How To Be Beautiful | Stake Your Claim

Ryan discusses how Epictetus defined being beautiful, and reads this week’s meditation from The Daily Stoic Journal, on today’s Daily Stoic Podcast. Eight Sleep is the most advanced solution on the market for thermoregulation. It pairs dynamic cooling and heating with biometric tracking. This holiday season, give yourself or a loved one a gift that keeps getting better night after night. Right in time for the holidays, give the gift of better sleep and a present that will keep giving back, everyday of the year. Go to eightsleep.com/dailystoic for exclusive holiday savings. → We hope you join us in the 2022 New Year New You Challenge. It kicks off in a little over a week. It’s 3 weeks of actionable challenges, presented in an email per day, built around the best, most timeless wisdom in Stoic philosophy. Just go to https://dailystoic.com/challenge to sign up before sign ups end on January 1st! Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://DailyStoic.com/emailFollow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and 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.

• 0:04Ryan 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. How to be beautiful. Epictetus said that the root of beauty was beautiful choices. If your choices are beautiful, he said, so too will you be. And it's simple, and it's true. You are what your choices make you.

• 0:48Ryan Holiday?

  Nothing more, nothing less. He was talking of true, beautiful, human behavior, one imagines, not a physical beauty. But actually, it applies to both. Beauty and either case can't be separated from the process, the regimen that creates it. It takes exercise, it takes discipline, it takes sacrifice, it takes weeks, and months, and years. It's the decision, day after day after day, to get up out of bed early and go for a run. It's how often you pick up the book instead of the television remote, the groceries instead of the fast food, the journal instead of the phone. It's saying no to cool opportunities and yes to our kids. So if you'd like to look and feel and be better, that gives you a good place to start in your choices.

• 1:33Ryan Holiday?

  Every single day presents us with plenty of opportunities to make a choice between beauty and ugliness, kindness and selfishness, mercy or vengeance, serenity or anger. There's the little choices we have to make daily, what we eat, how we talk to people, whether you pick up the television remote or a book, what you think about. And on some days, there's bigger choices, whether you stand up for what's right, whether you reach down to help someone who needs it, kind of work you do, what standards you hold yourself to. If you want a beautiful life, there's really no escaping it. You have to make beautiful choices.

• 2:11Ryan Holiday?

  And the new year is almost here, which is the perfect chance to get back in the habit of making beautiful choices. You know you deserve better. You know you're capable of better. What's it going to take for you to actually ask for it? When are you going to fulfill the potential that is just sitting there? But how about right now? Because it's possible. This year, we're putting it to you here. Stop putting it off till tomorrow, until Monday, waiting for it to just happen, because it won't. Someone has to take control, and that someone is you. And one of the reasons that we, that I, created the New Year, New You Challenge, which we've done now every year for four years here at Daily Stoic, is for

• 2:55Ryan Holiday?

  that person and for that reason, to help people create a better life, a new you in 2022. It's three weeks of actionable challenges presented in an email per day, built around the best, most timeless wisdom in Stoic philosophy. It's three weeks of waking up each morning, opening the email, following the prompt, making beautiful choice. And I, look, it's not the easiest thing in the world. It will require three weeks of discipline and sacrifice and following the process regimen. But when you see the results, well, they may just take your breath away. So head over to the Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge. We'd love to have you join us. I'd love you to join me, because I do all the challenges myself.

• 3:38Ryan Holiday?

  Honestly, to be perfectly honest, I build them around things I want to be working on, too. You'll see me in the Discord channel. You'll see me in the video chats we do together. Head over to dailystoic.com/challenge and join us in the Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge. It starts soon. Stop putting it off. Make the right choice, not later, but now, and join us, the Daily Stoic Challenge, dailystoic.com/challenge.

• 4:07Ryan Holiday?

  Stake your claim. And this is from this week's entry in the Daily Stoic Journal, 366 Days of Writing and Reflection on the Art of Living by yours truly and my co-writer and translator, Stephen Hanselman. I actually do this journal every single day. There's a question in the morning, a question in the afternoon, then there's these sort of weekly meditations. As Epictetus says, "Every day and night, we keep thoughts like this at hand. Write them, read them aloud, and talk to yourself and others about them." You can check out the Daily Stoic Journal anywhere books are sold. You can also get a signed personalized copy from me in the Daily Stoic store at store.dailystoic.com. We like to collect the sayings of great writers or of leaders we admire. They often

• 4:48Ryan Holiday?

  become montras for us on the path to life, providing guidance and assurance. But as Seneca reminds us, truth hasn't been monopolized. We need to spend some time and effort each week formulating our own wisdom, staking our own claims based on our study, practice, and training. And that's what the Daily Stoic Journal and this podcast has always been about, reflecting on Stoic wisdom and adding our own to it. Seneca urged us to blaze our own trail and to take charge and stake our own claim. Well, let's do that. Let the pages in your own journal, your own writing, reflect the insights you've learned through your

• 5:29Ryan Holiday?

  own experiences. Let the inspiration you've taken from the Stoics help you create your own exercises, reminders, and perspectives. Then we have two quotes from Seneca and one from Marcus. The first from Seneca's Moral Letters, "It's disgraceful for an old person or one in sight of old age to only have the knowledge carried in their notebooks. Zeno said this. What do you say? Klyamphe said that. What do you say? How long will you be compelled by claims of another? Take charge and stake your own claim. Something prosperity will carry in its notebook." That's Seneca Moral Letters 33:7. And then in 33:11, Seneca says, "Won't you be walking in your predecessor's footsteps? I surely will use the older path,

• 6:14Ryan Holiday?

  but if I find a shorter and smoother way, I'll blaze a trail there. The ones who pioneered these paths aren't our masters, but our guides. Truth stands open to everyone." Hasn't been monopolized.

• 6:28Ryan Holiday?

  And then Marcus Aurelius Meditations 3:5, he says, "Don't act grudgingly, or selfishly, or without due diligence, or be a contrarian. Don't overdress your thoughts in fine language. Don't be a person of too many words or too many deeds. Be cheerful, not wanting outside help or the relief that others might bring. A person needs to stand on their own, not be propped up." I mean, obviously, this is something I think a little bit about. As a writer, a popularizer of Stoicism, I rely quite a bit on the ideas from the Stoics. That is what the Daily Stoic is, and it's funny. I'll see comments from people, they'll say like, "Well, you're just quoting other people. What do you have to say?" But then, of course, when I say what I have to say,

• 7:11Ryan Holiday?

  if I don't make enough nods to the Stoics, people go, "Well, who's this guy? You should just read the originals." And so it's a delicate line that I walk, but I think it's analogous to the line that we all walk, which is, "Smarter, wiser people came before us." And they said, they picked so much of the low-hanging fruit. But we have to, I think, use kind of the Austin Kleon approach, "Steal like an artist, take from here and there and there and there." And it's in the taking and the synthesis and the arrangement that we make something new. For instance, it's funny, now I watch people talk about the relationship

• 7:51Ryan Holiday?

  between Stoicism and Amor Fati, but I know I'm the one that made that connection explicit and popular because it was something I was introduced to when I was a research assistant on Robert Greene's book with 50 Cent. And he talks about the idea of Amor Fati, and it struck me just how deeply connected that idea was with Stoicism, and it's something I integrated in my own books. And that became popular. Now, I see people going, "Hey, you know, the Stoics never really said Amor Fati. That's from Nietzsche, not from the Stoics." I know, but I made the connection. And so the idea then of relying on these ancient ideas, but not relying so much, or too much, not being dependent on them, using just the right amount.

• 8:35Ryan Holiday?

  But also understand you can't listen to this. I mean, I think it was Klianthes put together one of his books and he quotes so much from the play Medea that he said, "This is Klianthes' Medea." He included almost the entire book in all the quotations that he'd used. And I guess at some point, if I keep doing this, I'll have quoted from every single passage from Marcus Aurelius. But the arrangement that I do it in is different. The reading I have is different and my interpretation might be different than your interpretation, which might be different than the interpretation that even I myself might have made a few years ago. So we put our own spin on these things. We make them our own, right?

• 9:20Ryan Holiday?

  And to not do that, to not do that is also a shame. I think it was Nastim Taleb, again, I'm quoting, but he says, "Most of the quotations you make should be of people you disagree with." Now, I would disagree with the idea of most, but the point is, if all the quotes that you have, that you use, that you write down are just ones that you accept, that you agree with, you're probably not being critical enough. You're not challenging enough. And so I want to push you to do that, too. You shouldn't agree with everything the Stoics say. You certainly shouldn't agree with everything that I say. You should be blazing your own path. And that's something I think about even as I'm doing marginalia in the sides of the

• 10:00Ryan Holiday?

  books that I read is like, am I just unthinkingly agreeing with everything I said? Or I think it's better if it's, the reading process is a bit of an argument. And if you agree with everything that I say, that means probably you're not thinking enough for yourself, but also it means I'm probably, you know, not being courageous enough in what I say. I'm not pushing the envelope enough. I'm not being honest or vulnerable enough. So. You gotta be comfortable both quoting and carving your own path. You gotta be comfortable agreeing as well as disagreeing.

• 10:41Ryan Holiday?

  And it's in how all that shakes out that we have, we have our original say, we have our original voice. And Seneca does say that, again, quoting, noting the irony. Seneca says something like, how do you prove that you really understood these masters? It's by putting their thoughts into your own words. And you see that illustrated in the Stoics, the sort of constant allusions or reframing or tightening of sort of Stoic mantras or ideas in one's own voice, one's own expression. And to me, that's partly what journaling is. I'm writing, writing the ideas down, writing them down in my own voice, putting my own

• 11:22Ryan Holiday?

  spin on them, staking my own claim, as Seneca says. As we wind up this year and we go into the new year, I hope you can put a stamp on this new year. You can stake out your own claim, claim your own original voice. But that's what Stoicism is about. And I'll talk to you soon. Thanks so much for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Again, if you don't know this, you can get these delivered to you via email every day. Just go to dailystoic.com/email. So check it out, dailystoic.com/email.