Why You Must Build A Deep Bookshelf | The Best Advice Ryan Holiday Ever Got

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

• 0:02Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. On Tuesdays, we take a closer look at these Stoic ideas, how we can apply them in our actual lives. Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy.

• 0:31Ryan Holiday?

  Why you must build a deep bookshelf.

• 0:36Ryan Holiday?

  We know that if we can lift the weight easily, we're not getting stronger. We know that if we eat the same few foods over and over again, we won't get the vitamins and nutrients we need. We know that if we shelter a person, especially early on in life, from different bacteria or viruses, they'll never develop the necessary immunities and may well find themselves stricken with many allergies. Should the mind be any different than the body? The author and entrepreneur Luke Burgess, and recent Daily Stoic Podcast guest, has written often about the tendency to read books we enjoy by writers we agree with. Most people, as we've talked about recently, look for mirrors. Their bookshelves are full

• 1:18Ryan Holiday?

  of books that reflect back what they know and believe. "That's what I call a thin shelf," Burgess writes. "What we want to build is a deep shelf," as he continues. "Republicans should be reading books by Democrats, and Democrats should be reading books by Republicans. Atheists or agnostics should read books that challenge them. Christians should read Dawkins, Talebians should dabble in Pinker. Cross over into the enemy's camp," Seneca wrote. "Deliberately read and immerse yourself into the thinking and the strategies of those who disagree with, not as a deserter," Seneca writes, "but as a scout." And he would have liked Epictetus's line that, "You can't learn that which you think you already know," even

• 2:02Ryan Holiday?

  if Epictetus were an Epicurean. So read and study like a scout. Go into the enemy's camp. Build a deep bookshelf. Challenge yourself. Vary your diet. Expose yourself to new and foreign influences. That's how you get stronger.

• 2:25Ryan Holiday?

  Why do we study philosophy? It's because these people, a long time ago, figured out stuff about life that we can benefit from. Seneca said that those who study philosophy annex all the ages of the past into their own. And they said, only an ingrate would fail to avail themselves of this. Bismarck famously said, fools learn by experience. I prefer to learn by the experiences of others. And I think that's what we're doing when we read Marcus Aurelius, when we read Seneca, when we read Epictetus. These are people who experienced a lot of things, who made mistakes, who were under stresses.

• 3:08Ryan Holiday?

  And what they took out of this is stuff we want to avail ourselves to. Stoics were learners. That's what you can't avoid when you read their writings. In fact, Marcus begins meditations by cataloging all the things that he learned from other people in his life, big or small. Some people he names, some he doesn't. Some people get whole pages or paragraphs, and some people get a sentence or two. Well, that's what I wanted to focus on in today's episode. I'm going to give you some of the best advice I've ever received, lessons, ideas, things that I took from the experiences of others or that others took from their own experiences and distilled into wisdom to me,

• 3:50Ryan Holiday?

  which I am gratefully paying forward by passing along to you. Enjoy this. And you might have noticed we adapt a lot of these episodes from the Daily Stoic YouTube channel, which you can check out at dailystoic.com/youtube. Over 600,000 people subscribe to us there, and we'd love to have you join us. And as I've been telling you, Discipline is Destiny. My new book is now available for preorder, and you can grab that at dailystoic.com/preorder. You can get signed copies from me, a bunch of awesome bonuses. And that's all my hard-won lessons and advice on discipline plus learning from the experiences of others. I hope you check that out. Discipline is Destiny. It's out at the end of September.

• 4:34Ryan Holiday?

  But if you preorder it now, you get this awesome stuff at dailystoic.com/preorder.

• 4:41Ryan Holiday?

  I remember I was in my 11th grade English class. I have this teacher named Miss Carr. Someone in the class was stealing an idea I had. We talked about it in a small group and then they'd raised their hand and answered a question with the thing that I had said. And I remember I complained, I said, "They're stealing my ideas." And then my teacher looked at me and she had no tolerance for what I was complaining about and she said, "Ryan, that's your job." And what she meant was that as a smart person, my job was to come up with ideas and that the whole point of a successful idea is that it does get adopted, that people use it, that people take it up as their own. What was so true about that advice, what hit me about it, is that that is our job.

• 5:23Ryan Holiday?

  Our job is to come up with things, to make a contribution, to want credit for that or attention for that. It's to miss the point. Marx really says this is like asking for the third thing. You do something good, you say something good, you discover something. That is the reward in and of itself, the contribution to the common good. That's the whole point. It's wanting recognition for it, wanting to be understood for it, wanting to be admired for it. You're missing the point. Your job is to put things out in the world. Your job is to do good things. Everything else is extra. Everything else is the third thing.

• 6:00Ryan Holiday?

  When I worked in Hollywood, I was this intern and I was sitting in this meeting and all the important people were talking and talking. They were talking about something that I vaguely knew about or I was connected to. I forget what it was. But I remember I interjected, I said something. I was like, "Oh yeah, that's like this." I spoke up and said something. And they all sort of looked at me and then moved on. And afterwards, one of my mentors, the guy that I was working for, he said, "Come to my office, I want to talk to you about something." And he's like, "When you spoke up in that meeting, he said, 'Why did you say that?'" And I was like, "What do you mean? Was I wrong?" He's like, "No, you're totally right and you're totally welcome to talk, but..." He said, "Did you felt that needed to be said or did you just want to have something to say?" Right? And he was totally right. I just felt like everyone was talking and I felt like I needed to get in there. I was injecting myself.

• 6:43Ryan Holiday?

  He said, "You should just sit there and watch and listen and learn. You don't need to say something." Which of course is also a law. And the 48 laws of power always say less than necessary. But it's also a rule that Cato lived by. Cato said, I only speak when I'm certain that what I'm about to say is not better left unsaid. And then Zeno said, two ears and one mouth, right? That we should listen a lot more than we talk. And so I think about that always. Is what I'm about to say, does it actually need to be said? Why am I saying, what's my motivation for saying it? Is this actually an important or meaningful contribution? Or am I just feeling insecure? Am I just feeling uncertain? And my nervousness, my insecurity is driving me to say something that's actually not to my or anyone's benefit.

• 7:26Ryan Holiday?

  I've never actually met Seneca, of course, but the thing that hit me the most out of all of Seneca's writing is when he says that it's wrong to think of death as something in the future that we're moving towards. He said, no, death is happening now. It's happening every minute. He said, we're dying every day because the time that passes belongs to death. We can never get it back. So of all the helpful advice I've gotten in my life, it's been little things here or there. But this fundamentally changed how I perceive time, how I perceive my day. I realized that how I spend today, it's a purchase for which there is no refund policy that you can't undo. So how you spend your time is literally how you spend your life and it's your most precious resource. So the idea that that death isn't this thing that we fear that's over there, that we have

• 8:09Ryan Holiday?

  no connection with, no, no grasp of, is to totally miss the point. No, death is everywhere. It's all around us. It is the passage of time and you have to live your life with that in mind. You have to take advantage of it, protect your time and live your life accordingly.

• 8:28Ryan Holiday?

  It's perfectly possible to learn good lessons from bad people, to take value from, from at least flawed people. And I worked for several years under Doug Charney, the founder of American Apparel, who was a genius in many ways and a fundamentally positive force in fashion in a lot of ways, until he wasn't, until those demons overwhelmed and destroyed all that good. But I remember early on, we were talking about something. He described something, some criticism he was getting or something that happened and he described it as a tax. He said, that's it. That's a tax you have to pay in life. He described it as a success tax, like a cost of doing business. That because of what the company was doing, because of where things were, just something we're gonna have to pay.

• 9:11Ryan Holiday?

  And Seneca says that, he says, "I pay the taxes of life gladly." He doesn't mean, or just mean, from the government. It's like, look, are annoying people a tax on being outside of your house? Of course, right? Are delays a tax on travel? Yes. Are sudden rainstorms a tax on, like, a tropical paradise? Yes, there are taxes on everything, right? The tax of having this YouTube channel is negative comments or haters, right? There's a tax on everything. And if you want the thing, if you want the income, you have to pay the tax. It's funny, sometimes we'll post this on social and people go, "I don't wanna pay my taxes, taxes are theft." Which is the whole point, right? They're arguing against the fundamental reality of life, right? Nothing certain but death and taxes.

• 9:56Ryan Holiday?

  There are going to be taxes in life, whatever you do. If you become a famous person, they'll make up rumors about you. If you do charitable work, people will question your intentions or your motivations. If you have kids, you will lose sleep, right? There's a tax on everything in life. So when Dove was saying there's a success tax, it just, it reminded me. It costs what it costs, you gotta pay these things. There's no use crying about it, there's no use whining about it. And to try to find complicated, illegal ways to avoid it, as some people do about their actual taxes, is again to miss the point that you have to pay the taxes of life gladly, as Seneca said, and then move on.

• 10:36Ryan Holiday?

  Three things I learned from Tim Ferriss. Number one, and I learned this very early from him. He said, "Look at what an hour of your time is worth, and then try to pay people to do anything that's less than that amount," right? And this is so hard, because if you come from a sort of a middle-class background, you're used to doing stuff for yourself, it feels reckless to pay for people. But time is your only non-renewable resource. And so to spend it doing things that you're not the best at is a complete waste of time. The second thing, and this was really life-changing for me. He said, "Think of everything as an experiment." So as you go through life, if you're thinking about dropping out of college, don't think about it. As a irrevocable life decision, think about it as an experiment where you take a year off. If you think about quitting your job, it's the same thing. If you think about any change in your lifestyle, move into a new city, see it as an experiment.

• 11:21Ryan Holiday?

  And the third thing is, you know, Tim was not the first person to start a blog, he's not the first person to get a Twitter account, he's not the first person to be an angel investor, he was not the first person to start a podcast. You don't have to be first, you just have to do the thing really well. You have to do it better than most people, and eventually quality will find its audience.

• 11:42Ryan Holiday?

  Three things I learned from Robert Greene. One, mastery requires a long apprenticeship, either under a great master or painful trial and error, but to be great at something, it takes a very long time, and the education phase of it is the longest period. Number two, he told me once when I was thinking of leaving my job in American Apparel, that life can be defined by a live time or dead time. Are you learning and getting better or are you killing time? We have to always be learning and getting better, always focus on how we can use the moment in front of us. The third and the most important lesson is, even if you want to be a good person, even if you want to be nice and friendly and generous, it doesn't change the fact that you have to understand the laws of power. You have to understand how people are acting in the world and the forces that make them do what they do.

• 12:28Ryan Holiday?

  Three things I learned from the great George Raveling, Hall of Fame basketball coach, civil rights activist, always be reading. He told me that his grandmother told him that the slave masters used to keep money in books because they thought the slaves would never read them. Point being, there's money in books, there's freedom in books, and there's a reason powerful people don't want you to read. Number two, he has a great question, he says, "Are you going to be a positive difference maker today?" That's his question. "Are you going to be a positive difference maker today?" And that's a question I think about all the time, and I got that from him. The third one is, you can learn from anyone. George Raveling once said, "I was his mentor in an interview," which of course is preposterous, but I'll take the point, which is that you can learn from anyone,

• 13:10Ryan Holiday?

  including people who are younger than you. You can learn from anyone, even if they live very different lives than you. Even if you disagree with them about 99% of stuff, you can learn from anyone. Anyone can be your mentor, and I learned that from George Raveling.

• 13:25Ryan Holiday?

  Three lessons from Marcus Aurelius. Number one, it's not what happens, it's how we respond to what happens. He says, "The impediment to action allows us an opportunity to move forward, to try a different action." Number two, he says, "Ask yourself at every moment, is this essential? Do I really need to do this?" And he says, "When you do less, you get the double benefit of doing less better." The third thing from Marcus Aurelius, this would be the exercise of memento mori. He said, "You could leave life right now, let that determine what you do and say and think." He says, "Let every action, every decision, every thought be that of a dying person." When you think about life that way, it gives you urgency, it gives you clarity, and it lets you see what actually matters. If you want to learn more about Stoic philosophy, totally for free,

• 14:09Ryan Holiday?

  you can sign up for our Daily Stoic email. It's one free email every morning, the best of Stoic wisdom, dailystoic.com/email.