It Doesn’t Matter What You Do, It Matters How You Do It | Practice True Joy

Ryan talks about the why the Stoics stress the importance of taking action, 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. One of the things I'm always jealous of when I read the ancients is their proficiency in other languages. Marcus Aurelius speaks Latin, but he writes meditations in Greek to himself beautifully. One thing that I think humbles us, but also makes us better, is learning languages.

• 0:49Ryan Holiday?

  Babbel, the language learning app, has sold more than 10 million subscriptions for this reason. It takes 15-minute lessons that are designed to help you learn a new language on the go. Other language learning apps use AI for their lesson plans, but Babbel lessons were created with over 100 different language experts, and their teaching method has been scientifically proven to be effective. You can choose from 14 languages, Spanish, French, Italian, and German, and their speech recognition technology helps you improve your pronunciation and accent. Start your new language learning journey today with Babbel. Right now, when you purchase a three-month Babbel subscription, you get an additional three months free, six months for the price of three. Just go to babbel.com and use promo code STOIC. Babbel.com code STOIC. Babbel, language for life.

• 1:36Ryan Holiday?

  It doesn't matter what you do, it matters how you do it. The occupations of the three most well-known Stoics could not be more different. Seneca was a playwright, a wealthy landowner, and a political advisor. Epictetus was a former slave who became a philosophy teacher. Marcus Aurelius would have loved to be a philosopher, but instead found himself wearing the purple cloak of the emperor. Xeno was a prosperous merchant. Cleiantheus was a water carrier. Cato was a senator. The modern Stoics include James Stockdale, a fighter pilot, and Tim Ferriss, a writer and technology investor. These jobs have very little in common. The lifestyles they support are vastly different as well.

• 2:19Ryan Holiday?

  So are the opportunities, the temptations, the frustrations, and the stresses which they produce. But none of that matters. Neither does your job or the lifestyle it provides. What matters is how you do that job and how you respond to the situations it puts you in. Marcus Aurelius wrote himself that it was possible to live a good life anywhere, including in the complicated and intoxicating halls of power. He mostly proved that true. Sadly, Seneca often fell short in the same hallways. It doesn't matter whether you're a janitor or a junior senator. It doesn't matter whether you're negotiating a multimillion-dollar deal or negotiating traffic on the way to your unpaid internship.

• 3:02Ryan Holiday?

  What matters is what you do with this. What matters is how you do it. Wherever you are, whatever you're doing, it's possible to live a good life, to be a good Stoic. It's not easy, but it's possible.

• 3:16Ryan Holiday?

  Practice true joy. This is this week's meditation from the Daily Stoic Journal, 366 days of writing and reflection on the art of living. There is no audiobook of this journal, so the weekly podcast episode is the only way to hear this sort of weekly meditation that we do inside the journal. And it's always been weird for me. I don't know if I should call the journal that I wrote a book. It's 20,000 words. It's got writing in it. Is it a journal or is it a book? In any case, here is today's meditation. The Stoics held joy to be one of the good passions worthy of practice in everyday life. But Stoic joy isn't about the delights of the senses or material pleasures.

• 4:00Ryan Holiday?

  To Marcus Aurelius, joy was being kind to others. To Seneca, it was freedom from fear or suffering and death. "Let's laugh with Democritus," a Seneca says, "and engage in our proper human work with joy." So consider making your study of philosophy this week around the idea of where you might find joy and what good you might find to do with it. And here's Marcus Aurelius on meditations. "Joy for human beings lies in proper human work, and proper human work consists in acts of kindness to other human beings, disdain for the stirring of the senses, and identifying trustworthy impressions, and contemplating the natural order in all that happens in keeping with it." Then we have Seneca in his Moral Letters.

• 4:44Ryan Holiday?

  He says, "Trust me, real joy is a serious thing. Do you think that someone can, in the charming expression, blithely dismiss death with an easy disposition? Or swing open the door to poverty, keeping pleasures in check? Or meditate on the endurance of suffering? The one who is comfortable with turning these thoughts over is truly full of joy, but hardly cheerful. It's exactly such a joy that I would wish for you to possess, for it will never truly run dry once you've laid claim to its source." And finally, we have Seneca in On Tranquility of Mind. He says, "Heraclitus would shed tears whenever he went out in public. Democritus laughed. One saw the whole as a parade of miseries, the other of follies. And so we shall take a lighter view of things and bear them with an easy spirit,

• 5:29Ryan Holiday?

  for it is more human to laugh at life than to lament it." There is this sense, right? That the Stoics are joyless, that the Stoics are humorlessness, that the Stoics don't appreciate existence, that they're just here beasts of burden, unfeeling, and ready to face death with barely a whimper. But I think there's, first off, too much humor in the Stoics, whether it's Marcus Aurelius or Seneca, or of course Chrysippus, who allegedly died laughing at some inside joke whose meaning barely even survives to us. I just don't think that the Stoics were without joy. You could look at Seneca's enormous parties.

• 6:13Ryan Holiday?

  You know, he famously has like 300 ivory tables as hypocrisy, or it could be an insight to a side of the Stoics that perhaps doesn't appear in their writing very much, but clearly was a big part of their existence, which was, you know, socializing and connecting and having fun with people. But I think what the Stoics, what Seneca most of all is trying to say here is that, is that joy is not hedonism, it's not just pure happiness and lightness. The joy comes from that place of resilience, from removing the unnecessary disturbances that cause misery. And probably define Stoic joy as the absence of misery that a lot of people experience,

• 6:57Ryan Holiday?

  whether it's fear, or anger, or jealousy, or anxiety. Instead of like, joy is drinking, joy is luxury, joy is parties. I think for the Stoics, it was, joy was the absence of the longing for those things, or anything that made you unhappy. But then, we have to add in Marcus Aurelius's wrinkle, which I think Marcus truly found, although he seems to be an introverted, quiet person who loved his books, he clearly found joy in being of service, helping people, of making the world better. And we have to see that as a key part of our, of our role, you know?

• 7:42Ryan Holiday?

  As an introvert myself, I do empathize with that expression, that hell is other people, that life is easier when you focus on your stuff. But this is also its own form of misery ultimately, because it makes you lonely, it deprives you of purpose, it deprives you of connection. The Stoics did celebrate joy, they did believe it was an important passion, an important part of life. They just would have disagreed with the Epicureans, who seemed to find joy in external things, external pleasures, external experiences. I think for the Stoics, joy was something deeper. It was a way of living, it was a way of thinking, it was a deeper emanation of self-sufficiency,

• 8:26Ryan Holiday?

  but also connection, a locking in on one's purpose, doing the work that one is put here to do. And Marcus Aurelius says, "The fruit of this life is good character and acts for the common good." I think he's also talking about what gives him joy and what makes him happy in this life. And I hope you find the same thing. Seek out joy, don't, certainly don't disdain joy, and certainly don't think that this philosophy is about not experiencing the joy. I wish you much happiness and joy, you deserve it. My life is better when I have it. And it's something that I, that I actually actively have to work on, and so do you.

• 9:03Ryan Holiday?

  Thanks so much for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Again, if you don't know this, you can get these delivered to you via email every day. Just go to dailystoic.com/email. So check it out.