Is It Even Possible To Be Happy?

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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.

• 0:15Ryan Holiday?

  Is it even possible to be happy? A master does not actually master anything. Ask any great athlete, musician, chef, writer, surgeon, teacher, coach, comedian, and they'll tell you they're not done improving because that's what a craft is, something you spend your whole life getting a little bit better at. And the Stoics understood this, that the highest level one could attain, they said, was the sage, a level, they said, that you don't actually reach, you just make progress towards. Aristotle said this about virtue, that you can become endlessly more wise, courageous, just, and disciplined, just as you can keep getting better at any skill or profession. And when we were talking about this on the podcast

• 0:59Ryan Holiday?

  a little while back with Harvard professor and happiness researcher, Arthur Brooks, he actually put happiness in the same category.

• 1:07Speaker 01

  I started off doing this work years ago, saying, I want to find the secret to happiness. And it's wrong because you can't be happy. What you can be is happier, which is an Aristotelian notion as opposed to a Platonic notion. You can get happier. And the goal is putting yourself, your life, on a jagged, messy path toward happier-ness.

• 1:30Ryan Holiday?

  Epictetus said something similar, that he was riffing on Socrates when he said, "Just as one person delights in improving his farm and another his horse, I delight in attending to my own improvement day by day." That's the path to a good life, getting a little better every day, a little more skilled, a little wiser, a little kinder, a little gentler, more disciplined, a little happier. You don't think of these things as something you arrive at in a flash of insight or something, the finish line. No, they are things you accumulate day by day, action by action, as Marcus really has put it, over the course of a lifetime.

• 2:14Ryan Holiday?

  In fact, it was Zeno who said that well-being is realized by small steps, but it is no small thing. We actually just relaunched our challenge built around this very idea, the Daily Stoic Habits for Success, Habits for Happiness Challenge. It's a step-by-step guide for helping you make some daily incremental changes that have long-term positive impact. Six weeks of challenges. Like, we are going to challenge you. We're going to push you to get outside your comfort zone. But the point is to make you better, to make your life better, to get you closer day by day to being happier, to being the person you want to be, to be the person you know you can be.

• 2:57Ryan Holiday?

  And you can start on that path today. I'd love to have you join us in the Daily Stoic Habits for Success, Habits for Happiness Challenge. You can sign up right now at dailystoic.com/habits. And if you join us in daily Stoic life, you get this challenge and all our challenges for free. So I will see you there.