Daily Stoic Sundays: All You Need Are a Few Small Wins Every Day

In today’s episode, Ryan describes how success rarely comes in one fell swoop, but rather is built a little more every day, bit by bit. Building success day by day is just one of the many things you can do with an effective, efficient habits regimen. Get your habits in order with Daily Stoic’s Habits for Success, Habits for Happiness (https://geni.us/DShabits) course. It’s six weeks of challenges designed to revitalize your habits and make them start working for you. This episode is brought to you by GoMacro. 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 http://gomacro.com and use promo code STOIC for 30% off your order plus free shipping.***If you enjoyed today’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/ryanholidayInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/ryanholiday/Facebook: http://facebook.com/ryanholidayYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicSee 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 the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something that can help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, wisdom, and temperance. And here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We reflect. We prepare. We think deeply about the challenging issues of our time. And we work through this philosophy in a way that's more possible here when we're not rushing to work or to get the kids to school, when we have the time to think, to go for a walk,

• 0:46Ryan Holiday?

  to sit with our journals, and to prepare for what the future will bring.

• 0:53Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another Sunday edition of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Today's episode is about habits. And it's fitting because we're in the middle of launching our Daily Stoic Habits for Success: Habits for Happiness Challenge. It's six weeks of psychological and philosophically-based strategies for building better habits, foundational habits, that will help you be both more successful and happier at home. The Stoics had this word erite, which meant excellence. And excellence is what we're after in all facets of life. And that's why we designed this habit challenge. We invite you to check it out at dailystoic.com/habits. We have a false picture about how success happens.

• 1:37Ryan Holiday?

  Because we see only the results and almost never the process of things, that we tend to think that if the finished product, a book being in shape, being wise, is impressive, then therefore, the process by which the event was created must have been equally brilliant. In fact, it's usually the opposite. Success, like the proverbial sausage, is much less pretty when you see how it's made. I make no pretensions about being wise or in shape, but I do know books well. I also remember equally well how I thought authors Created them back when I was just a reader, I assumed that it must be some magical, special process. If only that were so.

• 2:18Ryan Holiday?

  The single best rule I've heard as a writer is that the way to write a book is by producing two crappy pages a day. It's by carving out a small win each and every day, getting words on the page that a book is created. Hemingway once said that the first draft of anything is shit, and he's right. And I actually have that on my wall as a reminder. And while it would be wonderful if books could be created through raw genius, if we could spit fire each time we sat down at a keyboard, that's not how it goes. Instead, the best writers have routines that put their asses in the chair and create opportunities to move the ball slightly forward each day.

• 2:58Ryan Holiday?

  Enough of these small actions strung together, reviewed, dissected, iterated upon, produces publishable work. And it's a process that might even produce things that sell like crazy or take people's breath away. And while this might be less glamorous, the upside is that it means it's much more accessible. Businesses are also built by humble means, good ones, anyway. Sure, the WeWorks of the world get all sorts of attention for their ambitious plans for taking over the world, and their stratospheric valuations can make it seem like a viable strategy. But just as often, these companies collapse or implode, and in the end, not even the bones or the foundation remain, because they never existed in the first place.

• 3:41Ryan Holiday?

  They were fictions created in a flash, when no one was watching. Trees that grow tall and live long grow slowly, especially at first, but then they grow steadily. They may be underground a long time and a vulnerable sapling for longer still, but like a good idea or a new habit, once the roots are in, they're hard to dislodge. And so it goes with businesses and net worths. Plutarch tells us the story of a rich shipowner who was asked how he built his fortune. "The greater part came easily," he said, "but the first, smaller part took time and effort." How does that work? Creating anything of consequence or magnitude requires deliberate incremental and consistent work.

• 4:24Ryan Holiday?

  At the beginning, these efforts might not look like they are amounting to much, but with time, they accumulate and then compound on each other. Whether it's a book, or a business, or an anthill, or a stalagmite, from humble beginnings come impressive outcomes. A friend of mine, the writer Pete Williams, once surprised me with a stat a few years ago. It's that 10% improvements across just seven categories in a business could combine to mean doubling your profits. And this is the approach I apply to my writing, to my business, and to my personal life. When I am not creating, I look for areas I can make small tweaks. How can the subject lines of my emails be better? Could my art be better?

• 5:06Ryan Holiday?

  Where do I have leaks of time, or money, or energy in my business? Are there habits or systems that are holding me back? What groundwork can I lay that might come in handy in the future? What investments can I make? What deals can I make or renegotiate to improve the health of my finances or the quality of my products? In one of his most famous letters to Lucilius, Seneca gives a pretty simple prescription for the good life. "Each day," he wrote, "acquire something that will fortify you against poverty, against death, indeed, against other misfortunes as well. And after you have run over many thoughts, select one to be thoroughly digested each day. One gain a day, that's it."

• 5:48Ryan Holiday?

  George Washington's favorite saying was that "many mickles make a muckle." It was an old Scottish proverb that illustrates a truth we all know. Things add up, even little ones, even at the pace of one per day. The Stoics believed that it was the little things that added up to wisdom and virtue. What you read, who you studied under, what you prioritized, how you treated someone, what your routine was like, the training you underwent, what rules you followed, what habits you cultivated. Day to day, practiced over a lifetime, this is what created greatness. This is what led to a good life. Well-being is realized by small steps, as you know, would say, looking Back on his life, but it is truly no small thing, which is why today and every

• 6:31Ryan Holiday?

  day you need to think about those little things. They are worth sweating. You need to create good habits. You need to stick to your rules. You can't make excuses to yourself by saying, oh, this doesn't matter because it adds up, because it determines what you'll accomplish and what you won't. And most important, it determines who you are. No longer naive about the process. Today, I focus on improving a little bit every day personally and professionally. I know that cumulatively, this has an enormous impact. It's not as sexy as transformative reinvention or bold risky bets, but it's dependable and it works. It's something I control. No one can stop me from showing up, from getting

• 7:13Ryan Holiday?

  better in the areas which most people don't pay attention to, from what I do when nobody's watching. Epictetus called this fueling the habit bonfire, and that's what I try to do day in and day out. Even this podcast you're listening to is an example. How it turned out is a far cry from where it started as an idea on a note card to an item on my to-do list, which became a commitment I honored, which became an article I wrote across several days, which I returned to when I had tweaks and improvements, which was edited by a team and then finally published. Is it the best thing I've ever written? Absolutely not, but I am better for writing it, and it's better for the work I put in on it. And the next piece I write will be better still.

• 8:00Ryan Holiday?

  Don't forget to subscribe to this podcast on iTunes or your favorite podcast app. And if you don't get the Daily Stoic email, go to dailystoic.com/email.