Don’t Abuse This Power | A Little Better Every Day

In one of the weirdest passages of Meditations, Marcus Aurelius notes with pride that he never laid a hand on any of his female slaves. Not cheating on your spouse, not sexually assaulting a captive person, these are hardly achievements worthy of being feted for. They are the bare minimum, you could argue, to be considered a good, moral, virtuous person. And yet, they are not nothing, especially back then, it’s worth taking a minute to consider. ---In today's Daily Stoic Journal reading, Ryan explores the Stoic idea of bettering oneself with small steps every day by reflecting on quotes from Seneca, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more, including the Premium Leather Edition of the Daily Stoic Journal.📱 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.

• 0:02Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Each day, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, illustrated with stories from history, current events, and literature to help you be better at what you do. And at the beginning of the week, we try to do a deeper dive, setting a kind of Stoic intention for the week, something to meditate on, something to think on, something to leave you with, to journal about, whatever it is you happen to be doing. So let's get into it.

• 0:38Ryan Holiday?

  Don't abuse this power.

• 0:42Ryan Holiday?

  In one of the weirdest passages of Meditations, Marcus Aurelius notes with pride that he never laid a hand on any of his female slaves. Since he makes no other remarks about slavery, most historians assume he is making a statement about self-discipline. When considered through the lens of Meditations as a set of private reflections never meant for publication, one could easily view this entry as a kind of self-reassurance of his goodness, that as the head of a wealthy household and the leader of one of history's largest empires, Marcus could have had sex with his female slaves, but by choice did not. Not cheating on your spouse, not sexually assaulting a captive person,

• 1:25Ryan Holiday?

  these are hardly achievements worth celebrating. They are, the bare minimum, you could argue, to be considered a good and moral and virtuous person. And yet, they are not nothing, especially back then, which means they are worthy of at least taking a minute to consider. Because when you remove the cultural and legal permissibility for Marcus as emperor to do whatever he wanted, what you are left with is a man who had power over another human being and chose not to use it. It's the kind of position, in the abstract at least, that we all find ourselves in from time to time in our own ways. And can we all say that we would have acted with the same kind of restraint, the same kind of self-discipline, the same kind of virtue? How often have we exercised that power,

• 2:10Ryan Holiday?

  consciously or unconsciously? How often have we taken advantage, gained advantage?

• 2:16Ryan Holiday?

  Do you know? If not, it's important to think about because we all must be conscious of the power dynamics, the privileges of our positions because of our age, because of our job, because of what someone thinks of us, because of our platform, because of our gender, because of various traditions, or expectations, or social norms. From all this comes power and thus responsibility. We can't take advantage of that sexually or otherwise. We must be kind, respectful, generous, decent, honorable. We must insist on clean and clear boundaries. We must do what is right, not what feels good, or what we can get away with. This, as Marcus Aurelius did, is the bare minimum.

• 3:08Speaker 01

  A little better every day. This is week four in the Daily Stoic Journal. Like I said, I've got this new cool leather cover, which you can check out at store.dailystoic.com. It, I think it just spruces it up, hopefully helps, sort of is the continuity, the thread between each year of using the journal. This is my fifth year, I think, this is the fifth journal I've gone through. So it's got a little spot here for my note cards. It's got the Daily Stoic logo on it. Says from Seneca, "I examine my day and go back over what I've done and said, hiding nothing from myself, passing nothing by." That's what we're doing as we journal. Check that out at store.dailystoic.com.

• 3:52Speaker 01

  But today, or this week's entry is, "The Stoics saw their lives as works in progress. They didn't believe they were born perfect, but they believed that with work and dedication, they could get a little better every day. There is real delight in this progress," as Epictetus quoted by Way of Socrates. Marcus Aurelius avidly pursued his own education and improvement, eagerly looking for advice, for mentors, and historical examples. Well, let's follow that example this week and see how you get a little better as each day passes. "We must keep constant watch over ourselves," and as Seneca phrased it, "put each day up for review.

• 4:33Speaker 01

  Looking back on our day helps us to better understand where we may have fallen short and gives us tangible feedback for how to improve and grow." Only what you measure and record can be monitored. Only what you put up for reflection can be learned from. And our first quote is from Seneca's Moral Letters. "I will keep constant watch over myself and most usefully will put each day up for review. For this is what makes us evil, that none of us looks back upon our own lives. We reflect upon only that which we are about to do. And yet our plans for the future descend from the past." Marcus Aurelius from Risticus, he said, "I learned from Risticus to read carefully and to not be satisfied with a rough

• 5:16Speaker 01

  understanding of the whole and not to agree too quickly with those who have a lot to say about something." And then Epictetus says, "But what does Socrates say? Just as one delights in improving his farm and another his horse, so I delight in attending to my own improvement day to day." This is Epictetus's Discourses 3:5. As I think about the decade and a half now I've spent studying Stoicism, I sometimes marvel at like who I was when these ideas first hit me and how far I've come. Some ways I look at how not far I've come and how I still find myself making the same mistakes over and over again, which Marcus remarks about in Meditations. He goes, "Look, you're still an old man and yet here you are.

• 5:59Speaker 01

  You're afraid of death, you're losing your temper, you're prizing the wrong things." But the truth is, he had come very, very far. And I feel like I have come far. I'm not perfect, I'm not where I want to be. But I can't deny that I have made progress. And so that's what Stoicism is, it's progress. What does that progress look like? Well, one of my favorite observations from Seneca says, "How do I know I'm making progress as a Stoic? Says I'm a better friend to myself." Are you, right? I don't know when you first came into understanding these ideas, what you first read, but it's wonderful in those moments where you catch yourself and you go, "This really would have rocked me before. This really would have sent me off before.

• 6:42Speaker 01

  I really wouldn't have caught myself before." I think about this even with my marriage with my wife, like just things. We were talking about something the other night and it's like... Yeah, we've been together for fifteen odd years and we're just coming around to realizing that when you do this, I do this, or that I do this and, you know. And so on the one hand, it's like, man, things would have been easier if we figured this out earlier. And yet, and yet, it's also wonderful that we're figuring it out now. And the time it's going to save us and the frustrations it's going to save us and the heartache it's going to save us, right? You delight in your improvement day to day. You make little bits of progress. We have a TikTok that I posted about this, but one of the most interesting things I read

• 7:25Speaker 01

  about Tom Brady is that it's not that Tom Brady is obsessed with winning. People think that's what it is. He's obsessed with getting better. And that's how you get great. It can be a curse, certainly, right? It can be taken too far. If you only look at what you can do better, if you only look at where you fell short, if Seneca's sort of putting yourself up for the review every day becomes a kind of torture. That's not the idea. The idea is that we, you know, we push ourselves to get better. We notice where we've made improvement. I interviewed Michael Dell on the podcast, I guess this was last year, and he had this great acronym. He says pleased but never satisfied. That's how the company celebrates the success it's had, how he celebrates the success he's

• 8:10Speaker 01

  had or the improvements he's made. But that doesn't mean you rest on your laurels. That doesn't mean you call it. No, you're always trying to get better, right? And the person who focuses on where you can get better, who is pleased but not satisfied, that's kind of a self fulfilling prophecy. That's how we get better. That's how we push ourselves. That's the idea. So if you think of Stoicism then as a day to day journey, a week to week journey, a year to year journey, right? It's not a magical transformation. It's something you work. As they say in sobriety circles, it works if you work it. The idea is if you work it, if you make small improvements, if you try to apply them here and now, a little bit every day, it adds up, adds up.

• 8:55Speaker 01

  Wellbeing is realized by small steps, as Zito said, but it's no small thing. So the little tweaks, little breakthroughs, little conversations, all the things that have happened for me over the years, they're not major. Not any one of them is probably worth writing home about. That's why I don't tend to put myself in the books. But cumulatively, you know, it's changed the course, the bearings, the direction of my life in a really, really big way. And I know that's true for lots of you, and here we are at the beginning of the year. Let's, um, let's set out to make some small improvements day to day over the next 12 months and, and think about who you would be if you made a 1% improvement every day for the next year, every week for the next year, every month for the next

• 9:38Speaker 01

  year, every year for the rest of your life. Right? That adds up. It adds up. Small steps, but it's no small thing. That's the message from the Daily Stoic Journal, which of course you can pick up everywhere and check out the new leather cover. I think it's really sick. Um, store.dailystoic.com.