Don’t Let This Crush You | Make Honesty Your Only Policy

This life thing: It’s wonderful. We are sentient beings. The apex predators at the top of the food chain. We have brilliant technology, incredible pleasures, as well as talents and skills that bring us joy and success. And guess what? We’re still gonna die. Each and every one of us. That’s the thing about life. As wonderful as life is, none of us get out of it alive. We were born mortal. Born fragile. We have had a terminal diagnosis since birth.--And with today's meditation on the day's Daily Journal excerpt, Ryan reminds us to move with all things in moderation by having an identifiable approach on honesty. That we don't have as much time as we think we do. That’s why we created our own additions to the rich history of memento mori, including: The memento mori medallion , memento mori signet ring And the memento mori pendant, All these were created to remind us that we must live NOW, while there is still time.⏳ You can view our entire Memento Mori Collection at dailystoic.com/mm✉️ 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.📱 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.

• 0:42Ryan Holiday?

  Nobody gets out alive. This life thing, it's wonderful. We are sentient beings, the apex predators at the top of the food chain. We have brilliant technology, incredible pleasures, as well as talents and skills that bring us joy and success. And guess what? We're still gonna die, each and every one of us. That's the thing about life. As wonderful as it is, none of us get out of life alive. We were born mortal, born fragile. We've had a terminal diagnosis since birth. This shouldn't detract from our sense of wonder or appreciation. It doesn't render everything pointless. Look at Seneca.

• 1:24Ryan Holiday?

  He wrote often on the inevitability of death. He wrote, and yet, he wrote. That's the point. He published books. He cared about each and every word in them. He wanted them to find large audiences. He celebrated his successes. Marcus Aurelius was constantly meditating on those words, "memento mori", and still, he raised his family. He sat at the head of an enormous empire, which he struggled and strove to maintain and protect. He also laughed and loved and hunted and read and went to the theater. The fact that we will die is not sad. It's just that, a fact. We have to be aware of it. But we don't have to let it crush us. Instead, we should be freed by it. Freed to follow our talents where they lead us,

• 2:08Ryan Holiday?

  but don't weep if they don't lead us to everlasting fame. Freed to fall in love and raise a family, but not to be crippled with anxiety and worry every second about the pain of losing them. Freed to have fun, but be careful not to waste our finite amount of time doing so. None of us are going to get out of this life alive. None of us will escape the prophecy, and that's okay. What we have is right now. What we have is plenty. So seize it, embrace it, live it. And of course, memento mori, you can check out the memento mori coin that I carry in my left pocket everywhere I go at store.dailystoic.com.

• 2:58Ryan Holiday?

  Make honesty your only policy. As Emperor Marcus Aurelius did not see the best of humanity, leaders never do. At court, there would have been backbiting, people who sold their friends out when they saw an opportunity to advance themselves, avarice and deceit. He especially didn't like faux attempts at honesty. His point? If you have to say, "I'm gonna be honest with you here," what you're casually saying is that honesty is an exception for you and not the rule, that you're making a special effort to tell the truth here, because you usually don't. And how sad is that? It's time to think about what these little statements say about us and how to make sure that our default policy

• 3:40Ryan Holiday?

  is honesty and straightforwardness. Today's, and then the two quotes we have from Marcus Aurelius's Meditations and then from Seneca's Moral Letters, go as follows. How rotten and fraudulent when people say they intend to give it to you straight. What are you up to, friend? It shouldn't need to be your announcement, but be seen readily as if written on your forehead, heard in the ring of your voice, a flash in your eyes, just as the beloved sees it all in a lover's glance. In short, the straightforward and good person should be like the smelly goat. You know it when they're in the room with you. I love that quote. That's so great. A calculated give it to you straight is like a dagger, and there's nothing worse than a wolf befriending sheep. We should avoid false friendship at all costs.

• 4:25Ryan Holiday?

  If you are good, straightforward, and well-meaning, it should show in your eyes and not escape notice. That's from Marcus Aurelius's Meditations 11:15. And then Seneca's Moral Letters 109, he says, "It is in keeping with nature to show our friends affections and to celebrate their advancement as if it was our very own. For if we don't do this, for if we don't do this, virtue, which is strengthened only by exercising our perceptions, will no longer endure in us." Look, I think this idea that honesty is your best policy is really important. And obviously, we should cultivate a reputation for candor, for straightforwardness, for not holding back, for not being two-faced. If you have an opinion, you put it out there. You don't say one thing in private,

• 5:09Ryan Holiday?

  another thing in public, right? But I would say, you know, and we had Randall Stutman on the Daily Stoic Podcast and in the Daily Stoic Leadership Challenge recently. And he did push back on this trend of radical candor, you know, that often it can be an excuse for being a jerk. You know, the Stoics take their original roots from the cynics, you know, Diogenes, who sort of walks the streets of Athens just saying whatever he thinks. But I don't particularly admire him. I see him as sort of antisocial. So I think what Marcus is saying, cultivate a reputation for straightforwardness, this is in context of the other Stoic virtues.

• 5:52Ryan Holiday?

  It takes courage to be clear and to voice unpopular opinions and to say what people don't want to hear. But it also takes moderation and an understanding of justice to know what opinions to voice, how to voice them, how not to be a jerk about them. You know, radical candor in Wall Street firms, Randall was saying, is, again, often an excuse for asshole bosses to be more of a jerk. And that's not the excuse they need. We want to be both straightforward as well as restrained. And I know that seems a little contradictory, but, well, life is complicated and it's about balance. So when we say we want to be the smelly goat in the room, I don't think we want, and as someone who owns goats, let me tell you, man, goats can stink.

• 6:37Ryan Holiday?

  I can sometimes smell my neighbor's goats. He's like a half mile away. I'll catch a whiff of it in the wind. A male goat, the sort of musk they have, man, it is repulsive. It's disgusting. I don't think that's what Marcus is saying. I think he's being a bit exaggerated. He's just saying that, you know, these, "I'm gonna be level with you, with you here." Or when we say, "I don't mean any offense," or "no offense intended," you really did mean, you're a, you can almost expect that the next words out of this person's mouth are gonna be really poorly thought out, not so nice things. And so I think we should take some time here to think about this balance. This is what temperance is really about, right?

• 7:19Ryan Holiday?

  Just in the way that courage is a midpoint between cowardice and recklessness. I'd like to think that honesty is a line somewhere between omission, not saying things, and saying too many things, or something like, to that regard, if you get what I'm saying. It's, it's that, yes, we have to tell the truth, but you don't have to tell someone that you find them repulsive today. You don't have to tell them that you really hate the sound of their voice, right? There are things you can keep to yourself. And I guess I just wanted to add a little color to this week's meditation, that being a Stoic, and there was an interesting lawsuit recently, a workplace lawsuit, where a man claimed that Stoicism was his religion.

• 8:05Ryan Holiday?

  And therefore, the offensive things he said at work, the way he comported himself and behaved, even some of his hygiene habits, he could not be fired for them because they were his religious beliefs. But when you really look at the remarks that he was defending the way that he's behaving, it's true that he's actually just a jerk. And that's not what we're talking about. So all things in moderation, including this kind of honesty that we're talking about from Marcus Aurelius, have an identifiable scent that you are an honest person, but don't be a stinky goat.