Heal Yourself With This | The Cure for a Reading Slump

The Stoics urged us to read, study, and journal, not as abstract philosophy, but to help us recover from the stuff life throws at us. 📚 Sign up for Ryan’s free monthly reading list newsletter: https://ryanholiday.net/the-reading-list/🎥 VIDEO EPISODE | Watch this episode here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ES4h6q1497I✉️ FREE STOIC WISDOM | Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

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

• 0:00Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

• 0:15Ryan Holiday?

  Heal yourself with this. Sometimes life gets heavy. Relationships dissolve. The job you thought you'd have forever disappears without warning. Someone you love gets a difficult diagnosis. It stings. Stoicism is designed as medicine for the soul. It relieves us of the vulnerabilities of modern life and restores us with the vigor we need to thrive. That's why the Stoics urged us to read, to study, and to journal, not as abstract philosophy, but to help us recover from the stuff life throws at us. "Don't return to philosophy as a taskmaster," Marx really says in Meditations, "but as patients seek out the relief in treatment of sore eyes

• 0:58Ryan Holiday?

  or addressing 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." Musonius Rufus also believed that we could be like doctors, treating ourselves with reason, the power to think clearly, to get to the truth of the matter. That is how we recover from being bashed around by our emotions or from world events. He was not interested in shortcuts, he said, or smelling salts that revive, but do not cure the disease. So that's what philosophy does. It cures what ails our souls. So check in with it today and let it do its healing.

• 1:45Ryan Holiday?

  So you're stuck, right? You're not reading as much as you want. You've got a bunch of books piled up. Life got busy. Maybe you're a bit of a reading rut. What do you do? How do you get back on track if you're not reading as much as you'd like? As an author, I read as part of my job, but I get stuck too. We all do. Reading slumps are real, and you can get real stuck. In them. Usually when I'm stuck or I'm not reading as much as I want, I have three go-to options. Either something really short, something I read a page a day of, or just something that's gonna rip your face off. It is so good. And that's what we're gonna talk about in today's episode. Because the way out of a reading rut is to find the right book.

• 2:30Ryan Holiday?

  I've been doing that for the last 20 years, not just in my own habits as a reader, but now owning my own bookstore. And it's a little bit different than your average bookstore. At The Painted Porch, we don't carry all books. We carry only books that are amazing, like the kinds of books that can change your life. The ones that have changed my life or my wife's life. The kind of books that are so good, you're gonna think, where has this been? Why haven't I read this yet? Come with me, let's go next door, and I'm gonna give you some books that are so good, they're gonna blow your mind. This is one of my absolute favorite genres of books, The Daily Devotional. You read one page a day, every day, for a year. And then ideally, you read it year after year. And even though the book stays the same, you bring something different to it each time, and you take something different out of each time. These are some of my favorites.

• 3:13Ryan Holiday?

  One of the classics of the genre is Tolstoy's Calendar of Wisdom. This book was actually banned shortly after it came out by Soviet Russia, and it was only rediscovered in the late 80s. But just absolutely incredible book with his favorite quotes from the Stoics, from Chinese wisdom, from the Bible, from the transcendentalists, the greats in so many different eras. I love this book. This is one I read every single day. I can't take credit, this book was my idea. I love Robert Greene's books, but people, should I start with the 40 Laws of Power, Laws of Human Nature, Mastery, or Art Seduction? I was like, Robert, there should just be like a greatest hits album. So this is the greatest hits of Robert Greene. One meditation every day on power, seduction, mastery, strategy, and human nature. Great book.

• 3:55Ryan Holiday?

  Peter Drucker, this is one page a day from the business strategist and management expert Peter Drucker. My agent actually did this book when he was an editor at Hartford Collins. And the success of this book is what gave me the idea to do my book, The Daily Stoic, which is one page a day of Stoic philosophy, a leather edition. And then I also followed up later with The Daily Dad, which is one page of parenting advice every day. This is the Parenting Dabjin. It's not one page a day exactly, but the idea is it's a parenting meditation you can start each day with. It doesn't go, it only goes to 80, but you can just start over once you get to 80. Amazing books you can read in a single sitting. So this little book, I loved it so much, I bought a thousand copies of it.

• 4:39Ryan Holiday?

  I think we're one of the only bookstores in the country that has it. This is a little book by Stefan Zweig, who wrote The World of Yesterday. And it's just a short biography of Montaigne. He's writing as the world is falling apart and he's writing about a guy, Montaigne, who is writing and thinking, when his world is falling apart. It is a lovely book that you can read very quickly. The War of Art. This is a book you can read in one sitting and then you should read it again and again and again. I try to read it before I start any creative project. This is the new Walter Isaacson book, The Greatest Sentence Ever Written, about the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence. On the 250th anniversary of our country, he does a nice, what is this? Seventy-page or so meditation on a wonderful sentence and what it means.

• 5:24Ryan Holiday?

  This is Gift from the Sea by Anne-Marie Lindberg. It's a lady walking along a beach riffing on modernity, quietness, stillness, writing on youth, age, love, and marriage, peace, solitude, and contentment. She writes this on a brief vacation and it's kind of a vacation of a book to read. I actually read this flying through the beach on vacation on a two-hour flight or so. It's perfect. This one's almost too short to be a book, but it is in fact a book. This is Stockdale's Courage Under Fire. This is a man testing the doctrines of Epictetus in the Hanoi Hilton as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. Okay, 21 pages, so you can do this in less than one sitting. I think you'll like this one, though.

• 6:09Ryan Holiday?

  This is Claire Keegan's Small Things Like These. I'll get one novel in here. This book is 114 pages, but it is incredible. The ending, it's gonna fuck you up, but it's very good. Eighty-four Charing Cross Road. Again, this doesn't seem like an amazing book, but it is. It's a series of letters between a screenwriter in the US and an antique bookseller in the UK right after World War II. But you will fall in love with all of the characters in this book and devour it in one setting. All right, this one is very relevant today. It's written by General Smedley Butler. This is War is a Racket, the anti-war classic by one of the most decorated Marines in US history. All right, so this is a letter, 120 pages.

• 6:53Ryan Holiday?

  This is a letter that Kafka wrote to his father. He had this overbearing, imperious, judgmental father. They never got along. He never understood his son. And so one day Kafka sits down and he says, I'm going to write him a letter, just pouring out all my thoughts and emotions. And that's what this book is. He sends it to his mother, who of course never gives it to his father. But this to me is a great parenting book. It's also a great book if you had difficult parents yourself. Steal Like an Artist is great. Show Your Work is great. Keep Going is great. If you want to be more creative, if you want to be more inspired, you want to do better work, you want to build an audience for your work, I think these three books are great. And they've got lovely little drawings and doodles in them, too. You can definitely read these in one sitting. This is one of the greatest sports books ever written. I would not have guessed that it was so short.

• 7:36Ryan Holiday?

  It is exactly 150 pages about the famous match between Arthur Ashe and Clark Grabner. Just an incredible exquisite piece of sports writing and character study and psychology. It's so stuck in my mind and so riveting, I would have guessed it's 250 or 300 pages, but it obviously reads much faster than that. This is The Way of Love by Anthony DeMayo. Not only is it only, it's 190 pages or so, but these are very little pages. If you wanted to put this on a normal size, it's going to get way smaller. Basketball coach gave me this book one time and it changed my life. Just absolutely beautiful writing in here.

• 8:18Ryan Holiday?

  Timothy Snyder's short book on tyranny, very apropos of this moment, clocks in at 126 pages. If people could just read these pages, we would be in better shape. Some books that are so good, you'll have trouble believing that they're true, but they are, and they're so well-written, they'll rip your face off. Literally, that's true for this one. This is Night of the Grizzlies, which is about a series of grizzly bear attacks that happened on one night in 1967 in Glacier National Park. First time it had ever happened in the park. When you read about the lead up to it happening, you realize it was inevitable. Like they would have shows where they would feed the bears trash every night. And then they let people camp right next to the shows. Mind blowing.

• 9:00Ryan Holiday?

  Of course, the best animal versus man's narrative nonfiction book is The Tiger by John Valant. I just can't tell you how good this story is. And if you haven't read it, I don't know what you're doing with your life. I just read Marriage at Sea, which is about this couple sailing from London to New Zealand. And then halfway through, a whale sinks their boat. Really like Moby Dick, which is also what In the Heart of the Sea is about. It's the true story of Moby Dick. But hundreds of years later, basically the same thing would happen again. And they spend many, many days on this inflatable raft. They catch turtles and sharks and they somehow managed to survive against all odds. And it's this sort of interesting look at their marriage that is under strain throughout all of it. Absolutely incredible.

• 9:45Ryan Holiday?

  The Stranger in the Woods and The Art Thief, both written by the same guy. This guy steals literally billions of dollars worth of art from tiny museums all across Europe. And then he just keeps them in his apartment until, I won't spoil it, incredible. And then one day, some guy just drives off into the woods in Maine. And then he doesn't come out for 27 years. Everyone knew there was someone who was breaking into their houses and stealing supplies. And there were whispers and rumors of it, but no one saw him. Just absolutely incredible book. This is The Black Count about a black general in Napoleon's army, who also just happened to be the father of Alexander Dumas. Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo. Incredible book. And let's close this out with The River of Doubt about Theodore Roosevelt,

• 10:28Ryan Holiday?

  exploring a river in South America where he almost dies post presidency. Just mind blowing. And by the way, he took a copy of Epictetus with him. If you want more book recommendations, I send these out in my reading list newsletter, which I've sent out every month for 15 years. And you can sign up at ryanholiday.net/readinglist.