Pod Insights The Daily Stoic Premium (🔓) BONUS: Why They Do This | You Need To Quit These 14 Habits In 2025 About this episode What Seneca said is true—that the only people to pity are those who never experience difficulty because they never knew what they’re capable of. The Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge is 3 weeks of ALL-NEW, actionable challenges, presented in an email per day, built around the best, most timeless wisdom in Stoic philosophy, to help you create a better life, and a new you in 2025. Why 3 weeks? Because it takes human beings 21 days to build new habits and skills, to create the muscle memory of making beautiful choices each and every day. Head over to dailystoic.com/challenge today to sign up. Get The Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge & all other Daily Stoic courses for FREE when you join Daily Stoic Life | dailystoic.com/life🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast🎥 Watch top moments from The Daily Stoic Podcast on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/📱 Follow 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
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:04 Ryan Holiday? Welcome to the Weekend Edition of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Sundays, we take a deeper dive into these ancient topics with excerpts from the Stoic texts, audiobooks that we like here or recommend here at Daily Stoic, and other long-form wisdom that you can chew on on this relaxing weekend. We hope this helps shape your understanding of this philosophy, and most importantly, that you're able to apply it to your actual life. Thank you for listening.
0:43 Ryan Holiday? Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast, or not another episode, a bonus episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. We put this together last minute. I thought it was worth doing. Anyways, I hope it helps you kick the new year off right.
1:00 Ryan Holiday? Why do they do this? They come from all over the world. They are men and women, young and old. They have little in common. And yet, for some reason, instead of beginning the new year by making vague resolutions or hoping for change, they begin with a challenge. Not one challenge, but 21 of them in a row, each different from the next. Why? Why such craziness? Especially when many people spend the first few days of the year recovering from time with family or the stupor they ate and drank themselves into over the holidays. The reason for this self-selected difficulty is simple, and it is rooted in Stoicism. It is because,
1:42 Ryan Holiday? as Seneca said, "The person who does not know challenge, who does not regularly experience adversity, is to be pitied. No one knows what they are capable of, not even themselves." So some of these challenges are physical, some test mental toughness, some are directed at internal struggles, while others force people to tackle real-world issues in their community. A few of the challenges are completed in a day, others span the whole year. But in every case, these challenges offer a choice, the easy path or the hard one. And these people choose the latter. They choose, as Epictetus said, "A tough sparring partner."
2:27 Ryan Holiday? The question for you then is how will you start the year? Will you choose the easy way or the hard way? Challenge or comfort? And by now, you probably realize that the people we're talking about are the thousands of Stoics all over the world who join us in the Daily Stoic New Year, New Year Challenge, which is 21 days of actionable challenges, one per day, built around the best, most timeless wisdom in Stoic philosophy. And for seven years, we've been doing it. I've been doing it myself now. This will be my seventh challenge. Every year, we make up all new challenges. They're awesome. And so many of my foundational habits, I kick off the new year with, and I build on it every year. And it's awesome.
3:08 Ryan Holiday? For seven years, we've been kicking off the new year in a new way to create new yous. I hope you join us. You can sign up right now at dailystoic.com/challenge. I'll link to it in today's show notes. And then, just to make this bonus episode a little bit better, I wanted to give you some Stoic ideas on things, not just to start doing in 2025, but 14 things you should quit in 2025. So here's some more Stoic meditations on things to quit in 2025, based on the Stoics. I hope you don't quit listening to this podcast. I hope you like it. I know we've been talking a lot about the challenge, but that's because we want to see you in there.
3:50 Ryan Holiday? Again, that's dailystoic.com/challenge. It's going to start on the first, so not much more time. And I'll see you in there.
4:02 Ryan Holiday? At the beginning of a new year, we look at all the things we want to start doing this year. Habits we want to build, practices we want to start, routines we want to develop. And this is great. A new year is a chance for a new you, new things that you can start doing. But Stoic philosophy is also a philosophy of elimination. Seneca started each year by plunging into the freezing Tiber River. This was a way of washing himself clean. He thought it was like a metaphorical cleansing. And Mark Sturilius said, "The essential question in all things..." But Especially at the end of the year was to ask yourself, is what I'm doing essential? Says, because so much of what we do is inessential, or worse, it's destructive and harmful.
4:46 Ryan Holiday? And so here, looking at a new year, let's ask ourselves, what habits, what practices, what routines are we going to let expire at the end of 2024? And with their elimination, who will we allow ourselves to become in 2025? Because that's what Stoic philosophy is. Looking at ourselves in the mirror and saying, which parts of myself should I keep? Should I continue to develop? And which parts of myself do I need to stop? And so here, at the end of a new year, let's think about what habits and practices and routines we're going to stop, we're going to eliminate, so there can be a better and new you in 2025.
5:28 Ryan Holiday? Nobody likes getting up early, not even Marcus Aurelius. In Meditations, he talks about trying to get up early. And he has this fantastic conversation with himself. He goes, but it's warmer under the covers. And he says, is that what you were put here to do? To huddle under the blankets and be warm? He says, we're all put here for a purpose. We have a nature, we have a duty, and we have to go and we have to do that. And the morning is the best time to do stuff, to get stuff done. So that's why the Stoics tried to get up early. I say tried because they didn't always do it, and it wasn't always easy, and they didn't always like it. They tried to do it anyway.
6:03 Ryan Holiday? Marcus Aurelius had a lot to complain about. A lot goes wrong. He doesn't meet with the good fortune that he deserved. He's betrayed, he's misled. People lie to him. People try to take things from him. He has a job that he doesn't even want. And yet, nowhere in Meditations, what he thinks is his private diary that no one is going to read, we never once see him complain about any of this. He doesn't complain about being unappreciated. He doesn't complain about being abused. He doesn't complain about being put upon. He doesn't complain about the stress. He doesn't do any of it. Because, as he says in Meditations, we should never be overheard complaining, not even to ourselves.
6:45 Ryan Holiday? People don't seem to understand this one really important thing. It's that you have a superpower. You have the power, Marcus Aurelius says, to have no opinion. He says, "Remember, events, things are not asking to be judged by you. You don't have to have an opinion about this," he says. "You can just see it as it is. You can think nothing of it. You don't have to label it. You don't have to put it in categories. You don't have to say it's fair or unfair, positive or negative, smart or dumb. Just accept it as it is." Though Stoics try to see the world as objective. Try not to insert opinions or judgments on top of things because this is the path to peace. It's the path to wisdom. And of course, being agnostic in this way allows you to get to work doing what you need to do
7:29 Ryan Holiday? rather than wasting your time labeling, judging, and having opinions about stuff that is not up to you.
7:38 Ryan Holiday? You can't learn that which you think you already know. That's Epictetus. He was sent the best and the brightest students from all over the Roman Empire. But he understood that conceit was the enemy. The problem with being a know-it-all is that it's true. It's impossible for you to know anything more. If you come to learning from a place of humility, if you come to it like Socrates did, the great hero of the Stoic, that you know what you don't know or that you understand that you know very little, then it becomes possible for you to learn so much more. It's impossible to learn that which you think you already know. Focus on what you don't know. Focus on how much there is left to learn. Always stay a student. That's how you get better, smarter, and wiser.
8:15 Ryan Holiday? The essence of Stoic philosophy is being in command of yourself. Seneca says, "No one is fit to rule who is not first master of themselves." And the reason we're not masters of ourselves is we give that power over to someone or something else. Drugs, alcohol, codependency. The Stoics, it was about being in control of yourself, not your urges, not your desires. Seneca himself actually defines poverty as not having too little but wanting more. The reason we battle our addictions, the reason we try to get clean, the reason we practice discipline so we can be fit to be good parents, to be leaders, to be bosses. If we're not in command of ourself, if something or someone, some urge or some substance,
8:59 Ryan Holiday? if that's really what's ruling our life, that is not a good place to be.
9:07 Ryan Holiday? You have to stop doing less than your best. There's this great story about Jimmy Carter. He's being interviewed. He wants to get this job when he's a naval officer. And after Carter has talked about how he did in school, the grades he got, the tests he passed, the things he learned, the interviewer looks at him and goes, "But did you always do your best?" And Carter has to answer him honestly, and he goes, "No, I guess I didn't always do my best." And the man looks at him and he says, "Why not?" And he gets up and he leaves the room. And that question haunts Carter for the rest of his life. Why didn't he always do his best? And as you look back on your own life, on last year and the years before, why didn't you always give your best? Why are you doing things that you don't think deserve your best? This year, we have to do our best at whatever we're doing. We have to give everything that we have.
9:52 Ryan Holiday? That is one of the things that we control, right? We don't control whether we succeed. We don't control whether we win. We don't control whether we get recognized for what we do, but we do control whether we do our best, whether we give everything we have. And as the great Steve Prefontaine quote goes, "Giving less than your best is to cheat the gift." Not just the gift of your talents, I would say, but also the gift of the time in front of you, the life you've been given. Look, it's a bad use of your creativity. The time you're spending imagining what might happen, the conversations you're making up in your head, the things that you think people are thinking about you. This is a bad way to deploy your creativity. You're using it to make yourself miserable. You're imagining these terrible scenarios.
10:36 Ryan Holiday? Notice you're never imagining things going well, people liking you. You're putting your imagination to work on your anxiety, on your self-consciousness, on your doubt, and it's just not a good use of it. The Stoics would say our mind is this incredibly powerful thing. How are you going to deploy it? How are you going to use it? Are you going to use it to torture yourself? Or are you going to use it to move yourself forward, to solve problems or create them?
11:04 Ryan Holiday? You have to quit holding on to stuff. I don't mean physical possessions, although you should stop hanging on to those too. The Stoics would say that you have to let go, right? It already happened, it's done. Grudges aren't helping you, regrets aren't helping you. There's a great New Year's tradition where people would write down all the things that they're hanging on to, that they regret, that they're mad about, and then on New Year's, they would light it on fire and they'd watch it dissolve into smoke. The Stoics would say that holding on to things, regretting things, hanging on to grudges or pain, it's not serving you, it's not serving the world, and it's not going to make you who you're capable of being this year. So let's start the new year by letting go of things. We have to quit holding on to things.
11:47 Ryan Holiday? I don't have goals, I have zero goals. I'm not trying to sell a certain number of copies, I'm not trying to write a certain number of books, I'm not trying to beat anyone, I'm not trying to be the best at anything, I don't really care about bestseller lists. I'm trying to do the thing. I like doing the thing. I wake up every day, I try my best, I put in my hours, I focus on what I control. I control what I put in, I control the effort that I put in, I control the energy that I direct at it, the brain power that I put in it. Everything else is not really up to me, so I leave that where it is. My goals are to be the best that I'm capable of being, to realize my potential, that's what I wake up and do. And to focus on specific metrics, or specific goals, or specific accomplishments, to me is artificially delimiting. It's like putting a ceiling on it. My job is to do my best, to do the thing, that's what I want to keep doing.
12:32 Ryan Holiday? To do the thing, to do the writing, to do the work, let the chips fall where they may. I don't need goals, I don't need that, it's my motivation, so that's not what I focus on.
12:43 Ryan Holiday? Actually, Ramit Sethi said this to me once, he said, "You don't owe anyone a response." And his point was that, you know, just because an unsolicited email comes in doesn't mean you have to reply to that person. There was a time, early in my life, when I believed in Inbox Zero, and that plan has had to get abandoned as I've gotten older and more successful, because I value other things. Of course, again, I want to reply, and there are people I do get back quickly to, but I've had to realize that the preconceived notion I have of what being caught up is, is actually preventing me from getting caught up on what's truly important. Eisenhower has that decision matrix about what's urgent and what's important, and sometimes the things that come in, the inbound inquiries, they feel important, but actually they're just urgent.
13:27 Ryan Holiday? And as you're tackling them, what you're ignoring is what's actually important, but not necessarily urgent.
13:38 Ryan Holiday? Don't look for the third thing this year. In Meditations, Marx really says, okay, you did something good. Someone benefited from it, right? That's one. And two, the third thing he said is asking to be recognized for it, asking to be thanked for it, asking to be paid in return for it. He says, no, you have to stop looking for the third thing. Right? Again, what do we control? What we don't control? We control what we do. We don't control whether people appreciate it. We don't control whether people understand it. We don't control whether it's liked in its own time. We only control what we do. If you want to have more resources, more happiness this year, one of the things you can do is stop looking for credit, attention, recognition, compensation in return, and focus instead on, did you do your best?
14:23 Ryan Holiday? Did you do a really good job? Did you give everything that you had? Do you think you made a positive contribution to the world, to humanity, to the common good? If so, then you have been paid back. You have been recognized. You did what your nature demanded. The Stoics would say, you did your job, and that's enough.
14:44 Ryan Holiday? Show me who you spend time with, and I will show you who you are. It's a great expression. It's this idea that we become like the people we spend the most time with. But I think it's true not just for people, but for information. What is your information diet look like? Who are you spending time with? Who are you giving access to your brain? In Meditations, Marx really says, our soul is dyed by the color of our thoughts. You know, we're colored, we're dyed by the inputs, by the things that we allow access to. So if you're spending all your time on social media, if you're following nothing but breaking political news and opinion, if you're dwelling on things that are inconsequential, or superficial, or materialistic, you're going to become dyed and changed by that.
15:26 Ryan Holiday? But if you spend time with the wisest and smartest people who ever lived, if you look backwards to history, you surround yourself with great books, and great ideas, and great people, you can become like that, too.
15:42 Ryan Holiday? When people find out that you're a runner, they always ask, "Are you training for a marathon?"
15:48 Ryan Holiday? And the answer is no, I'm training for this. Running every day, that's the marathon. Running when you don't want to, running when you're tired, running when it's cold, running when it's hot. Doing it, pushing yourself, that's the marathon. Seneca says, "We treat the body rigorously so that it's not disobedient to the mind." We're training ourselves, we're training our muscles, literally. We're also building the muscle that makes us do stuff day to day, that runs the marathon of life. We're developing the ability to push ourselves, to demand stuff from ourselves. And that's the ultimate race, that's the competition. You're competing with yourself, you're competing with the desire to not do it.
16:29 Ryan Holiday? If you're competing with anyone, you're competing against all the people that are doing nothing, that are staying on the couch. Epictetus's great line was, "Run races where winning is up to you." The race against yourself, the race against the desire to not do it, the race against the impulse to stay on the couch, that's where we're challenging ourselves, that's where we're pushing ourselves, that's the race that you're doing every single day.
16:58 Ryan Holiday? All fools in life have one thing in common, according to the Stoics. Seneca says, "What they all have in common is that they're always getting ready to start." They are delaying to live because they think they have the future they think they have forever. They say, "I'm not ready," or they say, "I'm gonna do it after, I'm gonna do it once this thing happens, when conditions are more favorable." They never say to themselves, "I'm never going to do it." They say, "I'm going to do it later." But no one knows what the future holds. No one knows how much time we have left. Life is happening right now, this second. In fact, the time that ticks by, the Stoics say, belongs to death. It's dead, it can never be recovered. So don't be a fool, don't delay. "You could be good today," Marcus really reminds us, "but instead you choose tomorrow."
17:46 Ryan Holiday? Here we are, we're staring down the barrel of a new year. It would have been better to make changes, make improvements in yourself 10 years ago, a year ago, 10 minutes ago. But as they say, the second best time to do it is now. I try to kick every year off with some challenges that help me get towards where I want to go. That's actually what we built, the Daily Stoic New Year New You Challenge. It's three weeks of Stoic-inspired challenges, one after another, that gets you out of your comfort zone, that pushes you to be what you're capable of being. The powerful thing is that you're doing it as part of a community of other Stoics who are trying to get better. There'll be an email every single day from me, videos, resources, and a prompt, a really
18:30 Ryan Holiday? important Stoic-inspired challenge or exercise, almost a book's worth of content. There's going to be weekly Zoom calls with me and other Stoics and a bunch of other awesome stuff. Stop putting it off. Come join us. Come join the Daily Stoic New Year New You Challenge. You can sign up at dailystoic.com/challenge or just click below.
18:54 Ryan Holiday? Anyways, that concludes our bonus episode. Would love to see you in the challenge, dailystoic.com/challenge. Let's stop putting it off. Let's do something challenging together. I'm really excited for it to start. I think you're going to like it. Oh, and if you're thinking about maybe doing a couple of the other Daily Stoic challenges we have, we've got that deep dive into meditations, we've got a habits one, we've got a temper one, we've got a reading one, we've got a whole bunch of different Stoic challenges. If you're thinking about doing more than one in 2025, I would recommend signing up for Daily Stoic Life, which allows you to get New Year New You and all of our challenges throughout the year for free as part of Daily Stoic Life, plus a bunch of other awesome benefits. You can sign up for that at dailystoiclife.com or I think the landing page, dailystoic.com/challenge, can walk you through how to do that also.
19:43 Ryan Holiday? Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it and I'll see you next episode.
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