Can You Savor it | Expect To Change Your Opinions

Ryan talks about why it’s so important to soak in the present moment, and reads The Daily Stoic’s entry of the day. For a limited time, the ebook edition of Courage Is Calling by Ryan Holiday is only $1.99! We have no idea how long the discount will last, so grab your copy now! Or if you prefer hardcover, you can get those over in the Daily Stoic store, where you can also get signed copies! Go Macro is a family-owned maker of some of the finest protein bars around. They're vegan, non-GMO, and they come in a bunch of delicious flavors. Visit gomacro.com and use promo code STOIC for 30% off your order plus free shipping on all orders over $50. As a member of Daily Stoic Life, you get all our current and future courses, 100+ additional Daily Stoic email meditations, 4 live Q&As with bestselling author Ryan Holiday (and guests), and 10% off your next purchase from the Daily Stoic Store. Sign up at https://dailystoic.com/life/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.

• 0:06Ryan 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.

• 0:44Ryan Holiday?

  Can you savor it? The Epicureans and the Stoics were actually not that different, at least in the ancient world. Epicurus, like Marcus Aurelius or Seneca, strove to be sober, to live frugally and austerely. The Stoics chose to be more active in political and civil life, and that should be to their credit. But the Epicureans, one gathers, deserve a point for something it often feels that the Stoics missed. Although they each may have partaken in the same diet, it was clear that the Epicureans savored what they ate more. The same went for drinking, for friends, even sex. When they spoke of pleasure, the Epicureans weren't referring to gluttonous feasts or really excesses of any kind.

• 1:26Ryan Holiday?

  They meant enjoying what one had, whatever that was. Epicurus always stopped before the hangover or the regret. It's just that while he was doing it, whatever it was, he took the time to soak it in, to appreciate it, to feel the pleasure for what it was. Not something to feel guilty about, not something to avoid, but something to experience as part of our nature and as a gift. Reading Marcus Aurelius's Meditations or Epictetus, one is not wrong to think that these two men could have done a better job of that. Indeed, they deserved that. So do you. No one needs to chase pleasure. No one needs to become a hedonist. Just enjoy what's there in front of you. Notice it. Roll it around in your mouth.

• 2:10Ryan Holiday?

  Soak it in. Savor it.

• 2:15Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, crazy news, it sort of caught me by surprise, but Courage is Calling as an ebook is just $1.99 right now in the US, anywhere you get your ebooks. It's my first book in this Four Virtues series that I'm working on. I'm actually just sending in the sequel, which is on Temperance to the publisher now. But in the meantime, you can get Courage is Calling, the first book in my Four Virtues series for $1.99. That's as cheap as it'll ever be. If you were looking to try it, you wanted to give it as a gift, now is the time to do that. You can get it anywhere your ebooks are sold, or you can just check out the show notes and grab a link to it and pick it up. And I hope you do.

• 2:54Ryan Holiday?

  Expect to change your opinions. And I'm reading to you today from the Daily Stoic, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living by yours truly, 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. Spend more than 250 weeks, consecutive weeks on the bestsellers. 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. There are two things that must be rooted out in human beings, Epictetus says in Discourses

• 3:36Ryan Holiday?

  3:14, arrogant opinion and mistrust. Arrogant opinion expects that there is nothing further needed, and mistrust assumes that under the torrent of circumstances, there can be no happiness. How often do we begin some projects, certainly know exactly how it will go? How often do we meet people and think we know exactly who and what they are? And how often are these assumptions proved to be completely and utterly wrong? And this is why we must fight our biases and preconceptions, because they are a liability. Ask yourself always, what haven't I considered? Why is this thing the way that it is? Am I part of the problem here, or the solution? Could I be wrong here?

• 4:20Ryan Holiday?

  Be doubly careful to honor what you do not know, and then set it against the knowledge that you actually have. And remember, if there is one core teaching at the heart of this philosophy, it's that we're not as smart and wise as we'd like to think we are. And then if we ever do want to become wise, it comes from questioning and from humility, not as many would like to think, from certainty, from mistrust, and from arrogance. Of course, this is the idea of ego is the enemy. Epictetus says, "You cannot learn that which you think you already know." And this is the irony, the tragedy of most stupidity, is that the stupid are too conceited, too dumb, to know how dumb and stupid they are, right?

• 5:05Ryan Holiday?

  Ignorance often also hides from us the extent of our ignorance. This is called the Dunning Kruger effect. It's a primary strain in our politics, our cultural life these days. It's not just a disinterest in ideas or what's going on in the world, but it's a sense that one already knows all these things, that one knows better and thus is superior. There's a great book that I recommend, I carry it in the bookstore, and I had him on the podcast a while back by Tom Nichols, called The Death of Expertise, right? This sense that we know better than the people who have spent their entire lives studying and exploring these things.

• 5:50Ryan Holiday?

  I even see this with ego as the enemy, right? People go, "Ah, but isn't ego a good thing?" And I go, "You know, I talk about that at length in the book." And they go, "Oh, I haven't read it." And it's interesting, "Oh, it's so nice that you have a strong opinion about the book that you have not bothered to read," right? That's it in a nutshell, right? What gets in the way, and I think Zeno said this, that conceit is the impediment to knowledge, right? That our sense of what we know, our preconceptions, our suspicions, our cynicism, right, this isn't just from ignorance, can also come from a sort of a jadedness, or a sense of superiority, or a sense of, it could come from that other place too.

• 6:34Ryan Holiday?

  But the point is, we get in our own way and we close ourselves off, right? And this prevents us from learning, prevents us from having our minds changed, prevents us from understanding new things. It's a toxic force in the world today. It's just a toxic, terrible force. And it holds us back. So let's, but let's go back a while, right? Let's go back to Socrates, this hero of the Stoics. Socrates is considered wise, but what is the source of Socrates's wisdom? Diogenes Laertus says it's that he is aware of his own ignorance. Now, whether Socrates really says this himself, you know, that quote comes later, it doesn't really matter.

• 7:19Ryan Holiday?

  Think about what the Socratic method is. It's Socrates asking questions. It's almost exasperating, listening to Socrates, never coming out and taking a position or making an assertion, just, it's all questions. But that's who Socrates was. He was trying to learn, trying to ask, trying to get to truth. He wasn't trying to prove that he was smarter than anyone else. He was trying to really articulate how elusive and complicated the truth actually is. Think about what the scientific method is. It's a hypothesis, but then the next thing you do after the hypothesis is try to disprove the hypothesis.

• 8:04Ryan Holiday?

  Try to get the information that points one way or another, whether that hypothesis is correct. It doesn't, the hypothesis isn't a conclusion, it's not a certainty. It's a sense, here's what I think, based on my knowledge, based on past information, based on what's intuitive, but then I'm gonna go do the work, I'm gonna get the evidence, I'm gonna, I'm gonna poke holes in this. You know, we talked about, they talk about this idea of the confirmation bias, that when you think things are a certain way, or when you're looking for something, when you have a preconceived notion, you tend to only find the things that confirm that preconceived notion. But the opposite of that is true. It means you don't see all the things out there that would make you see it differently,

• 8:49Ryan Holiday?

  that would make you think differently, that would open your mind to this, or that, or the other. So remember, the Stoic comes to knowledge from a place of humility, from a place of questioning. Our forefather is Socrates in this regard. It's humility. You cannot learn that, what you think you already know. Focus on what you don't know. Focus on learning. Focus on getting better. If you think you know everything, in one sense, you're right, because you have made yourself incapable of learning anything new. So expect to change your opinions. Keep your mind open. Focus on all you have yet to learn, as opposed to all the things you think you already know.

• 9:32Ryan Holiday?

  You know, the Stoics in real life met at what was called the Stoa, the Stoa pokile, the painted porch in ancient Athens. Obviously, we can't all get together in one place, because this community is like hundreds of thousands of people, and we couldn't fit in one space. But we have made a special digital version of the Stoa. We're calling it Daily Stoic Life. It's an awesome community. You could talk about, like today's episode, you could talk about the emails, ask questions. That's one of my favorite parts, is interacting with all these people who are using Stoicism to be better in their actual, real lives. You get more Daily Stoic Meditations over the weekend, just for the Daily Stoic Life members, quarterly Q and As with me, cloth-bound edition of our Best of Meditations, plus a whole bunch of other stuff, including discounts, and, this is the best part, all

• 10:17Ryan Holiday?

  our Daily Stoic courses and challenges totally for free, hundreds of dollars of value every single year, including our New Year, New You Challenge. We'd love to have you join us. There's a two-week trial totally for free. Check it out at DailyStoicLife.com.