Do This Unflinchingly | It’s Not The Thing, It’s What We Make Of It

Ryan explains why you must engage with the material that you study, and reads The Daily Stoic’s entry of the day, on today’s Daily Stoic Podcast. List your product on AppSumo between September 15th - November 17th and the first 400 offers to go live will receive $1000, the next 2000 to list a product get $250. And everyone who lists gets entered to be one of 10 lucky winners of $10k! Go to https://appsumo.com/ryanholiday to list your product today and cash in on this amazing deal. 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.

• 0:04Ryan 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.

• 0:40Ryan Holiday?

  As an author, as an entrepreneur, as a creative in this world, I wear like a lot of hats. And that's why I'm excited about today's sponsor, actually from a dear friend of mine, AppSumo, the leading digital marketplace for entrepreneurs, has awesome tools for authors and creatives as well. AppSumo is the best way to automate all of your busy work that comes from running a business. So you can boost your productivity, scale beyond your skillset, and focus on what matters most to you. And the great news is that AppSumo is giving away their entire $1 million Black Friday marketing budget to creators like you and me. If you have an ebook, an online course, a template, or any other digital product, this is for you.

• 1:21Ryan Holiday?

  List your product on AppSumo between September 15th and November 17th. And the first 400 offers to go live will receive $1,000. The next 2,000 to list a project will get $250. Just go to appsumo.com/RyanHoliday to list your product today. Cash in on this amazing deal. Again, appsumo.com/RyanHoliday. The link will be in the episode description as well. Check it out, appsumo.com/RyanHoliday.

• 1:54Ryan Holiday?

  Do this unflinchingly. We've talked a lot about reading here at The Daily Stoic, but it's important to remember what Epictetus had to say. It's not that you read, it's what you read. To study history, for example, is important, but not if one goes through and only looks for the stuff that they like. You have to go through and read and study history unflinchingly. You have to engage with the good stuff and the dark stuff, the glory and the low points, and you have to look at it all with clear eyes. To study philosophy is similarly essential, but not if you only read stuff that you agree with. To study Stoicism is important, but it's important, as we said recently, to look at

• 2:39Ryan Holiday?

  the failures of the Stoics as much as you look at their successes. The pursuit of wisdom is not always going to be pleasant. That's why Epictetus compared his school to a hospital. It's not always a fun place. You're going to see and feel some unpleasant things, but this is all a part of growth. People have done horrible things in the past, including the Stoics. How can we hope to avoid or learn from missteps and mistakes and injustices if we refuse to see them? The job of a book is to provoke you, to challenge you, to be a hard-sparring partner. Truth is not your friend. It is objective. It sits beyond us, does not care about our feelings. So be brave, be bold, be prepared.

• 3:24Ryan Holiday?

  Read and study unflinchingly. It won't be easy, but it will make you and the world better for that effort. If you want to read more about the Stoics and some of their failings and successes, check out Lives of the Stoics. But I think if you do want to engage in this unflinching reading practice, I do think you should have a reading practice. I recommend our Daily Stoic Read to Lead Challenge. Not all readers are leaders, as Truman said, but all leaders have to be readers. So do check it out. It's two weeks of really great strategies for being a better reader. Check that out, dailystoic.com/read.

• 4:03Ryan Holiday?

  It's not the thing, it's what we make of it. When you are distressed by an external thing, it's not the thing itself that troubles you, but only your judgment of it. And you can wipe this out at a moment's notice. This is Marcus Aurelius's Meditations 8:47. And I'm reading to you today from the Daily Stoic 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living by yours truly and 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. Spent more than 250 weeks, consecutive weeks, on the bestsellers. It's just an awesome experience. But I hope you check it out.

• 4:48Ryan Holiday?

  We have a premium leather edition at store.dailystoic.com as well. But let's get on with today's reading. Now, this might seem familiar because we talked about this just last week. We have a little story to illustrate the idea. Imagine you've dreamed of a life in politics. You're young, you're vigorous, you've held increasingly powerful positions over the course of your career. Then at 39, you start to feel run down. Your doctors tell you you have polio and your life will never be the same. Your career is over, right? This is the story of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, now widely regarded as one of America's greatest political leaders. He was, at middle age, diagnosed with polio after spending years preparing for and dreaming of the presidency.

• 5:29Ryan Holiday?

  It's impossible to understand FDR without understanding this disability, this external thing that said he was crippled, this literal fact, and then his judgment of it that it did not cripple him or his personhood, let alone his career. Though he was certainly a victim of a then incurable disease, he wiped away almost immediately the victim's mentality. We must not confuse acceptance with passivity.

• 5:58Ryan Holiday?

  There's another story about Theodore Roosevelt. He was told late in life that he was going to be confined to a wheelchair. And he responds to this, ah, okay, I can work with that. So when we talk about acceptance, it's really important that we don't confuse it with apathy or resignation in the sense of how we understand those words. We assent to it, as the Stoics say, A-S-S-E-N-T. We accept it. We say, it is a fact that I am short. It is a fact that I have gone bald. It is a fact that we are in the middle of a pandemic, or that you have lost your job, or whatever that fact is.

• 6:39Ryan Holiday?

  The acceptance of that, as opposed to denying the reality of it, living in a world where it might magically be undone, living in a world where you are owed restitution for that, all of that is to waste time. But we should focus instead, the Stoics say, on what we're going to do about it. Right? And we say, it's not the thing, it's what we make of it. Meaning, we don't control what it is. The event is objective, the event is frustrating, the event is heartbreaking, sure. But what we do about it, that's where we have power. So we focus our judgments on that, on the potential, on the possibility, on how we're going to use it, how we're going to grow from it.

• 7:24Ryan Holiday?

  This is, I think, what FDR and T are both do. Okay, this is my new normal. How am I going to use it? How am I going to push through it? How am I going to endure it? What advantages are in it? Right? We can wipe out at a moment's notice that victim's mentality, that sense of hopelessness, that sense of resentment, and instead, again, focus what we're going to do, what we're going to make of it, how we're going to keep going, how we're not going to be broken by it. That's what we're talking about in today's message. I hope that inspires you a little bit. It's nice when these themes line up, we get to talk about them twice in a row.

• 8:09Ryan Holiday?

  I'll talk to you soon.

• 8:12Ryan Holiday?

  Thanks so much for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Again, if you don't know this, you can get these delivered to you via email every day. You just go to dailystoic.com/email. So check it out, dailystoic.com/email.