Can You Do This Even Here? | It's In Your Self-Interest

With enough practice, Seneca said, he found he could think anywhere. He could find stillness and peace anywhere. 📚 Stillness Is The Key by Ryan Holiday https://store.dailystoic.com/products/stillness-is-the-key-signed-edition 🎟️ DAILY STOIC LIVE https://www.dailystoiclive.com/| Ryan Holiday is coming to a city near you https://www.dailystoiclive.com/! Grab tickets here https://www.dailystoiclive.com/ | https://www.dailystoiclive.com/ 🎙️ AD-FREE https://dailystoic.supercast.com/| Support the podcast and go deeper into Stoicism by subscribing to The Daily Stoic Premium https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ - unlock ad-free listening, early access, and bonus content: https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ ✉️ FREE STOIC WISDOM https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail | Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

• 0:00Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

• 0:14Ryan Holiday?

  Can you do this even here? It was one of the noisiest places in the noisiest city in the world. It was big enough that it would stun you even now. The baths of Diocletian in ancient Rome could accommodate more than 3,000 people at a time. People from all over the empire came there to wash off, to work out, to socialize, to primp and relax. Seneca found the noise of the baths intolerable. He describes the sound of fat men being massaged, people jumping in the water, obnoxious people in love with their own voices, vendors hawking their wares, even a thief being arrested outside. "It was loud enough," he said, "to make you hate your own ears." So you might think that in order to write,

• 0:57Ryan Holiday?

  which he was desperately trying to do, he needed to run away from it all. Perhaps he headed out to his country estate, or got up early, or stayed up late to skip the noise in the crowds. On the contrary, Seneca sought those baths out precisely because they were noisy. With enough practice, he said, he found he could think anywhere. He could find stillness and peace anywhere. And so can we. Stillness is not something we just have. It's not a product of environmental conditions being just right. Or if it is, we're going to be very vulnerable. No, stillness is something we cultivate inside ourselves. Marcus Aurelius agreed. He said that he could retreat inside his own soul anytime he wanted.

• 1:39Ryan Holiday?

  He knew that serenity and tranquility were an interior state of being. By the way, I wrote a whole book about this. It's called Stillness is the Key, and it opens with this scene from Seneca. I actually was just at the baths in Rome recently and standing outside those baths. It was just a fascinating glimpse into what Seneca was talking about. You can grab your signed copy of Stillness is the Key at store.dailystoic.com.

• 2:13Ryan Holiday?

  It's in your self-interest. This is an entry from the Daily Stoic. I realize I'm recording at my house. I ran upstairs and I grabbed a copy of the Daily Stoic off the shelf. I was looking for one. And I think I found a first edition because it doesn't say bestseller list on it. It doesn't say how many copies were sold. And it's kind of got these yellowed pages. So pretty cool. This would have been the first edition that came out in 2016. Obviously, since printed millions of copies, it's in like 30 languages. You can even grab a leather edition at store.dailystoic.com, but I'll get to the entry, I promise. Today's quote is from Seneca's Moral Letters. "Therefore, explain why a wise person shouldn't get drunk,

• 2:55Ryan Holiday?

  not with words, but with the facts of its ugliness and offensiveness. It's most easy to prove that the so-called pleasures, when they go beyond proper measures, are but punishments." Is there a less effective technique to persuading people to do something than yelling at them? Is there anything that turns people off more than abstract notions? That's why the Stoics don't say, "Stop doing this. It's a sin." Instead, they say, "Don't do this because it will make you miserable." They don't say, "Pleasure isn't pleasurable." They say, "Endless pleasures become its own form of punishment." Their methods of persuasion hew the line in the 48 Laws of Power.

• 3:36Ryan Holiday?

  Appeal to people's self-interest, never to their mercy or gratitude. If you find yourself trying to persuade someone to change or to do something differently, remember what an effective lever self-interest is. It's not that this or that is bad. It's that it's in their best interest to do it a different way. And show them, don't moralize. And think about what would happen if you apply this line of thinking to your own behavior. I've sometimes said, like, the difference between Stoicism and Christianity is the Christian argument is like, hey, don't do these sins. Don't violate these 10 commandments, or you could go to hell. And I realize this is a simplification. Just bear with me. But the Stoic argument is, hey, if you do these things,

• 4:21Ryan Holiday?

  and there's a similar probably list of things to do and not do, you will live in a kind of hell, right? The Stoics certainly would have saw people get ahead doing bad things, but they also would have seen how they pay for those quote unquote successes, right? That these were some of the most miserable people. Certainly, this is what Epictetus realized, is living in Nero's court. He goes, "Oh, man, these people weren't lucky. They're not getting away with anything. It's horrible to be them. I wouldn't want to be them at all." I'm obviously thinking about this now that I have kids. You know, when you forbid someone from doing something, or you just criticize something, what you're not doing is explaining the why.

• 5:05Ryan Holiday?

  You're not demonstrating the why. And the Stoic argument is like, look, when you do something and you experience that bit of pleasure, you know, the pleasure passes quickly, but sometimes the shame, or what you had to do to get it, or the wrong you committed to get it, that endures. Meanwhile, the other side of the argument the Stoics would say is that when you do something hard, or you resist, or you push forward, that labor passes quickly, but the pride in it remains. The good lasts a little bit longer. You know, the Stoics would have tried to point out, yeah, look, I'm not saying that it's not fun to drink, but you got to think about what you're going to feel like tomorrow.

• 5:49Ryan Holiday?

  You got to think about the road you're going down. I was just talking to someone about this, the idea of justice. You know, he was talking about this, like, bit of paperwork he had to fill out. And, you know, if you put one number, you had to pay a certain amount of tax. If you moved the number a little lower, it was less tax. And we weren't just talking about whether that was the right thing to do or not, or whether you would get caught or not. But again, kind of person do you become? Kind of habit are you building? And this matters too. Maybe karma exists. Maybe you will go to hell for it. But is it creating a kind of hell here, making you a hellish person, right? Are you actually getting away with it? Or are you paying for it in another way?

• 6:33Ryan Holiday?

  That's the question I want to leave you with today. That's, to me, the Stoic argument. You know, that's what so struck me about the Stoics early is they're, they're making a pretty self-interested case, a pretty logical case for these things. Because they saw it up close and personal. They know what happens when you go down that road. The choice of Hercules that I built the Four Virtues series around. It seems like the road of vice is more fun than the road of virtue, but in the end, it isn't.

• 7:05Ryan Holiday?

  Thanks so much for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. If you don't know this, you can get these delivered to you via email every day. Check it out, dailystoic.com/email.