It’s An Extraordinary Thing Indeed | Our Duty To Learn

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

• 0:03Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Thursdays, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from the book The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful co-author and collaborator, Stephen Hanselman. And so today, we'll give you a quick meditation from one of the Stoics, from Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, then some analysis from me, and then we send you out into the world to do your best to turn these words into works.

• 0:52Ryan Holiday?

  "It's an extraordinary thing, indeed." Marcus Aurelius said that if you ever found anything better in life than courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom, those four Stoic virtues, that it must be an extraordinary thing indeed, which raises the question, is there anything better? Well, here's one pretty extraordinary thing: love. Sure, you could argue that love fits within the virtue of justice, but it's notable how much the Stoics speak about it. Hikado said, "I can teach you a love potion made without any drugs, herbs, or special spell," and it's this: "If you would be loved, love." Marcus Aurelius himself says in Meditations that he learned from his teacher Sextus that

• 1:35Ryan Holiday?

  "the key to life was to be free of passion but full of love." Indeed, there is almost no situation in which hatred helps, but almost every situation is made better by love. "Love is something that transforms us." "Pure love, careless of all other things, kindles the soul," Seneca said. "It makes us selfless and inspires us to be better." In the end, the Beatles wrote, "The love you take is equal to the love you make," and that love is the thing that gives us meaning. Love may not be better than the four virtues, but it's certainly their equal. It emboldens courage, it inspires discipline, it strengthens justice, it gives purpose to wisdom, and it is an extraordinary thing, indeed.

• 2:35Ryan Holiday?

  Our Duty to Learn. This is today's entry, July 7th, in The Daily Stoic. And I'm reading to you today from The Daily Stoic, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living by yours truly and my co-author and translator, Stephen Hanselman. You can get signed copies, by the way, in the Daily Stoic store. Over a million copies of The Daily Stoic in print now. It's been just such a lovely experience to watch it. Spend more than 250 weeks, consecutive weeks on the bestsellers. It's just an awesome experience. But I hope you check it out. We have a premium leather edition at store.dailystoic.com as well. But let's get on with today's reading. "This is what you should teach me, how to be like Odysseus," Seneca writes in Moral

• 3:19Ryan Holiday?

  Letters 88.7, "how to love my country, wife, and father, and how, even after suffering a shipwreck, I might keep sailing on course to those honorable ends." And I write, "Many schoolteachers teach the Odyssey all wrong. They teach the dates. They debate whether Homer was really an author or not, whether he was blind. They explain the oral tradition. They tell students what a cyclops is, or how the Trojan horse worked." Seneca's advice to someone studying the classics is to forget all that. The dates, the names, the places, they don't matter. What matters is the moral. If you get everything else wrong from the Odyssey, but you're left understanding the importance of perseverance,

• 4:00Ryan Holiday?

  the dangers of hubris, the risks of temptation and distraction, well, then you really learned something. We're not trying to ace tests or impress teachers here. We are reading and studying to live, to be good human beings, always and forever." Of course, there's an entertainment element to something like the Odyssey, or really any great book. That's why it's survived for thousands of years as a text. There's literary value as well. You'd study it as a writer. And by the way, my favorite translation of the Odyssey is this one by Emily Wilson, who's also Seneca's biographer. If you haven't read The Greatest Empire by Emily Wilson, you absolutely should.

• 4:42Ryan Holiday?

  And you should read her newer-ish translation of The Odyssey, which I quite, quite enjoyed. And I actually carry both of them in the bookstore. It struck me at one point like how crazy it is that like, it was one of our bestselling titles for a while. Cause I was recommending it really hard after I read it and it's like, the bestselling book in this brand new bookstore is a book that's thousands of years old. That's what great art can do, right? It's perennial, it stands the test of time. All of which is to say, I also love how perennial Seneca's example is, right? Like, I'm sure you remember the pedanticness and the boringness with which you dissected texts in English class or whatever in, in high school.

• 5:26Ryan Holiday?

  It's like quizzes, what year did this happen? And what is the name of so-and-so's father in insert novel, right? They're trying to test whether you read it or not, as if just reading it is the accomplishment. No, you have to internalize the ideas, the lessons that the author was trying to teach. You have to understand it and translate it into insights as a human being, not recite trivia from it. And sadly, that's what so much mediocre education focuses on. They get us to memorize things. I, I think this is funny too. This is like the knock on, on like kids who have been raised in this digital era about how they don't remember things. They can just Google it.

• 6:10Ryan Holiday?

  What matters is that they remember the gist of the insight, not like the dates and places. Screw that, right? Like, does it actually matter to you in a tangible way, whether Napoleon was a real person or a literary character? Right? No, the insights that you can learn from his life, the strategic lessons, of course, even if they were fictional would, obviously the fact that they are real makes them more worthy of study. But my point is, like, you don't study Franco-Prussian battles unless you're, you know, going to become a general or something. You study them to learn about hubris, to learn about celerity and hustle, to learn about creativity and courage, right? To also learn about overreach and stupidity and the power of alliances, right?

• 6:55Ryan Holiday?

  We study history to learn those things.

• 6:59Ryan Holiday?

  Like, again, what you mispronounce Chrysippus, or, you know, sometimes I'll refer to Epictetus as a Roman slave, and someone will give me a angry email, "Actually, he's Greek." It's like, okay, but he lived in Rome and was owned by a Roman. I think we're getting into a rather pointless conversation. What matters is what you learn from Epictetus and his example, right? I bet if you'd asked Stockdale, if you said, "Oh, you know, the Roman slave, Epictetus," he wouldn't have been like, "Oh, I think he's Greek," right? No, what he took from Epictetus was the power of the courage and the fortitude and the strength and the lessons, and that's what he applied there in the Hanoi Hilton. That's why we're studying the Stoics,

• 7:44Ryan Holiday?

  and that's how we learn. This is how I try to teach my kids. This is what I try to study. The trivia is not important, right? The trivia is not important. What matters is internalizing the moral lessons. Epicurus would say that vain is the word of the philosophers, does not heal the suffering of man. I would say vain are most facts that you're not going to apply and use, not even in your work, but to be a better human being. That's the purpose of this study. That's the purpose of this philosophy. That's what I try to talk about here on this podcast, and it's a wonderful reminder, again, from a really smart person. Seneca was brilliant. He knew lots of facts. He knew all those things about the Odyssey. But what he really wanted to learn how to do, what the study of his life was,

• 8:28Ryan Holiday?

  was how to be like Odysseus. Although I think when you read Emily Wilson's translations, you're also reminded how not to be like Odysseus, because I saw in her translation that he was much more of a flawed character than perhaps I'd felt early on in my readings of that wonderful poem slash play. And again, is it a play? Is it a poem? Who gives a shit? What matters is what you do with it, and I do urge you to read it, and read it for the right reasons, and read all the things that you read for the right reasons, just to become better human being in the world.

• 9:10Ryan Holiday?

  It's not that life is short, Seneca says. It's that we waste a lot of it. The practice of Memento Mori, the meditation on death, is one of the most powerful and eye-opening things that there is. We built this Memento Mori calendar for Daily Stoic to illustrate that exact idea, that your life, in the best-case scenario, is 4,000 weeks. Are you going to let those weeks slip by? Or are you going to seize them? The act of unrolling this calendar, putting it on your wall, and every single week, that bubble is filled in, that black mark is marking it off forever. Have something to show, not just for your years, but for every single dot that you filled in, that you really lived that week,

• 9:55Ryan Holiday?

  that you made something of it. You can check it out at dailystoic.com/mmcalendar.