This Is A Choice You’re Making | Ask Daily Stoic

We think if we just make enough money, we won't have to worry anymore. We think if we just become powerful enough, we'll be free from feeling pushed around. Of course, it never works out that way.🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast🎥 Watch top moments from The Daily Stoic Podcast on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast✉️ 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 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.

• 0:05Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a Stoic-inspired meditation, designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life. Each one of these episodes is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women, help you learn from them, to follow in their example, and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. For more, visit DailyStoic.com.

• 0:56Ryan Holiday?

  The worry part is a choice. We think if we just make enough money, someday we won't have to worry about it anymore. We think if we just get big enough, strong enough, we won't have to worry about being pushed around. We think if we can just get through this or that rough patch, we can relax and not be so worried anymore. Of course, it never works out that way. No one has ever gotten there and reported back on their worry-free life. Just as you must have noticed how this has gone with the progress you have made, you have more than you did today. How do you feel? Have all your problems disappeared? Does that mean that worry is just a part of life? That stress is ever-present, no matter how successful or powerful we get? Well, no, unless you choose for it to be.

• 1:40Ryan Holiday?

  In meditations, Marx realist talks of his anxiety. He realizes that it's not coming from anything external, it's within him. It is a choice he is making. This is not to say that things cannot be made easier by money, or that your lack of money isn't a problem. It's that simply having and not having something is an external. Worry, doubt, anxiety, stress, indeed, any emotion we experience in our lives is internal. We have influence over the latter, not the former. So let's try to solve the problem where it will actually make a difference. Let's stop lying to ourselves, saying that we'll all be better in the future, because the present isn't the problem. None of the external things are. It's our emotions that are at the root of our discomfort. They are within us. They are our responsibility to work on.

• 2:31Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Back in November, I went over to Europe and then Canada to do a bunch of talks. You've probably heard me talk about this already too much. I'm not going to tell you about where to get tickets because well, you're a couple of months late, but I spoke first in London, then in Rotterdam, and then Dublin was my last talk in Europe. We spent like a couple of days in London, like one day in Rotterdam, and then a bunch of days in Dublin, which is one of my favorite places, one of my favorite places to run, one of my favorite places to eat and hang out and study history. We took the kids with us, so they really enjoyed it. They loved going to the jail because we'd just been in Australia and they were blown away that Ned Kelly's father was in that jail in Dublin because I'd shown them pictures of the armor and stuff.

• 3:16Ryan Holiday?

  So they're kind of wrapping their head around that. We went to a castle they were pretty excited about. We go to this, whatever, the big sort of government house castle that the British, I think it's Dublin Castle. We were walking into this building, right? And we go up the stairs and what do they have? A huge picture of Seneca. So the kids recognized that. That was fun. What does this have to do with today's episode? Well, I am bringing you some of the Q and A from that talk in Dublin. It was, I think, the best attended talk of all of them I did. I love being in Ireland. They were very good to me. Thanks to everyone who came out along the tour. Thank you for listening and I hope you enjoy this little Q and A episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast.

• 4:05Speaker 01

  Hi, Ryan.

• 4:06Ryan Holiday?

  Hi.

• 4:07Speaker 01

  Thanks very much for your speech.

• 4:08Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 4:08Speaker 01

  I want to say that your book, Obscures the Way, helped me finish my master's thesis.

• 4:13Ryan Holiday?

  Oh, congratulations.

• 4:15Speaker 01

  So I always thank you for that. I want to ask you about when you know something or someone is like annoying you or whatever, but you can't accept that they don't maybe agree with you, how to kind of have peace with that and not let it

• 4:32Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 4:33Speaker 01

  kind of take, take your own peace away?

• 4:35Ryan Holiday?

  One of my favorite quotes from the Stoics, it's in Meditations, Marx says, "Remember, you always have the power to have no opinion." He says, "Things are not asking to be judged by you." Now imagine, this is being said by a person whose opinion was literally law. He had the life and death power over people. And here he is reminding himself to live and let live, that he doesn't have to let things bother him. He doesn't have to try to change everything. He can just let some things be. And now, this sounds like not much of a power. You always have the power to have no opinion. But how many people do we know that have no such power? Right? I mentioned Elon Musk earlier. Elon Musk is an incredibly powerful,

• 5:19Ryan Holiday?

  incredibly wealthy person. But has he ever had an opinion he was able to keep to himself? Not that I know of. It's a hard thing to do, to just shut up. You know, to just focus on your stuff. That's what I try to do in my life as best as I can. Something I'm going through with my kids, like, I'll be like, "Oh, wait. I don't need to have an opinion on whether this show is good or not. You like it." I like that expression, "You don't have to yuck someone else's yum." "You like it, so it's good to you. It's not something I need to convince you of otherwise."

• 5:52Speaker 02

  Hi, Ryan.

• 5:53Ryan Holiday?

  Hello.

• 5:54Speaker 02

  I have a question on, how do you decide or what's the logic for choosing which battles to fight? I agree with what you're saying. You need to be courageous. You need to stand up. Sometimes it might come, or you might think it's not worth.

• 6:08Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 6:08Speaker 02

  Doing that. How do you gauge that?

• 6:12Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I think it's a tough one. I wish there was some hard and fast rule or some formula. I think it's probably one of the areas you want to trust your gut. You don't just do everything that pops into your head. You're just going to be responding emotionally to stuff. But I think one of the things I try to think about as a tester when I'm thinking about doing something or not, this isn't just matters of justice, is, you know, if I didn't do this, if I didn't say this, if I didn't take on this project, if I didn't do this task, would it get done by someone else? Or am I the best person to do this thing? Right? So as you're deciding what to get involved in, what to speak up about, et cetera, being the 5,000th or 5,000,000th

• 6:55Ryan Holiday?

  voice to be chiming in on something, maybe that's not the best use of your time and energy. That's not the stand you need to take. But what are the things that you are uniquely qualified, or uniquely positioned, or uniquely inspired to be involved with? And that's probably what I would use to direct me towards what to get engaged with and not get engaged with.

• 7:18Speaker 03

  Hey, Ryan, Jack here. So, over the past 10, 12 years, your output has been pretty prolific and very consistent. In structuring your time in a week, a month, a year, how do you structure your work on projects to maintain that consistency? And where does your time off come in and all of that?

• 7:41Ryan Holiday?

  The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing, as they say. So for me, that's writing. Writing is the main thing. There's other things I like. There's other things that I find enjoyable or fun. There's other things that are lucrative. But the main thing for me is writing. So I always have this kind of weather vane that tells me how my decisions are going, or my priorities are, if I have time to write or not. Right? Because that's the driver of everything that I do. And it's also what I wanted to do. And as I've said before, like, the reward for succeeding as a writer should not be that you don't have time to write. And I think that's true for whatever it is you do. You love basketball.

• 8:23Ryan Holiday?

  The rewards for having a successful career in that shouldn't be that you don't remember the last time you saw a basketball game in person, you know? And so, what's your main thing? And building around that is, I think, really essential. So I just try to write almost every day. And I find that if I am showing up and doing the work, publishable stuff comes out of the other side of that. It's not always publishable when I sit down to do it. But if I show up every day and do the work... The output tends to take care of itself. So again, do the verb or be the noun. If you're doing the verb, it makes you the noun. If you are acting like the noun, you know, assuming the identity of the noun,

• 9:08Ryan Holiday?

  you know, as he says in Fight Club, sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken.

• 9:14Speaker 04

  Welcome to Dublin. And great to see a Philip Aaron Maiden fan.

• 9:18Ryan Holiday?

  I love the shirt, yeah.

• 9:19Speaker 04

  Oh, thank you, thank you. I have a question about change.

• 9:22Ryan Holiday?

  Okay.

• 9:22Speaker 04

  So whenever I go into companies, it's normally because they're going through a tough time and staff members are required to change. The problem is, at least 80% of the companies I go into, staff don't want to change, even if their jobs are on the line. The most difficult, painful thing in the world for them to do is to change their behavior. They'd rather keep doing the same thing over and over again. I know you can't change people. Stoicism is it's how you react to them. But how do you influence or try to incorporate Stoic thoughts in people who are just so stubborn and so set in their ways? Thank you.

• 9:57Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, we can't change people, but we can maybe motivate people to change themselves, right? And Marx was talks a lot about change in meditations. He says, "Life is like a river. It's flowing past us. You know, we never step in the same river twice." My favorite bit from him meditating on change is he says, you know, "Everything in your life came from change. Even birth has changed. There was non-being and now being," right? Says, "You're afraid of death as if that's not the final form of change." And so I think sometimes helping people understand that the way things are, the thing they're trying to keep was never stable in the first place.

• 10:41Ryan Holiday?

  Do you know about the ship of Thessius paradox? There's an ancient paradox about an Athenian ship that was responsible for a major, you know, historical victory. And so they preserved it. And, you know, it would get old with time and pieces of it would fall apart. And so they would replace it. And so over the decades and then the centuries, every stick of it is replaced. Is it still the same ship? Or is it a new ship? And the idea is that everything and every one of us is a that's a metaphor for us. We're always changing and evolving and growing. In fact, there is, speaking of the War of Independence, there's a actually the War of 1812, but same, same common enemy, the British.

• 11:24Ryan Holiday?

  The oldest ship in the American Navy, it's still considered an active duty ship, is the USS Constitution. And it still exists, it still floats. I have a piece of it. My son's obsessed with ships. And so I bought him from an antique dealer, a chunk of the hull that they took out in one of the repairs and, you know, sold to pay for the repairs. So this ship has been, I think it was built in the 1790s and it's still floating. Obviously, if it hadn't changed, if it hadn't evolved, if they hadn't replaced the things piece by piece, it would have sunk by now. So change is a necessity. And it's like the Queen's motto was, if things are going to stay the same, then things are going to have to change.

• 12:09Ryan Holiday?

  I think we got to help people understand that this thing they're afraid of, not only is it an unstoppable force that they're powerless to actually prevent, but it's a good thing. And they got where they are because at some point in their life, they were more comfortable with change. They were obviously somewhere else before they came to work at this company, you know? So without change, where are we going to be? That's how I think about it.

• 12:34Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. I just wanted to say we so appreciate it. We love serving you. It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple of years we've been doing it. It's an honor. Please spread the word, tell people about it. And this isn't to sell anything, I just wanted to say thank you.