway through, they send me a little message on the stage on the monitors there. Your slides are almost up. They'll be there in a second, but it's way too late now. I can't start at the beginning. I can't even wave them off. So I can just be teased by the fact that the slides are coming. And then eventually the first slide appears behind me on stage, but it's too late. So I finish it. I do the whole talk, no slides. And now like, look, to me, the upshot is that I now know I can do this worst case scenario. I've also had the dreaded travel disaster. That's something I tell myself when things go totally sideways.

• 20:10Ryan Holiday?

  I go, look, statistically, they're going to go sideways some of the time. Every time they don't go that way, you're inching closer to them inevitably going this way. And sometimes you have enough slack to absorb it and sometimes you don't. And in this case, Everything went wrong, but here I am. I at least made it to the stage. So am I going to be ungrateful and be upset that my slides aren't there? Or I'm going to be grateful that I get to do it at all, that I didn't have to take a scrub at all, that I didn't have to take a scrub on the whole thing? I'm going to use this as an opportunity to get better as a speaker, to try it in a way I don't normally try it, which is what I did. Gave the talk, had a lovely little reception after where I got to meet these teachers

• 20:52Ryan Holiday?

  and administrators and education execs from all over the state. That was lovely. And then I was having a little conversation with the sort of person who was leading me around, a lovely guy named Dr. Jay Brewer, who was a school principal and superintendent there in Kentucky. I talked about my trip to Greece in the talk and he said, hey, you know, I've also been to Greece. He said, I went there and did the marathon. I said, no, wait, I just did it. And he said, oh, last year? And I said, no, no, like last week, like I just did it. And so we were talking all about the marathon and I was telling him my story. This will be an episode later. I'll bring you all that. But we're talking and then afterwards, as we're walking out to the reception, he's

• 21:35Ryan Holiday?

  sort of showing me around and goes, look, that's the Ohio River out there. And he says, see that bridge? And I go, yeah. And he goes, that bridge, you walk across that bridge, you're in Indiana. I go, oh, that's cool. I've never actually been to Indiana. And he says, well, I'll walk you over there after. And I was like, ah, okay. You know, people say things. I didn't know if he's serious. So we wrap up the talk. It's about eight 30. I'm exhausted. But he goes, so you ready to walk to Indiana? And I go, you know what? What the hell? This day's already been crazy enough. Let's do it. I said, give me a minute. Let me go upstairs. Let me change, put my stuff down, call my wife, call, say goodnight to the kids, come down, put on my shoes. I didn't even bring my running shoes because I was, I ran in the morning and then my flight the next day was very, very early. So I come down and we walk. He said it would be like a mile and a half.

• 22:18Ryan Holiday?

  It was like two and a half plus miles there and then two and a half plus back. So we did about five miles on top of all the craziness for the day. But I gotta tell you, and I have a video of it. We walk out, we see the Lewis and Clark statue and then There, there, there's a statue of the slave that sort of fled the expedition. Whose name is escaping me, I'm sorry. But standing out there, you're elevated up on basically the top of the sort of levee of the river. And the sun is setting over the Ohio River and it is one of the most gorgeous sunsets I have ever seen in my life. Just absolutely incredible. And I'm just standing there and go, hey, this was an insane day.

• 23:01Ryan Holiday?

  But this is like the least bad, worst version it could be. I'm alive, I got to do the talk, I challenged myself, I grew from doing the talk. And here I am in a place I've never been, looking at a sunset that rivals some of the prettiest sunsets that I've ever seen in my life. And I'm out for a walk. We had a lovely conversation about education, about philosophy, about history. He took me to see a nice Lincoln statue, Lincoln being a big chapter in the new Wisdom Takes Workbook. And I was telling him that Lincoln's the only president with a patent. That's why he is one of the characters in Wisdom. Again, you can preorder that at DailyStoic.com/preorder.

• 23:41Ryan Holiday?

  You know, and as I, I looked out over this sunset, I, I thought of a quote I've repeated here many times from Seneca where he says, "The whole world is a temple of the gods." The Stoics don't talk a ton about sunrises and sunsets, but whenever I experience golden hour like that or a beautiful sunset, I go, you know, they would have looked at similar things. Marcus would have looked at the sun over the Tiber, the sun over the Danube. Epictetus and Seneca and Cato and Cleanthes and Zeno. They would have seen the sun over the ocean, they would have seen the sun over the rivers, they would have seen it over lakes, they would have seen it over the Acropolis and the Forum.

• 24:23Ryan Holiday?

  And in that instance, or centuries fade away. The shittiness of a day can fade away. Frustrations with other people can fade away. It's just a reminder of how beautiful existence is and how lucky we are to get it. I'm very lucky to get to live my life. It's, it's not always going to go my way. There's going to be frustrations, there's going to be obstacles, there's going to be difficulties. You're going to set out. Thinking you're gonna get green lights all along the way and, and life's gonna disabuse you of that notion, right? Man proposes, God disposes. If you want to make God laugh, make plans. Actually inscribed at the Oracle of Delphi, the Temple of Apollo, it said,

• 25:06Ryan Holiday?

  "Offer a guarantee and disaster threatens." Any case, walking across this bridge and then boom, here I am in Indiana, check a new state off the list. We walk back, go to the hotel, scarf down some food. I'm reading a book, call my wife, she's read the same book, have a nice lovely conversation about this Court of Thorn and Roses book that I have put off reading for a long time, but she is just absolutely lit up that I am reading. And then I go to bed. And I'd love to tell you that that's the beginning and the end of the insane day. Beautiful walk in the evening, watching the sunset, go to bed, catch the car in the next morning, get home. Only there are some wrinkles once again. I wake up at 5:49 and

• 25:50Ryan Holiday?

  I'm so out of it. There's a time difference, whatever. My alarm's been going off, but doing so silently. Some of my phone is doing some bullshit. Yeah, I'd slept through my alarm. The car is downstairs. Mad dash, throw the clothes in. Again, still have not fucking showered. Get in the car, just barely make it to the airport, rush through, get on the plane, almost missed the flight home, which would have caused a whole ripple of things. But then I land in Austin, drive to the office, see Samantha, deal with some work stuff, and then I go to pick up the kids from camp. I go a little early and you know what I do? Do the same run again. Going to bring it full circle. It's lovely run. It's hot. It's

• 26:31Ryan Holiday?

  middle afternoon, but again, same shade. You run past this shelter that native peoples have been using for 500 years, splash around in the waterfall again, the cool off. And then my son's braces broke while he was at camp. And so, We go have late lunch, take him to get his braces repaired, have some lovely time in the car together, bring him home. That is the full circle of it. So, you know, I was gone for roughly 24 hours and I spent the vast majority of that just sitting at the airport. It was weird to me to be landing in Austin the next day and I call my speaking agent and I go, I'm back here. I like exactly 24 hours later, passing the table I was just sitting at and it

• 27:16Ryan Holiday?

  didn't go the way I wanted, but it went good, all things considered. And to me, that's the Stoic lesson that I try to remind myself of. Look, I said this wasn't actually the worst day ever, but it was a lot. Everything that could go wrong seemed to go wrong. But to me, what Stoicism helps us with is to handle this with equanimity and poise, to look for the good in it, to look for what we control inside it, to use that time productively, to find things to be grateful for and, and to know that, look, we're not in charge. We're not deciding. We don't get to decide how it goes, but we do decide what it means to us, what we take out of it. And we decide whether we're going to make this an awful day or a good day. So when I said it's the worst day, I'm being somewhat facetious

• 27:59Ryan Holiday?

  because it turns out to be one of my favorite days. I'll think of that sunset forever. I'll be able to tell people about the time I walked to Indiana forever. People will be grabbing these tip-ins from the wisdom book and they'll say, you know, stuck at the Austin airport on them, or they'll say, you know, flight to Nashville, or they'll say flight from Nashville to, to Louisville. I don't know. It was a lot, but I'm proud of how I handled it. Not proud of how I handled all of it. I wish it could have gone differently, of course. I wish more breaks had gone my way, but ultimately the big things that mattered, they did go my way. And anytime you fly through the air and don't crash and die, You're living in a miracle. You're living in a fantasy world.

• 28:43Ryan Holiday?

  And that's what I try to remind myself. And I got to go do what I love, got to go meet a bunch of lovely people. I'll probably bring you excerpts of that talk at some point. You'll probably see B-roll of this sunset in Daily Stoic videos on YouTube as well. And then this is what I tell myself. Robert Greene said, look, the great thing about being a writer is that it's all material. You take the worst, most painful, frustrating things in your life and you turn them into material. At some point in the middle of the crazy day, I did not know whether I would make it or not. I did not know whether the gig would happen or not. I did not know what it would cost me or what I would lose. But I did know, hey, there's probably a good podcast episode in this. And in that, that's my job. That's what I get to do and that's what you just listened to. So thank you. I'll talk to you all soon.

• 29:26Ryan Holiday?

  I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Please preorder Wisdom Takes Work, dailystoic.com/preorder. And you can also preorder a box set of all four books, all signed and numbered, first edition. A limited run of 1,500 of them. We have those. I'll link to that in today's show notes, too. Appreciate you, appreciate the group for having me out. Appreciate the Vayner folks for seeing me through. Appreciate my family for putting up with the stress. Thanks to the gods for getting me through it. Talk to y'all soon.

• 29:59Ryan Holiday?

  Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it and I'll see you next episode.