Stoicism and the Art of Resilience

How does someone who was born into slavery, whose master broke their leg and crippled them for life, somehow escape all that and become one of the fathers of Stoicism and an amazing thinker? Epictetus had every reason to be unable to transcend his own struggles, but instead he is one of the most important Stoic philosophers. He lived the philosophy and it saved him. Watch the video: https://youtu.be/6-UQYo1YabY Ten Thousand makes the highest quality, best-fitting, and most comfortable training shorts I have ever worn. Ten Thousand is offering our listeners 15% off your purchase. go to Tenthousand.cc/stoic to receive 15% off your purchase. Kion Aminos is backed by over 20 years of clinical research, has the highest quality ingredients, no fillers or junk, undergoes rigorous quality testing, and tastes amazing with all-natural flavors. Go to getkion.com/dailystoic to save 20% on subscriptions and 10% on one-time purchases. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemailCheck out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more. Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, 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.

• 0:06Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Weekend Edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these Stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space, when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal,

• 0:49Ryan Holiday?

  and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring.

• 0:57Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another weekend episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. You know, another way to describe Stoicism might be the art of resilience. How do we bounce back from the difficulty that life throws at us? How do we beat the difficulties? How do we overcome the odds? How do we overcome fate, fortune, as the Stoics talk about? How do we, you know, how do we become, as Hemingway said, "strong at the broken places"? And I really think that's what Stoicism is about. But really, that's what's beautiful about Epictetus's life. Here's a man born into slavery as a child, spends three decades of his life in one of the most brutal,

• 1:42Ryan Holiday?

  awful sort of forms of imprisonment and forced certitude that, you know, the human species has ever experienced. All slavery is bad. Roman slavery, I mean, you were an animal to be used up, worn out, and then put down. And Epictetus manages not only to survive this, but to become educated, to become wise, to become optimistic and inspiring. And he goes on to become a philosophy teacher and is so influential that he even instructs the Emperor Hadrian. And then, as we know, his work makes its way to Mark Aurelius. So here we are today, looking at Stoicism, the art of resilience, and of course, by extension, the life of Epictetus. The critical question is which handle will we grab?

• 2:27Ryan Holiday?

  The one of resentment, of bitterness, of anger, of unfairness? Or the one of forgiveness, of strength, of fortitude, of looking for the good, of looking for what we might do with what has happened?

• 2:43Ryan Holiday?

  There have been people who have talked about how to be resilient, and then there is Epictetus, the acquired one, as his name translates from Greek. Epictetus was born the son of a slave woman and spent the first 30 years of his life in chains. As a young boy, he was purchased by a man so violent and depraved that at one point he twisted Epictetus's leg with all his might for reasons unknown. All we know from Epictetus is that he warned his master repeatedly, "You're going to break my leg, you're going to break my leg, you're going to break my leg." And finally, when it snapped, he looked at his master in the face and said, "I told you that would happen." From this incident, Epictetus's leg was shattered,

• 3:26Ryan Holiday?

  and he walked with a limp the rest of his life. And yet, not long after something good happened, he began to attend the lectures of a Stoic philosopher named Musonius Rufus. And when Epictetus was freed from slavery in his 30s, he decided to become a philosophy teacher. His lectures immediately gained a large following. The poor, the affluent, the powerful, and even the future emperor Hadrian were told, passed through Epictetus's classroom. So what did he teach them? Why were people from all over the empire gathering at the feet of a one-time slave? It was because he could teach them what we all need: how to be resilient.

• 4:07Ryan Holiday?

  It was this skill that Epictetus promised will ensure we lead a mainly untroubled life, the ability to overcome the worst and darkest of circumstances. And Epictetus had mastered it, and he taught others how to do it too. How do you cultivate resilience? Or, as Epictetus put it, "Discover the power of endurance"? It starts with, he said, "Your chief task in life, which is to be able to identify and distinguish between what is up to us..." And what is not up to us, the things we control and the things we cannot. That's the crucial distinction that every person must make. That's the difference between people who are resilient and people who aren't. Epictetus liked to use the example of being insulted.

• 4:50Ryan Holiday?

  What other people say is not up to us. How we respond is.

• 4:57Ryan Holiday?

  So if someone succeeds in provoking you, he said, you must realize your mind is complicit in the provocation. And he called this the faculty of choice. And he said, it is our greatest power, our most efficacious gift, our uniquely human capability. It was critical to his own resilience and his survival as a slave. As powerless as we can sometimes feel, as frustrating as it is when things don't go our way, as unfair it is when fate deals us a bad hand, we always retain the power to choose our response, our attitude, our emotions, our perspective, our creativity, our judgments and opinions. And that brings us to the next task of the philosopher, as Epictetus said.

• 5:40Ryan Holiday?

  Every event has two handles, one by which it can be carried and one by which it can't. If your brother does you wrong, he said, don't grab it by his wronging, 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 will have hold of the handle that carries. When adversity strikes, a recession hits, a pandemic sweeps across the globe, setbacks, struggles, uncertainties, inconveniences, whatever it is, the critical question is which handle will we grab? The one of resentment, of bitterness, of anger, of unfairness? Or the one of forgiveness, of strength, of fortitude, of looking for the good, of looking for what we might do with what has happened?

• 6:24Ryan Holiday?

  Are we going to grasp the problem or the opportunity? The have to or the get to? That this is unfair, that you have a right to be angry, or that you have the power to move on? There is almost always some good hiding within or around the bad. You have to look for it and you have to grab hold of it. This is how we thrive in life. Well, almost Always, sometimes, as Epictetus knew well, there just isn't anything we can do. Sometimes, when you separate things into the categories of what is up to us and what is not, sometimes it comes down that something is not up to us. The shot didn't go in, the stock went to zero, the whole industry collapsed and took your job with it. All you can do is let go and move on.

• 7:07Ryan Holiday?

  Epictetus called this "the art of acquiescence", surrendering to fate, accepting that there is a larger plan. It's not resignation, it's not pessimism. It's bold optimism fused with determination. The recognition that there is more at work behind the scenes that we know, that there is a bigger picture that we cannot see, something higher than ourselves. This, Epictetus says, does not make us weak, far from us. It makes us powerful and unstoppable in every human way. The Stoics talk about the idea of amor fati, of embracing your fate. Well, that was easier for Marcus Aurelius, the emperor, the rich, the powerful, to wrap their heads around. But what about Epictetus? Even he too was able to see the adversity and the difficulty he went through

• 7:52Ryan Holiday?

  as something that was shaping him, something that was making him into the man he needed to be, so he could do what he needed to do, which was instruct a generation of Romans on how to rise above even the worst circumstances. Of course, this isn't easy to do. Separating what is up to us and what isn't, choosing to grab the right handle, accepting pain and suffering in life, none of that feels great. And so, Epictetus said, "We must undergo a hard winter training and not rush into things for which we haven't prepared." This is where we get the Stoic love of challenges, of embracing adversity, of taking cold plunges, of sleeping on a hard mattress, on making good,

• 8:33Ryan Holiday?

  of arduous physical exercise, training for what the world is likely to throw at us. This takes work. And so, when we talk about resilience, we are talking about building resilience. We have to work at it, practice, prepare, and of course, accept. Every time life throws something at you, remember, this is training, a chance to get better. You are lifting heavy weights and that is making you stronger. Focusing on this, seeing it this way is up to you. You can choose the right handle, except that you have some powerless, but that you retain an incredible power. It isn't always easy, but in time, Epictetus promised, you will grow to be confident that there is nothing which you do not have the means to tolerate.

• 9:18Ryan Holiday?

  And this was a man who was not simply speaking of overcoming adversity, but lived it through his whole life. And his example stands to us. Amor fati, turn what you have to do into what you get to do. Turn what life throws at you into fuel for the fire that is making you great.

• 9:42Ryan 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 at dailystoic.com/email.