These Are No Good To You

We are going to face scary situations in life. Our mind can be our friend in these situations or our worst enemy.🎥 Watch A Life Changing Stoic Lesson From Gladiator on YouTube💡 The Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge is 3 weeks of ALL-NEW, actionable challenges, presented in an email per day, built around the best, most timeless wisdom in Stoic philosophy, to help you create a better life, and a new you in 2025. Why 3 weeks? Because it takes human beings 21 days to build new habits and skills, to create the muscle memory of making beautiful choices each and every day. Head over to dailystoic.com/challenge today to sign up.🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram: https://www.instagram.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, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and 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.

• 0:03Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength, insight, and wisdom in everyday life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us, dailystoic.com.

• 0:30Ryan Holiday?

  So why do they do it? Why do thousands of people all over the world sign up for the Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge? Maybe it seems crazy to you. Maybe it doesn't make any sense. It's like, oh, I could do without it. I could do it by myself. Well, I thought maybe I'd just let you hear it in their own words. Here are some folks that signed up for the Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge over the years.

• 0:52Speaker 01

  I'm really loving the challenge. And everyone I'm talking to about it's really kind of enjoying hearing about it. So I just want to say thank you for everything.

• 0:59Speaker 02

  This was a really cool way to start the year. Thank you. About three years ago, I discovered you. So I've been through ego is the enemy fairly recently. And of course, this year's challenge, I've been doing the challenge for three years.

• 1:12Speaker 03

  I'm kind of a real-life embodiment of some of the stuff my wife passed from cancer. But just learn that it's day-by-day process, kind of cliche. I have been reading the Stoics and participating in your challenges the past few years.

• 1:25Ryan Holiday?

  And look, I'll give you one testimonial on top of that. It's worked really well for me. I get something out of making the challenge, but I also do it alongside all of you. It's one of my favorite things. It kicks off the year right for me. So if you want to kick the year off right with a challenge, well, join us in the Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge. You can sign up right now at dailystoic.com/challenge. It's going to start on January 1st. Why don't you challenge yourself right now to stop procrastinating and do it? And I will see you in there.

• 1:58Ryan Holiday?

  These are no good to you. The thing they're about to do is scary. It can be hard to be up there in front of people on stage. It's terrifying to step out onto a battlefield or rush into a dangerous situation. Of course, you're nervous. It's normal that you would be, but, but normal? Normal is not what leads to elite performance. On the set of Gladiator 2, Paul Mescal felt exactly those kinds of nerves. He was starring in a $210 million movie after all, a sequel to a movie that won five Academy Awards. "You nervous?", Ridley Scott, the director, asked him on the first day of shooting. And when he answered in the affirmative, Scott looked at him and said, "Your nerves are no fucking good to me." And then he walked out onto set.

• 2:43Ryan Holiday?

  Stoicism is a philosophy of nerve control. The first two virtues, courage and discipline, are all about this. We're going to face scary situations in life. Our, our mind can be our friend in these situations or our worst enemy. We can use it to calm ourselves down, to master our emotions, or we can allow it to stir us up, to drive us crazy, to paralyze us. Anxiety, worry, doubt, imposter syndrome? These things are no good to you. You must put these impressions to the test. Master them so they won't master you. So that you can do what you need to do. And speaking of Gladiator, the new movie is really good. I have no tie or stake in it. I wish I did. I wish they'd brought me on as a consultant or something.

• 3:28Ryan Holiday?

  But we have a great video that we did over on the Daily Stoic YouTube channel about the first Gladiator where I, I dive into the opening scene of that movie. I'm going to play it for you now. Here's this, I think you'll like it.

• 3:39Speaker 04

  There's a man walking through a field. The stalks of grain are bending low under their weight. The wind is blowing softly on, seems like a... A cold day, he sees a small bird land on a branch. Then the bird takes place and he follows it with his eyes, smiling at the beauty of what the Stoics would call nature's inadvertence. And then the man turns and you see that actually this isn't such a beautiful and pretty scene, that he's surrounded not just by mud, but by all the signs of war. Cavalry is getting ready, men are marching behind sharp palisades, checking their shields and their swords. They're about to do terrible damage to each other.

• 4:22Speaker 04

  There will be ceaseless, ferocious violence and death. This is, as you know, the opening scene of the movie Gladiator. Russell Crowe is preparing for a fictionalized version of the macro manic wars, the wars that Marcus Aurelius does in fact wage on the far-flung borders of the Roman Empire. Actually, this is Ridley Scott and Russell Crowe, and they've talked about this scene before. This is kind of an unscripted improvised moment between the director and the actor in the earliest days of shooting, when they realize that they have this incredible connection and they're gonna do something magical together.

• 5:05Speaker 05

  I'm pretty sure I did every single thing he asked and I put little strokes of color on certain things and then I brought the attention back to the battlefield. And he just came up to me and go, "You and me are gonna be fucking great together."

• 5:18Speaker 04

  But it's also through Maximus, an embodiment of a really key but easy to miss Stoic lesson. In the midst of darkness and death and the worst things that human beings can do to each other, humans also have the ability to see light and beauty and feel wonder and majesty. Epictetus would say that every situation has two handles. We choose which one we're gonna grab. We also get to choose the angle. Not unlike a director, that we look at a specific scene at, right? Maximus's gaze, how he's thinking, how he's looking. By framing it one way, he sees all the good. And then he zooms out slightly and he's able to see all the not so good, which is an exercise that we humans can do. Whatever is happening in the world, whether it's the middle of a pandemic

• 6:04Speaker 04

  or political polarization or your own impending divorce or bankruptcy or health crisis. You choose how you're going to look at this. The Stoics say that our life is dyed by the color of our thoughts. How we choose to look, the perception, the lens with which we look at the world shapes how we're going to see it and how we're going to feel as a result of it. The perspective that we take on life is everything. It's the most important thing. And we miss this power all the time, just as many of you have probably seen this scene in Gladiator and not noticed the subtext of what's happening, the Stoic message that's underneath it. We have to really look. We have to hone our senses. And Marcus Aurelius's life is the quintessential example of this. Again, this is a life with a plague. This is a life where he buried multiple children,

• 6:49Speaker 04

  where he was betrayed, where there were natural disasters. There was one thing after another. And yet, what you find in meditations, is there a certain amount of world weariness? Is this a certain amount of darkness? Is there a certain amount of depressiveness? Yeah, sure. And people have noted that for a long time. But you also can't read meditations and not see Marcus Aurelius's zest for life, his poet's eye, his gratitude, his perception about how lucky he is, about how wonderful life can be. And this is the power that we all have, an edge that the Stoic is trying to hone always. We should remember that in almost every way, Marcus Aurelius's times were worse than ours are now, more stressful than ours are now, darker than ours are now.

• 7:34Speaker 04

  We should choose to see all the positivity and beauty and change and progress and take solace and inspiration in the fact that if he was able to find good and things to be excited about and things to get out of bed for in the morning, then certainly we can too.