There’s Only One Path To Greatness | Try the Other Handle

“Thirteen years before Marcus Aurelius would be old enough to legally hold any public post, Hadrian decided something extraordinary: he was going to make Marcus Aurelius the emperor of Rome. What was it that Hadrian saw in this young boy?”Ryan discusses the importance of reading, and reads this week’s meditation from The Daily Stoic Journal, on today’s Daily Stoic Podcast. Blinkist is the app that gets you fifteen-minute summaries of the best nonfiction books out there. Blinkist lets you get the topline information and the most important points from the most important nonfiction books out there, whether it’s Ryan’s The Daily Stoic, and more. Go to blinkist.com/stoic, try it free for 7 days, and save 25% off your new subscription, too.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow Daily Stoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@daily_stoic See 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.

• 0:04Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Each day, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, illustrated with stories from history, current events, and literature to help you be better at what you do. And at the beginning of the week, we try to do a deeper dive, setting a kind of Stoic intention for the week, something to meditate on, something to think on, something to leave you with, to journal about, whatever it is you happen to be doing. So let's get into it.

• 0:34Ryan Holiday?

  There is only one path to greatness. Thirteen years before Marcus Aurelius would be old enough to legally hold any public post, Hadrian decided to do something extraordinary. He was going to make Marcus Aurelius the future emperor of Rome. What was it that Hadrian saw in this young boy? What gave him the sense that he was destined for great things? "Hadrian regarded himself as the greatest polymath of all time," Frank McLean says in his biography of Marcus Aurelius. "And Hadrian wasn't bashful about his affection for other intellectuals. Hadrian bestowed honors and riches on tragedians, grammarians, comedians, and rhetoricians," McLean says. "Like it or not, Hadrian judged a man by his interest in literature."

• 1:19Ryan Holiday?

  From an early age, Marcus Aurelius showed that he fit that bill. His tutor Fronto wrote that Marcus "used to go about in public with too serious a face and used to read books at the theater and at banquets." McLean talks about how the worst that his detractors could say about him was that he sometimes took books from the city libraries for his own use. That was exactly the kind of person that Hadrian was drawn to. Young or old, Hadrian believed that a love of reading was one of the surest signs that greatness lay ahead. And that love seemed to be inherent in Marcus. But that's not always the case. More often, it's cultivated by the seeking and unseeking alike. When he was in second grade, Harry Truman came down with a rare bacterial infection that paralyzed his arms and legs.

• 2:04Ryan Holiday?

  The boy who could hardly stand to be indoors was suddenly and helplessly bedridden. That's When he started reading, his sister recalled, he couldn't do anything else. Truman read so much that when miraculously and abruptly he recovered, it was recommended that he skip third grade. The infection would never come back, but the reading bug, it turns out, was incurable. "I don't know anybody in the world that ever read as much or as constantly as Harry did," one cousin said. "He was what you'd really call a bookworm." A classmate remembered, "I saw Harry go home from school many a time with two or three books on the weekends, and I guess by Monday he'd read them all." He became obsessed with finding out what caused success and failure, he said, and

• 2:44Ryan Holiday?

  he pored over Plutarch's lives, biographies, even Marcus Aurelius's meditations. And Truman's copy was famously filled with notes and underlines, even comments where he disagreed with Marcus. "The greats," Truman concluded, "were all readers of books, particularly books of biography and history. Not all readers are leaders," he said, "but all leaders are readers. Hadrian knew it, Marcus knew it, Truman knew it." So what are you waiting for? Why aren't you reading more? Why aren't you challenging yourself as a reader? You've gotta be. Try the Other Handle. Epictetus offered a powerful tool in his handbook, The Inqueridion, which the Stoics use as an exercise in decision-making about difficult events.

• 3:29Ryan Holiday?

  Everything, Epictetus says, has two interpretations, or handles, by which it can be grabbed. One that will make it harder, one that will make it easier. Do you take offense, or do you focus on a common ground? Do you focus on all that's gone wrong, or what has gone right? Ask yourself these questions about everything you see and feel. Try to always grab the right handle. That's from this week's entry in the Daily Stoic Journal, "366 Days of Writing and Reflection on the Art of Living," which you can get anywhere books are sold, including, of course, my bookstore, The Painted Porch, which you can check out, thepaintedporch.com, or come see us on Main Street, Ambassador, Texas. Let's listen to Epictetus drill down on this. "Every event has two handles," he says, "one by which it can be carried and one by which

• 4:14Ryan Holiday?

  it can't. If your brother does you wrong, don't grab it by its wrongdoing, because this is the handle incapable of lifting it. Instead, use the other, that he is your brother, that you were raised together, and then you have hold of the handle that it carries." This is Epictetus in Coridion 43. And then he says in Discourses 4:1, "No, it is events that give rise to fear, when another has power over them or can prevent it, that a person becomes able to inspire fear. How is the fortress destroyed? Not by iron or fire, but by judgments. And it is here that we must begin, and it is from this front that we must seize the fortress and throw out the tyrants." So, this idea of grabbing things by the handle. In fact, there's this interesting list, you can Google it.

• 4:58Ryan Holiday?

  Thomas Jefferson wrote a bunch of, like, rules for, for one of his young relatives. And he says, somewhat elusively, he says, you know, "Always grab things by their smooth handle." And I think it was Donald Robertson who pointed out to me that he's referring to Epictetus grabbing by the right handle. Instead of the rough handle, grab the smooth handle. The point being, stuff happens. Are you gonna try to say, "This was done to me," or are you gonna say, "This is done for me?" Are you gonna say, "Look at all I've lost," or are you gonna say, "Look at all I've gained?" As Epictetus says, you're gonna say, "Look at my brother, what did he do? What an asshole." Or are you gonna say, "This is my brother, I love him, he would never hurt me on purpose." You grab the handle that makes you stronger, the one that gives you agency, not the one that strips you of agency.

• 5:42Ryan Holiday?

  You grab the one that gives you hope, not the one that strips you of hope. You grab the one that gives you a path forward, not the one that freezes you hopelessly in place. What's the right handle? That's what we're thinking about. And every situation has a handle. And I, are you gonna get mad? Are you gonna use it as an opportunity? I think about this with my kids. They do something, am I gonna lose my temper and show them that I lose my temper and that I should be afraid, they should be afraid of me, or that they should hide things from me? Or am I gonna use it as a chance to... Talk to them to teach them something. Famously, the story of George Washington and the cherry trees, teaching this lesson. His father catches him chopping down the cherry tree. He asks who does it? George Washington tells the truth. His father could be angry.

• 6:24Ryan Holiday?

  He just has a confession from his son that he chopped down a priceless cherry tree. Instead, the moral of the story is, I'm glad that you told me the truth and you can trust me, I'm not going to punish you for having told me the truth. I'd rather you chop down my trees than tell a lie. Right? What handle are you going to choose as a parent, as a teacher, as a boss? And by grabbing the right handle versus the wrong handle, are you making the relationship stronger, better, based on trust, based on aligned incentives, based on shared history? Or by grabbing the wrong handle, are you showing them to lie? Are you showing them to hide things? Are you showing them that you should be feared, that you should be ignored, that you can't be taken seriously, that you're not really their ally or friend?

• 7:08Ryan Holiday?

  Right? The handle we choose matters. Even Epictetus, you've got to imagine, he's trapped in slavery. It's horrible. He spends the first 30 years of his life that way. Does he choose to see this as the worst thing that could have possibly happened, or does he learn from it? Even the so-called Stockdale paradox, and he says, I knew I would survive, and if I did, I would turn this into the very best thing that happened to me. That's choosing to grab the right handle, that's choosing to grab the smooth handle, which is what you must do, which is what we must all do in any and all situations. And that's it for me today. I'm exhausted. I've just spent all day recording videos. You hear my voice going out a little bit, but I'm trying to tell myself, this is one day among many. This is making me stronger. I'm getting better for it.

• 7:52Ryan Holiday?

  I'm crossing off stuff from my list, and I can focus on what I really need to be doing. I'm going to try to grab the good handle today. So should you. Talk soon. That line from Truman is actually the inspiration for our Read to Lead course. Again, not all readers are leaders, but to be a leader, you have to be a reader. Look, I love that you're listening to the podcast, but reading is just an essential practice. You've got to make time for it. I don't care if it's audiobooks or physical books, but you have to read and you have to have a reading practice. And that's what we built the Read to Lead Challenge around. You can check that out at dailystoic.com/reading. It's just one of the best things we've done. It's all sorts of Stoic-inspired wisdom, plus, you know, great stories from folks like Harry Truman,

• 8:35Ryan Holiday?

  and then really practical, applicable prompts and exercises that will help you become a better reader over the next few weeks. It's awesome. We're heading into a new year here. It's a great year to invest in reading, to invest in becoming a better leader. So check it out, dailystoic.com/reading.