10 Timeless Meditations From Stoic Philosophy

We hope this video helps you find the serenity, self-knowledge, and resilience you need to live well. Where can you find joy? What's the true measure of success? How should we manage anger? Find meaning? Conquer grief? These 10 timeless meditations from Stoic philosophy will help you answer questions and more. The Daily Stoic is a wise, calming, page-a-day guide to living a good life, offering inspirational daily doses of classic wisdom. Each page features a powerful quotation from the likes of Emperor Marcus Aurelius, the playwright Seneca, or philosopher Epictetus, as well as historical anecdotes and thought-provoking commentary to help you tackle any problem, approach any goal and live a better life. Watch the video: https://youtu.be/46rTnZg_99g Novo is the #1 Business Banking App - because it’s built from the ground up to be powerfully simple and free business banking that Money Magazine called the Best Business Checking Account of 2021. This year, get your FREE business banking account in just 10 minutes at bank novo.com/STOICKiwiCo is a subscription service that delivers everything your kids will need to make, create and play. Get 50% off your first month plus FREE shipping on ANY crate line with code STOIC at kiwico.com. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemailCheck out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more. Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookFollow Chuck Klosterman: Website, TwitterSee 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.

• 0:06Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Weekend Edition of The Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these Stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space, when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal,

• 0:49Ryan Holiday?

  and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring.

• 0:56Ryan Holiday?

  Obviously, I am a fan of page-a-day books. Right? I have Tolstoy's A Calendar of Wisdom here on my desk. I was lucky enough to work on Robert Greene's The Daily Laws. These are two books I try to read on a daily basis. I have a book over there I see from the corner of my desk, A Year with Roki. I love these daily books. And when my agent first came to me to talk about doing the Daily Stoic, I was like, I hadn't really read a book like that. So he was like, "Trust me, these books, they're magic. They just, it just becomes a part of people's life." He's like, "It'll be the bestselling book you've ever written." And just so you know, that's not the reason that I wrote The Daily Stoic for. The proof is, I didn't believe him. I thought that sounded crazy.

• 1:41Ryan Holiday?

  There's no way that book would sell better than real books, like books that you read cover to cover, like not chronologically, but just until you're done. Because 99.9% of books I'd ever written and read in my life up to that point had not been that way. He's like, "Trust me, think about it." And I was like, yeah, this because it was hard like, where do you start with Stoicism? Right? And so I ended up cobbling together like a bunch of all my favorite quotes, the Stoics, and then my breakdown of them. Steve Hanselman, my friend and agent did the translation. That became The Daily Stoic. You've heard some of those on the podcast. One day a week, we excerpt a quote from the book. But in today's episode, I wanted to bring you just

• 2:25Ryan Holiday?

  10 of my favorite meditations from The Daily Stoic, stuff on how to find joy, how to measure your success, how to conquer your temper, find meaning, conquer grief. I want to talk about some timeless meditations from Stoic philosophy. If you haven't read The Daily Stoic, if you're just enjoying this podcast, more power to you. But here's an insight into what's in the book and some quotes and passages and meditations from me on those meditations from the Stoics that I think you will enjoy. And you can check out The Daily Stoic anywhere books are sold. There's an audiobook version. You can get a signed print version from the painted porch. We even have like a premium leather edition that we sell at the Daily Stoic store as well as on Amazon. That's as much of a pitch I'm going to give you

• 3:08Ryan Holiday?

  in the book. Let's just get into these 10 meditations and what they mean from the Stoics from my book, The Daily Stoic, and enjoy.

• 3:20Ryan Holiday?

  God laid down this law saying, if you want some good, get it for yourself. I mean, what I think this is saying is there's one way to guarantee that you have a good day today. It's that you do good, right? You can always do that. It's always in your control. Doesn't depend on other people. Doesn't depend on things going right. If you want to feel good, do good. It's as simple as that.

• 3:47Ryan Holiday?

  Whatever anyone does or says, my part is to be good. In the same way that an emerald or gold or purple must always claim what anyone else does or says, I must be what I am and show my true colors. The Stoics believe that we all have a purpose. We all have a task. We all have something we were uniquely fitted to do. And I think our job is to not only do that well, but to be good in the world, to be a positive difference maker. Marcus says in Meditations, one of my favorite quotes, he said, you have to remain the person that philosophy tried to make you. You have to be good. Whatever anyone says or does, whatever other people's jobs are, however well or poor they do them, your job. Is to be good and do good.

• 4:37Ryan Holiday?

  This is Epictetus. He says, "You can bind up my leg, but not even Zeus has the power to break my freedom of choice." And this happens to Epictetus. His leg is broken by his slave master. He walks with a limp his whole life. And I think what he's saying is that those things can happen to you. Life can literally break you, can take things from you. But nothing can affect the power you have over your own choices, about your thoughts, about your opinions, about the story you tell yourself about things. And I think he's literally doing that there. He's deciding to tell himself a story that says, yes, he's been deprived of one thing, but he still maintains, even in Roman slavery, which is a horrible institution, even within that, he still has control over so much, his power of choice.

• 5:21Ryan Holiday?

  And you have that power today.

• 5:27Ryan Holiday?

  "Meditate often on the swiftness which all that exists is coming into being is swept by us and carried away. Substance, he says, is like a river's unending flow. It's constantly changing and causes infinite shifting, so that nothing stands still." I think the Stoics say this over and over again, that the one constant in life is change. You try to keep everything as it is. Not only are you acting contrary to nature, what the Stoics say, is it not right? You are preventing good things from coming into being as well. Borrowing from Heraclitus, Marcus says that, "We never step in the same river twice." The river is changing, and also we are changing, right? Even this book, you read the Daily Stoic one or two or three times, you come back to the entries, you are different, even though the words are exactly the same.

• 6:11Ryan Holiday?

  The world is different. I am different as the person who wrote them. And so we have to remember that everything is changed. All is changed. Life is changed. Every good thing in your life has come from change. Don't fight it. Accept it. Bend with it. Be flexible about it. Embrace it and flow alongside the river.

• 6:32Ryan Holiday?

  It's spring here in Texas and one of the great things about spring is doing outdoor projects with my kids. One of the best KiwiCo kits that I've done with my kids, they built this stomp rocket and we just spent hours out in the yard, shooting it up in the air, tracking it down, shooting it up in the air, tracking it down. They just had an amazing time. If you're looking to have some outside, non-screen time play, hands-on, science-based, work with your hands projects, KiwiCo is it. Kids can discover the engineering and mechanics behind everyday objects, the science and chemistry of cooking, geography and culture, brand-new art and design techniques, all through these fun, hands-on projects that you can do

• 7:15Ryan Holiday?

  together. I strongly suggest you check it out. Step into spring and celebrate the season of discovery with KiwiCo subscription. Get 30% off your first month plus free shipping on any crate line with code STOIC at kiwico.com. That's 30% off your first month. K-I-W-I-C-O.com, promo code STOIC.

• 7:39Ryan Holiday?

  Silence is a lesson learned from the many sufferings of life. One of my favorite quotes, actually, from Robert Greene is one of the laws of power. He says, "Always say less than necessary. The more you say, the more likely you are to say something foolish." What we learned by messing up, by saying too much, saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, is that we are better to shut up. And that's why Zeno said, "Two ears and one mouth," for a reason.

• 8:08Ryan Holiday?

  "Who is invincible?" he said. "The one who cannot be upset by anything outside their reasoned choice." So as we said, the job of the philosopher is to distinguish what's in my control, what's not in my control, and then to tune out all those things. The person who can't be upset by things that are not up to them, that only measure themselves by what is up to them, that person, to the Stoics, is invincible. And you are invincible in the sense that you are impervious to the things that are happening in the outside world, what other people are saying, what other people are doing, the random bad news that just got tweeted out, the thing that your phone is buzzing about. All that matters is what's up to you, what you're doing, what's in your control. And if you focus on that, you become, in a sense, invincible.

• 8:54Ryan Holiday?

  "That which isn't good for the hive, isn't good for the bee." You know, Marcus Aurelius talks in Meditations more than 80 times about the common good. He says, "The fruit of this life is good character and acts for the common good." The Stoics believed that we were all interconnected. There was a kind of mutual interdependence of all of us. We were woven together. We were put here for each other. And to do something that's good for you at the expense of everyone else is not only not right, it is ultimately a punishment of yourself. The Stoics believed in this connectedness. It guided why they participated in public life. And it should guide you, and it should be something to think about today. What isn't good for the hive, isn't good for the bee. What isn't good for the whole, isn't good for me.

• 9:38Ryan Holiday?

  Don't let your reflection on the sweep of life crush you. Don't think about all the bad things that might happen. Stay focused on the present situation. Ask yourself why it's unbearable and can't be survived. He says, "You will find that it can be." It's a great line from the writer Chuck Palahniuk that I like. He says, "The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at it up close." Sometimes, yeah, we have to zoom way out and see the big picture. But sometimes we have to zoom way in because the big picture is overwhelming and scary, and quite frankly, more than we can bear. Zoom way in, focus on a small piece. You're crossing a tight rope. You don't think about how high up you are. There's a great Hebrew saying about how the world is a narrow bridge. Don't look down, don't be afraid. Zoom in on the next step you have to take.

• 10:27Ryan Holiday?

  Philosophy calls for simple living, but not for penance. It's quite possible to be simple without being crude. I love this because Seneca was, I think, the most worldly and practical of all the Stoics. He's wealthy, he has these parties, he has friends. It's important that we don't see Stoicism as like self-flagellation or needless deprivation. The Stoics say if it's there, enjoy it. You just don't need it. And in fact, the Stoics are a rejection of the cynical idea that nothing matters. Diogenes sort of walks around in a barrel, he's very uncouth. The Stoics are saying, "No, you should be a part of the world. You should figure out how the world works. Just don't be addicted to it. Just don't be dependent on it."

• 11:08Ryan Holiday?

  Often injustice lies in what you aren't doing, not only what you are doing. This goes to that famous quote, it's now a sort of a common expression, that the only thing that evil needs to triumph is for good men to do nothing. Right? Yes, other people might be committing the injustice, but if you don't say anything, if you don't try to stop it, if you just go along with it, then you are complicit in it happening.

• 11:34Ryan Holiday?

  So we talked about this before, but Seneca says that one of the ways to get to wisdom is by like finding one thing a day, one thing to chew on each day that makes you better. His exchange of letters with his friend Lucilius, that's what they're doing.

• 11:49Ryan Holiday?

  Thanks so much for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. If you don't know this, you can get these delivered to you via email every day. Check it out at dailystoic.com/email.