Leaders Are Made Not Born | Keeping “The News” In Check

“Marcus Aurelius did not come out of the womb a leader. Nor was he an emperor ‘by blood.’ In fact, when first told he was to be king, he wept--thinking of all the bad and failed kings of history.”Ryan explains how becoming a great leader is a process, and reads this week’s meditation from The Daily Stoic Journal, on today’s Daily Stoic Podcast. If you want to become a better leader, sign up for our new 9-week live course The Daily Stoic Leadership Challenge today! This is a masterclass in leadership with the cadence and rigor of a boot camp. It is also a live course, which means all participants will join the course together and move through together at the same pace to their own version of the same goal—to be a great leader. Registration will close on Saturday, July 31st at midnight CST and the course will begin on Sunday, August 1st. We hope to have you join us at dailystoic.com/leadershipchallengeSign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow 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. Leaders are made, not born. Marcus Aurelius does not come out of the womb a leader, nor was he emperor by blood. In fact, when first told he was to be king, he wept, thinking of all the bad and failed kings of history.

• 0:49Ryan Holiday?

  So how does he get there to philosopher-king? Book one of Meditations shows us, in the first 10% of the book, "Deeds and Lessons," as it's called, he thanks people who groomed him into becoming one of history's greatest leaders. He knew that without his philosophy teachers and rhetoric teachers, and most importantly, his mentor Antoninus Pius, he wouldn't have become who he became. These first pages of the book are deceptive, too, because they compress a process which took 23 years. It was nearly two and a half decades between the time Hadrian first set in motion

• 1:33Ryan Holiday?

  his plan for Marcus and the day he would become the emperor of Rome. That's what it takes, because leaders aren't born. They're made. And yet, some of us recoil at this idea. Of course, we understand that athletes, and doctors, and dentists, and lawyers, and engineers, and accountants, and contractors, and cooks even, go through a process to master their profession. But leadership? Leaders don't do that. We think you either have it, or you don't. But a look at some of history's greatest leaders tell you that leadership is a process, not a position. As the Pulitzer Prize historian Thomas Ricks writes about George Washington,

• 2:16Ryan Holiday?

  "The process of becoming a valiant leader..." Was Washington's work of a lifetime. While few of us will be plucked by someone who has charted a course for us, or be thrust into a position of leadership the way Marcus was, we all need to think of leadership as the work of our lifetime. Because we're all leaders in one way or another, of families, of companies, of a team, of an audience, of a group of friends, of ourselves. So we could all benefit from a carefully thought out and tested process, from which we come out of the other side, a better leader. And that's why I've been hard at work at the Daily Stoic Leadership Challenge,

• 2:59Ryan Holiday?

  Ancient Wisdom for Modern Leaders. We've designed a nine-week course to mirror the kind of education that produced historically great leaders like Marcus Aurelius, and in fact, all the Stoics. We built it around the key lessons from Marcus's own development, the idea that leadership is less a position and more a process, and something that Marcus, like you, has to work at day after day. It's not something you just work at once. It's not something you're born with. It's something you work at diligently and consistently, a little bit each day. And it's a process you start now, so you can get compounding returns over the course of your life.

• 3:42Ryan Holiday?

  And that's why we've built this, what is actually the longest challenge and course we've built here at Daily Stoic, because becoming a great leader takes time. And to complete it with me, you're going to have to complete nine weeks of work and study, and then hopefully carry some of these habits with you going forward. Each week is going to be distinguished by a theme. Week one is becoming a lifelong student of leadership. Week two is about mastering your emotions. Week three is about dealing with people. Week four is about preparing for and surviving adversity. Week five is about decision-making. Week six is about problem-solving. Week seven is about culture. Week eight is about developing your own leadership philosophy. And week nine is about the challenges of leadership. Each day you get an email from me. It's 63 emails, more than 30,000 words of all-new content

• 4:27Ryan Holiday?

  that helps you take the right steps along that week's And not only have we assembled some of the best Stoic wisdom on what it takes to be a great leader, but we've also assembled some of today's great leaders to be for you what Antoninus was for Marcus. Once a week, there's a leadership deep dive, a live video session with me and a great expert on that week's theme. Their backgrounds vary from a major general in the air force, a leading psychologist who's one of the top cited scientists in the world, and a leadership coach who's been studying and advising some of the world's best leaders for more than two decades, and a GM of one of America's greatest sports dynasties. Each is a leader in their own way, in their own field, but

• 5:12Ryan Holiday?

  we picked them all for the same reason that they have proven hard-won wisdom and insights that we can benefit from. I'll interview each guest to extract some of that wisdom, and then we'll take questions from some of the course participants. There's going to be three leadership Q and A's with me. Again, a live office hours video session with me. Ancient wisdom for the modern leader. It's going to be a masterclass in leadership with the cadence and rigor of a boot camp. It's also a live course, which means all the participants will join the course together. We're going to move through it together with the same goal. This is the only time you can sign up for it. If you miss it, you can't sign up for it later. So registration is open now at dailystoic.com/leadershipchallenge. But the registration is going to close this Saturday, July 31st, at midnight Central

• 5:56Ryan Holiday?

  Time. We're really excited about this one. I think it's one of our best, and I can't wait for us to make each other better. As Seneca says, "We learn as we teach," and that's the premise here. So I can't wait to have it. You can click the link in today's show notes, or just go to dailystoic.com/leadershipchallenge.

• 6:15Ryan Holiday?

  Keeping the news in check. Even the ancient news felt inundated with gossip in news. This week, you will face a barrage like they couldn't have imagined, from texts, calls, emails, to the incessant grind of the 24/7 news machine. Instead of responding to every status update, every urgent call, or the latest trending incendiary news story, take a moment to remember the three ways that the Stoics used to keep their focus on their purpose and duty in the present moment. Number one, step away from the noise. Two, remember that no news can throw you off the purpose of your present choices. Three, don't add something negative or positive to what's being reported.

• 6:56Ryan Holiday?

  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 colleague Stephen Hanselman, who I also wrote the Daily Stoic with. You can actually get signed copies of the Daily Stoic Journal in the Daily Stoic store at store.dailystoic.com, or we've got copies here at the Painted Porch, my bookstore in Bastrop, Texas. Always popular. People ask me to sign them all the time. Anyways, check out the Daily Stoic Journal. I'm on like my fourth year of doing it. You might like it as well. But here's two quotes from Marcus and one from Epictetus to guide you this week. "Are you distracted by breaking news? Then take some leisure time to learn something good and stop bouncing around. But when you do, keep in mind the

• 7:40Ryan Holiday?

  other mistake: to be so distracted by getting control that you wear yourself out and lose a purpose by which you can direct your thoughts and impulses." That's Meditations 2:7. Epictetus's Discourses 3:8 says, "Whenever disturbing news is delivered to you, bear in mind that no news can be relevant to your reasoned choice. Can anyone break news to you that your assumptions or desires are wrong? No way. But they can tell you someone died. But even so, what is that to you?" And then Marcus Aurelius' Meditations 8:49, he says, "Don't tell yourself anything more than what the initial impressions report. It's been reported to you that someone is speaking badly about you. This is the report. The report wasn't that you've been harmed. I see that my son is sick, but not that his

• 8:24Ryan Holiday?

  life is at risk. So always stay within your first impressions and don't add them to your head. This way, nothing can happen to you." The number one secret to a good, productive routine and personal happiness is to limit your news consumption. Obviously, I'm biased as an author, but read books. Don't watch the news. Read thoughtful perennial analysis. Don't follow speculative news reports. Limit your news consumption. And like, honestly, if you do feel like you need the distraction, you need like a palate cleanser, don't pull up CNN. Pull up ESPN. Like, read about sports or something, right? Read celebrity gossip. Don't read the latest divisive piece of news.

• 9:09Ryan Holiday?

  I'm not saying that it's not important to be informed. Of course, it's important to be informed. I would just argue that following the infinite news machine is how one becomes informed. I think, as I've said before, The Great Influenza, a book that I read at the beginning of the pandemic, taught me much more about how to spend the last 15 months than, you know, any breaking news story, because the news stories never really changed anything. It's like, hey, this thing is real. Here's the scientific advice. Take it seriously. Wait for it to be over. Right? The latest report is only adding to what we already know for the most part. So step back. Don't consume so much news. Couple of recommendations on this front.

• 9:52Ryan Holiday?

  Obviously, one, my book, Trust Me, I'm Lying, is about how the news manipulates you. But there's a great book by Daniel Boorstein called The Image that I suggest people read. There's also Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death. These are two eye-opening books that will give you a sense of why you should consume as little news as possible and how manipulative it is and how harmful it is. And then the other book, which inspired my book, Trust Me, I'm Lying, if you read The Jungle as a kid in high school or whatever, Eppen Sinclair's expose of the meatpacking industry, then I strongly suggest you read his book, The Brass Check, which is actually an expose of the news industry around the same time. And sadly, almost nothing has changed. I'm not saying that reporters aren't good people.

• 10:36Ryan Holiday?

  I'm not saying that they don't do an important public service. I'm not saying I read no news. I'm just saying, look, the most viral emotion is anger. Should it surprise us that the news perpetually makes us angry? Right? Should it surprise us that news is always breaking but never fully arrives, that they're always speculating? No, it's an enormous beast trying to capture as much attention as possible to then sell that attention to advertisers. You are the product that's being sold when you consume this free news. Got to understand that. Listen to podcasts. Podcasts are great conversations. Even this, like, I'm recording this, but it has no real date on it. It should be relevant forever.

• 11:20Ryan Holiday?

  So I'm not as incentivized to rile you up. ...way that your news is. So I think it's interesting that even 2,000 years ago, the Stoics were struggling with it. They'd be appalled at what our information diet is today. So step back, give yourself some space. Don't follow breaking news. Don't let it change who you are. Don't let it rattle your equilibrium. Just keep doing you. Read books, study real wisdom and information. That will make you smarter and able to respond to what's happening in the world and make you a better, more informed citizen.