Ask Yourself This Question About Every Thought | Heroes, Here And Now

Ryan explains why you should always think through your impressions before you act on them, and reads The Daily Stoic’s entry of the day, on today’s Daily Stoic Podcast. List your product on AppSumo between September 15th - November 17th and the first 400 offers to go live will receive $1000, the next 2000 to list a product get $250. And everyone who lists gets entered to be one of 10 lucky winners of $10k! Go to https://appsumo.com/ryanholiday to list your product today and cash in on this amazing deal. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/emailFollow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and 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.

• 0:04Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Thursdays, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from the book The Daily Stoic, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful co-author and collaborator, Stephen Hanselman. And so today, we'll give you a quick meditation from one of the Stoics, from Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, then some analysis from me. And then we send you out into the world to do your best to turn these words into works. As an author, as an entrepreneur, as a creative in this world, I wear like a lot of hats. And that's why I'm excited about today's sponsor,

• 0:48Ryan Holiday?

  actually from a dear friend of mine, AppSumo, the leading digital marketplace for entrepreneurs, has awesome tools for authors and creatives as well. AppSumo is the best way to automate all of your busy work that comes from running a business. So you can boost your productivity, scale beyond your skillset, and focus on what matters most to you. And the great news is that AppSumo is giving away their entire $1 million Black Friday marketing budget to creators like you and me. If you have an ebook, an online course, a template, or any other digital product, this is for you. List your product on AppSumo between September 15th and November 17th. And the first 400 offers to go live will receive $1,000.

• 1:31Ryan Holiday?

  The next 2,000 to list a project will get $250. Just go to appsumo.com/RyanHoliday. Appsumo.com/RyanHoliday. Ask yourself this question about every thought. Every minute of every day, thoughts pop into your head about what's happening, about other people, about yourself, about what you see, about what you feel. What are you supposed to do with all these thoughts? Well, according to the core premise of Stoicism, the one thing you're not supposed to do is act on them immediately. Epictetus talks about stopping and putting every impression to the test.

• 2:13Ryan Holiday?

  Or as Dr. Stixrod said on the Daily Stoic Podcast, his excellent book, The Self-Driven Child, is one I recommend, you can pick that up at the Pinn and Porch. He said that, "With every thought, we must have the discipline to ask, is this true? All of life is opinion," Marcus Aurelius said. "Stuff happens and we make snap judgments, but this subjectivity can be misleading, can warp reality itself." And that's why we have to slow down, submit every impression to the test, confirm everything we think and feel is true, because most of it isn't. We're not actually upset, we're just hungry. We haven't been wrong, it just looks like we have been. There's nothing actually to worry about, that's just our anxiety talking.

• 2:57Ryan Holiday?

  The situation isn't bad, because just as easily, we could see what's good in it. Or maybe, as so often is the case, we don't need to think anything about it at all, we can just turn off our thoughts about this or that altogether. Got it? Heroes, here and now. Such behavior. People don't want to praise their contemporaries, whose lives they actually share, but hold great expectations for the praise of future generations, people they haven't even met or ever will. And this is akin to being upset that the past generations didn't praise you. Marcus Aurelius is 618.

• 3:40Ryan Holiday?

  And I'm reading to you today from the Daily Stoic, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, by yours truly and my co-author and translator, Stephen Hanselman. You can get signed copies, by the way, in the Daily Stoic store. Over a million copies of the Daily Stoic in print now. It's been just such a lovely experience to watch it. It's been more than 250 weeks, consecutive weeks, on the bestseller list. It's just an awesome experience. But I hope you check it out, we have a premium leather edition at store.dailystoic.com as well. But let's get on with today's reading. Alexandria, the city in Egypt, still bears the name of its founder, Alexander the Great, some 2,300 years after he set foot there. How cool would it have been to have a city named after you for so many centuries, to

• 4:24Ryan Holiday?

  know how many people are still saying your name? Here's a thought, it wouldn't be cool because like Alexander, you'll be dead. You'll have no idea whether your name lasted through the centuries. No one gets to enjoy their own legacy by definition. And worse, think of all the horrible things that Alexander did to achieve what he did. He fought pointless wars. He had a terrible temper, even killing his best friend in a drunken fight. He was ruthless and a slave to his ambition. Is he really so admirable? Instead of wasting even a second considering the opinions of future people, people who are not even born yet. Focus every bit of yourself on being the best person you can be in the present moment, on doing the right thing right now. The distant future is irrelevant.

• 5:09Ryan Holiday?

  Be good and noble and impressive now while it still matters. When I had Camila Cabello on the podcast several months back, or last year at this point, and I have no conception of time anymore with the pandemic. She was talking about this idea that she heard from one of her mentors. They told them the legacy is not for you. The legacy is for everyone else. And I think that's a great way of saying this same Stoic concept, which is, you know, doesn't bring Elvis any pleasure that we're still enjoying these songs. What matters is, did he do them honorably?

• 5:48Ryan Holiday?

  Was he bringing pleasure to himself and his family and collaborative partners, all that at the moment he was making them? When the Stoics talk about indifference, they're saying it's not good or bad. It just is, right? You, I think this is kind of where they come down. Like Marcus Aurelius wouldn't be upset that we're still talking about him, that Meditations is still relevant. It's that making Meditations relevant was not his goal in any way. In fact, he never intended Meditations to be published. So unlike Alexander, who's naming these cities after himself, obsessed with his legacy, trying to be the greatest conqueror in the world.

• 6:26Ryan Holiday?

  Marcus Aurelius fights a more internal battle to be great, to master himself rather than master the world, to conquer himself rather than conquer the world. And he tries in his writings not to impress future generations, not to show people how smart and brilliant he is. But instead to get so personal and vulnerable and raw and real and true.

• 6:47Ryan Holiday?

  That incidentally, he makes something that stands the test of time. The longevity and staying power and continued relevance of meditations is an accidental byproduct of the truer, greater place that Marcus Aurelius got to in his life. And I think Marcus Aurelius is uniquely suited to talk to us about this because he was famous and powerful. He was a peer of these great emperors, but even then he was reminding himself, like, how many people even remember Antoninus, his predecessor? Or how many people are still around from Hadrian's court? Or Augustus's court? How many people know any of these names anymore? He's like, you know, it goes by like this and it's forgotten so easily.

• 7:31Ryan Holiday?

  And I remember when I was talking to Camille, we were talking about how, you know, you look at the most streamed songs of this year and you've heard of most of them. And you go back five years and you know, most of them. You go back 10 years and you know, a handful of them. In 20 years, you know, a couple. And as, as you go back, it recedes. You know, fewer and fewer and fewer until, you know, you don't know any of the famous songs from 1900. And that's inevitably what's going to happen to you and your accomplishments, even if they reach those heights or greater. We're all forgotten and even if we weren't, we aren't around to enjoy it. So what matters then is who we are today to ourselves, to our people, to our own potential. Anything else is extra. Anything else, we're indifferent to.

• 8:16Ryan Holiday?

  What matters is that we do the right thing. All those horrible compromises and sacrifices that Alexander has to make to be Alexander. The payoff is what? He dies as a young man, a horrible death. Marx says he's buried in the same ground as his mule driver. And then what? The legacy, it means what? Not only is it not really last, yes, some of the cities are still named after him. But Emerson talks about Napoleon. He's like, by the end of Napoleon's reign, what's left? Europe's exactly the same as it was essentially. All that's, you know, it faded away. His accomplishments faded away as quick as the smoke from one of his cannons, he said. Ashes and dust, as they say in Gladiator, that's all we are. Remember that, be humble, act accordingly.

• 9:01Ryan Holiday?

  Don't give a crap about legacy. Give a crap about who you are and what you are doing today. Thanks so much for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Again, if you don't know this, you can get these delivered to you via email every day. Just go to dailystoic.com/email. So check it out, dailystoic.com/email.