Ask Daily Stoic

The first Saturday Q&A episode. In each of these episodes, Ryan will answer questions from fans about Stoicism. You can also find these videos on the Daily Stoic YouTube channel. See 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 Daily Stoic, where each day we read a short passage designed to help you cultivate the strength, insight, wisdom necessary for living the good 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 at dailystoic.com.

• 0:30Ryan Holiday?

  All right, so we are starting a new segment called Ask Daily Stoic. So people can send in questions on Twitter @DailyStoic, you can send them in Facebook @DailyStoic, you can email [email protected], and you can ask us your pressing, most interesting, most provocative questions about Stoicism, and I will try to answer them. And then this will go up on the weekend on our podcast, Daily Stoic, and will also go up on our YouTube channel, youtube.com/dailystoic. So, the first question we've got here, and this is one I actually get a lot in email, it's, "How would you explain Stoicism to a kid?" Right? And there's this awesome subreddit I love called "Explain it to me like I'm

• 1:10Ryan Holiday?

  five." Right? And so, I've always been a big believer too, if you can't explain something simple to a kid, you probably don't understand it. So, if I was trying to talk to your kid about Stoicism, I wouldn't tell them who Marcus Aurelius was, I wouldn't tell them about Seneca's complicated history with Nero, I wouldn't try to explain, you know, Epictetus. What I would focus on instead is like the core lesson. I don't even think I would go with the four virtues, right? Wisdom, justice, moderation, and courage, because I think even that can go over their head. I'd give them what I think is the simplest, most core lesson of Stoicism, right? Again, this doesn't require dates, it doesn't require names,

• 1:53Ryan Holiday?

  it doesn't require anything. It just requires this simple idea. And it comes to us from, I think, all the Stoics. There's not one that I would give, but it's, "You don't control what happens to you in life." You control how you respond. And you can see how like instantly, this is something you can give your son or your daughter. You can say, look, if someone pushes you down, you don't control it. You don't like it, you don't want it to happen, you wish it didn't happen. But you do control how you respond. You control whether you hit them back, you control whether you tell a teacher, you control whether you cry, you control how you respond to what happens to them, right? You'd say like, look, you couldn't go outside earlier because it was raining. So you had a choice, right? Did you cry about it? Did you get upset about it? Did you blame me?

• 2:37Ryan Holiday?

  Did you throw a temper tantrum? Or did you just decide to play games in your room instead, right? Did you decide to build a fort instead, right? What are the things we do instead of the things we can't do because of the things that are outside of our control? And I know that seems really simple, but if it was actually that simple, I think as adults would be better at it. And so the earlier you can teach your kids that like, look, the vet, like there's this huge circle of everything that's happening in the world, then there's the tiny percentage of it that we control. And most of what we control is in response to those things that we don't control. And when we realize this, we have an incredible power. We have the ability to be resilient, we have the ability to be creative.

• 3:22Ryan Holiday?

  So almost by accepting some powerlessness, we embrace a great power. And I think that's what you want to arm your kids with. I would say like, look, you're little right now. So you're probably used to a lot of things not being in your control. People tell you what to do, people tell you what you can and can't do. People yell at you, people push you around. Bigger kids don't let you do things you want to do. So that's unfortunate, right? But you also have this extreme power is that you decide how you're going to respond to these things, right? You control how you respond. And look, I think I'd be honest with your kids that like, You struggle with this, that Marcus Aurelius, the emperor of Rome, he struggled with this, right? And yet, all the great things that they did, that you've been able to do,

• 4:07Ryan Holiday?

  are fundamentally related to this attitude. The decision to control how we respond to external events. It decides who we're gonna be in this life. And if they can learn this, if they can embrace it, they'll have the best life ever. No one will truly be able to boss them around, because they will be the boss. They're the boss of their feelings, their thoughts, and their decisions. And that, to me, is the core of what Stoicism is about. So, to summarize, right? Another Reddit thing, too long didn't read. I just tell you, to tell your kid, "Hey, look, the core of Stoicism is, you don't control what happens in life, you control how you respond." So probably the most common question I get is like, "What Stoic should I start with?" And I don't know, because every person's different. But I personally started with Meditations.

• 4:52Ryan Holiday?

  This is actually my first copy of Meditations. You can see it here. All these different pens, all these different things. I found Marcus Aurelius to be the easiest one to start with, because it's not linear, it's not chronological, it's just a collection of aphorisms or ideas. But I can totally see why that's hard for some people. I would say, if you're gonna start with Marcus Aurelius, read Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, the Gregory Hayes translation for the Modern Library. This is an older one. It's now, I think, black with like a bird or a feather on it. But I think Marcus Aurelius is the best one to start with. The next one, though, if Marcus Aurelius doesn't work for you, I'd probably go with Seneca. I'd read either Letters of a Stoic, the Penguin Classics translation, or I'd read his Essay on the Shortness of Life.

• 5:37Ryan Holiday?

  And there's also a Penguin short book with that as the title. I think that's a good, simple sampling of Seneca. Seneca wrote hundreds and hundreds of letters. And Letters of a Stoic is really just a collection of the best ones. But I'd start with Marcus Aurelius or Seneca. If I had to go with Epictetus... Who's a little denser, the Penguin Classics translation is pretty good, but I also recommend Sharon LaBelle's translation, which is more modern, more free-flowing. It's called "The Art of Living." It's definitely not scholarly in that sense, but it's like really readable and really accessible. So I'd start with those. And then, of course, Daily Stoic. What we wanted to do is answer that question, which is like, can you just give me one page

• 6:22Ryan Holiday?

  of the Stoics to read each day? So it's all new translations. I think it's the best stuff from Seneca Epictetus Marcus Aurelius, but I'd probably start with any of those. So the question is, how can Stoicism help me respond to criticism that I'm getting in my life? And I think this is a great question, because the Stoics were criticized a lot. Marcus Aurelius is the emperor of Rome. He is not a tenured university professor, right? He is a political leader at the highest level. And naturally, a lot of people didn't like him, right? And they said that he sucked, right? Seneca was not just a high-ranking political leader and a writer, so people had feedback on both those things. But like, as a philosopher who was also quite rich, he was the subject of a lot of criticism for his opulence.

• 7:07Ryan Holiday?

  And people thought he was a hypocrite, and they attacked him for these things. And so the Stoics thought a lot about how do you respond to this? I think one of my favorite lines from the Stoics about responding to criticism comes from Epictetus. He says like, when someone criticizes you, just say to yourself, if they really knew who I was, they'd be even harsher, right? His point is that like, whatever they're saying about you probably isn't even addressing your deepest, darkest secrets or flaws. So you should be grateful that they're criticizing you for this and not the other things. But Marcus Aurelius, what he thought, tried to think about is not that. He'd go like, who is this person criticizing me? You know, he says, "What is to be prized? An audience clapping? No more than the clacking of tongues." That's what praise is, clacking of tongues.

• 7:52Ryan Holiday?

  So he saw criticism and praise as being like this empty, meaningless thing that didn't really matter. And he thought that because he really tried to think about the people who were throwing these insults or praise at him. And he said, you know, how they act when they eat and sleep. And mate and defecate and all the rest. Then, when they order an exalt or rage or thunder from on high. And yet, just consider the things they submitted to a moment ago and the reasons for it. And the things they'll submit to again for very long. So he's trying to say, look, why do you care what these people think? Look at who they are, right? He says, "It never ceases to amaze me. We all love ourselves more than other people, but we care about their opinion more than our own." And what he means is like, why do I want the opinion?

• 8:36Ryan Holiday?

  Why do I want praise from someone who doesn't even have a high opinion about themselves? Or certainly doesn't deserve a high opinion of themselves? So, when Marcus Aurelius wrote his meditations, he wasn't preaching. He wasn't trying to get your approval. He was practicing this sort of process himself, right? He was trying to envision criticism and then steel himself in advance for the response. And, and clearly, he fell prey to it, right? Like, we all do. It's really hard to tune out noise. It's really hard when someone nails that thing that you're so sensitive about. But you have to remind yourself who's saying it. You gotta remind yourself, as Epictetus is saying, do they really even know what they're talking about? Do they really even know what's actually your problem?

• 9:21Ryan Holiday?

  And, and one of the things I try to remind myself is I go like, look, these people don't work hard enough for their opinion to matter to me. They don't know me well enough. They don't even know what they're talking about well enough for me to let that hit me in a place that's gonna get inside. And so, the kind of stoic inner citadel, the, the thick skin you gotta have to be in public life, that's part of it. But then, we also wanna break down who's saying it. And even if they were saying what we want them to say, does it mean anything? And the answer is really no.