How To Train Yourself | 4 (Stoic) Secrets To The Good Life

You don't lift a weight one time and become strong. You aren’t taught something once and it stays in your mind forever. You don’t do the right thing once and it becomes a lifelong habit. It would be nice if it worked that way, but it doesn’t. Many, many more reps are required. In life and in philosophy. It’s about taking the right actions and holding yourself to the highest standard, day by day by day. Today, Ryan outlines the 4 Stoic virtues that will improve your life, if you live by them.📙 For a limited time, you can purchase The Daily Stoic ebook for only $1.99 on Kindle✉️ 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, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. On Tuesdays, we take a closer look at these Stoic ideas, how we can apply them in our actual lives. Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy.

• 0:31Ryan Holiday?

  How to Train Yourself

• 0:35Ryan Holiday?

  You don't lift a weight one time and become strong. You aren't taught to do something once and it stays in your mind forever. You don't do the right thing once and it becomes a lifelong habit. It would be nice if things worked that way, but they don't. Many, many, many more reps are required, in life and in philosophy. As Epictetus said, "Philosophy is a hard winter's training, practice that a soldier does in the safety of camp so that they may draw on it in the heat of battle." "You must linger among a limited number of master thinkers and digest their works," Seneca said, "if you would derive ideas which shall win firm hold in your mind." Stoicism then is designed to be a practice

• 1:18Ryan Holiday?

  and a routine. It's not a philosophy you read once and magically understand at the soul level. No, it's a lifelong pursuit that requires diligence and repetition and concentration. Pierre Hadow, the French philosopher, called this "spiritual exercising." And this is one of the ideas behind The Daily Stoic. Since we published it seven years ago, The Daily Stoic has sold well over a million copies and spent more weeks on the bestseller list than any book about Stoicism ever. And of course, that's a testament to the timeless ideas in Stoicism above all, but it's also a testament to the power of combining the right idea with the right medium. Training is difficult, and when there are

• 2:00Ryan Holiday?

  obstacles or friction in the way of doing it, people will find a way not to do it. And that's why I've put so much time and energy into making the ideas and process as accessible as possible. I put out Stoic Lessons every day on the Daily Stoic Podcast and on the Instagram and on TikTok and YouTube and every other medium. It's why Daily Stoics have been translated into 40 languages and why we created the leather edition to stand the test of time. And I've got some exciting news today. So price isn't an excuse. I got my publisher to discount the Daily Stoic ebook to $1.99 in the US and the UK for just a few days, which you can check out. I'll link to it in today's show notes, or just go to Amazon, or wherever you get your ebooks. But the idea is that every

• 2:45Ryan Holiday?

  day, all over the world, literally millions of people are practicing Stoicism together, going through the same spiritual exercises that Marcus Aurelius was doing in Rome, or Zeno was doing in Athens thousands of years ago. They were training themselves, challenging themselves, lingering on the master thinkers, building muscle memory, so that they can draw on that strength when they need it. Will you join them? Will you put in your reps? I hope so. Join all the people who've read the Daily Stoic. This is the cheapest it will ever be. We try to do this once a year, so if you missed it in past years, now's your chance. $1.99 as an ebook anywhere books are sold. Obviously, you can get the hardcover anywhere books are sold. I'll sign it if you buy it at store.dailystoic.com,

• 3:30Ryan Holiday?

  or you can get the leather edition, which I'm super proud of. That's what I have on my desk here. That's what I often give as gifts to people who are interested in finding out about Stoicism. You can find that in the Daily Stoic store as well. But I'll jump on this. It's only going to last for a couple of days to kick off the new year, and I hope you like it.

• 3:56Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. When we hear this word virtue, right, we think one thing, but for the Stoics, they'd argue that virtue was was four things. And then beneath those four virtues, there were sub virtues. That's obviously what I'm writing about a lot these days. Courage is Calling is about the first virtue. Courage. Discipline is Destiny is about the second virtue of self, self-discipline or temperance. I'm writing now about justice. I won't leak the title to you just yet. Then the third, the fourth book in the series will be about wisdom. But in today's episode, I want to talk about those four virtues, how we live by them, how we live up to them, how we act with them. The four Stoic virtues that will improve your life and in improving your

• 4:41Ryan Holiday?

  life in guiding and inspiring your behavior, I know will make the world a better place. Touchstones of goodness, as Marcus Aurelius called them, but let's just get into it. Here are four Stoic secrets to the good life.

• 5:00Ryan Holiday?

  I think C.S. Lewis is right when he says that courage is all of the virtues at their testing point, right? It takes courage to pursue truth in the world. It takes courage to fight for the right thing. It takes courage to be disciplined in a time of excess. And when I think of the Stoics, I think of them defined as they were in these moments of courage. Thrasya challenging Nero. Marcus Aurelius having empire foisted upon him and stepping up, dreaming that he has shoulders made of ivory, getting over his doubts and imposter syndrome and choosing to do it. I think of Seneca bravely facing his death when Nero's goons came to kill him.

• 5:40Ryan Holiday?

  I think of Cato resisting Julius Caesar and fighting to the death. I think of Epictetus living through slavery and not being broken by it. It takes courage to live in this world. And in fact, Seneca says that. He says, "Sometimes it takes courage just to stay alive in this world." And I think it's true. You think of the pandemic, you think of economic uncertainty, you think of what it takes to start a business or to raise a family or to talk to a stranger across the room. Life demands courage because the world is a scary, unpredictable place. And the Stoics knew this. They lived in times that were more unpredictable, that were more capricious.

• 6:20Ryan Holiday?

  They had tyrants and they had mobs and they had death and disease that make our cushy modern times seem pale in comparison. So one requires courage to live in this world.

• 6:36Ryan Holiday?

  So if C.S. Lewis said that courage is all the virtues at their testing point, you could argue that wisdom is equally critical in that it's how you understand what the other virtues are. Without the ability to learn, that's what wisdom is, the love of knowledge, the love of truth. Without this, how does one know anything? Without the ability to read, without the ability to interpret information, without the ability to get to the bottom of something, to study it. Epictetus would also say that sort of the chief task of the philosophers is to be able to think about their own thoughts. So it's not just what you consume. All of that is super important, but without the ability to have self-awareness, to examine oneself, what good is all of that? The Stoics approached things from a mindset of humility and self-awareness.

• 7:21Ryan Holiday?

  Epictetus says it's impossible to learn that which we think we already know. In that sense, Socrates, one of the sort of forbearers of Stoicism, is an illustrative example. This idea that our wisdom comes from our lack of wisdom. By admitting how little we know, we're able to learn more. Conceit, the Stoics thought, was the impediment to wisdom, the impediment to virtue. If you think you're perfect, if you think you know everything, you can't get any better and you can't improve. So the Stoics are on this lifelong journey of self-improvement, of self-discovery of knowledge, and that's what wisdom is. That's what allows us to know what cause is just or unjust, what the right amount of courage in a situation is, what to engage in, how to engage, what the right amount of it is. So without wisdom,

• 8:05Ryan Holiday?

  all the other virtues are pointless. Conversely, wisdom is what helps us understand what and how to wield the other virtues.

• 8:14Ryan Holiday?

  In a world of distraction and excess, self-discipline is a critical virtue. Stoicism is about an imposed self-discipline. Dwight Eisenhower famously said that freedom is really the opportunity for self-discipline. That's what virtue is. It's you deciding what you're going to do and not do. Epictetus famously said that Stoicism could be summed up in two key words: persist and resist. Some things you do, you keep doing, even when it's hard, even when you don't To say getting up early, persevering on a difficult project in some things you don't do. You don't do hard drugs, or you don't cheat on your spouse. Temperance has this

• 8:55Ryan Holiday?

  kind of negative connotation, right? We think that temperance is like the temperance movement, which banned alcohol in the United States. No, temperance for the Stoics is about moderation, it's about self-control. Seneca talks about like, what's the proper limits for a person? Epictetus talks about not setting your heart on so many things, about constraining your desires, about being in control of yourself. Self-discipline is having the fortitude, the strength, the will to avoid the wrong thing. Marcus really specifically learns about temperance from Antoninus, who he said, "He admired his ability to enjoy the things that people had trouble enjoying and abstain from the things that most people had trouble abstaining from." To me, that's the perfect definition of temperance and self-control,

• 9:39Ryan Holiday?

  which I think Cicero properly defines as a polish on life. It is the polish on a good person. We admire the people who, despite their success, despite their wealth, despite their fame, despite their power, are in control of themselves and their urges and their desires.

• 9:56Ryan Holiday?

  You know, Stoicism is a philosophy of rugged individualism, sure, but the Stoics return to this idea of the common good over and over and over again. Marcus really says that the fruit of this good life is good character and acts for the common good. In fact, the key difference between the Stoics and the Epicureans is that one was involved in civic life, tried to contribute to the palace, to the city, and the other sort of retreated to their own individual spiritual development. So justice is this key virtue. I think when the Stoics are talking about justice, they mean it in the social contract sense of the word. They mean it in the sense of the golden rule, how we treat people, the ethical standards

• 10:39Ryan Holiday?

  that we guide our own behavior by. Marcus really says, "It's just that you do the right thing, the rest doesn't matter." That's what I think he means by justice. You think- Of Cato, who refuses to take bribes, who fights to preserve the Roman Republic, the old ways of doing things. You think of Marcus Aurelius, in the depths of the Antonine Plague, selling off the palace furnishings to pay down Rome's debts. How different that is than the corrupt leaders who spent frivolously on themselves, who indulged a life of luxury. To me, there's a sign down the street from my house in Austin, where I like to go running. And it was put there by the football player, Hollywood Henderson, and it says, "Leave this place better than you found it."

• 11:23Ryan Holiday?

  To me, that's the embodiment of the Stoic idea of justice. I think it's also important that justice isn't just about ourselves, our own sphere of interests. Marcus Aurelius famously says in Meditations, as he's listing what justice is, he says, "And remember that you can commit an injustice by doing nothing, by being indifferent, by being too ruggedly individualistic, by caring only about yourself, by focusing so narrowly on what's up to you right now that's easy." And this is a criticism against the Stoics as well. I mean, Marx Jewish doesn't do anything about slavery. He's a reader of Epictetus, and he never seems to question whether a human being should be able to own another human being. Doesn't seem to question

• 12:07Ryan Holiday?

  the brutality of the wars that he fought in. But that's the idea, that you're supposed to commit justice with what you do, but remembering that being too selfish, ignoring, not following these Stoic principles can also contribute to injustice in the world, and that's not good either. Thanks so much for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. If you don't know this, you can get these delivered to you via email every day. Check it out at dailystoic.com/email.