Just Keep Hammering Away | The Color of Your Thoughts

“There is something delightfully simple about Ulysses S. Grant. Napoleon seems like some sort of larger than life figure, a peerless genius like the freak athletes we see on television. The same for the incredible heroism of Admiral Stockdale. Their accomplishments are impressive, but not exactly relatable.”Ryan explains why you must keep your emotions under control to continue the work, and reads The Daily Stoic’s entry of the day, on today’s Daily Stoic Podcast. This episode is also brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs. LinkedIn Jobs is the best platform for finding the right candidate to join your business this fall. It’s the largest marketplace for job seekers in the world, and it has great search features so that you can find candidates with any hard or soft skills that you need. And now, you can post a job for free. Just visit linkedin.com/STOIC to post a job for free. ***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow Daily Stoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicSee 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 another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Thursdays, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from the book, The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful co-author and collaborator, Stephen Hanselman. And so today, we'll give you a quick meditation from one of the Stoics, from Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius Seneca, then some analysis from me, and then we send you out into the world to do your best to turn these words into works. Just keep hammering away. There's something delightfully simple about Ulysses S. Grant.

• 0:47Ryan Holiday?

  Napoleon seems like some sort of larger-than-life figure, a peerless genius like the freak athletes we see on television. The same for the incredible heroism of an Admiral Stockdale. Their accomplishments are impressive, but not exactly relatable. Grant, on the other hand, is more like us, not just because he struggled in life, or because he was uninterested in pomp or circumstance, but because his theory of war was so simple that even a grunt could understand it. As the brilliant historian S.C. Gwynn writes in Hymns of the Republic, "Grant's main approach was to punch the enemy in the gut and then afterward worry about what the enemy had been planning to do to him." Contemporaries said that Grant was like the mythological Thor.

• 1:29Ryan Holiday?

  He just kept hammering away at problems until they fell. "He did not stop," Gwynn writes. "He would not be deterred. He came directly at you and smashed into you again and again until you were beaten, and then persisted beyond that to the nonexistent terms of your surrender." Simple, but it worked. What's better is that it still works in war and life. Marcus Aurelius said, "We solve our problems action by action, step by step." He said, "We can't get deterred just because they are hard, or because they are hard for us. If it's humanly possible to do it," he said, "then commit to doing it and know that you can do it." Cato, like Grant had that same kind of determination.

• 2:12Ryan Holiday?

  The only way you could beat him was to break him, and you are not going to break him, which was clear from boyhood on when a bully tried to intimidate him by dangling Cato off a balcony, and all he got in response was silence and a stare that gave him the chills. We could all use a little bit of that in our lives. Clench your jaw, sit down or stand up and get to work. Don't get excited, don't get discouraged, just keep hammering away. That's how you win a war and win at life. You solve most problems by beating them into submission. You crush resistance. You cannot be deterred and you cannot stop. If you can do that, then nothing can beat you.

• 2:56Ryan Holiday?

  The Color of Your Thoughts. This is the Daily Stoic entry for April 1st. "Your mind will take the shape of what you frequently hold in thought, for the human spirit is colored by such impressions." Marcus Aurelius's Meditations 5:16. "If you bend your body into a sitting position every day for a long enough period of time, the curvature of your spine changes. A doctor can tell from a radiograph or an autopsy whether someone sat at a desk for a living. If you shove your feet into tiny, narrow dress shoes each day, your feet will begin to take on that form as well. And the same is true for our mind.

• 3:41Ryan Holiday?

  If you hold a perpetually negative outlook, soon enough, everything you encounter will seem negative. Close it off and you will become close-minded. Color it with the wrong thoughts and your life will be dyed the same." I wanted to show Gregory Hayes's translation of that same quote. I think you guys will like it. He says it interesting, too. He says, "The things you think about determine the quality of your mind. Your soul takes on the color of your thoughts. Color it with a run of thoughts like this." He says, "Anywhere you lead your life, you can lead a good one." But lives are led at court, then good ones can be. Things gravitate toward what they were intended for. What things gravitate towards is their goal.

• 4:25Ryan Holiday?

  A thing's goal is what benefits it. It's good. A rational being's good is unselfishness. What were we born for? That's nothing new, remember? Lower things for the sake of higher ones and higher ones for one another. Things that have a consciousness are higher than things that don't. And those with the logos still higher. Really, what meditation is, is an example of Marcus Aurelius trying to dye his soul with good thoughts. He's trying to write every day these little mantras, these little reminders of what he believes, of who he wants to be, of what life should be. You know, people believe in the law of attraction, this idea of, you know, like attracts like. Of course, the law of attraction is bullshit.

• 5:09Ryan Holiday?

  It was created by con artists to trick people. Not saying that, but I am saying, if you are a negative person, you are gonna see things negatively. If you are a positive person, you're gonna see things positively. Being positive doesn't attract positive things in your life. It does allow you, however, to see positive in situations that other people see negative. Even the idea of the obstacle being the way. Marcus Aurelius is not saying life's gonna be rosy and fun and awesome. Marcus is saying, life's gonna roll obstacles in your path. But if you have this kind of Stoic optimism, if you've dyed your soul with the right thoughts, you'll be able to find the good inside that.

• 5:49Ryan Holiday?

  So, what I try to do in this podcast, what I try to do in my own life, what I try to do with the tattoos on my arm, is dye my soul with the right thoughts. Literally dye my skin with the right thoughts to be a reminder. It's why I made the daily Stoic medallions, why I carry the Four Virtues one and the Memento Mori one in my pocket. I want these things to be a part of me. I want them to be mantras. I want them to be reminders. I never wanna lose track or sight of them. It's what I try to do in my journal. I know all this stuff intellectually, but it's taking the time to write them down on the page, to write it down for the thousandth time, for the fifth year in a row, whatever it is. It's the practice, it's the dying,

• 6:33Ryan Holiday?

  it's the reminding, it's the going over. This is what shapes us. This is what makes us who we can be. I hope you can do that. I hope you're getting what the point of this practice is. Even if you've heard me say this stuff before, that's the point. It's supposed to come back through you. It's supposed to be the practice of it. So we're dying ourselves repeatedly with the right thoughts. We're not trying to magically make the world something different than it is, but we're trying to make ourselves different inside that world, because that's what we control. So I hope you dye your soul with some good thoughts today. I hope this meditation helps you do that a little bit. Our soul is dyed by the color of our thoughts. We are dyed by the impressions. Our life becomes what our mind makes it.

• 7:18Ryan Holiday?

  Our life is what our thoughts make it. That's what Stoicism is, and I hope you follow that today. 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. You just go to dailystoic.com/email. So check it out, dailystoic.com/email.