Little Actions Add Up to Real Transformation

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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Ryan 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, dailystoic.com.

• 0:27Ryan Holiday?

  Do better where you can. When we look at the lives of a great man like Marcus Aurelius, or a great woman like the Catholic activist Dorothy Day, it's easy to be intimidated. They seem to always know what to do and seem to always do it regardless of the stakes. It's easy to be discouraged when you hold their examples up as inspiration. It seems impossible to live up to their standards, and easy to forget, of course, that they didn't always live up to their own. The same is true for Stoicism as a whole. The philosophy is so aspirational, so idealistic, that, given the flaws we each carry, the idea of even coming close to approaching the life of a sage feels ridiculous. But what if that was the wrong way to think about it?

• 1:12Ryan Holiday?

  What if, instead of trying to be some unassailable moral force of good in the world, each of us just tried to be a little bit better whenever we saw an opportunity? What kind of cumulative difference would that end up making? An example: Anyone who has bought one of the coins in our Daily Stoic store over the last couple of years might remember that they came wrapped in a thin plastic sleeve. A few months ago, it occurred to us that this was producing a lot of unnecessary plastic in the world for not a lot of benefit, so we asked the Mint to stop shipping them that way. Was this some transformational improvement to the world? Was it some shockingly selfless sacrifice? Of course not.

• 1:53Ryan Holiday?

  But it was an improvement in our operations that reduced our ecological impact a tiny bit. We got better where we could. Everyone has opportunities to do this: opportunities to put their phone down and really listen to someone who needs to be heard. Opportunities to contribute some spare change to a worthy cause, opportunities to let their employees go home early from work, opportunities to pass on an unnecessary cross-country flight, or to pick up some trash, or to hold the door open for someone. These are little actions. They won't make you a sage or a saint, but they will make a little improvement to the world and to yourself. And if we all did them more often, they would add up to real transformation.

• 2:42Ryan Holiday?

  Thanks for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Just a reminder, we've got signed copies of all my books in the Daily Stoic store. You can get them personalized, you can get them sent to a friend. The Obstacle is the Way, He Goes the Enemy, Stillness is the Key, the leather-bound edition of the Daily Stoic. We have them all in the Daily Stoic store, which you can check out at store.dailystoic.com.