It Asks This Of You

No one ever became excellent by chance, the Stoics said…so if you want to be courageous and disciplined and ethical, you gotta do the work.📖 Preorder the final book in Ryan Holiday's The Stoic Virtues Series: "Wisdom Takes Work": https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/wisdom-takes-work📚 The Four Stoic Virtues: Justice, Temperance, Wisdom, Courage, are timeless keys to living your best life. Pre-order the Limited Edition Stoic Virtues Series Today! | https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/stoic-virtues🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast🎥 Watch top moments from The Daily Stoic Podcast on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/📱 Follow 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.

• 0:05Ryan 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.

• 0:55Ryan Holiday?

  It asks this of you. The benefits are clear: resilience and toughness and clarity and productivity, freedom from disturbances, from following the crowd, from impulses and urges. Stoicism, it offers a lot. And that's why it's popular today, to be sure. And that's why it's been the secret weapon of impressive people for centuries. And of course, we talk about all those things here at Daily Stoic. These are the things that make for viral videos and cool quotes. And they may be what attracted you to Stoicism in the first place. But you need to know that Stoicism is more than just Marcus really's morning routine. There's more to Stoicism than Seneca's cold plunges

• 1:39Ryan Holiday?

  or all the practical advice he wrote to his friend Lucilius. Because while Stoicism offers a lot, it also asks a lot of us. In fact, it demands a lot. Thrasseus and Cato and Helvidius gave their lives and commitment to the ethical ideals of this philosophy. Musonius and Agrippinus and Rutilius were all exiled for their commitment. Marcus Aurelius writes more about justice than he does about mental toughness. That's obviously the idea in Right Thing Right Now, but the whole Stoic Virtue series, courage and discipline and justice and wisdom, they're all interrelated. They demand a lot from us as well as ask a lot from us.

• 2:21Ryan Holiday?

  And when Right Thing Right Now came out a year ago, I wasn't sure how it was going to do. I wasn't sure how people were going to receive it. But the point of the book was to demonstrate that Stoicism isn't some philosophy about how to become great at work, although it can help you that way. It's also a philosophy about being a great human being. And yes, Stoicism offers many benefits, and we talk about them here. Those benefits don't come without obligations, an obligation to other people, to truth, the decency, to selflessness in many cases, and you can't have one without the other. Just that you do the right thing, Marcus Aurelius says in Meditations, the rest doesn't matter. But how do you know what the right thing is? As I said, all these virtues are interrelated.

• 3:06Ryan Holiday?

  You know what the right thing is because of the next virtue. That's the one I've been working on the last two years. It's the virtue of wisdom. And wisdom isn't something you just have. It's something you have to earn. It's something you have to get, right? Wisdom is the result of work. No one became wise by chance, Seneca said. And one year anniversary of Right Thing Right Now, I am really excited to tell you that you can preorder Wisdom Takes Work with a bunch of awesome preorder bonuses. We've got signed, numbered first editions, and you can even get a full set of all four books. That's all very exciting. It's a limited collector's edition of all four books. Courage is calling, discipline is destiny.

• 3:50Ryan Holiday?

  Right Thing Right Now, and now Wisdom Takes Work. I actually was signing them today on my flight to Salt Lake City. You can grab all that at dailystoic.com/stoicvirtues. I'll link to that on the landing page, which you can also find at dailystoic.com/preorder. I'll link to all this. Anyways, it's all very exciting. I can't wait. Wait for you to read the book. It's going to come out this fall. I've been working on this series now for six years and I'm super proud of it. And I've been so honored to hear from all of you who've read the books and I've gotten so much better for writing it. And that's why I'm excited to bring Wisdom Takes Work out into the world and this four box set, which completes the whole series. Grab all that at DailyStoic.com/preorder.