How To Change The World | Count Your Blessings

Ryan talks about the importance of constantly learning that which you do not yet know, and reads this week’s meditation from The Daily Stoic Journal. If you want to become a great reader, the Stoics can help. We built out their best insights into ourRead to Lead: A Daily Stoic Reading Challenge. Since it first launched in 2019, Read to Lead has been our most popular challenge, taken on by almost ten thousand participants. Today, we’re excited to announce that, for the first time ever, registration to jointhe 2022 live cohort is officially open. 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.

• 0:39Ryan Holiday?

  How to Change the World. We think we have to be an Elon Musk to have a big impact on the world. We think that if we're not solving enormous and complex issues like global warming, we're not changing the world. But just a cursory glance at history proves that in reality, changing the world doesn't require such grandiose measures. We briefly mentioned this the other day, that Marcus Aurelius's life was changed by a single book recommendation. In Book One of Meditations, he thanks his philosophy teacher, Risticus, for "introducing me to Epictetus's lectures" and loaning me his own copy. Risticus handed Marcus Aurelius one book, and Marcus read that one book, and this changed the arc of history.

• 1:24Ryan Holiday?

  There's also the story of someone like Malcolm X, perhaps the most controversial of the civil rights leaders. Malcolm was a complicated man, and his early life was defined by crime, and it led him to a prison cell. But in that cell, Malcolm picked up a book, and then another, and another. "People don't realize how a man's whole life can be changed by one book," he would say later. In fact, he would come to refer to books as his alma mater, his college education. And he would say that when we read, we change our attitude. And when we change our attitude, we can change ourselves and change the world. If we want to make these changes, the Stoics can help. We can look to the Stoics' best insights on how to become a reader and how to read widely.

• 2:06Ryan Holiday?

  And that's actually what we built the Daily Stoic Read to Lead Challenge about. Since we first launched it in 2019, the Read to Lead Challenge has been our most popular challenge, taken in by almost 10,000 people all over the world. And we're launching it again here in 2022 with a live cohort. It's open till tonight at midnight. This is literally your last chance to join us in this group to become better readers together. The 2020 Live Course is going to take place over the next five weeks. Two emails a week, 30,000 words of exclusive content about how to read better, how to read more, how to find books that can change your life, how to think more critically, how

• 2:48Ryan Holiday?

  to make more time, how to digest books above your level, and so much more. And there's going to be weekly live sessions with me. I've written my fair share of books. I've read my fair share of books, as we've talked about before. If you don't get my reading list newsletter, for almost 15 years now, I've been recommending books to this list of 300,000 people. My videos on how I read, my reading habits are pretty well-known, and I think the results speak for themselves. As a part of the Read to Lead Daily Stoic Reading Challenge, you'll not only become a better reader and build a better reading habit, but you'll get to learn from me and how I do what I do. And I'm excited to talk to you and share with all of the community. It's a live course.

• 3:29Ryan Holiday?

  Look, tomorrow is the last day, so I want you to move through this course with us, which means signing up tonight before it's too late. And then we'll get started tomorrow, the morning of the 17th. You can sign up now at dailystoic.com/reading. Love to have you. And then remember, Daily Stoic Life participants get this challenge and all the other challenges for free, so I'm excited to see you in there.

• 3:57Ryan Holiday?

  Count your blessings. 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.

• 4:38Ryan Holiday?

  It's easy to complain about things missing in our lives and so much harder to appreciate what we already have. Seneca reminded us that everything we need to be happy is right in front of us, while the luxuries we might be missing could themselves come at a great cost, the cost of what we already have. Marcus agreed and reminded himself to count those blessings present in our lives and try to imagine what it would be like to not have them and how much we'd miss them. So take a minute and list some of your blessings this week. Take a conscious note of what you are fortunate to have and enjoy so you can see clearly, as Epictetus put it, where they come from and feel a sense of gratitude for that.

• 5:20Ryan Holiday?

  The first quote is from Marcus Aurelius's Meditations 7:27. He says, "Don't set your mind on things you don't possess as if they were yours, but count the blessings you actually possess and think about how much you would desire them if they weren't already yours. But watch yourself that you don't value these things to the point of being troubled that if you should lose them." That was a really helpful exercise for me about envy. You know, you can look at all the things that other people have that you'd want to have, but it gives you a whole nother perspective if you take a minute and think about all the things that you have that other people would be jealous of. And it is funny how often we lust or crave things that other people not only don't like, but they would lust or crave for our life. And that should give you some sense that this is all crazy, this is all some...

• 6:05Ryan Holiday?

  Freakish evolutionary drive that's made us miserable. Focus on what you have, be grateful for that instead of craving what you don't have. But of course, don't be so obsessed and grateful for the things you have that you would miss them if you lost them. This is from Seneca's Moral Letters. "The founder of the universe who assigned to us the laws of life provided that we should live well, but not in luxury. Everything needed for our well-being is right before us, whereas what luxury requires is gathered by many miseries and anxieties. Let us use this gift of nature and count it among the greatest things." Seneca is a bit of a hypocrite here. He's a very, very rich man. Famously has something like 300 tables that he uses for entertaining. But the point is, he knew even richer people.

• 6:50Ryan Holiday?

  And he knew people who were not as rich but craved what he had. He said marble and gold are forms of slavery, that the people who live under them are slaves. He said that these things are won at the cost of life. And so when we're not counting our blessings, what we are doing is by definition is chasing other people's blessings, or more blessings, or other blessings. And this is preventing us from being satisfied with what we have right now in front of us. And then we have a quote from Epictetus's Discourses 1:6. He says, "It is easy to praise providence for anything that may happen if you have two qualities: a complete view of what has actually happened in each instance, and a sense of gratitude.

• 7:30Ryan Holiday?

  Without gratitude, what is the point of seeing? And without seeing, what is the object of gratitude?" And look, it's not just gratitude about possessions. It's not just focusing on material items. But it's also just grateful that you were born here, to these parents, to this or that. That grateful for your set of experiences because they made you who you were. And that it's impossible, for instance, to have had different parents, or be born to a different nationality, or to have had this or that. And it not changed the whole course of your life, right? You can't just pick and choose. You have no line-item veto over the things that happened to you in life.

• 8:13Ryan Holiday?

  So in that sense, you have to be grateful for the whole of it, because all of it made you who you were. All of it shaped who you are and will become. And so this sense of gratitude for everything, for the stuff we have, as well as the stuff we haven't had, as well as the experiences we've had. And as the different experiences that were out of reach or didn't happen to us, or the things we thought we wanted, but we didn't get, right? Gratitude for all of it, gratitude for what it is, because it made you who you were, and it couldn't have been any differently. The Stoics would say, this is what fate chose for you. This is how it worked out. There's no reason to feel anything but gratitude for this. And that's what amor fati is really about. I spent a lot of time journaling about this this week. I hope you do as well.

• 8:58Ryan Holiday?

  Enjoy, focus on gratitude. Enjoy what you have instead of lusting over the things you don't have. Keep working on it. I'll talk to you soon.

• 9:09Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. I just wanted to say, we so appreciate it. We love serving you. It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple of years we've been doing it. It's an honor. Please, spread the word. Tell people about it. And this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say, thank you.