Come Back To This | Ask Daily Stoic

It doesn’t matter how badly we’ve messed up, how much we’ve fallen off course, it’s still there. It’s not exactly waiting for us, but it continues on, ready for us whenever we choose to rejoin. Since we received such great feedback from the launch of 2025's New Year New You Challenge, we decided to RE-OPEN the challenge for February. Head over to dailystoic.com/challenge today to sign up.🎙️ 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.

• 0:02Ryan 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. While on Thursdays, we not only read the daily meditation, but we answer some questions from listeners and fellow Stoics who are trying to apply this philosophy, just as you are. Some of these come from my talks. Some of these come from Zoom sessions that we do with Daily Stoic Life members or as part of the challenges. Some of them are from interactions I have on the street when there happened to be someone there recording. Thank you for listening, and we hope this is of use to you.

• 0:43Ryan Holiday?

  Come back to this. Marcus Aurelius wasn't perfect. With so many responsibilities competing for his time and attention, he was guilty, as we all have been, of letting his good habits slide. Why else would he remind himself to keep returning to philosophy if he didn't occasionally find himself reverting to old ways and bad habits? There he is in meditations, talking about the need for a simple diet, talking about getting up early to stop sleeping through the morning. He must have fallen off. He'd messed up. He got distracted, disrupted, overwhelmed, just like we all do. The question then is, what do we do when this happens? Well, Marcus actually explains. "When jarred unavoidably by circumstances," he writes,

• 1:27Ryan Holiday?

  "revert at once to yourself and don't lose the rhythm more than you can help. You'll have a better grasp of the harmony if you keep going back to it." The thing about rhythm is that it doesn't get lost. Only we can. The beat goes on. The right path stands open. We just have to come back to it. We just have to pick it up again. It doesn't matter how far we've drifted, how much we've slid, how off course we've gotten. It's still there. The rhythm is there. It's not exactly waiting for us, but it continues on, ready for us whenever we choose to rejoin. And maybe that describes how your January has gone. You had high hopes and ambitious

• 2:07Ryan Holiday?

  resolutions, but you lost it already. Well, there's a way back. We are relaunching the Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge, 21 actionable challenges presented one per day, built around the most timeless wisdom in Stoic philosophy. We just finished it, the live version of the challenge with thousands of people all over the world. And typically, that's what it is. It's like this live challenge. You're doing a challenge a day together in this community. But we heard from so many people. I just did the last live call for everyone. I've gotten emails from people who have came back from vacation later. They procrastinated or January got off to a rough start and they wanted to know if they could still join it. And so we decided to reopen the challenge because, you know, we all stumble. Life happens. But the key is to get back up and to keep moving forward. And that's

• 2:51Ryan Holiday?

  what the Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge is there for. To remind you, it doesn't matter. It's not about having a perfect start, but it's about that consistent action. You might remember before Christmas, we were saying that we think the 2025 challenge was our best yet. And well, here's what some people said about doing the New Year, New You Challenge. Let's just listen to them.

• 3:12Speaker 01

  This is my first New Year, New Me, but I've done your Spring Forward Challenge before. Love these. They're good reset.

• 3:19Speaker 02

  It's my second time joining the New Year, New You Challenge. Very uplifting. It gives you more depth, thinking about things that are not obvious to yourself.

• 3:30Speaker 03

  This is like my third or fourth year in the challenge. And I feel like it's a great re-energizer for me. I'm a school district superintendent. So this is a good little shot of adrenaline for the year.

• 3:40Ryan Holiday?

  So the point is, I'd like to hear stuff like that from you. I'd like to see you in the New Year, New You Challenge. And you can join us now at dailystoic.com/challenge. Don't put it off till tomorrow. Don't write the year off yet. Take the leap. I'll see you in there. Let's challenge ourselves together. I'm thinking about some of the habits that I've already taken out of this year's challenge. And I'm excited to share those with you. Dailystoic.com/challenge. It's not too late. I'll see you in there.

• 4:14Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another Thursday episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I don't like to dress up at all. I don't have a lot of fancy clothes. I don't like to dress up. I kind of like that Thoreau thing about being wary of any enterprise that requires the purchase of new clothes. So back in December, I had to dress up for something. And let me play this little video I recorded beforehand across the street from the White House. When I was younger, I was just viscerally opposed to dressing up. I thought it was stupid. I thought it was pointless. I had an approach closer to what the cynics thought, which was this sort of rejection of the norms and conventions of society. Then I read something from Seneca that made me think.

• 4:56Ryan Holiday?

  He said, "A philosopher on the outside should look the same as everyone else." He said, "But on the inside, everything should be different." So this is about as dressed up as I'll ever get. I'm in DC for some meetings. But the idea is that on the outside, adhere to convention. You don't need to be disruptive. You don't need to reject what everyone else is doing. Go along to get along. What matters is who you are on the inside. What matters is how you're thinking up in here. Are you thinking differently than everyone else? Are you living differently than everyone else? Are your values different? How you dress doesn't matter at all. There was a Roman poet who said, "The difference between the cynics and the Stoics was just a shirt." They had a shirt between them. One wore a shirt and the other didn't. So why was I at the White House?

• 5:40Ryan Holiday?

  As I told you, if you listened to the chunk that we ran a couple of weeks ago, I was at the White House Christmas party. And then I gave a talk to some staffers who were leaving the last administration before this new one came in. And so I was like, okay, great, I gotta get a suit. Or I gotta see if I still fit in my suit for my wedding, which actually I do fit nice. That was a nice little surprise. I was like, what am I gonna wear to this Christmas party? I was like, I definitely do not want to wear a tie. So what could I wear that would make me not have to wear a tie? And I was like, ah, Christmas sweater. So I put on my Iron Maiden Christmas sweater, which is one of my favorite things ever. And so as I'm going through security into the White House, first you go through this one set of security and then you go into this second set.

• 6:23Ryan Holiday?

  It's this sort of big room where there's not only metal detectors, but a Secret Service officer with a canine. And I'm standing there sort of waiting, like I think I had my arms above my head, whatever they're doing. And then the Secret Service guy with the dog looks at me and goes, "Is that an Iron Maiden Christmas sweater?" And I was like, Yeah. And he goes, fuck, yeah, it is. And he was like, where'd you get it? And I said, I got it from their website. And then we chatted a little bit. And then I'm still standing there with my arms above my head. And I go finally like, am I good? And he's like, you're good, man. Then I went to the Christmas party. And then the next day, I went back to the executive office building where I did this fireside chat with one of their digital officers. I'm going to blur all the names from everyone who asked questions because it was sort of

• 7:08Ryan Holiday?

  a, I don't know, off the record event, but I just want to preserve everyone's identities. And here is me answering some questions to about 200 White House employees in the Indian Tree Room of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. We talked a little more than an hour. So here's some more of those questions. This isn't political stuff, I don't think. But it's people who are about to go through a major life event and transition, people who, you know, just lost, or, you know, maybe feel like it didn't go the way they wanted. Or this is, I think, actually, a very relatable position that each of them are in. And that's why I wanted to bring it to you. So enjoy.

• 7:49Speaker 04

  So the question I have is within regards to identity, for those of us who are essentially still working on ourselves, trying to mold our character, values, and cultivating our ethics, what advice would you give us a guide to also try to navigate this introspective space while also trying to raise this cultural, big, um, divergent movement toward creating a more conscious policy system?

• 8:18Ryan Holiday?

  It's very fascinating to be the private thoughts of the Emperor of Rome, a Roman, if there ever was one, talking about how he's a citizen of the world, and how you zoom out, which he could, like, the tallest mountain in Rome is like 10,000 feet elevation, which he never got to the top of. But somehow, he has almost, it almost sounds like he's describing that blue marble view of the world from a distance. And he talks about how boundaries fall away, and racial differences fall away, and the things that we fight over suddenly seem puny. And it's significant that we're all this sort of one organism, which, again, is not something people associate stosis with, but it's this essential part of it.

• 8:58Ryan Holiday?

  There's a middle scope in Iroquois. And he has this idea of our circles of concern. And he says, so obviously, we're all born selfish and, you know, dependent on others. You know, then we start to care about our family and our neighbors and people we went to school with. And he describes life as this series of concentric circles. It gets bigger and bigger and bigger and ultimately it encompasses, you know, all living beings and people who have never been born. And he says that the work of philosophy is about pulling these outer rings inwards. That that's the work of the philosophy. And I really like that idea that it's work to kind of open yourself up and be more caring.

• 9:41Ryan Holiday?

  Because I remember as a kid, my dad said to me, you know, if you're not liberal when you're young, you have no heart. If you're not conservative when you're older, you have no brain. That strikes me as like the saddest thing you could possibly say. Putting aside political labels, the idea is no, no, as you get older, you get more cynical, less generous, less interested in other people. The work is to not let that happen. And I think of Stoic philosophy as a way to do that work, to not get close-minded and hard-hearted and, you know, sectarian or tribal as you go. And that to me is what the philosophy is about.

• 10:23Ryan Holiday?

  And we see in Meditations, Marcus Verdius knows this, but he's writing it not for us, to himself. It's work, you know, because we are inherently not that way. It is actually an active thing to remind yourself the shared affinities we have, the things we all have in common, the fundamental humanness of all people, despite what they do or where they live or how they act. That to me is like the project of our lives is to get more open and more compassionate and loving as we go and not the opposite. What would you recommend to someone who is not in power? Still try to do the work and engage as best they can.

• 11:07Ryan Holiday?

  There's a Stoic named Eusonius Rufus. You know, we're talking about cancel culture. He's exiled four different times by four different emperors. So it's rough.

• 11:20Ryan Holiday?

  And he's exiled to this one, you know, island in the middle of the Mediterranean. It's this barren, lifeless island with a small population. And the only thing we're here about it is that he, while he did ferry, he sort of sets to work and he discovers like this hidden spring and he brings water to the island that he's in. And I love this sort of Stoic idea there of like, he's punished, he's sent away. And what he does is he gets to work helping the people that he's with. There's another story about this Stoic named Rutilius Rufus, who's right around the time of Caesar and Cato, Caesar. He's brought up on charges of corruption because he had resisted corruption.

• 12:05Ryan Holiday?

  He was a governor in one of the Asian provinces, the Roman Empire. The job was to loot the provinces, make money. He decides not to do this. So the people who are corrupt brings him up on corruption charges to have a more corrupt governor. It's like today, every accusation is a confession. Anyways, he's brought up on charges, exile. And the one act of mercy is they tell him he gets to choose where he's going to be exiled. And he chooses the province that he was the governor of, who accepts him with open arms because he was the only non-corrupt governor they'd ever had. And so there's something just sort of practical and pragmatic

• 12:44Ryan Holiday?

  and then also kind of eternally optimistic about the Stoics in exile that I sort of take part in. You know, you could look at Churchill's years in the wilderness. Churchill does not come back to power. He does not experience those years in exile. And he says, the famous quote about how every prophet has to cross the desert to go into the wilderness, and he says, "This is where psychic dynamite is made." And so the idea is that how would this thing be a formative experience for you? How, instead of sitting around and waiting for your turn, how do you make, when it is your turn again, something that you are better off for having gone through this journey? So you've talked a little bit about... How many American presidents have been practicing Stoics in some way, shape, or form?

• 13:27Ryan Holiday?

  We're obviously in the very smart space right now. What's your favorite intersection between the American presidency and Stoics? Ooh, I have a great answer. So my favorite connection between Stoics and American presidents is Theodore Roosevelt. After he leaves office, he first off, he goes to Acre Bed and it feels like 10,000 men. Then, you can see most of them, they're in the Natural History Museum or in the Harvard and Explorers Club in New York City, which has elephants and dinosaurs and all these animals that he hunted. That's not my favorite part, that's the deal.

• 14:06Ryan Holiday?

  But he then takes this assignment exploring like an 8,000 river, an 8,000 mile river in the Amazon, the River of Doubt, which had no European explorer had officially returned. And it immediately goes awry. He nearly dies, he's suddenly dies. There's a beautiful book called The River of Doubt by Genghis Miller all about this. But if you visit the Theodore Roosevelt birthplace, which is the brownstone that he grew up in in New York City, I think it's on 20th and 21st Streets, the National Park. You walk downstairs and there's a little case of, you know, mementos.

• 14:47Ryan Holiday?

  They have the speech and the shirt where he shot before he kind of gave a speech, he spoke for like 90 minutes after getting the shot in the chest. They have the dirty shirt and then next to it, they have this copy of Marcus Aurelius, which he brought on the River of Doubt journey. And it's inscribed from a friend, you know, I think he might have, he took about eight books with him and that was one of the books that he took with him. That's so. Yeah.

• 15:16Ryan 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.