It’s All A Gift | Ask Ds

It doesn’t seem that way of course. The economy is a mess, the government is dysfunctional, the virus is still there, screwing up plans and making us sick. People are annoying. People are frustrating. Your co-worker is a jerk. Your kid just broke his arm. Everything is expensive, so expensive. This isn’t how things are supposed to be is it? Well, it’s pretty much how things have always been. Look at Marcus Aurelius, in his reign and life, he knew all those things intimately, plus many other tragedies. A few years ago, a Daily Stoic reader wrote in to make an interesting observation. In Meditations, Marcus is vague about some things and very specific about others. As a general rule, Marcus does not talk much about the plague he lived through or the grief he felt. Nowhere does he bemoan the disasters which happened with such frequency that one ancient historian described Marcus Aurelius’ reign as an unending series of troubles. Marcus skips over all this, but you know what he spends a full 10% of Meditations talking about in very clear detail? The gratitude he felt to the people who had helped him, who had inspired him, who had taught him. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, 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.

• 0:03Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. While on Thursdays, we not only read the daily meditation, but we answer some questions from listeners and fellow Stoics. We're trying to apply this philosophy just as you are. Some of these come from my talks. Some of these come from Zoom sessions that we do with Daily Stoic Life members or as part of the challenges. Some of them are from interactions I have on the street when there happened to be someone there recording. But thank you for listening, and we hope this is of use to you. It's all a gift. It doesn't seem that way, of course. The economy is a mess.

• 0:47Ryan Holiday?

  The government is dysfunctional. The virus is still here, screwing up plans and making us sick. People are annoying. People are frustrating. Your coworker is a jerk. Your kid just broke his arm. Everything is expensive, so expensive. And this isn't how things are supposed to be, is it? Well, it's pretty much how things have always been. Look at Marcus Aurelius and his reign and his life. He knew all those things intimately, plus many other tragedies. A few years ago, a Daily Stoic reader wrote in to make an interesting observation. "In meditations, Marcus is vague about some things and very specific about others. As a general rule, Marcus does not talk much about the plague he lived through or the grief he felt.

• 1:31Ryan Holiday?

  Nowhere does he moan the disasters which happened with such frequency that one ancient historian described Marcus Aurelius's reign as an unending series of troubles." Marcus skips over all of this. But you know what he spends a full 10% of meditations talking about in very clear detail? The gratitude he felt towards the people who had helped him, who had inspired him, who had taught him. It's a lesson. Marcus was shrugging off the negative and embracing the positive. He was actively defining what he was grateful for. He was passively accepting what he could not control. And this is a great example for us to follow. Convince yourself that everything is a gift of the gods was how he put it.

• 2:15Ryan Holiday?

  That things are good and always will be. When Epictetus talks about how every situation has two handles, this is what he means. You can decide to grab onto anger or appreciation, fear or fellowship. You can pick up the handle of resentment or gratitude. You can look for the obstacle or get a little closer and see the opportunity. It's so easy to miss the fact that Marcus Aurelius would not have been Marcus Aurelius without this unending series of troubles. The difficulties, they shaped him, refined him, called greatness out of him. It's also easy to miss when we focus on all the bad breaks the guy got, all the tragedies that he experienced, that he was also incredibly lucky. After all, this dude was chosen to be emperor.

• 2:57Ryan Holiday?

  For next to no reason at all, Hadrian selected a young boy and gifted him unlimited power and wealth and fame. Marcus had a wonderful wife, a stepfather he adored, amazing teachers, and he discovered Stoicism, which guided him when he most needed it. For everything that went wrong in his life, for everything that was taken from him, the gods actually gave him an equal number of gifts. So as you gather around your family and friends this Christmas or Thanksgiving or any other celebration you may partake in this year, of course, appreciate and give thanks for all the obvious and bountiful gifts the moment presents. Just make sure that when the moment passes, as you go back to your everyday, ordinary life, that you make gratitude a regular part of it.

• 3:38Ryan Holiday?

  Again, not for simply what is easy and immediately pleasing, but for all of it, for every day. I'm down at the beach celebrating Thanksgiving with my immediate family. Took a walk this morning, saw the sunrise. We took a walk this evening, saw the sunset. It was amazing, it was beautiful. Things are crazy, things are busy, behavior. It rained, it rained pretty hard in between. My kids weren't the best behaved. I've got a lot of work stuff going on, dealing with a couple of crises. But I just tried to sit in that feeling of gratitude and wonder and appreciation.

• 4:16Ryan Holiday?

  The biggest of which is, is for all of you. Thank you for being a part of the Daily Stoic Community. It's the largest group of Stoics in history. Thank you for letting me do what I do, for being such a great audience. And I hope you can carry some of this lesson out today in whatever it is that you're doing. Thanks.

• 4:48Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another Thursday episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast, where as you know, we jump into a Q and A. As I've said before, one of the honors of my life, one of the really cool experiences I've had as a writer and as a practitioner of Stoicism has been getting to do this series of lectures at the US Naval Academy as part of the Stockdale Center's Leadership Program. And so back in April of this year, I gave a talk, I gave the first of two talks I've given now on the idea of discipline, the second of the cardinal virtues. I spoke to 1,200 sophomores there at the Naval Academy. It's incredible experience, a really cool opportunity. And then they got to ask me some questions at the end. I'll bring you the talk in a different episode.

• 5:31Ryan Holiday?

  I think actually we're working on the YouTube video of it right now. But these are the questions that some sophomores at the US Naval Academy, some of the best and brightest young men and women in the United States, who have already been introduced to Stoicism, so they're thinking about it at a high level. They're already thinking about vexing, leadership questions, ethical questions, personal development questions. So I was really excited to get to talk to them and to bring you their questions.

• 5:56Speaker 01

  My question to you is, what would you say is the fine line between the difference of putting all others before yourself, but not putting others before yourself, so much so that it's in an unhealthy manner?

• 6:09Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, there's a great quote from Hillel. He says, "If I am not for me, who is?" And then he says, "If I am only for me, who am I?" And so when we think of the virtue of temperance, Aristotle renders it as a...

• 6:29Ryan Holiday?

  Spectrum, he says there's a golden mean. He says you have two vices and the virtue is a midpoint between those vices. Right, that caring only about yourself would be one end of the spectrum and caring exclusively about others in such a self sacrificial way that you're incapable of getting things done or functioning in the world. And that the virtue would be somewhere there in the middle. I wish I could tell you, here is the exact formula for knowing how to be one or the other. But if we think about it as a midpoint between these two extremes, it's quite helpful. And actually, if you think about the inter relationality between the virtues, the way that Aristotle renders the golden mean, talking about discipline, is he actually thinks of

• 7:14Ryan Holiday?

  courage as the perfect embodiment of this. There's cowardice on one end of the spectrum, and then there's reckless disregard on the other end of the spectrum, and courage is there in the middle, just as I think the midpoint that you're talking about is as well.

• 7:34Ryan Holiday?

  So this idea of choosing oneself a Cato, I think is the critical test or question of one's life. I think simply choosing one Cato is probably harder to do in the modern world where we have a lot more information about some of these historical figures than, say, the Stoics would. We have the ability to see them critically, to see them sort of warts and all. So I try to choose a collection as opposed to a singular individual. So the big three in Stoicism are Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and Seneca, and there are vices and virtues, you know, heroic and tragic elements of each one of those. I put General Mattis in the talk.

• 8:20Ryan Holiday?

  He's certainly, I think, an embodiment of these ideas in modern Stoicism. Then I have certain family members I'd put there. So I kind of think about it more as a collection or a... Board of directors, if you will, than a singular person that I'm modeling myself entirely against, if that makes sense. But it's a great question, I think. You've got to know who those people are. And the Stoics would say, you know who they are, and then you have to put up their example or their image where you live and work and operate. And this is, you know, why the busts of the Stoics survived to us is people would get a statue of them and put them up in your house. Or what's the, you know, the home screen on your phone?

• 9:03Ryan Holiday?

  Or what's the, you know, the poster you have on your wall? I think these are ways to do that.

• 9:08Speaker 02

  You mentioned a baseball player.

• 9:10Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 9:11Speaker 02

  Showing like exceptional discipline in like, you know, practice, doing those games that you've been doing for so long for a time. Is there a point at which like self-destructive behavior becomes the opposite of what the Stoics intended to be?

• 9:23Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, it's a great question. The idea of how much discipline is too much discipline? When does one quit? And for Lou Gehrig, you know, he has this streak. And there are moments where, you know, he gets lucky. Should have missed a game, but then it gets rained out at the last second. There may be moments where he shouldn't have pushed through. What's interesting about Lou Gehrig's streak is that at one point, a reporter goes, "Do you know how long your streak is?" And he says, "I don't know, probably over a thousand games." And it was, you know, more like 1,900 games at that point. So it wasn't a thing that he was thinking about per se, like, hey, I will never miss a game.

• 10:04Ryan Holiday?

  It's that he pushed through games that he could push through without causing serious harm or injury, right? He got lucky in the way that like a Tom Brady has only missed a certain never had one of those, you know, sort of truly devastating injuries.

• 10:21Ryan Holiday?

  But ultimately, Garrick has to make that choice, right? As ALS begins to ravage his body, he notices that he's so much more hit or miss. And he tells the coach, like, "Look, there's, I don't know what's happening, but I don't have it the way that I used to, and I'm gonna have to quit at some point." And nobody really believed it. And, you know, he made some mistakes, and he messed up, and he was really hard on himself. But he would say later that the moment that he knew it was time was when he made, he caught like an ordinary ground ball on first base. And his team was so happy for him that he realized that they had been carrying him.

• 11:04Ryan Holiday?

  And that, you know, what he used to be able to do easily, he could no longer do easily. And we do have to have a sense of not just when we're harming ourselves by continuing, but where by being selfish or stubborn or unwilling to seek help or rest or recovery or treatment, we're actually harming the people around us who depend on us, right? And taking sick days, I think we, we, at least in America, so often think of as a weakness. We don't think about the fact that we just got everyone else we know sick, right? We, by being stubborn and selfish, we're actually harming the people that we're telling ourselves we'd be letting down by ending.

• 11:48Ryan Holiday?

  But I do think for most high-achieving, ambitious people, which I would probably venture to say includes almost everyone in this room, too much discipline is more often going to be your issue than not enough discipline. There are gonna be things that you're not good at, that you don't like, and that's why you're not trying hard on them. But more often, knowing what our limits are, knowing when we're pushing it too far, that's actually gonna be the harder choice for us. Because by going for the run, we end up blowing out our knee. When if we sought treatment for it, we could have prevented that injury from happening, for example. Yeah?

• 12:25Speaker 03

  After having this significant discussion on significance of discipline in one's life, my question is this. If an individual were given the choice of a way of life that could produce a less quality of living for them, but at the same time, a greater amount of joy, and a way of life that involves a great deal of discipline for a more long-term prosperity, which one should one choose?

• 12:50Ryan Holiday?

  So this is the choice of Hercules. He is tempted by the goddess of vice and the goddess of virtue. And the goddess of vice says, "Come with me and everything will be fun and wonderful and enjoyable, and you will get everything you want right now." And the goddess of virtue says, "This is a harder road. This is a longer road. There will be struggles and difficulty and pain. But in the end, it will make you fit to be a god," she says, right? The point is that the easy path seems like it's easier, seems like it's more rewarding, seems like it gets you what you want. But I think we all understand that things are wonderful because they are hard, because we struggled to get them. And the things that we are handed

• 13:34Ryan Holiday?

  or the things that come easily or naturally to us are the things we take for granted and never fully appreciate. And I think that is the nature of struggle and suffering and difficulty, is that it's not fun while we're going through it, but it is what creates the meaning. Or in business, it's what creates the scarcity and thus the value. And so if you're asking me whether I think we should take the easy road or the hard way, I'm going to say the hard road. Not everyone makes that choice, but I think the people that do make that choice very rarely come to regret it. And the people who take the easy road almost invariably come to regret it.

• 14:13Speaker 04

  Thanks, Ryan. On behalf of the Class of 2025.