Does It Measure Up? | Philosophy As Medicine Of The Soul

You want to achieve. You want to leave your mark on the universe. You want to conquer the world.🎥 Watch 9 Stoic Lessons From Iron Maiden on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdPCjKWz8dISince we received such great feedback from the launch of 2025's New Year New You Challenge, we decided to RE-OPEN the challenge for February. Head over to dailystoic.com/challenge today to sign up.📔 Pick up your own leather bound signed edition of The Daily Stoic! Check it out at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/🎙️ 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.

• 0:03Ryan 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.

• 0:44Ryan Holiday?

  Does it measure up? You want to do big things. You want to achieve. You want to leave your mark on the universe. You want to conquer the world. This is what Alexander the Great did, literally. And yet, where did it get him? Marcus Aurelius took pains to remind himself that the man died and was buried like the rest of us. The band Iron Maiden, my favorite, of course, has a wonderful lyric, "Measure your coffin. Does it measure up to your lust?" As it happens, there's a much older poem from Juvenal, writing sometime in the 2nd century AD, who pointed out that in life, while the world was not big enough for Alexander's ambition, in death, a coffin was sufficient. No one is saying you should

• 1:26Ryan Holiday?

  put all your drive aside, that you should not try to do anything. Clearly, Marcus Aurelius tried to be a good person, tried to be a good ruler, tried to be a good philosopher, tried to be a good writer. But that's the point. He measured his life not by the size of the monument he hoped they would leave to him, and there are some, but instead, by the things he controlled. In the end, it's not about the size of the empire you build, or the monuments left behind. It's about the character you shape, the actions you control, the impact you make on those who matter most. Aim high, but remember, your legacy isn't... About the greatness of your ambition, it's measured in how you live each day.

• 2:07Ryan Holiday?

  And of course, I am an Iron Maiden nerd, so I'm always looking for ways to tie this into one of my favorite heavy metal bands. I did a video a couple of months ago about some Stoic lessons from Iron Maiden, which you can check out on the Daily Stoic YouTube channel. I'll link to that. And we've also got a bunch of other awesome videos. We're spending a lot of time and energy building out the YouTube stuff these days, so check that out at youtube.com/dailystoic.

• 2:35Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. The last day in January, it sneaks up on you, doesn't it? Felt like it was just December, looking forward to Christmas, then a new year, and then you're already, you know, a 12th of the way through the new year. That's how it goes. And I guess it's how it's always gone. Today's entry is entitled "Philosophy as Medicine of the Soul." Again, this is from Daily Stoic, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, written by yours truly, but really written by the Stoics themselves, because we have a quote from Marcus Aurelius's Meditations here, 5:9.

• 3:17Ryan Holiday?

  "Don't return to philosophy as a task-maker, but as patience seek out relief in a treatment of sore eyes, or dressing for a burn, or from an ointment. Regarding it this way, you'll obey reason without putting it on display, and rest easy in its care." You know what's weird? I always struggled with that quote a little bit, because if you read 5:9 in the Hays translations, he says, where is this? He says, "And not to think of philosophy as your instructor, but as the sponge and egg white that relieve ophthalmia, as a soothing ointment, a warm lotion."

• 4:01Ryan Holiday?

  So I was like, what the hell is that? I'm probably even mispronouncing it now. So then you flip to the back of Meditations and he goes, he explains what that is, right? Oh, I guess he doesn't. I thought he explained it in the footnotes, but you look it up. Let's, let's look it up here together. Learning together. Here, let's pronounce it. Ophthalmia, uh, Google is telling me. And it is an inflammation of the eye, especially conjunctivitis. Oh, okay. So it's a congestion of the eyeball, often eye watering, redness, swelling, itching and burning. Interesting. I wonder if Marcus actually had that. Doesn't really have anything to do with the entry. It's just an extension of the metaphor. But as I added in here, I say, the busier we get, the more we work and learn and read,

• 4:46Ryan Holiday?

  the further we may drift. We get in a rhythm, we're making money, being creative and we're stimulated and busy. It seems like everything is going well, but we drift further and further from philosophy. Eventually this neglect will contribute to a problem. The stress builds up, our mind gets cloudy, we forget what's important and it can result in an injury of some kind. When that happens, it's important that we tap the brakes, put aside all the momentum in the moment and return to the regimen and the practices that we know are rooted in clarity and good judgment and good principles and good health in the truest sense. Stoicism is designed to be medicine for the soul. It relieves us of the vulnerabilities of modern life. It restores us with the vigor we need to thrive in life.

• 5:28Ryan Holiday?

  We should check in today and let it do its healing. I guess this kind of ties into what I was saying, which is like, you're like, oh shit, January is over already, right? And soon enough you'd be like, oh, it's spring already. Oh, it's almost summer, school's about to be out. Got to figure out what we're doing. Then the end of summer creeps up on you. You, you get in your rhythm, you lose track of time, sometimes for positive reasons, sometimes for not so positive reasons. And you drift from philosophy. I go, oh, it's been a while since I picked up Meditations. Or, oh, it's been a while since I read anything new from the Stoics or that I challenged myself in some philosophical way. I'm drifting from these principles. And It's helpful to come back to it, that it's always there. That's what it's there for.

• 6:13Ryan Holiday?

  There's a passage where Seneca talks about, he says, you know what philosophy offers? Philosophy offers counsel, right? It's there to walk you through what you are going through because human beings have gone through that for a very long time. It's not new. And in fact, the Stoics, some of the smartest people who ever lived, not just the Stoics, but the people influenced by them who came after, Montaigne, Pascal, Stockdale, right? They thought about how to apply this stuff. They made it more practical and accessible. They added insights on top of it. We can learn from their specific, perhaps slightly more relatable and modern instances with this thing. And that's what philosophy is there for.

• 6:56Ryan Holiday?

  And I want you to come back to it today, however far you've drifted, however your January has gotten off, whether it's gotten off to a great start or a not so great start. That's what today's message is about. You want to see philosophy as an instructor, right? As a source of relief, as a source of solace, as a kind of treatment for whatever it is that ills you. And then just speaking of the year ending, if you missed out on the New Year, New You Challenge, if January got away from you a little bit and you want to come back to philosophy, you want to kick off February with some Stoicism, we're running the Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge again.

• 7:39Ryan Holiday?

  21 days of Stoic-inspired challenges to get you back on track. You can sign up right now at dailystoic.com/challenge. Really proud of this one. I got a lot out of doing it. Bedtimes, you know, I've stuck with my sit-ups and push-ups habit. That's been going well. I picked the big book that I'm going to read for the year, like this big intellectual project I'm going to sort of struggle with. So I got a bunch of stuff out of the challenge. I think you will too. Thousands of Stoics all over the world did, and you can sign up for that at dailystoic.com/challenge. But it's going to close tomorrow, so it's your last chance, and I hope to see you in there.

• 8:16Ryan Holiday?

  Thanks so much for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. If you don't know this, you can get these delivered to you via email every day. Check it out at dailystoic.com/email.

• 8:42Ryan Holiday?

  Thanks.