Which Will You Be? | 10 Stoic Exercises To Get You Started

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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, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. On Tuesdays, we take a closer look at these Stoic ideas, how we can apply them in our actual lives. Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy.

• 0:29Ryan Holiday?

  Which will you be? We can stipulate that it was a different time, there were different ideas. We can grant that people are products of their environment. We can grant that people are complicated and can still be good, even if they have some abhorrent beliefs. But still, the contrast is too stark to not point out. In the 19th century, the two great translators of the Stoics were in America. George Long was a British classicist who did a stint at the University of Virginia, and later put out an incredible edition of Marcus Aurelius. Thomas Wentworth Higginson was a New Englander who would translate Epictetus. These two men both loved the ancient insights and the ideas of the Stoics, which were formed around the virtues of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. Yet, when it came

• 1:14Ryan Holiday?

  to the most divisive issue of the day, they took very different paths. While he was in Virginia, George Long married into a slave-owning Southern family. In fact, when he and his wife returned to England, they took one of her slaves with them as a servant, where the man later died of cholera. Higginson, on the other hand, left Harvard in 1845 to dedicate himself to the cause of abolition. He protested the Mexican-American War, rightly seeing it as a cause trumped up by slave owners to expand the institution into new territories. When the Civil War broke out, he enlisted for the Union, where he served as a captain until he was wounded in battle. Then he led the first South Carolina Volunteers, the

• 1:53Ryan Holiday?

  first regiment of Black freedmen in the war. One philosophy, two men, two paths. It's a schism that goes back to the ancients themselves. Some of the Stoics were opposed to slavery in the ancient world, others accepted the practice and benefited from it. Epictetus was a victim of this system, cruelly tortured and exploited by a man who worked for Nero, while Seneca, Nero's right-hand man, took the institution as a fact of life. It's delusional to think that there aren't issues like this in front of us today. It's imperative that each of us try to face that, try to ask what this philosophy demands of us, particularly the virtue of justice. George Long failed that test. He would later dedicate an edition of Meditations to Robert E. Lee.

• 2:37Ryan Holiday?

  Thomas Wentworth Higginson measured up to it. He passed it with flying colors. What about you? What tradition will you follow? What path will you take? Whether we want to admit it or not, we face these questions in big ways and small ways every day. That's why the Stoics urge us to develop our own character, our own moral compass, so that even if we're tired, overwhelmed, or frustrated, we can make a decision in the moment that years later we're proud of, that doesn't fill us with regret. Because we already made the decision. We made it when we decided that this is the kind of person we're going to be, that this is what we stand for, that this is what we fight for. And Wentworth's example was one that I was so inspired by.

• 3:18Ryan Holiday?

  He's a character in Right Thing Right Now, good character, good values, good deeds. I just think it's really important. We think of the Stoics as not being engaged, but in fact, they actually were very engaged in the issues of their time. And they didn't always get it right, but we should celebrate when they did get it right. And that's what Right Thing Right Now is about, developing a moral code and character. It's about celebrating acts of great justice and decency and kindness that will hopefully inspire us to do more of that in our own life. The book is almost out, just like two weeks left. It would mean so much to me if you could preorder it. We got a bunch of awesome bonuses if you could.

• 4:00Ryan Holiday?

  You can grab that at dailystoic.com/justice. And let me tell you a bunch more about Thomas Wentworth Higginson. He's in the book, and he's a hero of mine, and hopefully he'll become a hero of yours too. Grab the new book and get it in any format. You can get signed, numbered first editions from me, of course, but grab it, audio, ebook, whatever. Send your bonuses in. All the details are at dailystoic.com/justice, and I'll send you a bunch of awesome stuff.

• 4:32Ryan Holiday?

  Almost two decades ago, I was introduced to Stoicism. And like a lot of people, I heard about this word. I was interested in it. But where do you start?

• 4:42Ryan Holiday?

  That's the question, right? Do you start with Epictetus? If you can even pronounce it right? Do you start with Seneca? Do you start with Marcus Aurelius's Meditations? And which translation do you start with, right? Do you start with a Wikipedia page? Where to start with Stoicism is the perennial question. And this is a question that's been vexing people, not just since the time of ancient Rome, but realizing that even between the Stoics, between Zeno and Marcus Aurelius, over 600 years of history elapsed. I'm Ryan Holiday. I've written a number of books about Stoic philosophy. I've spoken about it to everyone from the NBA to the NFL, sitting senators and special forces leaders. So in today's episode, that's what I want to give you, an introduction to the Stoics. Not one book to read, but a bunch of things that you should know that will help you get

• 5:25Ryan Holiday?

  started and hopefully start a lifelong study of this amazing philosophy, one that's changed my life, changed the life of millions of people throughout history, and is now used by Super Bowl-winning teams, special forces operators, activists, politicians, and just ordinary people trying to make sense of a crazy world.

• 5:46Ryan Holiday?

  We're gonna go back 2,000 years ago. A plague breaks out in Rome. It's a devastating pandemic, overwhelms Rome in every capacity you can imagine, and it all falls on this guy, Marcus Aurelius. Not the only problem he faces, there's historic floods, there's a long, long war, and then he has personal issues, he has health issues. Some people suspect his wife was unfaithful to him. He buries multiple children. So it's one crisis after another, personal and professional. They would say that Marcus doesn't meet with the good fortune that he deserves. His whole reign is involved in a series of troubles. And he staggers under this, right? There must have been moments when he asked himself if it was hopeless. He asked himself if he'd given enough.

• 6:30Ryan Holiday?

  We know that he staggers under this weight. We know he struggles with it because he writes in Meditations. That it's unfortunate that this happened, which is a little bit of an understatement. We don't know which of the crises he's talking about, but it was unfortunate. And yet, he doesn't even give himself this. He stops and he goes, "No, it's fortunate that this happened to me." This is the Stoic exercise we're going to talk about today, how we turn our obstacles upside down, how we dye events with our own colors, how the way that we see things, the story we tell ourselves about these things determines what we're going to be able to do with them. So this idea that is something fortunate or unfortunate, this is a choice that we get to make. So the essence of Marcus Aurelius's philosophy, the essence of Stoicism, what we're going to talk about today,

• 7:15Ryan Holiday?

  is this idea that our actions can be impeded, our plans can be disrupted. The moment we thought we were going to get can get cruelly taken away. And yet, it also can't, because we always have the ability to adapt and adjust, to work on the fly, to use what's happened to us to our own advantage. Marcus says, "The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way." Or, "The obstacle is the way." So the idea for the Stoics is that in any and every situation, no matter how bad or undesirable, we always have the opportunity to practice a virtue or practice eritae, or excellence. It's this idea that we're going to control how we respond because we don't control what happened.

• 8:01Ryan Holiday?

  The chief task in life, the Stoics would say, is finding what's in your control and what's not in your control. Fundamentally, dealing with stress, high performance, success, whatever you're dealing with, is coming down to this really basic, almost so basic it doesn't feel like it could be, ancient philosophy.

• 8:15Speaker 01

  Stoicism helps you to conserve and best deploy your limited resources. If you are easily offended, you're a poor resource allocator. And if you look at the most successful CEOs of all time, one of the key characteristics is they're very good capital allocators. But what that comes down to is limited resource allocators. Time, energy, attention, capital, in this case. The tenets of Stoicism help you to be a better resource allocator, coming back to what you said, by pausing a lot to think about what is in your control and what is out of your control. If it's out of your control, trying to allocate as few calories, as few minutes, as few dollars to that as humanly possible.

• 8:55Ryan Holiday?

  A big part of success is positive visualization. If you can't see it happening, it's unlikely that it's gonna happen. If you don't see yourself on the medal stand, if you don't see the shot going in, if you don't see yourself connecting with the ball, it's not gonna happen. If you don't believe it's possible, it can't happen. But the Stoics would pair this positive visualization with a kind of negative visualization. The term for this is premeditatio malorum, a premeditation of evils. Basically, understanding that things are unpredictable, that because things can go wrong, they invariably will go wrong. Are you prepared to respond to it? Do you have a backup plan? Are you gonna be rattled by the stuff that happens? Seneca says that the only inexcusable thing for a leader, but I think also for an athlete, to say is, "Oh, I didn't think that would happen."

• 9:38Ryan Holiday?

  You have to think it could happen, and you have to have a plan for what you're going to do if that happens.

• 9:46Ryan Holiday?

  There's really no way to separate Stoicism and journaling. They're the same thing. You know, Marcus Aurelius's Meditations is to himself. It's his journal to himself. The journal helps me clear my mind. It helps me get centered, helps me remember, helps me work on myself. Seneca talks about putting each day up for review. That's so important. You can't get better if you don't look honestly and with self-awareness at who you've been over the last 24 hours. So I wanna see what I can improve, where I fell short. The pages in my journal, they're just for me. I never will show anyone. I don't even often look at them myself, but it's the process of writing them down that helps me get better.

• 10:30Ryan Holiday?

  How we see things, of course, matters. The way we see things, the story we tell ourselves about things, that's the first, and in some ways, the most important step. The idea is that the world is objective. There really is no such thing as good or bad. Shakespeare says, "Neither good nor bad, but thinking makes it so." Events are objective. We tell ourselves what they mean. We make up a story about them. There's no such thing as a bear market or a bull market, good weather or bad weather. There's just weather. There's just the market. Our job as humans is to respond to that. Now, of course, we put names on these things, so we have a helpful way of seeing them, but we have to understand that the way we see them and the story we tell ourselves about them determines what we're gonna be able to do about them.

• 11:15Ryan Holiday?

  So if you focus on the fact that something is unfair, that something is not your fault, that something sucks, that something is impossible, insurmountable, these words have a kind of self fulfilling prophecy to them.

• 11:32Ryan Holiday?

  The poet Juvenal was saying that when Alexander the Great was alive, the whole world couldn't contain him. Sort of like Tony Montana, right? The world is not enough. But then Juvenal said of Alexander the Great, "In death, a coffin was sufficient." Meaning that the biggest, most powerful, most successful person in the world, in the end, goes in the same box as the rest of us. So the idea of memento mori, it's not just that time is short. It's not just that it should give you a sense of urgency, because Alexander the Great had that. It also should give you a kind of a sense of humility, of perspective, that you can't take any of it with you when you die. That you won't be around to enjoy your posthumous fame. That no amount of power,

• 12:17Ryan Holiday?

  or fame, or importance, or respect, none of that makes you immortal. You can start to think we matter more than we do, that we're more important than we are, that we're somehow more special than we are, when in fact, in the end, we all go in the same box, in the same ground.

• 12:34Ryan Holiday?

  If you want to understand what's happening, you have to zoom out. When you're watching the news, when you're freaking out about what's happening in the world, it's because you're looking at it up close. You think all the things that you're doing are important. You think what you're worried about is important. In fact, these things are miniscule, unimportant. Let me show you some.

• 12:56Ryan Holiday?

  Marcus Aurelius talks about ants. These are ants on my farm. He talks about, he talks about, Marcus Aurelius talks about how even armies, nations, are just like little ants fighting over scraps of land. Right? What we think we're after, what we think we're doing, what we think we're accomplishing, we think it's so important, but it's puny. And when we zoom out a little bit, we finally get some perspective. We get some clarity. We realize how exaggerated, what a preposterous sense of our own proportions we have. So whatever you're focused on, whatever you're worried about, whatever you're convinced is of the utmost importance, I promise you, if you just zoom out a little bit, you see it from the 10,000 foot view.

• 13:39Ryan Holiday?

  If you see it out of the window of an airplane, it will put it in its proper perspective, and it will remind you. That you're not nearly as important, things aren't nearly as dire or significant as you think. If you just relax, you can work your way through them.

• 13:56Ryan Holiday?

  When we look back on the bad things that have happened to us in life, with enough time, with enough distance, we come to accept them, maybe even feel grateful for them. We know that without those things, the breakup, or the failure, or the embarrassing mistake, or the accident, we wouldn't be where we are now. And we like where we are now. But in that moment, that was the furthest thought from our mind. We were fighting it, we were resenting it, we were wishing it was otherwise. But it's crazy. If later you're gonna feel good about it, if later you're gonna give yourself that gift, why delay it? Why not give it to yourself now? Why not understand, as the Stoics would say, amor fati, love your fate. Practice the art of acquiescence. Don't resent it, don't fight it.

• 14:40Ryan Holiday?

  Accept it for what it is and understand, even if you can't see it in this very moment, in the end, you will come to see this as a positive. You will come to see it as good. You will come to see it as a thing that made you who you are and how it couldn't have been anything different.

• 14:59Ryan Holiday?

  There's this story about Seneca, who's this very wealthy guy, and then he becomes a political power broker. He would supposedly practice poverty on a regular basis. So he'd like wear rags and not eat, not stay in his house. And his point was, he said, you wanted to get up close and personal with this thing so you could say to yourself, is this what you're afraid of?

• 15:18Speaker 02

  Totally, it totally is. I think that's what happens in politics, where people are too scared to lose that identity. And like you said, once you walk the plank. So once I started like really speaking out, once January 6 happened, I started prior to that. But then it's all of a sudden like, okay, I can do this. It's not that hard. And by the way, yes, I can, if I look at all my Twitter comments, they're not that good. So I'm just not gonna look at them. And if I do this, and you realize like, life is actually quite better when you all of a sudden are freed from fear. And I got freed from fear of losing my job. I was freed from fear of losing my tribe. Even though it was an intense couple of years, it was much more mentally healthy for me than anything else.

• 16:00Ryan Holiday?

  You are going to die. That is a fact. We are all going to die. Death is the prophecy that never fails. Every single one of us that was born is gonna die. And I wear this ring on my finger. It says, "Memento Mori." What does that mean? Memento Mori means you're gonna die. Marcus Aurelius says, "You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think." He says, "Let every thought and action be that of a dying man." I promise, if you live with death in mind, you will live better, you will live more fully, and you will be so much happier. I hope you like this video. I hope you subscribe. But what I really want you to subscribe to is our Daily Stoic email. One bit of Stoic wisdom, totally for free, to the largest community of Stoics ever in existence. You can sign up at dailystoic.com/email.

• 16:44Ryan Holiday?

  There's no spam. You can unsubscribe at any time. I love sending it. I've sent it every day for the last six years. And I hope to see you there at dailystoic.com/email.