Go Back And Pick It Up Again | Is This the Life You Worked For?

Everyone has a book that changed their life. But how long has it been since you first read the book that hit you so hard? Thenew 10th Anniversary Edition of https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/the-daily-stoic-10The Daily Stoic https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/the-daily-stoic-10https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/the-daily-stoic-10is out NOW! 👉 Grabhttps://store.dailystoic.com/pages/the-daily-stoic-10your copy here: https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/the-daily-stoic-10 🎟️https://www.dailystoiclive.com/DAILY STOIC LIVE https://www.dailystoiclive.com/| Ryan Holiday is coming to a city near you https://www.dailystoiclive.com/! Grab tickets here https://www.dailystoiclive.com/ | https://www.dailystoiclive.com/ 🎙️AD-FREE https://dailystoic.supercast.com/| Support the podcast and go deeper into Stoicism by subscribing toThe Daily Stoic Premium https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ - unlock ad-free listening, early access, and bonus content:https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ ✉️ FREE STOIC WISDOM https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail | Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email athttps://dailystoic.com/dailyemail -- Stop online threats before they become real-world attacks. Visit ironwall.com/DAILYSTOIC and request a free Risk Assessment to see exactly how exposed your executives are. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

• 0:00Ryan Holiday?

  Look, hiring is make or break for a business, especially if you're a small business. You can't just hope that you find the right people. Hope is never a strategy, but when it comes to recruitment, it's not going to work. So when the pressure's on and you need the right hire, this is a job for sponsored jobs. Indeed, sponsored jobs gets you the quality candidates when you need them the most. It's how you get your job seen. And with Indeed sponsored jobs, you'll get matched with and hire quality candidates who can drive the results you'll need. And plus, with Indeed sponsored jobs, you only pay for results. People are finding quality hires on Indeed right now. In the minute or so we've been talking to you, companies have made dozens of hires on Indeed, according to Indeed data worldwide.

• 0:45Ryan Holiday?

  So join the 3.3 million employers worldwide that use Indeed to connect with quality talent that fits their needs. And listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to help your job get the premium status it deserves at indeed.com/podcast. Just go to indeed.com/podcast right now and support the show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. If you're hiring now, then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

• 1:28Ryan Holiday?

  Go back and pick it up again. Everyone has a book that changed their life, one that opened their eyes or taught them something, moved them, challenged them. We know that this was Marcus Aurelius's reaction to Epictetus. Perhaps this was how you felt when you read Marcus Aurelius for the first time. I know it was for me. But how long has it been since you read that book that first hit you? Now, think of everything that's happened then. All the other books you've read, the experiences you've had, things that have happened in the world, the lessons you've learned. How much have you grown? How much has your perspective shifted? In his great biography of Emerson, The Mind on Fire, Robert D. Richardson writes about a year of rereading

• 2:11Ryan Holiday?

  that had a revitalizing effect on Emerson, enlivening his reading and sending him ranging over further afield. "New readings overlapped old," he writes. "Familiar books yielded fresh connections with the present, and books from one culture or era became newly applicable in another." This sort of cross fertilization happened frequently for Emerson. This year in 1844, he gave it a name. Croisement. Crossings or crossbreedings. "Its startling symbols for Emerson were the seashore and the taste of two metals in contact, our enlarged powers at the approach and the departure of a friend." He felt that these crossings or intersections, most strongly perhaps in the experience of poetic creativeness,

• 2:56Ryan Holiday?

  which is not found in staying at home, nor yet in traveling, but in transitions from one to the other. And as he tried to court this crossroads experience, so he now tried to manage his whole life as to present as the most transitional surface possible." That word. Croisement. It itself came from a reread. Emerson is quoting a French philosopher who said that "nature loves crossbreedings." Growth, creativity, and insights emerge from this, from dynamic intersections. Points where different ideas and experiences or influences converge and create something new, transformative, and vital. And this is why we cannot simply pick up a book once. It's why we have to revisit the books

• 3:40Ryan Holiday?

  that shaped us again and again. It's crazy to me, but can you believe that it's been 10 years since The Daily Stoic came out? But think of the life you've lived since you first picked it up, what you've experienced, what you've learned, what's happened, how you've changed. For a decade now, Stoics all over the world have been reading those same pages, completing basically loops of The Daily Stoic, getting something new from it each time. And the Daily Stoic 10th Anniversary Edition, which is out now, has been updated and informed by a decade of writing and reading about the Stoics. More than 60 new translations. It's got new meditations, new stories, an expanded glossary, a bunch of awesome stuff. I think you'll really like it.

• 4:24Ryan Holiday?

  Because again, we never step in the same river twice. That's why we must return again and again to the books that have impacted us. Revisit the Stoics, revisit the books that changed your life, revisit the works that have stood the test of time, whose wisdom has endured across generations. Give them a chance to crossbreed with your ever-changing self and see what new wisdom emerges. And you know, normally updated editions, they just slap a new forward on the same book. But I really wanted to go back and ask myself, hey, if I was doing this again, knowing everything I know now, what would I do? And that's what this new 10th Anniversary Edition of The Daily Stoic is. It's better. I'd like to think I'm a better writer. Certainly, I understand the philosophy better. We added new stories. We made corrections.

• 5:09Ryan Holiday?

  As we said earlier, there's 60 new quotes in there that weren't in the first edition. And there's new illustrations. Also, we totally redid and improved the leather edition, which has really made to stand the test of time. You can grab all that at dailystoic.com/ds10. I'll link to that in today's show notes. Thanks to everyone who's supported the book over the years. And I hope you like this new version. Makes a great gift. And these are signed numbered first editions. And yeah, check it out. All right, dailystoic.com/ds10.

• 5:48Ryan Holiday?

  Look, hiring is make or break for a business, especially if you're a small business. You can't just hope that you find the right people. Hope is never a strategy, but when it comes to recruitment, it's not going to work. So when the pressure's on and you need the right hire, this is a job for sponsored jobs. Indeed sponsored jobs gets you the quality candidates when you need them the most. It's how you get your job seen. And with Indeed sponsored jobs, you'll get matched with and hire quality candidates who can drive the results you'll need. And plus, with Indeed sponsored jobs, you only pay for results. People are finding quality hires on Indeed right now. In the minute or so we've been talking to you, companies have made dozens of hires on Indeed,

• 6:31Ryan Holiday?

  according to Indeed data worldwide. So join the 3.3 million employers worldwide that use Indeed to connect with quality talent that fits their needs. And listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to help your job get the premium status it deserves at indeed.com/podcast. Just go to indeed.com/podcast right now and support the show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. If you're hiring now, then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. My kids actually saw an ad for this the other day on YouTube, and they asked if we could try it. And we did. We had a lot of fun. Whatnot is a totally different platform for buying stuff. It is a live shopping app.

• 7:15Ryan Holiday?

  It's really fun because I think you want to see who's selling you this stuff. You want to see what they have to say about it. Whatnot is where sellers shine and find their people, repeat customers that come back to see your face instead of just a logo. Whatnot is the largest dedicated live shopping platform. Beauty, collectibles, electronics, luxury fashion, even cookies. Sellers are building real thriving businesses. Anyone can sell. Your business can be big or small, can be just starting. And people selling on Whatnot sell 10 times more than on other marketplaces because you're not just listing products, you're building real connections with buyers. Whatnot users spend something like an hour a day on the app. They're not just browsing. They're engaged, they're buying, they're coming back. You go live, you show up products in real time, and you turn what you love into real income.

• 7:59Ryan Holiday?

  Search Whatnot, W-H-A-T-N-O-T, in the App Store. Download and start selling right away.

• 8:10Speaker 01

  One of the questions that we talk about with a lot of families is this idea of how do you define enough? Right? Whether that's in business, whether that's wealth, whether that's passing wealth to kids. Right? That's a really big question for a lot of families. And so I'm curious how you think about it and how you define that mark.

• 8:28Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, there's the famous Kurt Vonnegut-Joseph Heller story where they're at a party at some rich guy's house, which I've been to this exact party many times. They're sort of talking about, you know, how this guy probably made more money than any of them had made in the totality of their book sales, despite them being two incredibly successful authors. And Joseph Heller says to Kurt Vonnegut, well, I have something this guy doesn't have. And he says, you know, what's that? He says, enough. And it's a really powerful thing. I think sometimes people might take that story to mean, okay, so he has enough, so he just doesn't care. What, like, yes, he wrote Catch 22, but that's not the only book that he wrote.

• 9:10Ryan Holiday?

  He had enough, but he wrote many books after this point. I think what Heller is saying, like, I'm not driven by money alone, and I'm not trying to get to some number or prove some point. And what I have noticed in a lot of successful people, and I've noticed it in a lot of my peers who are doing books, this is specifically what that story is about, is like, the reward for succeeding at the thing that they love doing is that they don't get to do that thing anymore. You know, and so it's like, someone really loves, they're a chef, they love food. And then it's like, when was the last time they were in the kitchen? And it's like, no, because like, the impulse is, well, we have one successful restaurant, so I gotta scale it up, and then I gotta open another restaurant. And now, all of a sudden, all of their time

• 9:55Ryan Holiday?

  is on phone calls and meetings and accounting stuff and marketing, and they don't actually get to do the thing that they like anymore. And like, I really love writing. That's why I decided to write books, right?

• 10:06Speaker 01

  Many books.

• 10:07Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, but no, no, I got into it because I like doing the thing, not because it was a means to an end, which was another thing. And so I think a lot about like, how do I protect the time and the space? So the reward for succeeding at the thing I love is that I get to do more of that thing. I get to do it in different ways. And there's obviously other things that I do, but I just don't want success to be a punishment. And so I think the question is not just like enough, like, what's your number? What is financial independence? But it's like, if you get to some point of financial independence, well, what is that independence for? And how is it actually creating or facilitating what you like?

• 10:52Ryan Holiday?

  And this is something I think the Stoics were talking about, where they're like, who's in charge here? Like, yes, you have this company, but the company has you. You're running around from meeting to meeting, deal to deal. You don't see your kids. You can buy everything but like, the day that you want. Because that day is for you some point in the distant future, when you sell, when things slow down, when you're older. And the big thing hovering over the Stoics was like, That is not guaranteed.

• 11:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:24Ryan Holiday?

  Not just because in their time, you know, you could run afoul of the emperor and be exiled or killed. But that's not guaranteed because markets could turn, industries can turn. And then also, you know, you could die from a cut on your finger back then, right? Like, like today we'd say like you get hit by a bus, right? So like the idea of, hey, I don't like my life now, or I do a lot of things I don't like to do now. So some point in the distant future, I'll be able to do whatever I want.

• 11:56Ryan Holiday?

  Obviously, that's a version of a lie that everyone says. But I think the degree to which successful, wealthy, powerful people tell themselves this, even though they could have that right now, is, I think, a really important, like, kind of philosophical thing to think about.

• 12:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think it's one of those questions that takes a lot of work and reflection and probably constant work. And in thinking about how can I keep that front of mind? What's important? Like you mentioned, what is that ideal day? What are you really striving for and having that front and center?

• 12:31Ryan Holiday?

  Well, this is where all these virtues come in, right? So this decision of like having enough and then, you know, making sort of a counter-cultural, even transgressive decision to be like, I'm gonna live and be this way is like, so first, let's go wisdom. This is like self-awareness. This is understanding yourself, understanding what you want. This is discipline to be able to say no. Like, sometimes that's the hardest thing to do in the world. It's also courage to be like, hey, I'm gonna go in a different direction than everyone else. I'm gonna do a thing that maybe not everyone understands. Or some of my peers laugh at me about. Or I'm just gonna have the courage to be like, hey, I'm good with this. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna let it bother me that I'm at this point on this list and there are these people above me.

• 13:16Ryan Holiday?

  And then, and then also the justice of like, like, it's not all about you. And what's, where can you have more impact? Can you leave some for other people? You know, like, so all these virtues come in to these seemingly, you know, kind of modern questions of like, what am I here for? What's enough? What should I be doing with my life? But these kind of timeless virtues, I think they always apply.