Do You Make Time For this? | Ask DS

Even when he was president, Jimmy Carter tried to carve out space for reflection and study. Just a few days after being sworn in, he was already asking his aides to push his meetings back. “I need more time alone early each morning,” he wrote to his team. He wanted an hour of reading and thinking and prayer. The Stoics protected this time too.---And in today's Ask Daily Stoic, Ryan answers questions from the audience at the conclusion of a Stoicism 101 seminar, covering topics including how we can use anger as a tool, how and why to read points of view that we don't agree with, how to balance appreciating what you have with striving to achieve something else, and more.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, 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.

• 0:02Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. Well, on Thursdays, we not only read the daily meditation, but we answer some questions from listeners and fellow Stoics who are trying to apply this philosophy, just as you are. Some of these come from my talks. Some of these come from Zoom sessions that we do with Daily Stoic Life members or as part of the challenges. Some of them are from interactions I have on the street when there happened to be someone there recording. But thank you for listening, and we hope this is of use to you.

• 0:44Ryan Holiday?

  Do you make time for this? Even when he was president, Jimmy Carter tried to carve out space for reflection and study. Just a few days after being sworn in, he was already asking his aides to push his meetings back. "I need more alone time in the morning," he wrote to his team. He wanted an hour of reading and thinking and prayer. The Stoics protected this time, too. Marcus Aurelius writes, even though it was a struggle, about greeting the dawn. And this was likely when he penned his meditations. We talked about Hugh Jackman a while back. He talked about getting up in the mornings and reading "Stillness is the Key," aloud to his wife. But what about us? We're sucked into the phone first thing, or we're waking up well into mid-morning, and we're already behind. When Carter was pushing back those meetings,

• 1:29Ryan Holiday?

  it wasn't the gossip or get distracted. It was that having spent his whole boyhood getting up an hour before daylight, he was still getting to his morning meetings at around 8:30. We asked recently, "What do you give the most important part of your day to?" Well, the mornings are such a time. How are you spending them? How are you protecting them?

• 1:58Speaker 01

  My question for today is, um, when we are accepting this new information, do you, uh, when you, when you learn a new school of thought, these revelations that you get from what you're reading,

• 2:12Speaker 01

  does that become your new belief without like, we, cause I, I heard you, I heard you mention that one of your podcasts, you're like, I wish when I was younger, I, I would have thought about what I said instead of what I just read.

• 2:24Ryan Holiday?

  Sure. No, to, to go back to your point about anger, I've got to imagine that as an actor, you have some experience, uh, getting inside an angry person and, and you can see, not that anger is a choice, but you can see that it's sort of like a habit or a character that one inhabits. Um, I'm, I'm fascinated in sports, like when a coach gets angry on purpose to send a message either to like the team or to the refs. Um, obviously a coach who's not in control of themselves is not good. Uh, but a coach who can get angry to send a message is good. So I would, I would think that being an actor would be really good practice

• 3:09Ryan Holiday?

  for sort of understanding your emotions and being able to use them when they're of use to you. And say, no, I'm not going to do that when they're not, uh, uh, to use of you. So, so, so I think that's interesting. But yeah, look, there, there's even a quote from Epictetus where he says, you know, when you start to make progress, when you, when you, um, when, when you learn something, he says, don't put on airs about it. Like, don't go on, uh, bragging about all the things that you've learned, all the progress you've made. Don't just regurgitate the things that you just learned. Um, he says that sort of that's when you get in trouble. And when I think about, you know, maybe things that I've, when I look back at things that I read

• 3:53Ryan Holiday?

  and maybe I, or sorry, that I've written that maybe make me cringe a little bit, what I can feel is maybe, um, some artifice, right? Like I can feel that like, I I didn't really know this. I just heard it and it sounded good. You know what I mean? Or it it wasn't. I hadn't really done the work, right? I might have. I might still be correct, but I think back and I go, I was correct, but for the wrong reasons. Or I was correct and I was presenting it in the wrong way. And so that that's sort of what I think about. Mackenzie.

• 4:28Speaker 02

  Hi.

• 4:28Ryan Holiday?

  Hi.

• 4:29Speaker 02

  I was truly not expecting that. I was like, there's so many people with their hands raised. Um, so my question actually has to do with this idea of reading books and kind of, and I love the line you had on the podcast about meeting information, kind of like in the middle of the field that you might not agree with.

• 4:48Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 4:48Speaker 02

  And I think one of the biggest challenges I have, um, and maybe it it might just be kind of my own little bubble. But when you're reading those challenging things, removing your ego long enough to say, all right, I'm gonna read a Jordan Peterson. I'm gonna read a challenging book and not sit here the whole time going, you idiot. Instead, like being really like actually open, not that line you say an ego is the enemy where you're like, I'm so humble, but you don't actually mean it.

• 5:18Ryan Holiday?

  No, no, it's it's true. I mean, I I think because we have so little time to read and and we love reading that generally we want to spend time reading things that make us feel good or that that are are down a rabbit hole or a a line of thinking that we agree with. The problem is, reading should also be challenging us. And if you're only, it's like, like, what I would think, what I try to think back on, and I don't think my own answer is good enough. But it's like, how many books? What was the last book you read that you disagreed with? Right? And I think there's two problems with that. It's not just that we uh aren't um reading challenging enough stuff. It's probably also that we're not.

• 6:01Ryan Holiday?

  Digging deep enough in a topic that we're even getting more than one point of view. Right? So it's not like you should just go read the most incendiary, offensive, awful things. But it's just like, hey, like in any school, like, like, look, there's some, you know, classicists who think that the Stoics are brilliant. And there's some classicists who think that they're very overrated. This is a book I read a few months ago called How to Be an Epicurean, which is, you know, obviously to write a book on Epicureanism, you're, you're, you're sort of diametrically opposed to the Stoics in some way. I didn't really love this book. Like there's a bunch I disagreed with it.

• 6:41Ryan Holiday?

  But that's sort of the point. Like you want to be reading things at least on a semi regular basis that you, that you disagree with. Right? And so I, I, I think that's how I want to think about it. So it's not just reading the Jordan Petersons, but it's also just reading deep enough in a topic that you're getting a diverse set of views. Even if, you know, there, even if you're, you know, you're reading in, I don't know, critical race theory, there's obviously disagreements inside critical race theory, just as there's disagreements inside, you know, libertarianism and conservatism and liberalism. You know, where, where are the disagreements? Cause that's, I think, where you're forced to examine your own assumptions.

• 7:23Ryan Holiday?

  But as far as the, the more controversial views too, you know, it doesn't have to be a book, but one of the things I learned from Peter Thiel, when I wrote my book about him, he was talking about how often we deal with straw men. So when we argue against someone, we have only the most superficial understanding of what they say or think, because like we, we've never actually engaged with their point of view in any way. I think that's like when Jordan Peterson gets on these interviews and he, and he, and he sort of ends up making the person look foolish. I think that often happens because they seriously underestimated him. They saw him as this like moronic caricature instead of a guy who was like a Harvard professor

• 8:08Ryan Holiday?

  for many years and is clearly intelligent and articulate. So like, let's say he's totally wrong about everything. You would be well served to really go understand where he's coming from and what he's saying, so that when you try to argue against it, or when you hold a countervailing view, that you don't end up looking like an idiot, because, you know, all you've read is like five tweets.

• 8:34Speaker 02

  That is incredibly helpful. Thank you. Oh, and I just have to say, my mother wanted me, if I ever had the opportunity to thank you, she had, um, my grandmother was a woman that we used to joke, used to speak and teach about death and living life every moment. And so when my mom and I learned the concept of memento mori, my mom was like, my very religious mother was a stoic and people didn't even realize it. She wasn't weird. She was just teaching a four-year-old to have a concept of the world.

• 9:00Ryan Holiday?

  That's beautiful. I love that. Well, thank you.

• 9:03Speaker 03

  Okay. Thanks so much. Yeah. So, uh, I guess I'm kind of working through some career stuff right now, but I think this kind of applies to, uh, anything, you know, and, uh, I like this idea of where you are is where you need to practice your philosophy, right? You can just do that anywhere, right? So how do you kind of keep that, hold that idea, and then hold the other end of the idea that now I'm looking for something else, or I'm either aspiring or striving elsewhere?

• 9:31Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I was actually just writing a daily Stoic email about this. There's this letter between Marcus Aurelius and his rhetoric teacher Cornelius Fronto. And Fronto says, "Look, um, against your will, you must put on the purple cloak of the emperor instead of the coarse cape of the philosopher." Meaning, um, like, "Life chose you to do this, and that's where you're gonna have to sort of shine." Um, and I like the idea that for all of Marcus's sort of freedom and power, he's constrained by this, you know, opportunity, but also obligation that is sort of foist upon him. Now, in the ancient world, obviously

• 10:14Ryan Holiday?

  there was a lot less mobility, sort of socially, economically, culturally, you know, there were literally ranks of classes. And the idea of like, "Well, just because my dad was a blacksmith doesn't mean I want to be a blacksmith," right? That, that, that, that didn't exist. So, we, it's not a perfect analog that, that, uh, you know, because we do exist in a time with sort of mobility and, and, and some agency that, that would have been... Incomprehensible to a Marcus Aurelius. So I don't know if there's like a clear cut answer of when you should stick, when you should quit. But, but I think his idea that whatever it is that you're doing is a chance to be philosophical, is a chance to practice

• 10:59Ryan Holiday?

  the philosophy. I think I was asking someone about this recently who'd like sort of transitioned jobs or careers or something. And I said, you know, how do you know that you're not leaving because you're scared or intimidated? And he said, he said, the test was, is the thing you're going to do harder or riskier than the thing you're than the thing you're leaving? Right? So it's like, if Marcus Aurelius was, was turning down being the emperor, because he just wanted to study books and philosophy quietly alone in his room, that's kind of a cop out. Do you know what I mean? Conversely, if you know, he's studying bricks,

• 11:43Ryan Holiday?

  books alone in his room, and he gets this opportunity to be emperor, you know, that's a bigger opportunity, a better opportunity. It's a more challenging thing. And I think that's why he accepts it. So that might be a decent fitness test to think about.

• 11:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, I guess just ultimately looking at using your philosophy to understand your own motivations.

• 12:04Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 12:05Speaker 03

  Got it. Cool. Thanks.