The Old Way Is Not Always Better | Do Your Job

“People are frustrating. They fall short. They fail us. They do something that surprises or disappoints you. But before you get angry, you have to remember: Everyone is going through something. Sometimes people are going through things and even they don’t know it.”Ryan explains why you have to think about other peoples troubles, and reads The Daily Stoic’s entry of the day, on today’s Daily Stoic Podcast. Athletic Greens is a custom formulation of 75 vitamins, minerals, and other whole-food sourced ingredients that make it easier for you to maintain nutrition in just a single scoop. It tastes great and gets you the nutrients you need, whether you're working on the go, fueling an active lifestyle, or just maintaining your good health. Visit athleticgreens.com/stoic to get a FREE year supply of Liquid Vitamin D + 5 FREE Travel Packs with subscription. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow 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 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 Aurelius, 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.

• 0:41Ryan Holiday?

  "The old way is not always better. As Caesar and the triumvirate tried to corrupt and change Rome's republic to accommodate their needs, it was Cato who stood strong against them. Almost entirely alone, Cato resisted. He filibustered to block their laws. As they offered him both the carrot and the stick, he rejected both, insisting on living by the old ways, the ways of his ancestors. It was a noble fight, just as there have been noble fights before and since by patriots and pastors alike, who sought to protect core values from a cascade of decadence. In fact, you could argue that this is the core fight of Stoic philosophy, the battle waged by Thrasseus and Musonius against Nero of Marcus against the decline and fall in his times. And yet, it is important that

• 1:26Ryan Holiday?

  we don't overstate its importance or allow it to lead us astray. It is ironic, for instance, that just as Cato fought for the old ways, it was his own great-grandfather, Cato the Elder, who tried to have the early Stoic philosophers thrown out of Rome two generations before for corrupting those same old ways. Cato does look admirable, fighting to resist the tyranny of Caesar, yet it's also undeniable that the liberty he was trying to protect consisted of even worse tyranny over Rome's slaves. We must be careful, as we pursue this philosophy, not to become reactionary conservatives and not to accept without question the status quo. The founding fathers didn't. Compared to the royalists in colonial America, it was the Stoic

• 2:10Ryan Holiday?

  Inspired George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, who were overturning centuries of the old way. Later, it would be a stain on the Percy family, those great Southern Stoics, that they could not question the racist structures and beliefs of their long traditions. There's no question that when we flash forward to the future, that we will find ourselves looking back at our own recent present this way, and that future generations will be appalled at some of the institutions and practices we tolerate. Are there things worth protecting? Absolutely. But we should be sure that we are protecting virtues, justice, courage, wisdom, temperance, and not simply precedent and familiarity. The old way is not always better. The way we have long done things is not always right. We must be willing to change.

• 2:54Ryan Holiday?

  We must be willing to probe and evaluate. We must do the right thing, as Marcus Aurelius said. The rest doesn't matter.

• 3:03Ryan Holiday?

  Do your job. Whatever anyone does or says for my part, I'm bound to the good. In the same way, an emerald, or gold, or purple might always proclaim, whatever anyone does or says, I must be what I am and show my true colors. That's Marcus Aurelius's Meditation 715. This is today's entry in The Daily Stoic, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, by me, Ryan Holiday, and my friend Stephen Hanselman. And get this, anywhere books are sold, audiobook, physical, we even have an awesome leather-bound edition in the Daily Stoic store. And you can check that out at dailystoic.com/leather.

• 3:46Ryan Holiday?

  But let's get on to the meditation today. The Stoics believed that every person, animal, and thing has a purpose or place in nature. Even in ancient Greek and Roman times, they vaguely understood that the world was composed of millions of tiny atoms. It was this idea, this sense of the interconnected cosmos, that underpinned their sense that every person, every action was part of a larger system. Everyone had a job, a specific duty. Even those who did bad things, they were doing their job of being evil, because evil is unfortunately a part of life. The most critical part of this system was the belief that you, the student who has sought out Stoicism, have the most important job, to be good, to be wise,

• 4:31Ryan Holiday?

  to remain the person that philosophy wished to make us, as Marcus Aurelius said. Do your job today. Whatever happens, whatever other people's jobs happen to be, do yours. Be good.

• 4:46Ryan Holiday?

  This is one of my favorite entries in Marcus Aurelius. And you know, it's funny, he talks about being good, doing good, talks about the common good, like dozens and dozens of times in meditations, because that is Stoicism. Yes, it's an individual philosophy, but individual in the sense of that famous quote about being the change that you want to see in the world. And in fact, this is something that Stoics say, if you want to see good, you do good. We always have the ability to do our job. And in doing our job, we know the world is not totally lost, that it's not hopeless, that there is good because

• 5:27Ryan Holiday?

  we can produce it. Marcus says that we're sort of a fountain of goodness. It's always bubbling up. Yeah, sometimes it gets covered over by dirt or whatever, but we can dig it out. We can get that water flowing again. So that's the imperative today. What good can you do? I remember being in Boy Scouts as a kid, you know, do one good turn every day. What can you do? Can you hold the door open for someone? Can you give someone a compliment? Can you pay for someone's coffee? Can you, can you give an employee a few hours off? You know, what can you do? Who can you help? Who can you serve? What kind of difference can you make? And yes, this doesn't solve massive collective action problems. I understand

• 6:11Ryan Holiday?

  that. Those, those do exist. Those do need to be addressed. But think of the impact that this collective, individual action can have. Yesterday, my two sons and I, we went on our morning walk, and there was just so much trash by the side of the road. And we didn't have time to get it. It was starting to get bad. And we just, I said, you know what, Clark Jones? I said, you know what, Clark? We're gonna get the ATV after dinner. Instead of going for our evening walk, we're gonna get a trash bag. We're gonna pick all this up. We went out, it took about 30 minutes. We filled a giant trash bag with trash. It was fun. It was outside. They, they loved it. Oh, there's one. There's a piece. It was, you know, fun little game. But here's the thing, when I went on the walk this morning,

• 6:56Ryan Holiday?

  the goodness was there. It was visible. The trash was not there.

• 7:02Ryan Holiday?

  And you know, there's satisfaction in feeling like, hey, that didn't end up in a river somewhere. That didn't end up in a bird's stomach. Maybe it didn't end up in my stomach, right? We made a tiny difference. And I'm gonna walk by tomorrow, there's gonna be more trash. No one's gonna throw me a parade. I'm not gonna get thanked for it. But I did it because it's my job. My job is to show my true colors, to be good, to do good, to fight to be the person that philosophy wants to make us. That's what Stoicism is about. I'm really excited to think of all the good that the many, many, many, many thousands of listeners listening to this podcast can cumulatively do, not just in the future, but right now, today, when you stop listening to this message.

• 7:47Ryan Holiday?

  Go out there, get at it.