Put The Weight Right On Me

“So much happens in life. There is so much happening. Forget macro events—there are dogs that get sick in the middle of the night. There are trips that need to be made to the store. There are unpleasant conversations to have. Bills that somebody has to pay. Dishes to be done. Hard decisions to make.”Ryan discusses why a Stoic leans into responsibility and adversity instead of avoiding it, and launches his new book The Boy Who Would Be King, on today’s Daily Stoic Podcast.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow Daily Stoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicSee 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.

• 0:04Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a passage of ancient wisdom, designed to help you find strength, insight, and wisdom in everyday life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us at DailyStoic.com.

• 0:27Ryan Holiday?

  Put the weight right on me. So much happens in life. There is so much happening. Forget macro events. There are dogs that get sick in the middle of the night. There are trips that need to be made to the store. There are unpleasant conversations to have, bills that somebody has to pay, dishes to be done, hard decisions to make. Most people's reaction, especially when those macro events are stressing them out on top of everything, is to shirk. It's to see if someone else can handle all of it for them. It's to try to get out of whatever can be got out of. It's to resent even the idea of obligation. But the Stoic, a Stoic politely sings to themselves that lyric from one of the greatest songs of all time.

• 1:12Ryan Holiday?

  And you put the load right on me. You put the load right on me. Remember, in a crisis, a pandemic just like this one, Marcus Aurelius stepped up. In fact, the famous story about Marcus Aurelius is that he didn't want to be emperor at all. He wasn't sure he could do it. But the night he was informed of the news, he had a dream. In that dream, he had shoulders made of ivory. It was a sign. He could do it. His shoulders could bear the weight. Put the load right on me, he said to himself, and he bore it for the rest of his life. Things are hard right now. They are scary. They are not your fault, but they are your responsibility. They are yours to step up to and carry,

• 1:57Ryan Holiday?

  because you have the shoulders that can bear the weight.

• 2:02Ryan Holiday?

  What makes Marcus great are his teachers and the early influences in his life. Risticis, Antoninus Pius. I mean, the whole opening section of Meditations is him really acknowledging the people who were formative in helping him become the man that philosophy wanted him to become. And that's the story I tell in my new book, The Boy Who Would Be King. It's an illustrated fable about the early years of Marcus Aurelius. How this little boy was selected from obscurity and ruled the world and did so without being corrupted by it. He really did become the man that philosophy wanted him to be. And that book is now out. It's available everywhere. I've been working on this book for the last year. It came out of the pandemic for me, something I've wanted to do for a really long time. You can check it out.

• 2:47Ryan Holiday?

  Go to dailystoic.com/king, or you can pick up The Boy Who Would Be King anywhere books are sold, including on Amazon. But if you buy it from us at dailystoic.com/king, you get the audiobook for free, which has me reading it and a bunch of other cool people. So check it out, The Boy Who Would Be King. And we should learn to lead like Marcus Aurelius, and we should try to not just make Stoicism proud, but we should try to make the example of Marcus Aurelius proud.