25 Essential Rules For Life (From The Stoics)

It's pretty straight forward: Define your rules. Live by them. “When the standards have been set,” Epictetus said, “the work of philosophy is just this, to examine and uphold the standards, but the work of a truly good person is in using those standards when they know them.”But of course, the Stoics were not quite so direct in practice. One Stoic, Chrysippus—supposedly wrote 500 lines a day…the vast majority of which are lost. The Stoics spoke, wrote, debated, but nowhere did they put their “commandments” down in one place. Not at least in any form that survived. Here are 25 rules from the Stoics, gathered from their immense body of work across two thousand years. These rules functioned, then, as now, as guides to what the ancients called “the good life.” Hopefully some of them will illuminate your own path. InsideTracker provides you with a personalized plan to improve your metabolism, reduce stress, improve sleep, and optimize your health for the long haul. For a limited time, get 20% off the entire InsideTracker store. Just go to insidetracker.com/STOIC to claim this deal. 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, 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.

• 0:06Ryan 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?

  The great General Mattis says, "We have to find our flat-ass rules and stick to them." Epictetus says that "When the standards have been set, the work of philosophy is this: to examine and uphold the standards." The work of a truly good person is in using those standards. Unfortunately, the Stoics don't really lay out what those rules are, what those standards are, as clearly as they would like. So over the years, I've tried to distill them down into aphorisms, epigrams, rules to live by. And in today's episode, we're going to review 25 rules from the Stoics. I've done a version of this with 50. We're going to focus on 25. I think it's a little more manageable. This is 25 rules from the Stoics gathered from their immense body of work, 2,000 years of practice and distillation.

• 1:42Ryan Holiday?

  And they function then as now as, I think, ways to get to the good life, to get to peace and purpose and meaning and connection and resilience and strength and courage and temperance, justice, wisdom. So that's what we've got in today's episode. 25 essential rules for life from the Stoics. From me, Ryan Holiday. Enjoy.

• 2:04Ryan Holiday?

  Epictetus says that every situation has two handles. And that's where this rule, actually adapted from Thomas Jefferson, comes from. He says, "Always grab the smooth handle." Epictetus says, "One of the handles will hold weight, the other won't." What handle are you going to grab in this situation? The one that empowers you or disempowers you? The one that makes you angry? Or gives you something to focus on and change? Right? So every situation has two handles. Which one are you going to grab? Grab the one that makes you better, that gives you something to do, that challenges you. Ignore the other handle.

• 2:37Ryan Holiday?

  Seneca says, "Every person is an opportunity for kindness." And that's the rule here. Every situation is an opportunity for kindness. Kindness is the key. It's what moves us forward. Never pass up an opportunity to be kind, to care, to be compassionate, to listen, to appreciate what someone is going through. Because that's the truth. Everyone is going through something.

• 3:01Ryan Holiday?

  This comes to us from Epictetus. He says, "It's the chief task of life, which is focus on what you control." Is it up to me? Is it not up to me? If it is up to you, it gets 100%. If it's not up to me, it gets 0%. We focus on what we control, because that's where our energy, effort, and emotions actually make a difference.

• 3:22Ryan Holiday?

  The next one is related to the first one, which is, "We control how we respond to things." As Epictetus says, "We don't control what happens, but we control how we respond to what happens." So by ignoring all the things that are not up to us, by refraining from regret, or complaint, or blame, and focusing on, "This happened. What am I going to do about it?" This is how we move forward. And this is what all great leaders, artists, human beings do. They focus on what they control. And what they control is how they respond to what happens in life.

• 3:57Ryan Holiday?

  The next is a question from Marcus Aurelius. He says, "Ask yourself in every moment, is this essential?" Because the truth is, most of what we do, most of what we spend time on, most of the things that other people do and spend time on are not essential. And he says, "When you eliminate what's inessential, you get the double benefit of doing the essential things better." Do I need to do it? Yes or no? And if I do need to do it, then because it is essential, I'm going to give it everything I have.

• 4:26Ryan Holiday?

  Are you meditating on your mortality? I carry a coin in my pocket that says, "Memento Mori." "You can leave life right now," Marx's really says. "Life is short. Don't waste time. Don't focus on things that don't matter." Going through our life with a clear sense of our mortality is essential.

• 4:45Ryan Holiday?

  You have to say no a lot. This goes back to Marx's really is. Is this essential? If it's not essential, what do you do? This is the rule. You say no. You have to say no. When I talk to NFL teams, this is something we talk about. I say, "Look, everything you say yes to means you're saying no to something else." And whatever you say no to gives you more room, more time to say yes to what matters. In their case, being great at what they do. So what are you going to say no to this year? So you can say yes to the things that matter, to the people that matter in your life as well.

• 5:20Ryan Holiday?

  You can't be afraid to ask for help. I don't want you to think that the Stoics are invulnerable, that they're, they never show weakness. In fact, Marx's really says, "You're like a soldier storming a wall. If you have to reach up and have a comrade help you up, so what? I love this. So what? So don't be afraid to ask for help. I love the book, "The Boy, the Fox, the Horse, and the Mole" by Charlie Macksey, who I had on the Daily Stoic Podcast. And he has a great line in that book. He says, "Asking for help isn't giving up. It's actually refusing to give up." Don't be afraid to be vulnerable. Don't be afraid to ask for help. Dare greatly, as Brene Brown says, be vulnerable. Ask for help.

• 6:02Ryan Holiday?

  What is the path to wisdom? Seneca says, "It's finding one thing every day. One quote, one story, one conversation, one book, one insight." That's the idea. You get better one thing at a time. That's actually why we do the Daily Stoic email, right? Every single day, we send out a free email inspired by Stoicism to the largest community of Stoics ever in the world. Almost 400,000 people get this email. You can sign up at dailystoic.com/email. But the point is, you got to find something that delivers value for you every day. You got to seek it out. One thing that makes you better every day. That's the path to wisdom.

• 6:41Ryan Holiday?

  We're not in this alone. To do harm to another person, to allow harm to come to another person is to allow harm to come to yourself. So Marcus really says in this rule, what's bad for the hive is bad for the bee. The way I think about this is whatever I do, say, however, I live, I go, what would the world look like if everyone did this, right? And if the answer is things would fall apart, things would be bad, then it's something I try not to do, right? What's bad for others is bad for me. What's good for me should be good for others. We talked about being tolerant with others, strict with yourself. That means not judging. Seneca says, "The study of philosophy is about scrubbing off your flaws, not other

• 7:22Ryan Holiday?

  people's," right? Leave other people to their own mistakes. Don't judge them, especially people you don't know, especially people who are going through things that you don't know about. Seneca is right. Focus on yourself, be strict with yourself. Don't judge other people. Leave them to their own struggle. You have to study the lives of the greats. Seneca says, "Choose yourself a Cato. Focus on someone who's going to make you better." As I say in my book, "The Lives of the Stoics," we study the lives of the people who went before us so we can learn easily what they learned with great difficulty, so we can pick up where they left off, so we don't have to learn by trial and error. Find some heroes, study them, learn from them, learn what to do, but not to do. That's the journey I'm on with Marcus really, Seneca, Epictetus,

• 8:07Ryan Holiday?

  it's what I write about in Lives of the Stoics. But the idea is whose lives are you studying? And what are you learning from them? Forgive, forgive, forgive. That's this rule. I heard a great expression that forgiveness is a gift that you give to yourself. Marcus really says, "The best revenge is not to be like that." I would add to that is also to not hang on to whatever that was. You gotta let go. You gotta forgive. Yes, Marcus really says that, you know, if someone's cheating in the ring with you when you're boxing, you gotta, you gotta act accordingly, but you can't hold on to grudges because they make you miserable. Value time more than money and possessions, right? You can earn more money, you can get

• 8:50Ryan Holiday?

  more land, you can get more opportunities. What you can't get is this moment back. Seneca says, "The time that passes belongs to death." So don't think of death as something in the future. Think of death as something that's happening right now. And everything you do, even watching this video, you are choosing to purchase with your life.

• 9:11Ryan Holiday?

  You have to remember you're a product of your habits. Epictetus says, "If you want to be beautiful, make beautiful choices. If you want to be excellent, make excellent choices and make them habitually. Day in and day out, they add up."

• 9:27Ryan Holiday?

  It's easy to get upset by things, which is why the Stoics say that we have the power to have no opinion. You can just think nothing about something. If you didn't know it existed, you wouldn't have an opinion. Now that you know it exists, great. But you don't have to say it's positive, it's negative. You don't have to say it's anything. It just is. Seeing things objectively, withdrawing judgments from them is really important. As Epictetus says, "It's not things that upset us, it's our opinion about things. We control our opinions."

• 9:57Ryan Holiday?

  "Well begun is half done," as they say. So own the morning. If you want to have a good day, have a good morning. If you want to have a good life, have a good day. So it all comes back to how you start the day. Own the morning. There's a great passage in Marcus Aurelius where he's arguing with himself about getting up out of bed in the morning and he says, "Look, were you meant to huddle under the covers and stay warm?" He says, "No, get to work, do what you gotta do, do what you were put here on this earth to do, and do it early."

• 10:27Ryan Holiday?

  Seneca's rule was, "Put the day up for review. Ask yourself, what could I have done better? Where did I fall short? Who do I want to be? Was I being that person?" So every day, the law is, "Put your day up for review, evaluate yourself, interrogate yourself, that's how you get better."

• 10:45Ryan Holiday?

  Seneca says, "We suffer more in imagination than reality," and that gives us the next law, which is, "Don't suffer imagined troubles." The stuff that you're worried about, it'll happen or it won't. Worrying doesn't affect it, right? So Seneca says, "Don't feel more than you have to. Deal with that when it comes. For now, focus on what's in front of you, focus on what you need to do. Don't add to your suffering by anticipating it, by suffering in advance. That's only adding cumulatively up to more suffering."

• 11:17Ryan Holiday?

  You gotta see the good in people. That's an important law. Yes, the Stoics were pragmatists. Yes, they were realistic. They were even a bit pessimistic, but Marcus Aurelius famously tried to get the most out of people. He tried to see the good in them. He knew, yes, there's a certain amount of bad people out there, but he always tried to find something good in everyone he was dealing with. If you don't do this, you're gonna be miserable and unhappy.

• 11:41Ryan Holiday?

  Marcus Verdius didn't want to be emperor. So it's interesting that in meditation, he gives this rule to himself. He says, "Never be overheard complaining, not even to yourself. Complaints are for losers. Complaints solve nothing. Focus on what you're going to do. Focus on the good in a situation. Don't allow yourself to complain."

• 12:02Ryan Holiday?

  Zeno gives us this rule. "Two ears, one mouth for a reason. Always listen more than you talk."

• 12:11Ryan Holiday?

  There's always something you can do. We talked about this earlier. It's focus on the response. There's always something you can do. Some way to move forward. Some little bit of progress that you can make. Zeno says, "Well-being is realized by small steps, but it's no small thing." So start small, focus on the little thing you can do in this situation.

• 12:33Ryan Holiday?

  Marcus Verdius talks about envy, right? Dita Roosevelt says that comparison is the thief of joy. Comparing yourself to other people is focusing on something you don't control. It never makes you feel good. It either makes you feel egotistical or makes you feel crappy. Only focus on what you do. Don't compare yourself to other people. Hold yourself to your own standards, as Cato did, that are higher than other people. So when you're succeeding, you focus on how much further you have to go. And when you're failing, you ask yourself, "Did I live up to my own standards?" That's what matters.

• 13:05Ryan Holiday?

  You can learn something from everyone. Ralph Waldo Emerson says, "Everyone I meet is better than me at something, and in that, I want to learn from them." Right? So focus on what you can learn from every single person. Even people you don't like, even people you don't respect, even people who suck. Focus on what you can learn, because everyone is better than you at something. And even if they're not better than you at something, you can learn from them. And the cautionary tale. So you can learn from everyone. We always want to be learning. That's where wisdom comes from.

• 13:35Ryan 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.