It’s Never Too Late To Learn

Ryan discusses the importance of always continuing your education, on today’s Daily Stoic Podcast. Check out the Read To Lead Reading Challenge at: https://dailystoic.com/readSign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://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.

• 0:05Ryan 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 at DailyStoic.com.

• 0:27Ryan Holiday?

  It's never too late to learn. From the time he was a small boy, Marcus Aurelius's life had been shaped around the educational process. He had tutors. He had an ascending ladder of jobs designed to teach him. He read books. He attended philosophy lectures. Even after he became emperor, Marcus kept advisors and experts around him. So you might think eventually, as he got older, that he would have tired of this, or at least tapered off. He was pretty smart at this point, right? He was, after all, further along the path of wisdom than just about anyone who had ever held his job before or since. But no, that's not what happened. The opposite did. Even well into old age, we're told that Marcus kept learning.

• 1:10Ryan Holiday?

  A friend once spotted Marcus heading out on an errand. "What are you doing?" he asked. "It's good even for an old man to learn," Marcus replied. "I am now on my way to Sextus the philosopher to learn that which I do not yet know." It's a stunning scene, particularly after a parade of so many close-minded and ignorant emperors. "Oh, Zeus," his friend exclaimed, "the king of the Romans in his old age takes up his tablets and goes to school." "If Marcus can do it, so can you. It's never too late to learn. We're never too old to go to school. Education is something we're doing for life," Seneca said, "not for graduation. So we must never stop. We must never think that we've learned all there is to know.

• 1:54Ryan Holiday?

  We must never think we are too important to keep challenging ourselves. There's always time to learn what we do not know." And of course, this is the principle that we built our Read to Lead course around Truman's idea that not all readers are leaders, but all leaders have to learn. Have to be readers, all leaders have to be learning constantly. And the best way to learn and read and pursue this sort of path of wisdom is to have a practice, a process by which you learn. That's what we built this course around. You can check it out at dailystoic.com/reading. And it's two weeks of really great thinking, exercises, challenges that will make you a better reader, make you a better thinker, and ultimately, a better leader. So check that out. And of course, remember, all Daily Stoic Life members get all our courses for free.

• 2:39Ryan Holiday?

  So you can sign up at dailystoiclife.com.