Are You Dug In? | 7 Perspective Shifting Stoic Tips From Actors, Writers, and Politicians

What about you? Are you ready for the inevitable, unending challenges that lay ahead? Just think about what 2024 could bring—we’re facing global conflicts, a make-or-break presidential election, untamed inflation, climate change…plus all the regular stuff! How dug in are you? How tough is your inner citadel? How is your battle stance? How sharp are your weapons? How prepared is your mind? Are you a wrestler? You have to be. For the last five years, thousands of Stoics from across the globe have joined us in the New Year New You Challenge—a set of 21 actionable challenges, presented one per day, built around the best, most timeless wisdom in Stoic philosophy. These aren’t pie-in-the-sky, theoretical discussions but clear, immediate exercises and methods you can begin right now to spark the reinvention you’ve been trying for. We’ll tell you what to do, how to do it, and why it works. And in today's Daily Stoic video excerpt, Ryan quotes Seneca, “There is the need for someone against which our characters can measure themselves. Without a ruler, you won’t make the crooked straight.” We need mentors, teachers, and coaches to make us better. The key to peak performance is to always remain a student. Always seek opportunities to challenge yourself and your team. Always. Be. Learning. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee 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.

• 0:02Ryan 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.

• 0:26Ryan Holiday?

  Are you dug in? Considering what happened to him during his reign, it was a pretty good strategy. Marcus Aurelius experienced plagues, and war, and floods, and tragedies. He buried his own children. He was betrayed in a coup attempt. Rome's treasury was depleted. That was just the extreme events. There was also the day-to-day life, the week-to-week challenges that life brings every person. Trouble sleeping, bad weather, feeling sick, hurting your knee, travel delays, a disagreement with your spouse, habits you can't quit. How did he deal with all of this? He says in Meditations that he needed to face life like a wrestler, waiting, poised, and dug in for sudden assaults. Some say that Marcus was cynical or a little dark in his writings. No, what he was doing was preparing himself, steeling

• 1:08Ryan Holiday?

  himself for the very real challenges he faced, and that he knew that he would face. And what about you? Are you ready for the inevitable, unending challenges that lay ahead? Just think about what 2024 could bring. We're facing global conflicts, a make-or-break presidential election, untamed inflation, climate change, plus all the regular stuff. How dug in are you? How tough is your inner citadel? How's your battle stance? How sharp are your weapons? How prepared is your mind? Are you a wrestler? Because you have to be. And look, for the last five years, Stoics all over the world, thousands and thousands of them, have joined us at Daily Stoic New Year, New Year Challenge. It's 21 actionable challenges, and they're called challenges because they're hard, not easy, presented one per day, built around the best

• 1:52Ryan Holiday?

  Most timeless wisdom in ancient philosophy, and I'd love to have you join us, join me doing that together. It's almost a book's worth of content. There's live Q and A's. There's a calendar. You have access to the community, a bunch of awesome stuff. And I'd love for you to start your year by sharpening your weapons and getting in the habit of seeking out challenges. Don't let this be another year that you let yourself slide by, taking the easy path. That's not fair to you. It's not fair to the world. Let's do this together. You can sign up right now. Sign up with me at dailystoic.com/challenge. And if you're thinking about joining Daily Stoic Life, well, you could do that now and get the Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge totally for free. You can do that at dailystoiclife.com.

• 2:33Ryan Holiday?

  But I hope to see you in the Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge at dailystoic.com/challenge.

• 2:50Speaker 01

  This is life. Life involves pain. At the end of the day, it comes down to, I don't have control over it, and that makes me feel uncomfortable.

• 2:58Speaker 02

  When I try and fight back against that, I only make my life more uncomfortable.

• 3:03Speaker 03

  You can't do one without the other.

• 3:08Ryan Holiday?

  When you're reading a book, or listening to a podcast, or watching a video, there's a lot being thrown at you, right? And you've got, trying to follow all of it, you're trying to make sense of all of it. I kind of have a simple rule that's worked well for me over the years, which is I just try to find one thing. Actually, this comes to us from Seneca in one of his letters to Lucilius. He's saying, just find one thing a day, one quote, one idea, one exercise, one practice. He's saying, if you find one thing that makes you stronger or wiser, he said, "fortifies you against the chances of life, against poverty, against death," right? He said, "That's what it's about, just finding one thing a day." So when I'm listening to podcasts, or I'm watching videos, or reading books, that's really my rubric. I'm, do I get one thing out of it? And I've had the privilege now

• 3:50Ryan Holiday?

  of doing the Daily Stoic Podcast. I've interviewed hundreds of guests from all over the world, done over 150 million downloads. It's been this incredible experience, but it's also been an experience for me. I've gotten a lot out of it. I've been running the Daily Stoic Podcast now for the last five years. I've interviewed hundreds of guests from all over the world. I've done hundreds of millions of downloads. And in today's episode, I wanted to give you some of the stuff that I've taken out of it. Clips that I've written down, notes I've written to myself, things I've applied to my life from some of the Stoic guests and not so Stoic guests that I've been lucky enough to interview on the Daily Stoic Podcast. And I hope that all of them do as much for you as they did for me.

• 4:31Speaker 04

  When the mind and the body kind of, when you find that kind of sweet spot where they both kind of work together, you know, then you really have a big advantage.

• 4:42Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 4:42Speaker 04

  Because the mind is just like Freddie Gerstler was saying when I was a kid, you know, it needs the same kind of torture. It needs the same pain. It needs the same kind of a push and resistance. And the more adversity that you go through, the stronger you get as a character, the stronger your character becomes and the stronger your will becomes and all of that stuff. So, so it's very clear. I believe in that very strongly and I have always in the practice that.

• 5:11Ryan Holiday?

  One of the Stoics said, "We treat the body rigorously so that it's not disobedient to the mind." And I think it's the idea that we're sort of cultivating this when we feel that resistance, when we feel that doubt, when our body says, "No, you can't run two more miles," or "You can't do two more reps," and you push through that. That's what you need, like when you're trying to pass redistricting and you fail the first time and you fail the second. Like you need that part of yourself that has trained the muscle that pushes past no or the first failure or that it's hard.

• 5:41Speaker 04

  Right.

• 5:41Ryan Holiday?

  You have to cultivate that sort of meta muscle that pushes through hard stuff.

• 5:49Ryan Holiday?

  If you can go like, "Hey, this is what I'm trying to accomplish here," then it makes it easier to make decisions about include it, not include it. And I think people are bad at this with life as a whole. They don't know what they want their life to be, like what, like what success is. So they just go, "Well, someone offered me a lot of money to do X," or "It's unpleasant to do Y." And so sometimes you do unpleasant things to get to a place you want to get and sometimes you turn down lots Of money or a cool opportunity because it gets you far away from where you want to go. But if you don't have a sense of where you're trying to end up, you're just making these individual decisions and you don't actually have the perspective to know what the best choice is.

• 6:25Speaker 05

  Yeah, you're totally right. And it's very hard to be able to see clearly all those things when you're 25.

• 6:33Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 6:33Speaker 05

  You know, I mean, like at this age, I can look back and go, oh, I understand why someone isn't unaware or not yet there to make those decisions, which makes the people that are 25 and able to see that all the more impressive. In a way, I do remember having some of that clarity because when I was 21 and I was doing real estate in Boston, I remember being like, you know, you rent apartments. You show people their apartment and you get a crazy fee.

• 7:00Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 7:01Speaker 05

  For a kid, I'm six weeks out of college.

• 7:04Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 7:04Speaker 05

  Some of my weekly checks were two grand, 2,500. I'm like, this is fucking wild.

• 7:09Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 7:09Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, and I remember getting to September and being like, yeah, but I was just, it was eating me up that I wasn't performing.

• 7:17Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 7:18Speaker 05

  Not performing comedy. And so I was like, I'm moving to LA. And they were like, you just made like, you know, I forget how much it was in a few weeks, 12, 15,000. It was clear I was going to make, I was going to be 21 and be making 150,000. Now, I didn't get that money yet, but it just felt like the writing was on the wall and that. And I just was like, yeah, but I don't want to be showing the apartments.

• 7:40Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 7:45Speaker 05

  At the end of the day, it comes down to, I don't have control over it. And that makes me feel uncomfortable. If I'm not in control of that, ultimately it all points to, I'm afraid of dying.

• 7:54Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 7:54Speaker 05

  And that's why, to me, the memento mori of all the aphorisms is the one that means the most to me. Because if I can get cool with death.

• 8:02Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 8:03Speaker 05

  In Don Robertson's book, he talks about this where I'm going to butcher this quote, but in speaking to death, he says, I've imagined you many times. Now pass through the gates of my imagination. Let us visit his friends. That to me, that quote, and also there was a soldier, you may know this story. A soldier approaches his general and says, sir, your son is dead. And the general responds, I knew he was mortal.

• 8:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's in Epictetus, I think, or somebody's, uh, or maybe Seneca, it says, yeah, I knew, I knew he was mortal when I had him. That to me is everything, because if I can bring myself to that, and that sounds cold and callous on the surface, but it is also to me the most loving thing is like, I knew that my son wanted to be in the army. I knew that he was going to take a risk, and if I had been a weaker father, I would have prevented him from doing the thing that he wanted to do more than anything. I would have prevented him from being the person, because he could have potentially gotten hurt. But I allowed him, myself, to assuage my fear enough to not stand in the way of him becoming the person that he wanted to be. And I knew that, and I accept that, even if it means it is the most crushing horrific reality I can possibly imagine for myself. I knew he was mortal.

• 9:10Speaker 02

  I am wired to look for the silver lining, that I'm just always like, okay, well, how can this be for me? And how can I learn? And how? And my partner is very much accepting, just like it is. It just is. And sometimes it just is. And he had been talking about that for as long as we had been dating. And I was just sort of like, well, we're gonna agree to disagree. And reading that book was really helpful. I wouldn't say that I'm all the way there, but I'm so much more accepting of especially people, of people that in the past I would think, well, this is toxic energy, or this is, you know, this person, I'm talking about family members, like this person's crazy, or that I'm just sort of like, it is what it is.

• 9:52Speaker 02

  And when I try and fight back against that, I only make my life more uncomfortable. Like, it's that Byron Katie quote, "Defense is the first act of war." That when I try and like defend what I think should be true, because like, I'm not upset that you're acting this way. I'm upset because I think you shouldn't be acting this way. So if I can just sort of accept that that is what it is, and then go about my existence with or without you in my life, based on how you're behaving, that has been huge for me.

• 10:27Ryan Holiday?

  One of the most important things I tell authors and creators is you can't just be one thing. You can't just be an author. You can't just make YouTube videos. You want to have multiple income streams. You want to do many things. That's where the sponsor of today's video comes in. Kajabi. Kajabi makes it easy to build your brand, diversify your revenue, and turn your audience into customers, which is what we're all trying to do, whatever business we're in. Kajabi is the ultimate all-in-one platform that helps creators and entrepreneurs build successful online businesses by unlocking predictable recurring revenue. They provide a one-stop stop to turn your skills, passions, and experiences into enriching online courses, exclusive membership sites, and thriving communities. All of this is underpinned by robust analytics, marketing tools, third-party integrations,

• 11:10Ryan Holiday?

  and easy payment options. Right now, you can start a 30-day free trial for your business with Kajabi. If you go to kajabi.com/dailystoic, that's K-A-J-A-B-I dot com slash daily stoic, go to kajabi.com/dailystoic to earn more doing what you love.

• 11:32Speaker 03

  I know for myself, when I speak about like, mental health and like, oh, here's a meditation practice you can put in, or here's a way you can use gratitude to kind of make your life better on a daily basis, people really go for that. They love that. They're excited about that. And I get it, you know, and because there are tools, practical tools, that can make your life better. And people want to make their lives better. They want to feel happier. They don't want to feel bummed out all the time. I get it. Not even bummed out all the time, overwhelmed by anxiety and depression and self-hatred. And they don't want to feel lost. So I get that. But I also hope that we can talk about, I guess,

• 12:11Speaker 03

  spiritual and philosophical tools to help us transform society, because they, you can't do one without the other. Do you know what I mean? We're in this really toxic, we're a bunch of frogs in a really toxic pond. You can kind of like work on yourself in your little corner of your little lily pad on your pond. But as long as like, there's war and dissension and disunity and, you know, a cross The pond, I don't know why I went to this analogy. Why did I go to this metaphor? It's not sustainable. It's a terrible metaphor. But we have to also clean up the toxic pond at the same time and and address it.

• 12:46Speaker 06

  Totally.

• 12:47Speaker 03

  So they they feed each other. The more the more that we work on our own personal spiritual and philosophical selves, you know, finding meaning and hope and and and and vision, then we can bring that to the world. And the more we are a service in the world toward the quote unquote common good, then that feeds our soul even more. And it makes us even more kind of wise and arrived.

• 13:18Speaker 06

  One of the most important chapters in this book is the chapter on attitude and how your attitude towards life affects what happens to you.

• 13:26Ryan Holiday?

  That connects to the thing that you and I made together, which is the amor fati coin.

• 13:30Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 13:30Ryan Holiday?

  Which is the idea that the sort of loving everything that happens to you, not resenting it, not fighting against it, not caring around a grudge or a burden, but sort of embracing it and finding the good in it.

• 13:43Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 13:44Ryan Holiday?

  Where does that fit in with our human nature?

• 13:46Speaker 06

  Well, it it it doesn't fit in because it's not natural to us. Our natural frame, our natural starting position is when something bad happens, why me to feel sort of a grievance? A lot of what I'm talking about in this book is overcoming some of these natural elements in human nature and turning them around and using them for another purpose, another way. And amor fati is very powerful in that you train yourself to accept everything that happens. It's like for Nietzsche, it was this is life. Life involves pain. Life involves adversity. You're going to die one day, and it's not going to be pleasant. Your friends and family members, they're going to die one day,

• 14:31Speaker 06

  and it's not going to be pleasant. You're going to have failure in life. People are going to hurt you. But that is life. That's what it is. So to resist that, to be angry about that, means to not love life itself.

• 14:49Speaker 07

  So I'm friends with Derek Sivers and he had a catastrophic success. He sold his company for 30 or 40 million dollars or whatever. And he said that he developed a practice. I don't know if he still does it, but for a number of years, he would make a point that once a year, fly coach somewhere, stay in like a dingy hostel, you know, eat trashy street food, you know, basically put himself on the same budget that he had when he was 20 years old and just do that for like four days. They remind himself of like, okay, this is, this is normal life.

• 15:21Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 15:21Speaker 07

  You know, don't lose touch with it.

• 15:24Ryan Holiday?

  Well, there's a, there's a passage in one of Seneca's letters where he says like, we should do that every month. He said, you should like, wear your worst clothes, eat the worst food, you know, sleep on the floor in your house. And he said, the point of that, it wasn't just like play acting or anything. He was like, the point was, he was saying that one of the, one of the costs of success is actually not security, but a kind of fear because you're afraid of losing all the things that you're really comfortable with. Right?

• 15:52Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 15:52Ryan Holiday?

  And he's like, you want to, you want to get comfortable with the way that, by the way, most people alive currently live. You know what I mean? Like, it's, it's very survivable what you're afraid of, but you're afraid of it because it's unfamiliar to you because you've distanced yourself from it. And he said, the whole point of this sort of practicing poverty and adversity was to be able to say to yourself at the end of that exercise, is this what I was so afraid of? You still go back to your regular or your good life, but you're not waking up in the middle of the night going, what if I get robbed? What if I get canceled? What if I fall off? Because you, you go, the worst case scenario is I just go back to how things used to be. When I wrote The Daily Stoic eight years ago, I had this crazy idea that I would just keep it going.

• 16:37Ryan Holiday?

  The book was 366 meditations, but I'd write one more every single day and I'd give it away for free as an email. I thought maybe a few people would sign up. Couldn't have even comprehended a future in which three quarters of a million people would get this email every single day and would for almost a decade. If you want to get the email, if you want to be part of a community that is the largest group of Stoics ever assembled in human history, I'd love for you to join us. You can sign up and get the email totally for free. No spam. You can unsubscribe whenever you want at dailystoic.com/email.