How Will This Change You?

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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength, insight, and wisdom in everyday life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us, dailystoic.com.

• 0:30Ryan Holiday?

  How will this change you? John Profumo screwed up. He had an affair with what turned out to be a spy. He lied about it. And as a result, the prime minister lost his job. The country was embarrassed. He was canceled, driven into political exile from which he was never able to return. Did he deserve all that? Maybe, probably. But what's interesting is what happened after, because instead of licking his wounds, instead of being angry, instead of nursing many grievances, what John Profumo did instead was go to work at Toynbee Hall, a poverty-fighting charity in England. And for the next 40 years, he was the charity's single-longest-serving volunteer, working

• 1:11Ryan Holiday?

  his way up from manual labor to its chief fundraiser, almost entirely without recognition or fanfare. This is a story I tell in Right Thing Right Now, a book about the Stoic virtue of justice, which you can, of course, preorder right now. The reason I tell it, though, is so rare, because here we have someone engulfed in scandal and shame, largely of his own making. And instead of being made worse by it, instead of trying to settle scores or prove people wrong, he just decided to become better for it. Someone who quietly, diligently decided not to be defined by what happened to him, at least to himself, anyway. He did try to prove people wrong, but only in the sense that he tried to prove that he was not who he was at his worst moment.

• 1:54Ryan Holiday?

  Marcus Aurelius talks in Meditations about how events can only harm you if they harm your character. He talks about how the best revenge is not to be like that. And it's so easy in the middle of a scandal or after a huge mistake to double down, to make it all about you, to become bitter and angry about the unfairness of it all. Profumo didn't do that. Instead, he made something positive out of it. He showed his true character. He got revenge not on his political enemies, but on the old version of himself. And that's why seeing justice as a way of being about how you treat others, about what you do is so important. It's why Marx realized called it the source of all the other virtues. Because how could we become better versions of ourselves? How can we reach the heights of our potential if we can't admit our past blunders? If we can't make amends with others?

• 2:39Ryan Holiday?

  If we can't own the unpleasant responsibility of who we've been? Justice, as the Stoics understood, is the foundation to true self-improvement, which is what I wrote the new book about. Right Thing Right Now: Good Values, Good Character, Good Deeds. Profumo's character appears there midway through part three, I think. I just found him as a heroic, fascinating person. I once gave a talk at Clevedon in the English countryside. And I sat around the swimming pool where the scandal supposedly was first unearthed. So, sorry to break the fourth wall here, but I wanted to tell you about the new book. It's all about the Stoic virtue of justice. Of course, not justice in the legal sense, but it's who we are in moments like this that it's really about.

• 3:24Ryan Holiday?

  And I'm so excited for you to check it out. We've got a bunch of awesome preorder bonuses, including signed numbered first editions. If you buy, I think, five copies, you can get pages from the manuscript. You may even get an edited page from this very story that I just told. And we ran out of the signed numbered first editions on Discipline and Courage, so grab them while you can. And I can't wait to hear what you think of the book. I'm really excited. So grab that at dailystoic.com/justice. Right Thing Right Now: Good Values, Good Character, Good Deeds. Comes out on June 11th, but it would be awesome if you could preorder it before then, because that's how the publisher decides how many to print, with the bestseller list tracked and all that kind of stuff. So it would just be awesome. And I just can't wait for you to hear the book.