You Can’t Resent Them | What Little Wins Can You Find

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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Ryan 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.

• 0:44Ryan Holiday?

  You can't resent them.

• 0:49Ryan Holiday?

  There are things a leader, particularly in times of success, can get away with. There are also things that people generally can get away with when no one is looking, only think there won't be consequences. And yet, most of us don't do these things. We try as best we can to observe the Stoic virtue of temperance and moderation. Marcus Aurelius certainly did. He held incredible power. His predecessors had treated the Senate and laws as mere formalities. They treated Rome's treasury as their personal purse. They treated other human beings as pawns to use and abuse. So imagine the discipline and rectitude it took for Marcus, a guy who didn't even want the job in the first place, to be so strict with himself

• 1:34Ryan Holiday?

  about what he would and wouldn't do as emperor. Now, also imagine how frustrating he must have found it to see other leaders operate with much lower standards. They had so much less power, so far from absolute, and yet it corrupted them absolutely. They had less means and somehow more vices. This is a common thing. You've probably experienced it in your own life. It's baffling. It's exasperating. You tell yourself, "I would never let myself get away with that." Then you wonder, "How can they live with themselves?" But be careful. This self-righteous indignation can eat you up if you're not fully in

• 2:15Ryan Holiday?

  control of it. Marcus had to work very hard to be strict with himself, but tolerant with others. If he hadn't, he would have been consumed by resentment, by disappointment, and despair. Not everyone was as strong as him, just as not everyone is as strong as you. Not everyone has had the training. Not everyone has been enlightened to the right principles. This is why they fall short. This is why they try to get away with things. This is how they live with themselves. All you can do is be patient and tolerant. All you can do is keep being you. All you can do is keep doing the right thing for no other reason than it is the right thing.

• 3:04Ryan Holiday?

  What little wins can you find?

• 3:10Ryan Holiday?

  Zeno, the Phoenician merchant who founded the Stoic school on the painted porch, the Sto apo chile of the agora after shipwreck, said that happiness was a matter of small steps. While the Stoics believed in the perfectibility of human beings, they knew that so much stood in the way of realizing that potential. So they would be skeptical of the so-called epic wins and quantum leaps that our culture obsesses over today. Instead, they would urge you to focus on your daily duties, on making incremental progress. Spend your time this week thinking about small wins. What little gains can be had from this improvement or that one, a decision here or a decision there. Be satisfied with each small step. Keep moving and don't give up. This is from this week's entry in the Daily

• 3:55Ryan Holiday?

  Stoic Journal, "366 Days of Writing and Reflection on the Art of Living," from yours truly. You can find this anywhere books are sold. And of course, we also have signed books in the Daily Stoic store. But we have a quote from Marcus, a quote from Epictetus, and a quote from Zeno today. Do what your nature demands, Mark Serele says in Meditations 929. Get right to it if it's in your power. Don't look around to see if people will know about it. Don't await the perfection of Plato's Republic, but be satisfied with even the smallest step forward and regard the outcome itself as a small thing. Then Epictetus says, we don't abandon our pursuits because we despair of ever perfecting them. That's Discourses 1:2.

• 4:40Ryan Holiday?

  Well-being is realized by small steps, Zeno says, according to Diogenes Laertus, but it is no small thing. I was actually just thinking about this this morning. I'm in the middle of writing the book that I'm working on now. And there's a great writing rule. You know, just a couple crappy pages a day. Just put in the time, put in the work. That'll get you to a manuscript, like a draft one. Then you can edit draft one, but you can't edit what doesn't exist. So people, as Epictetus says, who despair of progress because it's not perfection, they never get there. But the person who shows up and does work every day gets there. So I was actually writing this in the, in my journal today.

• 5:24Ryan Holiday?

  I was saying, okay, just show up, put your ass in the chair, do a little work. And as I was writing this in the journal, I was thinking like, put your ass in the chair, be at the desk. And then this story popped in my head because I've been trying to write this chapter about like keeping your workstation clean. That'll be in like two books from now. But the point is, as I was thinking about this, I remembered this little thing that I'd read about Robert Moses in Robert Caro's book, The Power Broker. And I wrote down my note card and, and I, I just, boom, the chapter just unlocked itself. So my point is, I was thinking about the process when the process got to work and solved a problem that I was having trouble solving. I got to my desk, I got to sit down. I pulled the power broker off the shelf,

• 6:08Ryan Holiday?

  started going through my folded pages. And there on about page 280, something was it? The exact story that I needed. In about an hour, I busted out the first draft of this chapter. That was all I have to do for today's contribution to the book. Now, a lot of days like this add up. As George Washington was fond of saying, many mickles make a muckle. You show up enough days, you do this enough times, gets you to phase one, then you improve, then you go on to phase two, phase three, and finally you get your completed product. So today, it's not about sort of big, huge wins. Like, this was a minor, minor win. This is maybe three paragraphs of a book that's going to be 60-plus thousand words.

• 6:52Ryan Holiday?

  It's going to have to go through lots of rounds of editing that won't come out until 2023, probably. And who knows, maybe it'll even get cut from the book. But the point is, I followed the process. I showed up, I did the work. I didn't wait around. "I put my ass where I wanted my heart to be," quote Stephen Pressfield. "And I made the smallest step forward," as Marcus said. "I'm not going to get too high about this. I'm not going to get too excited. I'm going to," as Marcus says, "regard it as a small thing. But I'm also confident enough, experienced enough, to know that these small things add up, and that's what I'm excited about. And I know that I just have to do this enough times for long enough that I'll eventually get to the other side of where I need to go."

• 7:36Ryan Holiday?

  And that is true for your problems, for your projects, wherever you are, whatever you're doing. Show up, put your ass in the chair, do the work, let the process guide you to the eventual inevitable accomplishment.

• 7:55Ryan Holiday?

  It's not that life is short, Seneca says, it's that we waste a lot of it. The practice of Memento Mori, the meditation on death, is one of the most powerful and eye-opening things that there is. We built this Memento Mori calendar for Daily Stoic to illustrate that exact idea, that your life, in the best-case scenario, is 4,000 weeks. Are you going to let those weeks slip by? Or are you going to seize them? The act of unrolling this calendar, putting it on your wall, and every single week, that bubble is filled in, that black mark is marking it off forever. Have something to show, not just for your years, but for every single dot that you've

• 8:39Ryan Holiday?

  filled in, that you really lived that week, that you made something of it. You can check it out at dailystoic.com/mmcalendar.