Having Flaws Does Not Mean You ARE Flawed

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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, where each day we bring you a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength, insight, and wisdom in everyday life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us, dailystoic.com.

• 0:26Ryan Holiday?

  You are not the problem.

• 0:30Ryan Holiday?

  Epictetus's most powerful line is about how it's not things that upset us, but what we think about things that does all the damage. What he really meant is that our sense of what an obstacle or a disadvantage or a trial is, our subjective understanding is more powerful than the objective reality. For instance, if you tell yourself that you were failed by your teachers, and that's why you're not as smart as other people, for the rest of your life, you're going to have trouble learning and understanding things. It may be true that your teachers were less than adequate, but this story you've chosen to tell yourself is the true failure. And you can see how a person who tells themselves a different story about the same facts, for instance, "I attended underperforming schools,

• 1:14Ryan Holiday?

  but my hunger for learning allowed me to rise above it." Or, "My street smarts make up for what I lack in education, will do much better in life." As Epictetus said, "Sickness is an impediment to the body, but not to the will, unless the will wants to be impeded." "Lameness is an impediment to the leg, but not to the will." If you tell yourself this every time, you will find the impediment is to something else, but not to yourself. And let's not forget, he was saying this as a person whose leg was crippled, from his time as a slave, no less. He refused to see a physical impairment as something that changed who he was as a person. He refused to tell himself that depressingly myopic narrative

• 1:59Ryan Holiday?

  that he was somehow inherently broken or deprived as a result of this injury. Instead, you can see in his teachings that, over and over again, he chose to tell himself a bigger... Better story, that he had learned how powerful he really was, that no person could stop or harm him, even if they tried. That's the narrative we want for ourselves. Yes, we have problems, but we are not the problem. We have flaws, but we are not flawed. We might do something dumb, but that doesn't mean we are dumb. We decide what things mean. We decide what is actually an obstacle and what isn't. We have the power.

• 2:51Ryan Holiday?

  You know, the Stoics in real life met at what was called the stoia, the stoia po kiloe, the painted porch in ancient Athens. Obviously, we can't all get together in one place because this community is like hundreds of thousands of people and we couldn't fit in one space. But we have made a special digital version of the stoia. We're calling it Daily Stoic Life. It's an awesome community. You could talk about like today's episode. You could talk about the emails, ask questions. That's one of my favorite parts is interacting with all these people who are using Stoicism to be better in their actual, real lives. You get more Daily Stoic meditations over the weekend just for the Daily Stoic Life members. Quarterly Q and As with me, cloth-bound edition of our Best of meditations, plus a whole bunch of other stuff, including discounts.

• 3:35Ryan Holiday?

  And this is the best part, all our Daily Stoic courses and challenges totally for free, hundreds of dollars of value every single year, including our New Year, New You challenge. We'd love to have you join us. There's a two-week trial totally for free. Check it out at DailyStoicLife.com.