Don’t Take Control, Take Charge

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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, where each day we bring you a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength, insight, and wisdom in everyday life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us, dailystoic.com.

• 0:38Ryan Holiday?

  Don't take control, take charge. In her Page a Day book, Meditations for Women Who Do Too Much, the writer Anne Wilson Schaeff makes a distinction that the Stoics would have certainly agreed with. "There is a difference," she writes, "between trying to control everything in your life and taking charge of your life." "Trying to control our lives puts us in a position of failure before we start," she writes, "and causes endless and unnecessary pain and suffering." Taking charge of our lives means owning our lives and having respondability to our lives.

• 1:21Ryan Holiday?

  Respondability is a great word, and one we should add to our vocabulary today. The same goes for the distinction between taking charge and taking control. "As the Stoics tried to teach us, only a fool thinks they can control fortune or prevent bad things from occurring through worry or endless work. Only a tyrant thinks they can determine everything other people do and say. A wise person, on the other hand, takes responsibility for themselves and says, 'I might not be in control of what happens to me in life, but I am in charge of how I respond to it.'" A wise person is both responsible and respondable,

• 2:06Ryan Holiday?

  and that's exactly what we are going to focus on today.

• 2:15Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. I just wanted to say we so appreciate it. We love serving you. It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple of years we've been doing it. It's an honor. Please, spread the word. Tell people about it. And this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say thank you.