The World Wants To Know | Pain Is Self-Inflicted Harm

Ryan explains how we should think about courage, and reads this week’s meditation from The Daily Stoic Journal, on today’s Daily Stoic Podcast. Ryan Holiday’s new book Courage Is Calling: Fortune Favors The Brave is out now! - check it out at https://dailystoic.com/courageiscallingAppSumois the best way to automate all of the busywork that comes with running a business, so you can boost your productivity, scale beyond your skillset, and focus on what matters most to you. AppSumois the leading digital marketplace for entrepreneurs. List your product on AppSumo between September 15th - November 17th and the first 400 offers to go live will receive $1000, the next 2000 to list a product get $250. And everyone who lists gets entered to be one of 10 lucky winners of $10k! Go toAppSumo.com/ryanholidayto list your product today and cash in on this amazing deaSign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://DailyStoic.com/emailFollow 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.

• 0:04Ryan 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.

• 0:35Ryan Holiday?

  The world wants to know. Varlam Shalimov was a brilliant writer who was sentenced in 1937 to years of hard labor in a Soviet gulag. What were his crimes? The same crimes that brought most people to those frozen hellholes, finding themselves on the wrong side of a totalitarian regime, random bad luck, daring to criticize the powers that be for not being communist enough, for not confessing, though that would have hardly saved him. And there, in one of the darkest places a human being could be, what did he find? He found deep insight into the human condition. "I discovered," he said, "that the world should be divided not into good and bad people,

• 1:20Ryan Holiday?

  but into cowards and non-cowards. Ninety-five percent of cowards are capable of the vilest things, lethal things, the mildest threat. When we ask about courage, we are thinking about it precisely wrong. It's not our question to ask, for it is we who are being asked the question." In Cormac McCarthy's dark and beautiful novel, All the Pretty Horses, in a dark prison not unlike the one that Shalimov found himself in, Emilio Perez puts the question to John Grady like this: "The world wants to know if you have cojones, if you are brave." That's perfect. With the obstacles that life puts in front of you, with the decisions

• 2:04Ryan Holiday?

  it requires of you, the world is always asking about your courage, friend and enemy alike, every minute of every day, because it needs to know. Are you one of the cowards? Are you someone, or are you someone we can count on? Do you have what it takes? Seneca would say that he actually pitied people who have never experienced misfortune. "You have passed through life without an opponent," he said. "No one can ever know what you are capable of, not even you." And the question to you now and forever is, when things get difficult and the chips are down, who will you join? Will you be a coward? Or will you defy them and be brave? Be courageous? Have cojones? Or perhaps less gendered, will you have a spine? Will you

• 2:49Ryan Holiday?

  stand up or roll over? So today, answer these questions not with words, but with actions. Of course, that's what the new book is about. Courage is Calling, the first in a four-book series I'm doing on the four virtues, courage, temperance, justice, wisdom. It's out tomorrow. I would love for you to preorder it. We have a bunch of bonuses that you can still qualify for. Just go to dailystoic.com/preorder, pick up a copy of Courage is Calling anywhere books are sold. But if you go to dailystoic.com/preorder, click the link in the show notes today, you get a bunch of awesome bonuses. You can even get signed copies from me. You can get book copies from me. You can even get signed copies of the manuscript pages I used to do the book. I so appreciate your support. The first week's sales matter a

• 3:34Ryan Holiday?

  great deal. So if you go to dailystoic.com/preorder, we really appreciate it. Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Tomorrow, my new book is out. Courage is Calling is out. Courage is Calling: Fortune Favors the Brave. It's a book I've been working on now for something like two years. It's the first book in my Four Virtues series on the cardinal virtues, courage, temperance, justice, and wisdom. Really proud of this one. We have a bunch of amazing pre-orders you can check out at dailystoic.com/preorder. But we'll get into this today because today's episode is a little bit about courage, or at least it's about fear, which is the first third of the book.

• 4:17Ryan Holiday?

  Panic is self-inflicted harm. This is from today's entry in the Daily Stoic Journal, where we riff on, we have a weekly meditation and then daily journaling. But let's think about it, right? Name one situation that is improved by panicking. Go ahead, like seriously, can you think of something where panicking makes it better? Seneca used often about the problem of panic, both in his letters and his essays. The problem with panic is that it creates danger and it limits our ability to function effectively, prevents us from finding success and seeing objectively. And worse, it makes us weaker over time. Because we've never truly faced the danger that we're worried about. We're always running away and then we're weaker as a result.

• 4:58Ryan Holiday?

  So spend some time today meditating on scary things that might make you panic. Think about them in advance. Think about what's so overwhelming about them. Come to understand them, get familiar with them. One of the chapters I have in Courage is Calling is I talk about this dictum that Napoleon had for his generals. He said, "Ask yourself three times a day, what would I do if the enemy appeared on my left or my right or at the center?" Obviously, the idea here wasn't to create anxiety. It was precisely to prevent panic. By thinking about what scares us in advance, by familiarizing ourself with it, Napoleon was saying, we can respond to it, we can have a plan. A general who has a plan, who has an understanding, who has contingencies, who has backup plans and backup plans for the backup plans.

• 5:42Ryan Holiday?

  And they understand that no plan survives contact with the enemy. That's the general who can endure things. That's the general who's less afraid. Fear makes us worse. Familiarity makes us less afraid. And that's what I talk about in Courage is Calling. Again, Courage is Calling. You can check out the preorder at dailystoic.com/preorder. But we have three quick quotes from Seneca today. "For even peace itself will supply more reason for worry. Not even safe circumstances will bring you confidence once your mind has been shocked, once it gets in the habit of blind panic. It can't provide for its own safety. For it doesn't really avoid danger, it just runs away. Yet we are exposed to greater danger with our backs turned." There's another great quote I have in the book from Chris Hadfield, the Canadian astronaut.

• 6:26Ryan Holiday?

  He says, "Remember, it's always possible to make a problem worse." Panic does that. Worry does that. Fear does that. Makes us worse. The Seneca says, "We're actually more in danger as we're running away than when we face our problems." Then he says, "Success comes to the lowly and to the poorly talented, but the special characteristic of a great person to triumph over the disasters and panics of human life." And then he says, "The unprepared are panic-stricken by the smallest things." Another quote I have from Seneca and Courage is Calling that I really love. He says, "The only inexcusable thing for an officer to say is, 'I did not think that could happen.'" So, you can't panic just because it's a surprise, just because it came out of nowhere, just because it's a black swan.

• 7:10Ryan Holiday?

  In fact, your whole job is to be prepared for exactly this. Your whole job is, how do you perform under pressure? How do you perform when the enemy is up close? How do you perform when other people are running away, when other people are scared? This is why courage is so important. We have to see panic and fear as something that makes us worse. It's a competitive disadvantage. It's not that we, we, we never have fear. It's that we have the fear, we are alert to what it's trying to tell us, and we try to get to work breaking it down. We try to get to work preparing for it. We try to get to work anticipating it. We try to get to work putting ourselves in a position where if it does happen, and it probably will happen, we'll be able to respond, we'll know what we can do, we'll have something.

• 7:55Ryan Holiday?

  That's, you know, as, as Napoleon was saying, you know, what would you do if they were on your left? What would you do in your front? What would you do if they were over here? What would you do if all of these things happened at the same time? Even now, as I'm putting out Courage is Calling, I'm thinking, what are the things that can go wrong? What's my preparation for them? What would I do if it got a negative review? What would I do if I got attacked? What would it do? What would I do if, you know, the, the book suddenly didn't arrive, right? All the things that can go wrong, they do go wrong on launches. I've been around long enough to experience that. I'm not afraid of it anymore. I'm focused instead on solutions. I'm focusing, as a Stoic must, on what you can do about it. That's what confidence and courage gives you. I hope you check out the new book, DailyStoic.com/preorder.

• 8:38Ryan Holiday?

  Courage is Calling: Fortune Favors the Brave, available everywhere. And I hope you spend some time journaling about panic and fear this week. I hope it makes you better, stronger, and braver.