Can You Not Do It Even When You Really Want To? | Ask Daily Stoic

A lot of times discipline is pushing yourself to do something you don’t want to do, but the other part of it—what we might call the temperance part—is not doing the stuff you do want to do. Ready to make real, lasting changes in your life? Our course Habits for Success, Habits for Happiness provides a proven framework to build and maintain positive habits that will transform your daily routines. Check it out here: https://store.dailystoic.com📕 Grab a signed copy of Discipline is Destiny by Ryan Holiday 🎙️ 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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:05Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a Stoic-inspired meditation, designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life. Each one of these episodes is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women, help you learn from them, to follow in their example, and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. For more, visit dailystoic.com.

• 0:55Ryan Holiday?

  Can you not do it even when you really want to? Look, if you hated the taste, if it didn't feel good, if you weren't getting good results, if it didn't guarantee a dopamine hit, it wouldn't exactly require much discipline to steer clear. That's the whole point of the virtue, though, isn't it? That it's requiring you to resist an impulse or forgo a pleasure. As we said recently, discipline is about doing what's hard, just as courage is the triumph over fear. Discipline is the triumph over another lower part of our nature. A lot of times, discipline is pushing yourself to do something you don't want to do. But the other part of it, which we might call the temperance part, is not doing the stuff you want to do.

• 1:38Ryan Holiday?

  And in some ways, this takes the most strength. Seneca said that we're all slaves to one thing or another: sex, or ambition, or attention, or chaos. And by indulging in these passions often enough, eventually, we lose the freedom to abstain from them. We just can't not. We need discipline to push through that, to resist the urge to keep going when it's not serving us, to step back when our ambition tempts us to overreach, to recognize that rest and recovery and restraint are not signs of weakness, but also of strength and wisdom. True discipline means knowing when to stop. It's having the courage to say no to the extra hour, the extra project, the unsustainable pace, so that we can sustain ourselves for the long haul. Discipline in this way isn't just about action, it's also about control.

• 2:22Ryan Holiday?

  Control over our impulses, our desires, even our most deeply ingrained habits. Without this, we are slaves. Only through temperance can we ever be free. And I talk a lot about that and discipline is destiny. I didn't just want it to be a book about do this, do this. There's a bunch of things we need to stop doing and discipline is understanding that. You can grab a signed copy at store.dailystoic.com. But if you are looking for some better overall habits, you might like our Daily Stoic Course, Habits for Success, Habits for Happiness, which is a six-week deep dive into better Stoic habits, which you can sign up for right now. Or you can join us in Daily Stoic Life and get it and all our other courses for free.

• 3:05Ryan Holiday?

  I'll link to that in today's show notes. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another Thursday episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Back in November, I was on that little tour. I was in Europe and Canada and London was the first stop. It was at the Troxy. I was very nervous. It was a lot. I did an hour Q and A, then an hour talk, then another hour Q and A. But the first couple, I brought my kids, it was their first time in London. We all got food poisoning on the first day. Thanks, British Airways. Really appreciate it. It was my son's birthday and we got there, we were taking him to this restaurant he

• 3:46Ryan Holiday?

  really wanted to go to, wanted to go to Burgers and Lobsters, so excited and then blah, blah, blah. And then, you know, it was like that for a while, but recovered in time for the talk. And here are some questions I answered from the lovely folks in London. Enjoy.

• 4:06Speaker 01

  My question is regarding intuition.

• 4:08Ryan Holiday?

  Okay.

• 4:09Speaker 01

  An Indian philosopher, I think, quoted with saying that the instinct might be this spontaneous reaction of the body. So the intuition can be thought of the spontaneous reaction of the soul. I wouldn't necessarily say that intuition is a bad thing, but yet the Stoics instructors do not act on our immediate reaction. So I want to know what you think about intuition or what the Stoics would think about it.

• 4:39Ryan Holiday?

  I think it's critical. The Stoics are saying, "Don't act on your first impression." They're saying, "Take that impression and put it up to the test." Sometimes it is true and sometimes it is not, right? So they're not saying that your first impression is always wrong. They're just saying that our first impressions, our intuition, is sometimes wrong or even often wrong. So that the discipline, the self-awareness, the process by which you can pause and reflect and then act is the thing we are training to do. And look, I think intuition has to be trained itself.

• 5:23Ryan Holiday?

  A lot of people go, "Oh, I'm gonna, you know, I trust my gut." But have they done the work? You know, "I'm gonna trust..." You're trusting your intuition here, but have you actually done the work to generate that intuition? Is that intuition based on anything real, right? Like experience and understanding and training? Or is it ego and instinct and wishful thinking? And so I have no problem with intuition per se. I just try to make sure that I am trying to think these things through first.

• 6:04Speaker 02

  Hi. Thank you very much for your daily Stoic podcast.

• 6:08Ryan Holiday?

  Oh.

• 6:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, please keep doing that because I enjoy it every day, like on a daily basis. So if I would have in my life time to read just one book, yeah, what would be the book you would recommend me to read?

• 6:25Ryan Holiday?

  Why do you only have time to read one book?

• 6:28Ryan Holiday?

  I reject the premise.

• 6:30Speaker 03

  Please tell me five of them.

• 6:33Ryan Holiday?

  No, Seneca says that we want to linger on the works of the master thinker. So it's not that you're reading thousands and thousands of books to check them off the list. I do think as you read, you want to find the books that really resonate with you, that really speak to you, and you want to read them over and over again. Every year I try to pick a handful of books I'm going to reread on top of books that I'm going to read, because the Stoics talk about how we never step in the same river twice. I mean, as I was saying, this is almost 20 years with me and meditations. And so each time I go back to it, I find something new. And that process of coming back to it and getting something new out of it is a key part. So I don't actually reject the premise. If there was one or two books to choose, you were going to read them over and over again,

• 7:18Ryan Holiday?

  you know, Marcus Lewis's Meditations wouldn't be a bad choice, certainly. But you just want general book recommendations that I like? Oh, that have impacted me a lot? Uh, well, this is also hard for me, because the premise of my bookstore is that it's only my favorite books. And we have a thousand titles.

• 7:39Ryan Holiday?

  I'll take the easy way out and put Meditations at the top, and then I'll come up with some more for you. Yeah, of course.

• 7:46Speaker 03

  Hello, Ryan. I'm Rita from Mexico.

• 7:49Ryan Holiday?

  Wow.

• 7:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, I have read many of your books, and I've followed you for some time. And when I knew that you were going to be here, except for today, on my birthday, which I was going to do some sightseeing in London.

• 8:02Ryan Holiday?

  How amazing.

• 8:04Speaker 03

  You're the worst.

• 8:05Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 8:10Speaker 03

  I'm very happy. Nice to meet you.

• 8:12Ryan Holiday?

  Good to meet you too.

• 8:13Speaker 03

  Good person, and I have a question for you.

• 8:15Ryan Holiday?

  Okay.

• 8:17Speaker 03

  I have, I work as a psychologist, a psychotherapist, and I try to follow all these concepts every day in my professional practice and as a human being. And I have read about your kids, I've seen their pictures, and they're really young. The question is, what do you do? Well, my daughter is 26, and she is not as disciplined as I would like her to be.

• 8:42Speaker 03

  And I tried to convince her, to masturbate her. I know that there are some personality traits that are hard to change, but what could I do?

• 8:53Ryan Holiday?

  Were you as disciplined as you should have been when you were 26?

• 8:59Speaker 03

  Not that much, in the middle.

• 9:04Ryan Holiday?

  No, I...

• 9:04Speaker 03

  In the middle.

• 9:05Ryan Holiday?

  I get it. Look, I think when I was 26, there were things I was too disciplined about, and there were things I was not disciplined enough about. And, you know, it took some experience screwing up and getting imbalanced in some ways. And, you know, it took me a while to work it out, which is what our 20s are for, of course. That's what life is for, is sort of figuring it out. We're constantly twisting the dials. But I certainly wouldn't have been that responsive to my parents trying to tell me, you know, anything. Not that I would be responsive even now. And my little kids are not responsive either.

• 9:48Ryan Holiday?

  This is the challenge of parenting. Marcus Aurelius being the ultimate example of this. Having Joaquin Phoenix as Commodus.

• 10:01Ryan Holiday?

  But maybe worse in real life as his son.

• 10:07Ryan Holiday?

  I'm fascinated by how it goes so badly for Marcus. And why it goes so badly so often. Why great men and women of history so often have such... I don't know, what's a nice way to say this? Why their kids have so many problems. Commodus, Churchill's son Randall. Queen Elizabeth has a couple troubled children.

• 10:33Ryan Holiday?

  Cyrus the Great's son was about as bad as Commodus, you know, on and on. Was that because the parents were too busy saving the world and saving everyone else? And they neglected the family? Was the parent actually the opposite? Were they too attentive and overbearing? And the child was like that, uh, out of spite or in defiance? Was it, I don't know, the strictness of Marcus Aurelius made him a complete softie? When it came to his kids and he indulged them? Was it just random genetics? I don't know, you're the psychologist.

• 11:19Ryan Holiday?

  But it's hard, it's hard. I would say probably patience, understanding, gentle prodding, space, and leading by example are probably our best bets.

• 11:35Speaker 04

  Thank you very much.

• 11:38Speaker 04

  Hi, Ryan.

• 11:38Ryan Holiday?

  Hi.

• 11:39Speaker 04

  I've noticed you're wearing Iron Maiden music share.

• 11:42Ryan Holiday?

  Oh, yeah.

• 11:44Speaker 04

  Just wondered, because I know that the lyrics in some of their songs are very profound. I wondered if there was a particular one that you could share and elaborate on?

• 11:56Ryan Holiday?

  I would say, and I just saw Iron Maiden in Sacramento in last month. It was incredible.

• 12:05Ryan Holiday?

  I've always wondered why they don't have any explicit songs about this stuff. It seems like they've got stories about basically everything else at this point. I guess the people that been do is loosely based on a line from Julius Caesar, which is also a play about Cato. So that's maybe the closest explicit connection. But if I had to pick a sort of stoic theme in any of their books, or sorry, in their songs, I would probably pick Wasted Years, which is all about sort of seizing the moment and realizing that sort of now is the golden years. It's not...

• 12:50Ryan Holiday?

  Some moments in the future that you're gonna look back on fondly, it's right now and you're wasting it. There's, I think, a real strong momentum Mori theme in there that I've always been struck by. And maybe there's some fascinating momentum Mori theme in How I'm a Bel Air Nave, which is about a man who's been sentenced to death and he's on his way to the gala. So that's my answer. I could nerd out for quite a while longer, but I'll spare all of you.

• 13:24Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. I just wanted to say we so appreciate it. We love serving you. It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple of years we've been doing it. It's an honor. Please, spread the word. Tell people about it. And this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say, thank you.