Investigate Yourself First

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

• 0:05Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a Stoic-inspired meditation, designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life. Each one of these episodes is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women, help you learn from them, to follow in their example, and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. For more, visit DailyStoic.com.

• 0:56Ryan Holiday?

  Investigate yourself first. The world is full of mysteries. There's so much to learn, so much to discover. There are libraries of things to read about every day, brings countless news stories to follow. Do UFOs exist? What's going on with this scandal or that one? Who do you think is to blame for this or that? And while the Stoics were certainly curious and intellectual people, they tried to ignore a lot of that. Why? Because they had plenty of other questions they needed answers to first, questions that pertain more to self-awareness and self-actualization than being informed. "In fact, I am dealing with those more important issues," Seneca wrote, "the ones that soothe the mind. And I investigate myself first, and then," he said, "the cosmos."

• 1:41Ryan Holiday?

  Look, the man was a plugged-in power broker who also published a multi-volume series on natural history and biology, so he was hardly ignorant. He just tried to remind himself that his first job was to understand himself, was to solve the problems of living, before he then distracted himself with the issues of the universe.

• 1:59Ryan Holiday?

  In our very busy, very noisy, and very confusing modern world, this is a great model to follow. We ought to investigate ourselves first. Get to the bottom of what's happening in here first, rather than obsess about and despair over what's happening out there.