It’s Not Romantic. It’s Just Work. |12 Ways Stoics Build Mental Strength And Resilience

We have a false picture about how success happens. We often only see the results and almost never the process of things, so we tend to think that the finished product—a book, being in shape, being wise—is impressive, and therefore the process by which that event was created must have been equally brilliant. In fact, it’s not. All success happens the same way: “action by action,” as Marcus said. Just after the release of Metallica’s eleventh album, Metallica’s Lars Ulrich explained the simple secret to their high output:See 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.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. On Tuesdays, we take a closer look at these Stoic ideas, how we can apply them in our actual lives. Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy.

• 0:26Speaker 00

  It's not romantic, it's just work. We have a false picture of how success happens. We see only the results and almost never the process of things. So we tend to think that the finished product, be it a book, or being in shape, or being wise, is impressive. And therefore, the process by which that event was created must have been equally brilliant. In fact, it's not. All success happens the same way, "action by action," as Marx really said. Just after the release of Metallica's 11th album, Metallica's Lars Ulrich explained the simple secret to their high output. "I wish I could romanticize it and tell you that we're sitting down and there's a destination, but it's basically just work," he said. "You

• 1:08Speaker 00

  write one song, then you write another song, and eventually you have an album." That's what the Stoics believed too, that the little things add up to make the big things. This is what Zeno meant when he said, "Well-being is realized by small steps, but truly is no small thing." That's what Seneca meant when he wrote, "Each day acquire something that will fortify you against poverty, against death, indeed against all other misfortunes." And he said to pick one thought each day to thoroughly digest, one gain a day, that's it. It's not romantic, it's just work. That's basically the idea behind the Daily Stoic. It's basically the idea behind the Daily Dad. People ask me how I produce all this stuff, and you know, I could romanticize it, but I really just

• 1:53Speaker 00

  sit down and I write a bunch of them. I write one a day, two a day, three, I write a bunch, they go into the folder, I'm recording this right now off the spreadsheet that I have. It's gonna go in the pile and get processed and come out the other side, and you'll listen to it. It's not romantic. It's basically just work. And I appreciate everyone supporting. If you haven't read The Daily Stoic, you can grab that anywhere books are sold, including signed copies from The Painted Porch. You can grab The Daily Dad, which just came out. Get The Daily Stoic Calendar, a bunch of other awesome stuff. But I appreciate the support and I do the work. You listen to it and here we go.

• 2:28Ryan Holiday?

  The whole point of philosophy, the whole point of self-improvement is to get to a place where you're able to say, ah, yes, this is what I prepared for. When the adversity comes, are you ready for it?

• 2:41Ryan Holiday?

  Life isn't fair. Never has been and it never will be. But certainly it's more unfair for some than others. Marcus really doesn't choose to be emperor. He doesn't choose to lose his father at a young age. He doesn't choose for there to be a plague. He doesn't choose to be betrayed by his best friends. He doesn't choose any of this. But this is nothing compared to Epictetus. Epictetus, the great Roman Stoic, is born a slave. He's born a slave in one of the worst times you could ever be a slave. Then when he finally gets his freedom, he's exiled. That is the fate of human beings, to deal with things that are outside of our control. And not just to deal with them, but to overcome them, to bounce back from them,

• 3:23Ryan Holiday?

  to be made better and stronger for having gone through them. That's really the definition of resilience. And there's nobody better than Epictetus to teach us about that. I'm Ryan Holiday. I've written books about Stoic philosophy. I've been lucky enough to talk about it to the NDA, the NFL, sitting senators and special forces leaders. And in today's episode, we're going to talk about cultivating the mental toughness, the physical resilience, the spiritual strength, not just to survive what life throws at us, but to thrive because of and through what life throws at us and to follow the powerful lessons and most of all, the example of Epictetus.

• 4:07Ryan Holiday?

  Epictetus said that our first task in life, the first job of a philosopher is what? He said, "It's to separate things into two categories: what's up to us, what's not up to us." And you want to think about it. Is this thing up to me? Do I need to have an opinion about it? Just caring about it? Just getting upset about it? Just trying to change it? Does it actually have any impact? If it doesn't have any impact, you let it go. It doesn't concern you. It doesn't change who you are as a person. And so when he's saying that you focus on what's in your control and what's up to you, to me, this is really a resource allocation issue. If you have 100 energy points, every energy point you spend on things that are not up to you is giving an advantage to your opponent, to the world. It's taking away from the things that are up to you. So I think about this chief task,

• 4:52Ryan Holiday?

  this dichotomy of control, as the first resource advantage that we have as productive people. But it's also, as Epictetus says, our first task as a philosopher.

• 5:05Ryan Holiday?

  Some questions to ask yourself every single day from the Stoics. Number one, is this in my control? Epictetus says, "The chief task in life is to separate what's in our control from what's outside our control." Two, is this essential? Do I actually have to do it? Does it actually matter? Is this getting me closer to what is important in life? Three, what is the worst-case scenario? That's the exercise of premeditatio malorum, planning in advance for adversity. And then Seneca also says, "You should ask yourself at the end of each day, where did I fall short? Where did I improve? And where can I do better?"

• 5:43Ryan Holiday?

  The secret to life, Epictetus said, was two words. Two things explain everything you should do in all situations. And he said those two words were simple: persist and resist. Meaning, some things you have to endure, you have to do even though they're really hard. And then other things you have to stop doing, even though it's really hard to do them. Persist and resist. He was really talking about the virtue of temperance or self-discipline, self-mastery, right? And his point was that if we could do that, if we could persist in some things and resist other things, we could become what we're truly capable of becoming. That's what the new book, Discipline is Destiny, is actually about. But this virtue of temperance, self-discipline, self-command, it's everything. It's deterministic and predictive. It will make you better at what you do. It will make whatever you do

• 6:28Ryan Holiday?

  great if complemented by self-command and self-discipline.

• 6:35Ryan Holiday?

  I moved to New Orleans more than 10 years ago. I lived in this little apartment building. And one of the things I did when I moved here was I didn't tell a single person that I was writing a book for two Stoic reasons. Number one, I found out afterwards that a bunch of my friends thought that I just didn't have a job. They thought I was basically just a bum, which is an important Stoic concept. Epictetus says, "If you wish to improve, if you wish to become good at something, you must be content to be seen as stupid or foolish." I didn't care what anyone thought about me. I knew the work that I was doing. I knew that it would pay off eventually. And when the announcement came out, everyone was surprised, "Oh, Ryan was working on something. He wasn't just hanging out in his apartment." And then number two, a Stoic doesn't talk about it. A Stoic is about it. I've always believed that talking about what you're doing and doing it, fight for the same resources. So I didn't want to get credit for writing a book. I didn't want people to ask me about the book.

• 7:20Ryan Holiday?

  I didn't want validation for the book. I wanted to spend every day actually working on the project. That's what paid off. That's what put me on the track that I eventually got on. That's why I never talk about what I'm doing until after I've done it, and you probably shouldn't either.

• 7:36Speaker 02

  Question I most frequently ask about my experience is, "How do you do that?" And in my mind, the answer to that question is very simple. We did what we had to do. We did our best. We chose to grow through that experience. We kept our sense of humor. We kept the faith. I keep telling the story and I go through that framework and I keep hooking back into what I know is going on. At some point, I then say, "A, and oh, by the way." Those are all matter of choice. The question would be better if I ask it like this. "How do you choose to deal with your problems? How do you choose to get yourself through your situation? How do you choose to deal with the pressure in your life?" Now, what happens to us in our lives may well be beyond our control and often are. But the ways we choose to deal with these things are always within our control.

• 8:20Ryan Holiday?

  One of Stockdale's favorite Epictetus quotes, he says, "A podium in a prison is each a place." He knew this, he was a slave himself. "In that place, we still maintain a certain freedom of choice." We don't control what happens, basically, but we control how we respond.

• 8:35Speaker 02

  How we respond.

• 8:40Ryan Holiday?

  Commander James Stockdale is shot down over Vietnam. And as he's parachuting down into death or capture, he actually says to himself, "I'm leaving the world of technology, entering the world of Epictetus." He saw even then that it was an opportunity to practice the philosophy of Stoicism that he'd studied as a grad student. But I think the most fascinating part of Stockdale in this prison camp, where he spends seven years being tortured near death, is he says to himself, although the optimists in the camp got crushed, the people who thought it'd be over soon, the people who thought it'd be easy, the people that thought rescue was right around the corner. He said, "I wasn't an optimist in that sense." He said, "I unflinchingly accepted the reality of my situation." But he said, "I also knew that if I survived,

• 9:24Ryan Holiday?

  I was going to behave in such a way and respond to the adversity that I faced in a way that meant this was an event that in retrospect I would not trade." He decided to see it as an opportunity. He decided to be transformed by the harrowing ordeal that he went through. He decided to rise up and be good, to do good through the terribleness of his experience. They call this the Stockdale paradox, but it's really the essence of Stoicism, that we don't control what happens to us, but we control how we respond to what happens to us. We don't control the material we're given, but we control what we make of that material. And Stockdale is an incredible example of how a man in harrowing, horrible conditions turned it into a platform and an opportunity

• 10:08Ryan Holiday?

  for great heroism and kindness and resilience and strength.

• 10:16Ryan Holiday?

  So my favorite thing about Epictetus is he's born a slave, and he finds himself a slave in the court of Nero. So here you have this guy. He has no power, no freedom, amidst incredible wealth, power, and opulence. But he comes to realize, watching how people act in Nero's court, that these supposedly free people aren't nearly as free as he thinks. He watches a man suck up to Nero's cobbler, like he's brown-nosing the guy who makes Nero's shoes because he wants to get in Nero's favor. One man comes to Nero and says, "I'm down to..." To my last million dollars. And then Nero says, oh, my God, how can you bear it? Right? Epictetus realizes, although he's been deprived of his physical freedom, he's actually less of a slave than all of these people,

• 10:59Ryan Holiday?

  who are slave to their ambitions, slave to power, slave to impressing other people, a slave to appearances, a slave to urges or mistresses. And so Epictetus realizes that freedom comes from the inside. Yes, people can bind us up in chains, he says. They can't remove our power of choice. They can't change our ability to make our decisions, to set our own priorities. That's what Stoicism is actually about. And that's why the philosophy is popular, not just with Epictetus as slave, but Marcus Aurelius, who's an emperor later in that same court.

• 11:34Ryan Holiday?

  Epictetus says that you must undergo a hard winter's training. He was referring to how soldiers would train in the winter when they weren't at battle, so they could be prepared when the battle did come. That's what practice is. That's what training is. That's what all of this is about, is preparing for that big day. Epictetus is the whole point of philosophy, the whole point of self-improvement is to get to a place where you're able to say, ah, yes, this is what I prepared for. When the adversity comes, are you ready for it? Have you put in the hours? Have you put in the training? Have you prepared for this exact circumstances? Because the one who has done that is the one that will win. Bill Bradley says this. When you are not practicing, you have to realize, he says, that somewhere someone else is practicing.

• 12:19Ryan Holiday?

  And when you meet that person, they will beat you. You have to be willing to sacrifice. You have to be willing to put in the hours. You have to be prepared. So when that thing happens, when the day comes, you are ready.

• 12:34Ryan Holiday?

  There's a great story about Epictetus. He's in his house one night, and he hears that someone's breaking in. He rushes there and he sees that a thief has run off with his prized silver lamp. And you might think he's upset, that he feels violated. Instead, Epictetus says, you can only lose what you have. And the next day, he goes out and he buys a cheaper lamp. He says that having something he was afraid of having stolen, that was on him. So when you think about your possessions, You have to think about the cost of ownership. And often, the cost isn't just the insurance or the upkeep. It's the anxiety. It's the worry. It's the wanting to hold them close so someone doesn't take it. Do you own your possessions, or do your possessions own you? The Stoics wanted to be free. And that's why Seneca says, you know, slavery resides under marble and gold.

• 13:17Ryan Holiday?

  Because often, being rich, being successful, having everything you think you want is actually an incredible burden. It's incredibly stressful, and it's not a reward for hard work at all.

• 13:30Ryan Holiday?

  People ask me as a runner if I'm like training for a marathon. And I think people struggle with the idea of doing something because you enjoy doing the thing, and the thing makes you better. They want to have an external goal. They want to have some sort of validation. There has to be a race where you're competing and trying to beat everyone else. To me, the marathon is waking up every day and doing the thing. As the Stoics say, that's in my control. I control that. Even an injury, I can push through that. But if my metric is qualifying for something, beating other people, being accepted to something, well, then I've handed over the control to something else. And I've also taken this thing that I enjoy doing and turned it into a thing that other people have influence or control. I've turned it into a job, so to speak. I have no problem with people who race and do those other things. If that's what motivates you, great.

• 14:13Ryan Holiday?

  But for me, I try to keep my motivation intrinsic. Epictetus says, if you want to win, find a competition in which you are the only one in it. And that's how I think about physical fitness. That's how I think about running. That's how I think about exercise. And that's also how I think about writing, and it's how I think about my work.

• 14:30Ryan Holiday?

  I think at the center of all philosophy is really the ability to think about your own thoughts. You have this thing going in your head. You have these reactions. You have these impulses. Do you act on them unthinkingly? Or can you hold up the impression and put it to the test? As Epictetus says, can you think about your own emotions? Do you have that break that allows you to stop yourself from going into a pattern, into a cycle, into an overreaction? And so really, I think Stoicism is the ability to think about what you're thinking. Stoics refer to our sort of the command center of the mind, the ruling reason. Is that in charge? Are you in charge? Or are your passions in charge? Are other? People in charge. So the core of Stoicism is that the ability to think about what you're thinking

• 15:12Ryan Holiday?

  and to decide what actions you want to take based on that thinking. If you can get there, you're wiser than most. You're wiser than me most of the time. You're wiser than some of the wisest people who've ever lived. Can you think about what you're thinking, when you're thinking it, and act accordingly?

• 15:30Ryan Holiday?

  Joy or happiness or delight, that's not an emotion we associate with the Stoics. But the Stoics experienced that epictetus says, "Me, I delight in my own improvement day to day." I love that. His delight wasn't coming from money or fame or recognition or pleasure. It was from getting better every day. It was from improving. It was from fulfilling his potential. It wasn't based on externals, as the Stoics warn us against. It was based on the inner work he could do on himself. It was knowing that he was becoming a little bit better, a little bit wiser, a little bit more self-controlled, self-contained, a little more resilient. That's where the Stoic finds joy and happiness and pleasure.

• 16:13Ryan Holiday?

  When I wrote The Daily Stoic eight years ago, I had this crazy idea that I would just keep it going. The book was 366 meditations, but I'd write one more every single day and I'd give it away for free as an email. I thought maybe a few people would sign up. Couldn't have even comprehended a future in which three-quarters of a million people would get this email every single day and would for almost a decade. If you want to get the email, if you want to be part of a community that is the largest group of Stoics ever assembled in human history, I'd love for you to join us. You can sign up and get the email totally for free. No spam. You can unsubscribe whenever you want at dailystoic.com/email.