It's Ok To Stumble | A Little Better Every Day

Ryan explains why it’s ok to mess up, and reads this week’s meditation from The Daily Stoic Journal, on today’s Daily Stoic Podcast. For ONE WEEK ONLY, you can sign up and immediately begin the 2022 Daily Stoic New Year New You Challenge at your own pace. It’s 3 weeks of actionable challenges, presented in an email per day, built around the best, most timeless wisdom in Stoic philosophy. Just go to https://dailystoic.com/challenge to sign up. 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. It's okay to stumble. Marcus Aurelius wasn't perfect. He screwed up a lot, a lot, a lot. And we know this from meditations. That's why it's filled with admonishments for losing his temper, for being lazy, for temptations,

• 0:48Ryan Holiday?

  for all sorts of bad habits or destructive thought patterns. With so many responsibilities competing for his time and attention, he was guilty, as we all have been, of letting his good intentions slide. Despite our better judgment and best intentions, life has a nasty habit of getting in the way and sending us on accidental hiatuses or exiles from our good habits and resolutions. Well, what then? As Marcus Aurelius writes to himself, as always, "When jarred unavoidably by circumstance, revert at once to yourself, and don't lose the rhythm more than you can help. You'll have a better grasp of harmony if you keep going back to it." The path to self-improvement is rocky,

• 1:32Ryan Holiday?

  and stumbling is inevitable. You'll forget to do the push-ups. You'll cheat on your diet. You'll get sucked into the rabbit hole of Twitter, or you'll go weeks without doing your journaling. That's okay. It doesn't mean you're a bad person. The Stoics would have liked the advice from Oprah. If you catch yourself eating an Oreo, don't beat yourself up. Just try to stop before you finish the whole sleeve, and then try to do better tomorrow. In other words, it's okay to stumble. It's okay to mess up. Just don't let a stumble turn into a catastrophic fall. Catch yourself. Revert back to yourself. Come back to the rhythm. Don't lose it. Go back to those good habits. Do what you know you need to do. And look, if you're stumbling and you want to get back on track, maybe you had a bunch of resolutions

• 2:16Ryan Holiday?

  for the year. You said, I got this. This is my year. And then here you are, post-quitters day, as we were talking about earlier, and struggling. I'd love to have you join us. We're relaunching the 2022 New Year, New You Challenge for Daily Stoic. If you missed it at the beginning of the year, or you missed it last week when we announced it, there's two days left. And if you sign up right now, you will immediately receive the kickoff challenge. You'll be part of it. You can do it at your own pace. We've recorded, edited, time stamped all the Q and As I did. So you'll get my practices from the challenge, plus questions and insights from the thousands of other people who did the challenge alongside me. You'll see how I apply Stoicism to my own life, strategies, ideas, themes that I'm trying to tackle this

• 3:00Ryan Holiday?

  new year with. And you get 21 custom emails delivered daily that will help you get back on track to making 2022 your best year yet. You can sign up now at dailystoic.com/challenge. We'd love to have you. And if you're thinking about joining Daily Stoic Life, now's a good time because you get daily, if you sign up for Daily Stoic Life, you get this challenge and all the challenges we have planned for the year for free. So you can sign up there at dailystoiclife.com. Or of course, just go to dailystoic.com/challenge. There's just 48 hours left, and then this is closed. In previous years, we did only those first couple weeks of the year, and then that was over. We've opened it now for this extra week because we got so many requests. But this is a one and only time we're doing this. So check it

• 3:42Ryan Holiday?

  out, dailystoic.com/challenge for the Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge. It's not too late. Let's get back to the rhythm. Let's have a great year.

• 3:53Ryan Holiday?

  A little better every day. And this is from this week's entry in the Daily Stoic Journal, 366 Days of Writing and Reflection on the Art of Living by yours truly and my co-writer and translator, Stephen Hanselman. I actually do this journal every single day. There's a question in the morning, a question in the afternoon, then there's these sort of weekly meditations. As Epictetus says, "Every day and night, we keep thoughts like this at hand. Write them, read them aloud, and talk to yourself and others about them." You can check out the Daily Stoic Journal anywhere books are sold. You can also get a signed, personalized copy from me in the Daily Stoic store at store.dailystoic.com. The Stoics saw their lives as works in progress. They didn't believe they were born perfect, but they believed that with work and dedication,

• 4:37Ryan Holiday?

  they could get a little better each day. "There is real delight in this progress," as Epictetus quoted by Way of Socrates. Marcus Aurelius avidly pursued his own education and improvement, eagerly looking for advice from mentors, books, and historical examples. Follow that example this week and see how you can get a little better each day. "We must keep constant watch over ourselves," and Aseneca phrased it, "put each day up for review. Looking back on our day helps us to better understand where we may have fallen short and gives us tangible feedback for how to improve and how to grow. Only what you measure and record can be monitored; only what you put up for reflection can be learned from.

• 5:21Ryan Holiday?

  I will keep constant watch over myself and most usefully will put each day up for review; for this is what makes evil, that none of us looks back upon our own lives. We reflect only on that which we are about to do, and yet our plans for the future descend from the past." That's Seneca in Moral Letters 83.2. Marcus Aurelius: "From Risticus I learn to read carefully and not be satisfied with the rough understanding of the whole, and not to agree too quickly with those who have a lot to say about something." That's Marcus Aurelius Meditation 7117. What does Socrates say? "Just as one person delights in improving his farm and another his horse, so I delight in attending to my own improvement day by day." Epictetus Discourses 35.

• 6:06Ryan Holiday?

  You know, when I sign copies of the Daily Stoic Journal, which is what this is obviously from, one of the things I, the inscription I've taken to do, I say, "Prepare, review, and reflect." And that's sort of what I think journaling is, what the practice of this sort of Stoic meditation is. It's the preparing for what's to come, but then also reviewing what's happened. And then also taking some time just to think, just to really, really reflect. How's it going? What could you do better? What are the trends you notice? That's what this is about. You know, I talked about my practice that you could do the Stoic journaling in the morning, the Stoic journaling in the evening. I tend to, in the morning, reflect a little bit on the day just passed

• 6:49Ryan Holiday?

  and then set my intentions for the day going forward. So like, there's no right or wrong way to do that. I've just found with kids and all the stuff I have going on, and the fact that I spend so much time writing and thinking anyway, you know, sort of two rounds of journaling doesn't work for me, but at this current moment. But it has in the past. And so this idea of setting time, not just to, what do I want? What are my hopes? What are my dreams? That sort of, that sort of part of journaling. But there should also be the review and the reflection. You know, the analysis. You know, in the army, you go on a mission, they brief you before the mission. Then you get back, then they debrief the mission. But then you also have performance reviews throughout the year. And then at each posting, right? So it's this sort of process of stepping back and looking at these things from all angles.

• 7:34Ryan Holiday?

  That's how we get better. That's how we improve. Seneca is saying, "We must keep constant watch over ourselves. Put ourselves up for review. We have to look back upon our lives." You know, you hear people, and I've been through this my life, you sort of wake up and go, "Who am I? What am I doing? What is this?"

• 7:53Ryan Holiday?

  Obviously, that can't, the longer that goes on, the harder it's going to be to unravel, to undo. The more likely you've done something that can't be undone. And so I think this sort of little progress of trying to get better every day, a little improvement, maybe it's just listening to this podcast, maybe it's having a few minutes to talk to a partner in the morning or the evening, maybe it's reading that you do. I don't know, but the point is, we get better by taking these small steps, by working on ourselves little by little. And we should remember what Zeno said. You know, he said, "Well-being is realized by small steps, but it is no small things." But it is no small thing. And we underestimate... The progress we can make, you know, a little chunk at a time.

• 8:35Ryan Holiday?

  We want to have these sort of radical epiphanies, these huge breakthroughs. We want to go to therapy and figure it all out. But actually, it's the act of going to therapy, week over week, the routine of it, the little revelations that culminate over time into that, you know, state of wisdom, or peace, or tranquility. So, don't despair that you're not magically transforming. In fact, set your expectations as such that that won't, maybe that won't ever happen. It's the little progress, the little gains, that's how you get better. It's like your hair, you know, you don't, you get a haircut, and then you don't notice it's growing day by day, and then one day you look up and you're like, "Man, I need a haircut." And you want to have that in a good way. "Man, I'm making a lot of progress. I'm happier. I'm less bothered.

• 9:19Ryan Holiday?

  I'm more content. I'm more in my lane. I'm really chugging away on this project I'm working." That's where you want to get, that's where the Stoics want you to get. And they want you to learn how to delight in those kinds of improvements, as Socrates did and as Epictetus did. So, well, here's to another day of that. I wish you the best.