Can You Subject Yourself To This? | A Week Without Complaining

You have to interrogate the thoughts, views, and understanding of the facts. You do this not to prove you're right, but to ensure you’re not wrong—to make sure you’re not embarrassingly, shamefully, confidently wrong.🎙️ Listen to Wright’s episode on The Daily Stoic Podcast | Apple Podcasts & Spotify🎥 Watch Wright Thompson’s FULL interview on YouTube: https://youtu.be/qSqE7lvrzX0📚 Pick up copies of The Barn and Wright Thompson’s other books, The Cost of These Dreams, Pappyland, at The Painted Porch | https://www.thepaintedporch.com/📓 Pick up a signed edition of The Daily Stoic Journal: 366 Days of Writing and Reflection on The Art of Living: https://store.dailystoic.com/📖 Preorder the final book in Ryan Holiday's The Stoic Virtues Series: "Wisdom Takes Work": https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/wisdom-takes-work🎙️ 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?

  It's natural, it's common, it's also a cognitive bias. We have our assumptions and we stick to them. We seek out confirmation of them. We do not want to have to change them. This is comfortable, and it's also a recipe for getting things terribly wrong, and a Stoic must fight it. This is why Seneca tried to read books from rival schools, why Marcus Aurelius said he appreciated people who disagreed with him or even corrected him, certainly a rare thing for an emperor in those days. When we had the writer Wright Thompson on the Daily Stoic Podcast, which you can listen to, you can even watch the episode, it's great, I'll link to it on YouTube, he talked about something he did for his book, which

• 1:35Ryan Holiday?

  I loved. It's called The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi. Using a cybersecurity term, he talked about the importance of red teaming your beliefs to guard against preconceived notions or incorrect assumptions.

• 1:52Speaker 01

  It's like when you're writing, the detail you love, you need to triple-check.

• 1:56Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 1:56Speaker 01

  Because like, so my researcher and fact-checker on this book is a woman named Katie King, and there are a couple of things in there that were so crazy that I started trying to, I was like, man... Could this possibly be?

• 2:10Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 2:11Speaker 01

  So there were a couple of things I sent to her and I was like, I love this so much.

• 2:15Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 2:15Speaker 01

  I need you to like red team the shit out. Like I need you

• 2:19Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 2:19Speaker 01

  To try to

• 2:20Ryan Holiday?

  Argue against it.

• 2:20Speaker 01

  Argue like, and so like we did that. We had a fact check where I rented a house and we moved into this house for like a week and all we did was tear it apart. Because I got to the point where page after page of details that are so ominous and menacing and crazy that I started to think almost the opposite of the cognitive. I started to think, this can't be true.

• 2:45Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, but that's a really important skill that you have to build and, and a lot of people not only don't build it, they build the opposite of it because it's, it's sort of hard work.

• 2:56Speaker 01

  Well, it, it's also as opposed to building, I think the natural state of being is cognitive dissonance.

• 3:01Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 3:01Speaker 01

  You have to go out of your way

• 3:02Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 3:03Speaker 01

  to sort of even come up with a intellectual framework to start trying to chip away at it.

• 3:08Ryan Holiday?

  You have to interrogate the thoughts, the beliefs, the views that you're most attached to, not to prove you're right, but to ensure you're not wrong. And Marcus really talked about this. He said, if anyone can refute me, I'll gladly change. It's the truth I'm after, he said, and the truth never harmed anyone. What harms us is to persist in self deceit and ignorance. You must understand that flip flopping on your beliefs is not a sign of weakness. It's a source of strength. Neither is admitting error or even quitting. In fact, it's something that needs to be stopped. We must constantly test what we think we know. We must red team our assumptions. We must seek out people

• 3:50Ryan Holiday?

  who can refute us. We must go out of our way to go after the truth, wherever it leads us.

• 4:09Ryan Holiday?

  A Week Without Complaining. Epictetus spoke often to his students about the need to give up blaming and complaining. In fact, he saw it as one of the primary measuring sticks of progress in the art of living. How much of life is wasted, pointed fingers? Has complaining ever solved a single problem? Marcus Aurelius would say blame yourself or no one. This week, try constructive feedback over complaining and responsibility over blame. And if something goes wrong, spend some time reflecting on what the true causes were. Don't waste a minute with complaints in your journal or out loud. This is from this week's entry in the Daily Stoic Journal, "366 Days of Writing on

• 4:52Ryan Holiday?

  Reflection in the Art of Living," by me, Ryan Holiday, and my co-author Stephen Hanselman. You can get this anywhere books are sold, although we also have signed copies in the Daily Stoic store and of course, at my bookstore, The Painted Porch here in Bastrop, Texas. But we have three quotes from Epictetus today about complaints. He says, "You must stop blaming God and not blame any person. You must completely control your desire and shift your avoidance to what lies within your reasoned choice. You must no longer feel anger, resentment, envy, or regret." That's Discourses 322. "For nothing outside my reasoned choice," he says, "can hinder or harm it. My reasoned choice alone can do this to itself. If we would lean this way whenever we fail and would blame only ourselves and remember

• 5:36Ryan Holiday?

  that nothing but opinion is the cause of a troubled mind and uneasiness, then by God, I swear, we would be making progress." That's Discourses 319. And then he also says in Incoridion 1:3, "But if you deem as your own only what is yours, and what belongs to others is truly not yours, then no one will ever be able to coerce or stop you, and you will find no one to blame or accuse, you will do nothing against your will, and you will have no enemy, and no one will harm you, because no harm can affect you."

• 6:09Ryan Holiday?

  It's funny, just as I was sitting here, I was thinking to myself, man, it's so hot. It's hot in my office. I have to turn off the AC when I record. But one of my favorite quotes from Marcus Rilis about complaining, which I actually also have in sort of fictionalized in The Boy Who Would Be King, he says, "Don't be heard complaining at court, not even to yourself." Right? There are so many parts of Marcus Rilis's job that we get the sense that he didn't really like. He's kind of an introverted person. He's a good person. He wants to do what's right. He's not an ambitious person in the sense he doesn't want to dominate or win everything. And so it must have been so frustrating to be around these obnoxious, annoying, you know, dishonest people, these professional politicians, basically.

• 6:54Ryan Holiday?

  But he catches himself. He's like, "It's not even enough not to complain publicly." And of course, everyone would have indulged his complaints. He's emperor. But he says, "Don't even complain in your own mind." And that is some higher level shit right there, isn't it? Right? To not only be able to stop yourself from complaining. I think it was Will Bowen. He had the no complaint challenge. Every time, you know, you say a complaint, you have to move the bracelet from one wrist to the other. And the idea is, can you leave it on one wrist for 30 days? Can you get it in one spot for 30 days? No complaints. But imagine how most of us would fail if even thinking about a complaint, not even verbalizing it disqualified us. But that's the challenge of the Stoics.

• 7:39Ryan Holiday?

  And I think Epictetus, though, is more honest. When he talks about just progress, the less blame, the less complaining, the more responsibility you're taking, the more constructive you are, that's what matters. Are you making a little bit of progress every day? Are you moving forward? Are you complaining less? Right? I think that's a fair way to think about it. So I thought the complaint, but I didn't say it. That's progress. But maybe next time I can just go, "The temperature is what the temperature is. If I want to do this thing, that's what I have to put up with." So that's what it is. Thinking about it doesn't help me. It doesn't make me any cooler. Right? It just makes me frustrated. And that's why we try not to complain. So don't be heard complaining today, not even to yourself.

• 8:24Ryan Holiday?

  That's the standard we're ascribing to. But could we just make some progress? Could we just blame only ourselves? Or ideally, no one? That's progress. Let's do it. Let's work for it. Let's make ourselves a little bit stronger as a result.

• 8:45Ryan 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.