Freedom is An Opportunity For This | A Strong Soul Is Better Than Good Luck

You’d think that the more powerful you are, the more freedom you’d have. The more money and success you have, the more you can do. You’d think that being a millionaire or being a celebrity or being the CEO would finally unshackle you from all the obnoxious and annoying constraints of being a ‘regular’ person…How wrong this is. How wrong this has always been.📕Pre-order Ryan Holiday's new book "Discipline Is Destiny" and get exclusive pre-order bonuses at https://dailystoic.com/preorder ✉️ 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 Facebook 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.

• 0:03Ryan 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, Rilius, 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.

• 0:51Ryan Holiday?

  Freedom is an opportunity for this.

• 0:56Ryan Holiday?

  You'd think that the more powerful you are, the more freedom you'd have. The more money and success you have, the more you can do. You'd think that being a millionaire, or being a celebrity, or being the CEO, would finally unshackle you from all the obnoxious and annoying constraints of being a regular person. How wrong this is. How wrong this has always been. Seneca once wrote that "people of humble station have more leeway when it comes to using force, bringing suits, rushing into quarrels, and indulging their anger. For a king, even raising his voice to use intemperate language is at odds with his majesty." This was an idea that Antoninus understood intuitively. He would tell his wife shortly after becoming emperor, "Now that we have gained an empire, we have lost even what we had before."

• 1:39Ryan Holiday?

  Ernest Renan, writing about Marcus, put it most plainly, "The sovereign is the least free of all men." It's not that anyone can tell the king what to do or what not to do. No one would argue that. History is filled with examples of rulers who used their power to do whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted, however they wanted to do it. But the rulers who didn't do that, great rulers, kind and just rulers, they are rare. What they have in common is the understanding that they are the only ones who can tell themselves not to do things they could probably get away with. They had that kind of uniquely paradoxical freedom to enjoin themselves, one they liberally took advantage of. It was Eisenhower who said that freedom is really better described as the opportunity for self-discipline. And you, you are lucky enough to live in a time of plenty

• 2:23Ryan Holiday?

  that would have been unfathomable to history's all-powerful kings. A time when nearly everything a person might want to do, they can, because there is no master standing over you. You are not an all-powerful sovereign, surely. You have also never been more free. So now what? What will you do with this opportunity? What will you do with your freedom? Who will you make yourself become?

• 2:49Ryan Holiday?

  A strong soul is better than good luck. 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. It's been more than 250 weeks, consecutive weeks on the bestseller list. It's just an awesome experience. But I hope you check it out. We have a premium leather edition at [email protected] as well. But let's get on with today's reading. Here we are, September 1st, and I can't believe, man, it does not feel like September.

• 3:32Ryan Holiday?

  Less than a month until Discipline is Destiny is out. You can preorder it now at dailystoic.com/preorder. I hope you check it out. But man, time flies. And I don't know about you, but the pandemic feels like it is just, continues to just mess with my sense of where things were. It feels like it was just January or February. I was putting the finishing touches on the book. But here I am, reading today's September 1st entry from The Daily Stoic. "The rational soul is stronger than any kind of fortune," Seneca writes in Moral Letters 98. "From its own chair it guides its affairs here or there, and is itself the cause of a happy or miserable life." Cato the Younger had enough money to dress in fine clothing, yet he often walked around Rome barefoot, indifferent to assumptions people made about him as he passed.

• 4:18Ryan Holiday?

  He could have indulged in the finest food. He chose instead to eat simple fare. Whether it was raining or intensely hot, he went bareheaded by choice. Why not indulge in some easy relief? Because Cato was training his soul to be strong and resilient. Specifically, he was learning indifference, an attitude of "let come what may", that would serve him well in the trenches with the army in the forum and the senate, and in his life as a father and a statesman. His training prepared him for any conditions, any kind of luck. And if we undergo our own training and preparations, we might find ourselves similarly strengthened. Right? The Stoics undergo a hard winter training, to borrow Epictetus's phrase. And the point of that training, whether it's the physical training that Cato is doing,

• 5:03Ryan Holiday?

  whether it's dressing awkwardly in your worst clothes, as Seneca was talking about, you're trying to cultivate an inner citadel, a strength, a fortitude, a sense of preparedness, so that you can, as Epictetus would later say, meet whatever situation happens and go, "Ah, this is what I've trained for. I got this. I know I'm capable of withstanding this." We've talked a lot about physical training here. And that practice, for me, the working out, the getting up off the couch when I don't want to, jumping in the cold water when I don't want to, lifting the weights when I don't want to, running a little bit further when I'd rather be home, taking the longer way on the run than the shorter way, trying to speed up a little bit,

• 5:48Ryan Holiday?

  trying to get up the hill faster, whatever it is. This is creating, cultivating that strength, so that when things are difficult, you got it. You've trained for that. But it's not, of course, not just the physical training. I think about this when I think about the pandemic. I was talking about how it's messed with my sense of time. But the good part about it is that it has, I think, made me stronger as a person. Obviously, I've been through adversity in my life, but it was one of those truly historic events, those big things that you're like, "I was there." Right? Whether it's the Great Depression, or I was in New York on 9/11, or whatever, where... My philosophical training and my maturity as a human, I was like, this is going to be

• 6:31Ryan Holiday?

  training for whatever else happens in life, right? And also, this is why, this is precisely what I've studied history for, what I studied Stoicism for, what my wife and I have worked on together, what I've worked on in therapy, what I've worked on every place in my life, it was for something like this, and also the sense that this itself would be training for future adversity and difficulty. There's a Frederick Douglass quote, maybe it's not totally accurate, some people doubt that he said it, he says, "It's easier to create strong children than repair broken men." And I think that's what Seneca is saying here about adversity.

• 7:13Ryan Holiday?

  And you think of the adversity that Seneca goes through in his life, his tuberculosis young, he has to spend 10 years in convalescence, has a child in Egypt of all places. I talk about this in Lives of the Stoics, if you don't know Seneca's life story, it's pretty incredible. On the way back, his uncle is killed in a shipwreck, Seneca makes his legal debut, he's going places, and then he's exiled on these trumped up charges, he loses a child, he's called back, but he's called back, he's in Nero's court. Obviously, things are difficult working for Nero. You know, it's one thing after another for Seneca, up until the end, when he's forced to, you know, die by his own hand at Nero's demand.

• 7:58Ryan Holiday?

  But Seneca had trained for this, even Tacitus, who's not a fan of Seneca, goes like, it's very clear that in that difficult moment, it was something he'd thought about, worked on, prepared for. That's who you want to be. You want to be strong, you want to be able to bear what comes. And it might be physical training, like running for a marathon, it might be something like, hey, I cranked the shower cold. Or it's the reading you're doing, the conversations you're having, the community that you're building, the relationships that you're building, the exercises you're walking through in your mind. All of this is training you, preparing you, putting yourself in a position so you can succeed, whatever happens, so you can be strong enough in that moment and not need to be repaired afterwards. That's what we're doing here. That's, to me, kind of the mission of Daily Stoic.

• 8:42Ryan Holiday?

  It's the preparation my own philosophical practice is about. And it's served me well the last couple of years. I hope it's served you well. And I hope the training and work you're doing now sets you up to be served well in the future. Enjoy. Talk soon.

• 9:01Ryan Holiday?

  As I write in my new book, Discipline is Destiny. All true greatness is rooted in the ability to keep your ass in line, the ability to work hard, to persevere through difficulty, to train and to practice, to know your limits, to focus, to find balance, to practice good habits, to avoid what should be avoided. And self-discipline is that ground from which great things, mastery, happiness, a good life grow. If you wish to make the most of the opportunities freedom has given you, you're gonna need it. That's the aim of the new book, which I have right here. Discipline is Destiny: The Power of Self-Control. It's available everywhere on September 27. I'd love for you to preorder it, wherever you preorder books, but you can also preorder at dailystoic.com/preorder. Got a million awesome bonuses. I'll sign your copy.

• 9:45Ryan Holiday?

  We can do some bonus chapters. If you do bulk orders for your team, you can even get signed manuscript pages from the drafts I created as I was writing the book. The Stoics believe we're all born to fulfill a great destiny, and discipline is how you do it. That's what this book is about. It's the second in my four virtue series. I can't wait for you to read it. And grab the preorder bonuses, dailystoic.com/preorder. Thanks, everyone. Enjoy.