BONUS: How Rory McIlroy Fueled His Comeback with Stoicism

Last week, Rory McIlroy won the 2025 Masters Tournament, securing his first Green Jacket and completing the career Grand Slam. Nearly five years earlier, The Golf Channel profiled Ryan in a feature on Rory McIlroy, showing how 'The Obstacle Is The Way' helped Rory reset his mindset and fuel what would become one of the most remarkable comebacks in golf history.🎥 Watch this on The Daily Stoic YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsegDV9aZvk📕 Pick up a copy of the 10th Anniversary Edition of The Obstacle Is the Way by Ryan Holiday at dailystoic.com/obstacle🎙️ 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.

• 0:05Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a Stoic-inspired meditation, designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life. Each one of these episodes is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women, help you learn from them, to follow in their example, and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. For more, visit DailyStoic.com.

• 0:55Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to a bonus episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. This is a bonus episode because it was a bonus surprise, very cool thing that happened last week. So if you were watching The Masters, Rory McIlroy has this incredible victory, not just over the competition, but over himself. He's been trying almost for a decade to finish up his Grand Slam. Incredible. It didn't look like he was going to be able to do it. And then, just out of nowhere, he pulls it off. And so many people sent me this clip. So, right after he wins, The Masters coverage cuts to this discussion. And let me just play this for you.

• 1:30Speaker 01

  A few years ago, I sat with Rory. I did a story. He had been doing a deep dive, reading the Ryan Holiday books about the Stoics, the Epictetus, the ancient Greek philosopher. And this is a quote from Epictetus. And Rory was really into this. "It's not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters." That was it. Ta-da.

• 1:50Ryan Holiday?

  Which, again, not expecting. It was cool. My dad's a big golfer, so he saw it and sent it to me. Because of that clip and because of the win, I wanted to actually show you some of this larger context of how Rory had come to Stoicism. Almost five years ago, The Golf Channel profiled me in that piece about Rory and his reading. Habits. I thought I would, I would just play that episode for you. You can watch a video of it if you want. I'll link to it in the show notes. It's just, you know, incredible. Obviously, the person who did all the work here is Rory. I just love the idea, though, of the Stoics holding up under all different sorts of pressure, working

• 2:31Ryan Holiday?

  for people in all different lines of work. And I don't know, maybe there's something in here that applies to you and some sort of internal or external obstacle you are trying to get over. Maybe it's, maybe it'll inspire you to tackle some kind of project. I wanted to throw this bonus episode together in honor of that incredible feat. If you notice, I actually wrote about Rory a little bit in Right Thing Right Now. You know, part of what I think has been so impressive is that he hasn't just been able to focus on golf. He's spent the last couple of years sort of fighting for the integrity of the PGA Tour against this sort of threat of the Live Golf League, where he turned down millions and millions and millions of dollars because he thought it wasn't the right thing

• 3:15Ryan Holiday?

  to do. And how does he get rewarded for that? Well, he basically gets screwed over and sort of hung out to dry. And so, you know, he was going through personal things. And then also, it's just really hard to be elite at anything and to be elite at something for as long as he's been elite and to be elite at a game as humbling as golf, you know, to not just give up and to call it. It's just an incredible feat of human performance. And I think, you know, the Stoics help us do things like that. So enjoy this bonus episode and I will talk to you all soon.

• 4:00Ryan Holiday?

  Probably doesn't seem like golf and Stoicism have anything in common. And that's certainly not what I was thinking about when I was writing the book. So I was super surprised to hear that Rory McIlroy, now the number one golfer in the world, one of the highest earning golfers of all time, the best athletes in his, in his sport, read both Obstacles Away and Ego's Enemy. And he actually said Obstacles is, I think, his favorite book. So the Golf Channel is here and they want to do a session where they sort of probe that. I guess he got interviewed about it, too. So I'm a little nervous, but it should be pretty cool.

• 4:36Ryan Holiday?

  It's so difficult to watch.

• 4:38Speaker 02

  A nightmare day for Rory. Where did that come from? There's one word for it. The word is choking. Mentally, it was a demolition of Rory McIlroy.

• 4:46Speaker 01

  When Rory McIlroy buckled beneath the weight of expectations, the kind that come with a swing you could hang in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he turned not to a new coach for help, but to Epictetus, the ancient Greek philosopher known as a Stoic.

• 5:06Ryan Holiday?

  What the Stoics believed is that we don't control what happens, but we always control how we respond. Everything that happens to us in life is an opportunity to practice excellence or virtue.

• 5:19Speaker 01

  Ryan Holiday wrote "The Obstacle is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph." So, in his quest to improve, Rory hit more than just golf balls. He hit the books.

• 5:33Speaker 03

  Just a journey of personal growth and development and trying to be the best golfer I could be, be the best person I could be. The moment that you stop wanting to learn, that's not a great place to be.

• 5:52Ryan Holiday?

  Fundamentally, the book is about how do you react. Golf is a game where, because it's so mental, the reaction or the disposition you bring is most, if not all, of the battle.

• 6:07Speaker 01

  Oh, you're kidding. Yeah. That's a lack of concentration. A lack of poise. Now he's in trouble.

• 6:14Ryan Holiday?

  It might not be how you want it to go, but you still have a chance to be like your best self in that situation.

• 6:29Speaker 03

  It's forced me to embrace difficulty, embrace impediments in my way. I used to shy away, and now I don't seek out failure, but if it comes, I welcome it.

• 6:42Speaker 01

  No failure stung more than the 2019 Open, when the first round 79 brought both pain and a chance for growth.

• 6:50Speaker 03

  Sometimes you go out in the first round and you're trying to play your way into the golf tournament. And that's never really been in my nature. That's something that I'm gonna try to improve on. It made me realize I need those failures to get to the point of winning four times, winning Player of the Year and all that.

• 7:07Speaker 04

  Rory McIlroy is a two-time FedEx Cup champion.

• 7:16Speaker 01

  The modern athlete must learn not only to deal with failure, and in this sport even the best will lose 95% of the time, but also shut out the noise. And with social media, it's never been louder. With referendums, harsh judgments rendered every minute, refreshed and rehashed. That led Rory to another book, Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport.

• 7:42Speaker 05

  Social media can be like poison for these deep-rooted human instincts we have. The people that you actually encounter are not a fair sample of the people out there in the world. Rory is reading these books on technology, he's reading books on Stoicism, because he realizes what happens between the ears is a significant contributor to what actually happens on the course.

• 8:08Speaker 03

  One of the hardest things about the judgment, about the comments, is learning not to read them. It's taken me a while to not read anything that's on Twitter or anything that might be said about me in a forum or online or media article.

• 8:25Speaker 05

  It's gonna optimize for outrage, it's gonna optimize for trolling, it's gonna optimize for aggressive pushback, because that's what keeps people's eyeballs on it.

• 8:33Speaker 03

  I have opinions of the people around me that I value, but someone that's never met me and makes a comment or a judgment on a presumption of who they think I am or what they think I might be like. I try to lock my phone in the bedside drawer for the weeks of majors and just do anything I can to just get away from that.

• 8:57Speaker 05

  The future of high-performance athletics is going to treat the smartphone and its role in the athlete's life just as importantly as weight routines, just as importantly as diets.

• 9:08Speaker 01

  And you think Rory is ahead of the curve on this?

• 9:12Speaker 05

  He's that type of athlete, yeah, looking for every edge he can get, and I think we see it's working.

• 9:17Speaker 04

  Rory McIlroy is a player's champion.

• 9:23Speaker 01

  Working in part by tuning out a world in which with one click, you can hear the roaring chorus of the rarely satisfied, always in need of more.

• 9:31Speaker 06

  You move up in the FedEx Cup standings, this sort of changes your goals.

• 9:36Speaker 07

  How do you assess looking ahead to 2020? What's next for you?

• 9:40Ryan Holiday?

  We kind of unthinkingly ask people that, and we don't really think about what it's implying. What it's implying is that what you've done is not enough. This can create a poverty in the sense that they're never satisfied, they're never happy.

• 9:55Speaker 01

  In his quest for a balanced existence, Rory's contemplated these profound subjects, even the heavy garment of fame.

• 10:04Speaker 03

  The more time I've spent in the spotlight, the more uncomfortable I've become with it.

• 10:11Speaker 08

  Rory McIlroy had the spotlight of sports on him, bigger than it's ever been. I can't imagine how he feels.

• 10:17Speaker 03

  I used to love the adulation, but now you crave that anonymity.

• 10:22Speaker 01

  That's an old idea considered by another Stoic, Marcus Aurelius.

• 10:28Ryan Holiday?

  Marcus Aurelius says, you know, what is cheering but, you know, the clacking of tons? What is clapping but the smacking of hands? What he's trying to remind himself is that these things that maybe you wanted early on or you thought would be amazing are actually not that meaningful, and what matters is the love of the process, the doing.

• 10:50Speaker 01

  Love what you do, not what it brings you. Progress, not perfection. Practicing golf, yes, but virtue as well, books as part of the process, and ultimately, a purpose deeper than shooting 65.

• 11:06Speaker 03

  It's a part of my life that I take very seriously, and I want to make the most of, but I have other purposes. I have responsibility to be a good husband, a role model to people that might want to emulate me. That's all a part of my purpose.

• 11:23Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, thanks for watching Daily Stoic. If you want to learn more about Stoicism, you can check out some of our other videos here. Subscribe, we'd really appreciate it. Keep learning, keep studying, and remember those four Stoic virtues: courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom.