Do Your Best. Then Do This. | Making Your Own Good Fortune

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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Friday, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from The Daily Stoic, my book, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful collaborator, translator, and literary agent, Stephen Hanselman. So today, we'll give you a quick meditation from the Stoics with some analysis from me, and then we'll send you out into the world to turn these words into works.

• 0:45Ryan Holiday?

  Do your best, then do this. It doesn't have to be this way. The world could be so much fairer, the safety net so much stronger. We could take better care of people. We could make life easier for parents. We could make it easier to afford a home. We could make things more colorblind. We could adjust for past evils like slavery and racism. We could make technological breakthroughs that would help people save lives and preserve the environment. We could do this. In fact, this is the role of politics in society, to do things together, to bring justice into the world. If more people made justice a cornerstone and shrine in the Four Stoic virtues, and of course, the topic of the new book, if they made this central to what they did and prioritize the world, would be better. So what do we do about the fact that this is not what most people do, that

• 1:30Ryan Holiday?

  this is not the path that society and government is on? Well, Marx really says we have to do our best to convince people otherwise. We persuade, we argue, we vote, we donate, we build coalitions. Act on your own, he says, if justice requires it, if there are things that we can do. But what about when we run into a brick wall, when we are beaten back, perhaps even with violence, as good causes often are? He says, then we have to practice acceptance and peaceability, and then we have to figure out how to use that setback to practice other virtues. We talked a while ago about the civil rights pioneer, John Doerr. He didn't burn courthouses down when they obstructed and resisted justice.

• 2:10Ryan Holiday?

  In the Civil Rights Movement, no, he practiced patience, he practiced creativity, he practiced compassion, he practiced determination and courage. He kept going back. He didn't try to do the impossible, nor did he give up. He fought, he chipped away at a big project, and he eventually succeeded at what he accomplished. And so must we. As the psychologist Carl Jung once advised a patient reeling from personal crisis and a sense of despair about the world, he said, "We must quietly do the next and most necessary thing: stay present and do the right thing right here, right now. And then if we need to, we have to have the courage and discipline to go back and do it again, with the wisdom to know when to change our course of action." These cardinal virtues of courage and temperance and justice and wisdom

• 2:54Ryan Holiday?

  are what the good life hinges on, the Stoics tell us. It's what I've been exploring for the last five years in my virtue series, with Courage is Calling, which is about courage, Discipline is Destiny, which is about temperance, and Justice, which I've been working on in Right Thing Right Now, which comes out on June 11. I've come to understand that justice is the most important of these virtues, because it's what our courage, our discipline, and our wisdom must be directed towards, as stories like Doris remind us. And you also see that in the lives of people like Harry Truman, Susan B. Anthony, Gandhi, Marx, Schreylius, Frederick Douglass, and towering figures from history of stories in the book. You see what it looks like to do the right thing in the face of adversity and difficulty, and to not be beaten back by it, and to both accept and then refuse to accept injustice.

• 3:39Ryan Holiday?

  And look, I've been struggling to write this book. It was the hardest of all the ones in the series, I think. It took the longest, it took an extra year. But I really wanted to take my time, and I wanted to do my best, and I'm really proud of it. I can't wait for you to read it. I worked with the publisher to do this limited run of signed first editions, which you can grab right now before we run out. It's at dailystoic.com/justice. I'll link to that. It's basically for the price, you can get it at your local bookstore. They've sold out in the past when we did this for Discipline and Daily Dad, so please grab them while supplies last. I can't do any more because I numbered them, so once we've run out, we're out. And we have some other awesome bonuses, which you can grab at dailystoic.com/justice. The book is out really, really soon, so you can grab it now. It would mean a lot. I can't

• 4:23Ryan Holiday?

  wait to hear what you think of this book.

• 4:31Ryan Holiday?

  May 24th, making your own good fortune. This is today's entry in the Daily Stoic, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living. Believe it or not, there is a book. Daily Stoic is not just a podcast. It's not just an Instagram account. It's not just a daily email, but it all started with the book back in 2016. And I just decided to keep it going. And that's what I've been doing now for eight years. And it's my pleasure to do it. And I'm honored that you're listening. Today, we have a quote from Marcus Aurelius' Meditations 536. "You say good fortune used to meet you at every corner, but the fortunate person is

• 5:15Ryan Holiday?

  the one who gives themselves good fortune. And good fortunes are a well-tuned soul, good impulses, and good actions." Just because I have it in front of me here, I thought what we might do is also read the Gregory Hayes translation of today's entry also. So let's pull up 536. Is that right? Looking at 536, is this not right? Maybe I labeled it wrong. This is very interesting. We found problem. Ah, it's 537. Interesting. Well, you heard it here first. There is a mistake in the Daily Stoic, and I am reading it to you now. And I'm going to have to make a correction. Very exciting.

• 5:58Ryan Holiday?

  Okay, so it's actually, today's entry is from 537. And Marcus Aurelius is saying, "I was once a fortunate man, but at some point, fortune abandoned me. But true good fortune is what you make for yourself. Good fortune, colon, good character, good intentions, and good actions." Let's see if the notes. I think the best part of the Gregory Hayes translation are the notes. The Robin Waterfield annotated edition is also quite good. And I've been doing this now for almost 20 years. Whenever I read one of the passages, I go, hmm, what's that about? I pull up the end notes and see if he says anything. He doesn't. I just wondered if that was a quote or anything because there's not a lot of eyes and meditations that way.

• 6:41Ryan Holiday?

  He tends to refer to himself as you. But let's get into today's entry. And then I'm going to shoot an email to Steve Anselman, my agent, and my editor over at Portfolio to make this little correction. What's the more productive notion of good luck? One that is defined by totally random factors outside of your control? Or a matter of probability that can be increased, though not guaranteed by the right decisions and the right preparation? Obviously, it's the latter. This is why successful, yet mysteriously lucky people seem to gravitate towards it. According to the wonderful site Quote Investigator, which I have used many times and has caught me a couple of times on my books, attributing quotes incorrectly. Again, I'm not a perfect person.

• 7:23Ryan Holiday?

  Versions of this idea, it says, date back to at least the 16th century in the proverb diligence is the mother of good luck. In the 1920s, Coleman Cox put a modern spin on it by saying, "I am a great believer in luck. The harder I work, the more I seem to have." And it's a saying that's been incorrectly attributed to Thomas Jefferson, who said nothing of the kind. Today, we say luck is where hard work meets opportunity, or is it typically flipped? Today, you can hope that good fortune and good luck magically come your way, or you can prepare yourself to get lucky by focusing on doing the right thing at the right time and ironically render luck mostly unnecessary in the process. Here's the other way to think about it, right? The obstacle is the way is basically saying there is no such thing as good or bad.

• 8:08Ryan Holiday?

  The quote from the Stoics or the mindset from the Stoics, right? Amor fati. It's saying there is no such thing as good luck or bad luck, because all luck is an opportunity. So when it says we make our own good luck, it's not just that by working really hard or deserving it, we get good things happening to us. It's that we take whatever happens to us and we make it good. In this case, like, right? I just found a little mistake in the book. I guess that's bad luck or unfortunate. Or I can be improved by having discovered it and tweak it. While I'm under the tweaking some things, maybe I'll make some other changes. Maybe I improve my process so things like this don't happen again.

• 8:49Ryan Holiday?

  Or it's just a nice excuse to send a little email to Steve and we chat and who knows what comes of it. So this is a strange episode, unlike many of the others. I usually have a whole message to you, but now I'm a bitchist. I can't believe I'm still correcting this edition eight years in. It's like, whoa, oh, man. It's still a living piece of text. Now I'm trying to remember. I've gotten better at this. Like, for instance, I found a mistake in one of the books and they corrected it in the ebook, but not the audiobook, or they corrected in the physical edition, but not the foreign translations. And so I've gotten better at saying, hey, we need to communicate this on down the line. Right?

• 9:32Ryan Holiday?

  So I do try to take mistakes and think about them in that sense. How are they an opportunity to improve the process? What did I learn from it happening last time? And another famous saying is that insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Well, one of my things is I try not to make the same mistakes multiple times. I'm not great at it. I'm getting better at it as I go. And maybe we'll leave that in today's lesson. And I will say it is interesting, right? Daily Soga sold millions of copies. Millions of people all over the world have seen it. We've posted this entry and no one caught this one. And so I'll correct that now and leave you to the rest of your Friday. Talk to you all soon.