How To Achieve Things | Reduce Wants, Increase Happiness

It’s always been difficult to concentrate. In one of his letters, Seneca talks about trying to write while Rome resounds beneath him with cacophony. There are street sellers and protestors and a fight and blacksmiths screaming and yelling and hammering down below. Now add to those typical sounds of the outside world, the chaos of our personal world–a buzzing iPhone, an overflowing inbox and endless Zoom meetings–and you get our daily nightmare. But if we wish to succeed, as Seneca did, we must find a way to tune this all out.---And in today's reading from the Daily Stoic Journal, Ryan dissecting three quotes from Epictetus in order to illustrate the Stoic idea of cultivating happiness in our lives by reducing the destructive habit of wanting more.📔 Check out The Painted Porch to get your signed copy of Stillness is the Key.✉️ 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.

• 0:38Ryan Holiday?

  How to achieve things. It's always been difficult to concentrate. In one of his letters, Seneca talks about trying to write while Rome resounds beneath him with noise. There are street sellers and protesters in a fight, and blacksmiths screaming and yelling and hammering down below. Now add to those typical sounds of the outside world the chaos of our personal world, the buzzing iPhone, an overflowing inbox, and endless Zoom meetings, and you get a daily nightmare. But if we wish to succeed, as Seneca did, we must find a way to tune this all out. But if we want to achieve great things in our chosen fields, we must figure out this puzzle just as every great man and woman

• 1:21Ryan Holiday?

  has in their own pursuit of greatness. Using a hunting metaphor, Oliver Wendell Holmes once explained, "If you want to hit a bird on the wing, you must have all your will and focus. You must not be thinking about yourself, and equally, you must not be thinking about your neighbor. You must be living in your eye on that bird." Every achievement, he said, is a bird on the wing. Writing a letter that is still relevant 2,000 years later, as Seneca did, that's a bird on the wing. Being a good spouse or a parent, that's a bird on the wing. Making a breakthrough in science or business or founding a new philosophical school, as Zeno did, that's a bird on the wing. Being a great emperor, that's a bird on the wing.

• 2:04Ryan Holiday?

  That's why Marcus really said that we had to concentrate like a Roman. We must put all our will in focus. We can't be thinking of ourselves, or others, or anything at all, except the task in front of us, which is to say, we must be able to shut out the world if we are to be able to do something great that changes it. It's one of the hardest things in the world to do, but it's a prerequisite for doing any other hard thing in this world that's worth doing. That's how it goes. Stillness is the key. Focus is everything. You must seek it, capture it, live in it. As I say in the book, Stillness is the Key, it was one of the books I needed most in my life as I was writing it. It's a book that changed me in writing it.

• 2:48Ryan Holiday?

  It's been lovely to hear from all the people who were changed by reading it. It debuted at number one on the New York Times list. I can't wait for you to read it if you haven't yet. And you can get signed copies at store.dailystoic.com, or pick it up in audio, ebook, physical, any format you want, anywhere books are sold. Stillness is key. I hope you check it out.

• 3:14Ryan Holiday?

  Reduce wants, increase happiness. The Stoics knew that wanting less increases gratitude, just as wanting more obliterates it. Epictetus focused much of his teachings on helping his students reduce this destructive habit of wanting more. In it, he saw the key to a happy life and to relationships. By practicing the art of wanting less and being grateful for the portion that we already have before us, we are hopping off the so-called hedonic treadmill and taking a real step on the path to a life of real contentment. That's what we're journaling about this week in the Daily Stoic Journal. That's where this little meditation comes from. We've got three quotes from Epictetus.

• 3:56Ryan Holiday?

  He says, "Remember to conduct yourself in life as if at a banquet. As something is being passed around and comes to you, reach your hand out and take only a moderate helping. Does it pass you by? Don't stop it. It hasn't yet come? Don't burn in desire for it, but wait until it arrives in front of you. Act this way with children, a spouse, towards position, with wealth. One day, it will make you worthy of a banquet with the gods."

• 4:23Ryan Holiday?

  That's Epictetus's Incoridion. "When children stick their hand down a narrow goody jar they can't get their full fist out and start crying, drop a few treats and you will get it out. Curb your desire. Don't set your heart on so many things and you will get what you need." That's Epictetus's Discourses 3:9. "Freedom isn't secured by filling up your heart's desire, but by removing your desire." Epictetus's Discourses. It's not that the Stoics didn't like stuff. I mean, they did. They enjoyed life. But they also knew that there is such thing as too much of a good thing. And they tried to enjoy what they had while they had it, but also not be dependent on it, and also,

• 5:04Ryan Holiday?

  more importantly, not desire and achieve and acquire so much that it becomes its own burden. And I think, I think that's something we miss, for instance, even about the Epicureans. We think the Epicureans were these sort of pleasure lovers, and to a sense, they were. But it was the simple pleasures. It was the right amount that brought them pleasure. And too much becomes not only not a pleasure, but a punishment. There's a joke I like. Someone attended one of Aristotle's dinners, and they said, "Aristotle, you know what I love about your dinners? I don't regret them the following morning." So this idea of moderation is so essential. And it's the key to happiness. The right

• 5:49Ryan Holiday?

  amount. I remember Steve, my editor and collaborator on the Daily Stoic and the Daily Stoic Journal, said to me once, he said, "Moderation in all things, and some things not at all." And I thought that was beautifully expressed, and that's kind of how I try to live my life. You know, Seneca probably took it too far in one direction, maybe Epictetus took it too far in the other direction, and maybe Marcus Aurelius is right there in the Aristotelian mean, enough, but not too much.

• 6:18Ryan Holiday?

  There's two beautiful metaphors there from Epictetus that I think are worth pausing on. He talks about the kid sticking their hand in the candy jar. They get too much. They could let some of it go, they could get it. But since they can't let it go, they get none of it. That's a beautiful image. But this other one, that we're life at a banquet. And I don't know about you, but whenever I'm at a buffet or a banquet, I tend to eat too much and then it's unhappy. It's unpleasurable. As Aristotle said, you regret it the next day. But if you can find a way to enjoy it, that the food is not really the point. The food is extra. The point is the conversation, the company, the experience. And to take too much, to take more than your share, to be distracted. Oh, that's coming over here. I want seconds of this. This is just take yourself out of the present moment. And in a sense, it ultimately ends up sort of punishing you

• 7:02Ryan Holiday?

  and it takes the fun and the joy out of it. So moderation in all things. He's saying that this, he's being explicit. This banquet thing is a metaphor. He says, "Act this way with children espoused towards position with wealth, and one day it will make you worthy of a banquet with the gods. The less you need, the less you want, the freer you are, the happier you are, and the more you enjoy what you do have." That idea of enough, that idea of the right amount is key. And that's what I'd love for you guys to spend some time thinking about this week. What is enough? Do you have it? Do you really need what you think you need? Or do you just want it? What would happen if you actually got it? Would it really fulfill the desire the way you think it would? Maybe not.

• 7:47Ryan Holiday?

  Be well, be moderate. Talk soon.