Here’s How You Take Back Your Time | Become Dangerously Persuasive With These Books

Think of how you spent the last week. Were those seven days as efficient or productive as they could be? 🎥 VIDEO EPISODE | Watch this episode on Ryan Holiday's YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ax6xguhdQFM📚 BOOKS MENTIONED:48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene33 Strategies of War by Robert GreeneThe Art of Seduction by Robert GreeneKeep Going by Austin KleonWords That Work by Dr. Frank LuntzThe 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing by Al Ries and Jack Trout Purple Cow by Seth GodinGrowth Hacker Marketing by Ryan HolidaySupercommunicators by Charles Duhigg Trust Me, I’m Lying by Ryan HolidayRight Thing, Right Now by Ryan Holiday Waging a Good War by Thomas RicksBury the Chains by Adam HochschildHow To Be A Leader by PlutarchHow To Stop A Conspiracy by SallustThe Children by David Halberstam’Rules for Radicals by Saul AlinksyThe Prince by MachiavelliBoyd by Robert Coram👉 SPECIAL OFFER | Go to dailystoic.com/spring and enter code DSPOD20 at checkout to get 20% off the Spring Forward Challenge! Challenge yourself to spring forward and become the person you aspire to be. The Spring Forward Challenge starts March 20, 2026.✉️ 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.

• 0:14Ryan Holiday?

  As winter fades and spring emerges, as we adjust our clocks for daylight savings, it's a good time to pause and reflect, where did that time go? It seems like only yesterday that we were bundled up against the cold, watching the last leaves fall from the trees. Now the days are getting longer and the air feels warmer. We talked recently about Philip Larkin's beautiful poem about the changing of the seasons, how their circular renewal contains within them a kind of finality. The winter you just had is over forever. Those cold winter afternoons where you didn't want to go outside, where you didn't do anything, where instead you waited for the temperature to go up, a break in the snow, you weren't just killing time, that time was killing you. Seneca reminded himself that death is not this thing in the future,

• 0:59Ryan Holiday?

  but something that is happening now. It's always happening. It is the ticking hand of the clock. It is the spring flowers. It's the fall harvest. It is the summer rains. It is the first snow of the year. This idea is a reminder that each moment is precious. It tells us to wake up and really live, not just watch the time go by, to embrace the longer days and make the most of it. And if that's speaking to you, if you're feeling like that's something you want to do, well, I would love to have you join us in the Daily Stoic Spring Forward Challenge. This time of the year, we're supposed to be thinking about spring cleaning, but how many of us get our whole houses in order? Not just our physical spaces, but our minds, our routines, our assumptions? Think about how you spent the last week.

• 1:42Ryan Holiday?

  How many of those days were as efficient and productive as they could be? Where did you waste time? Where did you make things more complicated than necessary? Where have you fallen back on old habits? Where are you, like so many people, still stuck in the doldrums of winter? Well, the Daily Stoic Spring Forward Challenge, which we've been doing for many years now, is set to push you to examine those parts of your life, to examine your choices, to examine your relationships, and move you forward to living your best life to help you seize this new season. Is upon us. We'd love to have you join us. It's gonna be 10 challenges delivered every single day. It's not a long challenge. It's a short, to the point challenge that packs some punch. There's a gonna be a Q and A session with me. You should remember what Marcus really said that, look, we could be good today, but instead we choose tomorrow. So it's up to you

• 2:26Ryan Holiday?

  whether you're gonna let those New Year's resolutions dissolve into missed opportunities, or whether you're gonna keep doing those things that you've always done. Or, or, you're gonna give yourself a 10 day sprint of improvement and some runway for true sustainable change. Challenge yourself to be the person that can spring forward this year. Spring forward to be that person. And you can head over right now, dailystoic.com/spring and join us. I'd love to see you in there. We've got a special offer for podcast listeners. 20% off when you use code DSPOD20 at checkout. You can join me and thousands of other Stoics in the Daily Stoic Spring Forward Challenge. Just head over to dailystoic.com/spring and enter code DSPOD20 to get 20% off.

• 3:22Ryan Holiday?

  It's not just how good your ideas are. It's not just that they're right. It's not just that they're important, but it's how good you are at communicating those ideas, convincing people that they should care about them. So here are some book recommendations that will help you with that. You have to read The 48 Laws of Power. All you want, if you want to know why powerless people should read The 48 Laws of Power, just know that there's a reason that this book is banned in the federal prison system. Power can be a little gross. It can be unsettling. The things you have to do to achieve, acquire, or leverage power, it can make you a bit uncomfortable. But that's, again, sort of the point. The people who want power, who have power, they know the ideas inside this book. You need to have the ideas in this book if you want to beat those people,

• 4:04Ryan Holiday?

  or if you just want to defend yourself against these people. So read The 48 Laws of Power. I would also read, again, to go to the idea in Waging a Good War. This is Robert Greene's book, The 33 Strategies of War. This is basically Sun Tzu and Von Clausewitz. And all the great military historians, strategists, generals, all in one book. You need to read this book if you're trying to achieve anything. And I would also pair that with, I might pair that even, again, another Robert Greene, The Art of Seduction. How do you seduce people? Not romantically, but how do you poeticize your presence? Disarm them through strategic weakness? Stir up the transgressive and the taboo?

• 4:47Ryan Holiday?

  Master the art of the bold move? Lots of great lessons here. This one might not seem like it would help, but I think it will help. This is Austin Kleon's Keep Going: 10 Ways to Stay Creative in Good Times or Bad. I was just talking to someone, a writer I know, and she was like, all this stuff that's happening in the world, I can't focus on my writing. I just can't do what I'm supposed to be doing. And I was saying like, that's letting them win. I think this book is actually really helpful. It's been really helpful to me, too. This is Frank Luntz's book. He's a Republican strategist. Again, you want to, Seneca says you want to read like a spy in the enemy's camp. Here he is talking about the difference, about how the word choices we use determine how people perceive and understand an issue, right?

• 5:30Ryan Holiday?

  Illegal immigrant versus undocumented worker, illegal alien versus homeless versus unhoused. These aren't just, it's not just about political correctness. It's about how you frame an issue and whether you pick a winning frame or a losing frame. It's a really important book because what you're trying to do is get people's attention and sympathy in the words and the messages that you're using. And so, from a marketing perspective, there's a couple other ones I would very much recommend. This is The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing: Violate Them at Your Own Risk. You have to sell and persuade your ideas. It doesn't just matter that you're morally right. It matters whether you can convince people that your cause is one that they ought to care about. This is Seth Godin's Purple Cow.

• 6:15Ryan Holiday?

  You've got to make something that stands out. You've got to make something that's different, that's worth stopping and looking at. This is something I talk a little bit about in Growth Hacker Marketing. Too many people are just, they're just like, "Oh, we'll just advertise," or, "Oh, we'll just hire a publicist." But when you have a small cause, when you're starting from nothing, when you're up against the really big guys, you can't afford any of that. So how have little guys, how have little companies, how have tiny startups, how have they effectively done that? It's about growth, it's about impact, it's not about attention necessarily, it's not about vanity metrics, but it's about things that really move the needle, so that's what I talk about here. Speaking of Frank Glenn's book, I might also pair this with Super Communicators. How do you get really good at communicating, connecting with people? This book makes sense. I talk about some of this marketing stuff in Trust Me, I'm Lying as well.

• 7:00Ryan Holiday?

  How do you not just understand how your opponents, the people you're up against, are manipulating media or getting their information out, but how are you effectively doing that for your cause? I talk a lot about that here. And then, of course, it's all got to be rooted in the Stoic idea of justice, which I talk about in Right Thing, right now. This is Thomas Ricks, he's a military historian, but he wrote A History of the Civil Rights Movement as a military campaign. We don't, a lot of people don't know that most of the civil rights leaders went to boot camp. They went to this place called the Highlander School, where they trained in not being provoked into violent action, where they trained their bodies to absorb physical pain.

• 7:41Ryan Holiday?

  And they did, like, this was a finely tuned military operation. For instance, they were not just protesting, they were protesting to get arrested, to fill the jails, and then they were refusing bail because they knew it would overload the system. The point is, they knew exactly what they were doing. If you want to make change, you've got to know what you're doing. This is a great book. For thousands and thousands of years, slavery was an unquestioned, inalterable institution, cross-culturally, all over the world. You can trace the abolition of slavery basically down to one man. His name was Thomas Clarkson. He was a college student at Oxford. He writes this essay about how slavery is wrong, and then he realizes, "Well, if I'm right, maybe someone should do something about it."

• 8:26Ryan Holiday?

  And then he says, "If someone should do something about it, maybe that person should be me." And thus begins the abolition movement, which changes the world. Adam Hochschild wrote this book, Bury the Chains, all about that. Of course, the first thing he does is build a coalition of people who collaborate and work effectively together. This is a super powerful, really important book. The abolitionist movement invents so many of the things we take for granted as part of the activist playbook. Consumer boycotts, petitions, public relations, all of that starts here. You've got to read this book. Here's two little ones from antiquity. This is Plutarch's How to Be a Leader, which is some great leadership lessons from someone who is not just a biographer of some of the great men and women of history, but also a local elected leader.

• 9:10Ryan Holiday?

  But given everything that's happening, Salas' How to Stop a Conspiracy, about stopping the Cateline conspiracy feels pretty relevant today. I was mentioning the civil rights movement. This is Halberstam's The Children, which is all about the teenagers and college students that organized the Nashville sit-in movements. We tend to think of Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement and all these sort of bigger, slightly older leaders, although Martin Luther King was not very old. The movement had kind of stalled out, and it was these young kids that forced the movement. There's just so many great lessons in this book about fighting back against unimaginable odds, against incredibly entrenched interests. You have to read this.

• 9:52Ryan Holiday?

  I would also recommend, speaking of strategy, this is Saul Olenski's Rules for Radicals. This book has been a sort of boogeyman for conservatives for many years, which again is a reason you should read it. But he's a community organizer and strategist. He had a great sense for what gets media attention, where the leverage is. This is a book that everyone should read. Going with Robert Greene, you should also read Machiavelli. People don't understand that Machiavelli, although he was writing to a prince, he was actually tortured by a prince for his republican leanings, that is to say, for his... Democratic sentiment, but one must be a fox in order to recognize traps and a lion to frighten off the wolves. I think that's Machiavelli in a nutshell right there. There's a book called Boyd. It's about a fighter pilot. You might think, well, I'm

• 10:37Ryan Holiday?

  not a fighter pilot. What does that have to do with me? So he was a great fighter pilot, but he was also a bureaucratic warrior. He's the reason we have the F-15 and the F-16 fighter, which he brings in way under budget. But he was a notorious pain in the side of the people in the Pentagon. He hated waste. He hated efficiency. He hated people who had conflicts of interest. He was like just a warrior who was able to get a bureaucracy to work, which so often is what people are fighting up against. He was a brilliant guy. There's so much here. This is a biography, but it's called The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War. He's also a brilliant strategist. There's some great stuff here, so I would highly recommend this book as well. We can get it in the bookstore. Okay, so this is

• 11:20Ryan Holiday?

  a biography of Roosevelt from a long time ago. This is Roosevelt, the Lion and the Fox. That's an allusion to Machiavelli. But it's a political biography of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The problem is we sometimes we just think of these old leaders, whether it's Lincoln or Roosevelt, as just like great human beings or just, you know, sort of like mythological figures. But they were effective politicians. They knew how to work coalitions. They knew how power worked. They knew how to sell things to the public. They knew the levers of power. And this is a book about how does Roosevelt become a transformational president? How does he beat the sort of moneyed and financial interests? How does he get the levers of government to work in the middle of the Depression? And how did he get to

• 12:05Ryan Holiday?

  be in that position in the first place? This is a really powerful, important book that everyone should read. I would also recommend along those lines, you want to talk about someone who battled incredible odds. This is Julian Jackson's biography of de Gaulle. De Gaulle's like the last man in France. Everyone, so much of France decides to collaborate. This is the Vichy French. He had every reason to just escape and get away and not fight. And he didn't. He stood and fight. He had this idea of France. He refused to see it as a middle-tier power. This is an incredible epic biography. I took a ton of notes. I think it's a good reminder for anyone against incredible odds. You gotta read this book.

• 12:49Ryan Holiday?

  All right, here is B. H. Liddell Hart's strategy. He's one of the great World War I and World War II strategists. If you have read Robert Greene's Thirty-Three Strategies of War or The Forty-Eight Laws of Power, this is a great supplementary book that everyone should read. Here is John Lewis Gaddis's book on grand strategy, which I would also read if I was a little guy going against the big guy or trying to bring change into the world.