Everything, Everywhere, All At Once | Say No To The Need to Impress

✉️ 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. Each day, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, illustrated with stories from history, current events, and literature to help you be better at what you do. And at the beginning of the week, we try to do a deeper dive, setting a kind of Stoic intention for the week, something to meditate on, something to think on, something to leave you with, to journal about, whatever it is you happen to be doing. So let's get into it.

• 0:43Speaker 01

  Everything, everywhere, all at once. At the height of his political career, Seneca suddenly ran afoul of the emperor. Perhaps his eloquence offended Claudius. Perhaps it was his political base that threatened him. Seneca was falsely accused of sleeping with Claudius's sister and exiled to the island of Corsica just days after he buried his only child. After decades of peace and prosperity and stability, the early days of Marcus Aurelius's reign were rocked by extraordinary and endless difficulties: a plague, floods, wars, and attempted coup. He too buried a child, then another, and another, and another, and another. Life comes at us fast. It does not stop.

• 1:27Speaker 01

  It hits us with everything, everywhere, all at once. We cannot prevent this. We cannot hope to be skipped. All we can do is be ready, dug in, as Marcus Aurelius said, like a wrestler, ready for sudden attacks. "The unexpected blows," Seneca said, "land heaviest, so we must anticipate them. We cannot be naive or lulled by false hopes. We have to prepare. We have to be ready to accept what happens," as Marcus said, "just as we accept the orders of a doctor." "We will stagger under the weight of all of this. We will struggle and break. All we can do," the Stoics tell us, as Hemingway wrote, "is try to be strong in the broken places, to focus on how we respond, what we do about it,

• 2:11Speaker 01

  to who we can become for having gone through it."

• 2:21Ryan Holiday?

  Say no to the need to impress. If the desire to impress and be liked by others is innate to humans as a species, then every generation born before social media got lucky. Today, we face an unending stream of status updates demanding to be filled with all the impressive things we are doing, the trials we are overcoming, announcements of our dangers averted, and triumphs realized. It's exhausting. Centuries ago, Epictetus saw this pride and narcissism even in his own computerless students and reminded them that it wasn't so innocent. In fact, he told them that it would destroy their life's purpose. It would distract and fatigue them.

• 3:02Ryan Holiday?

  Seneca too saw the seeking of approval of spectators as one of life's disgraces. Watch those impulses today. Notice how much you seem to need your phone and status updates and ask, is this the person I want to be? Is this what a philosopher would do? And this is from this week's entry in the Daily Stoke Journal, which you can check out. I do the journal every morning. I sit down and spend some time with the blank pages. We've got three, we've got two Epictetus quotes and one Seneca quote to round it out. "If you should ever turn your will to things outside your control in order to impress someone, be sure that you have wrecked your whole purpose in life. Be content then to be a philosopher in all that you do.

• 3:45Ryan Holiday?

  And if you wish also to be seen as one, show yourself first that you are, and you will succeed." That's Epictetus's Incoridion 23. "In public, avoid talking often and excessively about your own accomplishments and dangers. For however much you enjoy recounting your dangers, it is not pleasant for others to hear about your affairs." Epictetus's Incoridion 3314. "How disgraceful is the lawyer whose dying breath passes well at court at an advanced age, pleading for unknown litigants and still seeking the approval of ignorant spectators." Seneca on the brevity of life, 20.

• 4:26Ryan Holiday?

  You know, I think about this. I have a little rule for me. When I'm working on a book, I don't talk about it. I don't tell people that I've finished. I don't tell people that I just finished chapter two. I don't, I don't tell people that I just signed a deal. In fact, on my last book deal, I didn't even announce it. I could have gotten a little press. And early in my life, I kind of wanted that validation. Hey, I did it. Maybe media, maybe it's good for my brand. Now I see all that stuff as distraction. Even social media, if you, if you follow me, I'm at Ryan Holiday on Twitter and Facebook and I guess, yeah, on Instagram and at Daily Stoke also. But you'll notice there's almost no real time updates from me. I, I never really got the

• 5:07Ryan Holiday?

  habit, but when I feel it peeking up, I break it immediately. These are not platforms for me to fish for validation. I don't want to say, hey, look what I'm doing. And then people go, oh, you're so great. Oh, you're so awesome. And I'm not saying they do that because I'm like, well known. I'm saying like, your friends do this. We want to congratulate each other. We want to encourage each other. And I get that. But that's not why I want to be a writer. That's not why I want to do things. As I say in The Boy Who Would Be King, all the things Marcus Aurelius did made him very popular. It's not why he did it. He did it because they're the right thing. So I, I try not to let social media, I try not to let the chase for validation or approval. I try,

• 5:45Ryan Holiday?

  I just, it's not a need I really ever try to sate. I don't feed it because I, I feel like the more you feed it, the more it wants from you. So I try to focus on just not talk, I try to let my work do the talking about my work. That's not to say I don't believe in marketing. I do. Brand is important. I mean, I have the social media. I just try to have a healthy relationship with it, a healthy balance with it. So I'm using it, it is not using me. And look, Twitter and Facebook and Clubhouse and all these apps. You're the product that's being sold. They're exploiting your need for validation and attention. Right? They know that you want to tell people what you're doing and then you want to hear what people say about what you're doing.

• 6:30Ryan Holiday?

  And then you want to respond to the people who aren't liking it enough. And then you want to check back and see how many comments it got or likes it got or whatever. There's a reason Instagram, I think Instagram did people a public service when they turned off, you know, some of the, not everyone can see how many likes or, you know, views their post got. I think that's great. As a public figure, they leave these tools and they are tempting. And so I don't even have it on my phone. I don't want to touch it. Every time I, I never go to one of these sites and I feel better about myself as a person. I just feel that that insatiable need has been encouraged a little bit. So let's say no to trying to impress other people. Let's not care what other people think. As Marcus Aurelius said, this is another quote we could have included in the entry.

• 7:12Ryan Holiday?

  He says, you know, "We care about ourselves more than other people, yet for some reason we care about their, their opinions way too much." No, focus on what you have to do. Focus on you. Focus on what you think, what you know is right. Do things for that reason. If you get validation for it afterwards, wonderful, but that can't be why you do it. And if it is why you do it, it's going to break your heart, I promise you. So say no to the desire to impress other people. Plus, other people, man, they don't know. They're wrong 99% of the time anyway. Focus on what you know. Just do the right thing. The rest doesn't matter.