Look Around, How Lucky We Are To Be Alive Right Now | 10 Quotes To Improve Your Life

For all the stupidity, for all the disasters, for all the noise and uncertainty, this is actually one of the least bad moments to ever exist.📖 Preorder the final book in Ryan Holiday's The Stoic Virtues Series: "Wisdom Takes Work": https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/wisdom-takes-work🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast🎥 Watch top moments from The Daily Stoic Podcast on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/📱 Follow 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.

• 0:05Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a Stoic-inspired meditation, designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life. Each one of these episodes is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women, help you learn from them, to follow in their example, and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. For more, visit DailyStoic.com.

• 0:55Ryan Holiday?

  Look around how lucky we are to be alive right now. Corruption, dysfunction, wildfires, measles, war in the Middle East and Ukraine, political chaos, economic instability. Could it get any worse? Yes, yes, it could. You could be alive in Cato's time amidst the dregs of Romulus, as Cicero put it. You could be living through the decline and fall as Marcus Aurelius did. You could have watched Rome literally burn, as Seneca did. You could be alive when everyone had measles and tuberculosis and typhus and malaria and yellow fever and God knows what else. Just a few generations ago, the whole world went to war.

• 1:40Ryan Holiday?

  Millions of people died in trenches and of disease and then starvation. And then, you know what happened? 21 years later, they decided to do it again, but worse. Look around how lucky we are to be alive right now, as the Hamilton song goes. Right now, instead of then, instead of some other time. For all the stupidity and for all the disasters, for all the noise and uncertainty, this is actually one of the least bad moments to ever exist. But you know what the Stoics would also point out? That it doesn't matter either way, because this is when you exist. You don't get to pick. You don't get a say. This moment is your moment. This brief period is your time on earth.

• 2:24Ryan Holiday?

  The only thing you have a say over is how you spend it, who you are inside it. You can make your own luck in that one sense. So don't curse these crazy times. Make something of them while you still can.

• 2:49Ryan Holiday?

  It sneaks up on you, the, the passage of time. It's already June. It feels like January was just a few months ago. I can't believe that over 10 years ago, I sat down to start writing The Daily Stoic. But that's what happens. Tempest fugit, as they would say in Latin, or time flies. But what's interesting is that even as time flies, even as the world changes, we so often stay the same. We get into grooves, into patterns. We just do things the way that we've always done them. And here, 10 years after the publication of The Daily Stoic, I'm better in some ways, worse in other ways. I remain a work in progress. And so in today's episode,

• 3:33Ryan Holiday?

  I want to riff on some of the best ideas from the Stoics on how to improve, how to get better day by day, and some of my favorite entries from The Daily Stoic. If you want to check out this book, I'll link to it below. This is the leather edition. There's obviously an ebook, a hardcover. I will sign yours if you like as well. I'll link to all that in today's show notes. Let's get after it. How beautifully Plato put it. Whenever you want to talk about people, it's best to take a bird's eye view and see everything all at once of gatherings, armies, farms, weddings and divorces, births and deaths, noisy courtrooms or silent spaces, every foreign people, holidays, memorials, markets, all blended together and arranged in a pairing of opposites. There's actually a beautiful dialogue by the, by the poet Lucian.

• 4:19Ryan Holiday?

  Who is Seneca's nephew, I believe, in which the narrator is given the ability to fly and see the world from above. Turning his eyes earthward, he sees how comically small even the richest people, the biggest estates, the entire empires look from above. All their battles and concerns are made petty in perspective. In ancient times, this exercise was only theoretical. The highest that anyone could get was the top of a mountain or a building a few stories tall. But as technology has progressed, humans have been able to actually take that bird's eye view and greater. Edgar Mitchell, an astronaut, was one of the first people to see the Earth from outer space. And as he later recounted, "In outer space, you develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world

• 5:05Ryan Holiday?

  and a compulsion to do something about it." "From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles away and say, 'Look at that, you son of a bitch.'" Many, a problem can be solved with the perspective of Plato's view. Use it. You know, I just got off a plane. I'm getting on a plane again shortly. And sometimes when I fly into Austin, I can actually see where I live. And, you know, 40 acres, suddenly, very small. A thousand acres, very small. The Tesla factory, one of the biggest buildings I've ever seen in my life, very small. Skyscrapers, very small. People, miniscule. What Edgar Mitchell is talking about is this sort of paradox of it. Everything seems very small, but everything also seems very connected. Right?

• 5:47Ryan Holiday?

  And so wars and international boundaries, these all seem so insignificant, such artificial and petty distinctions. You realize that all these things we take very seriously are not that serious. And what matters, I think Marcus is saying, when you take Plato's view, is like our connection to other people, our obligations as human beings, being good, being decent. He can't serve in the military? Let him seek public office. Must he live in the private sector? Let him be a spokesperson. Is he condemned to silence? Let him aid his fellow citizens by silent public witness. Is it dangerous to enter the forum? Let him display himself in private.

• 6:28Ryan Holiday?

  At homes, at public events and gatherings, is a good associate, a faithful friend and a moderate table mate. Has he lost the duties of a citizen? Let him exercise those of a human being. Shortly before his death, as victory in the Civil War was finally within his grasp, Lincoln told a story to an audience of generals and admirals about a man who had approached him for a high-ranking government appointment. First, the man asked if he might be made a foreign minister. Upon being turned down, the man asked for a more modest position. Upon being turned down again, he asked for a job as a low-level customs officer. Finally, he could not even get that. He finally just asked Lincoln for an old pair of trousers. Ah, Lincoln laughed as he concluded the story. It is well to be humble. This story embodies

• 7:11Ryan Holiday?

  the flexibility and the determination of Stoicism. If we can't do this, then perhaps we can try that. And if we can't do that, then perhaps we can try some other thing. And if that thing is impossible, then there is always another. Even if that thing is just being a good human being, we always have some opportunity to practice our philosophy to make some kind of contribution. I just, I love this story, and I think the lesson that Lincoln was trying to say is that you find your role, you're willing to accept or make whatever works. And I think that's what Seneca was saying. And I suspect Seneca was also telling this story, you know, near the end of his life, as the options in public

• 7:51Ryan Holiday?

  life were closing to him. Okay, so Nero turned out to be insane. Okay, so you're forced into exile. You know, all throughout Seneca's life, in fact, he's forced to adjust, to accommodate, to make the best of a bad situation. For the Stoics, this was the resignation. Not like resignation, like, oh, everything sucks. What am I going to do? But like, oh, this is the role I've been assigned. I'm going to act the hell out of it. And this is something that Epictetus talks about as well. You know, he says, we're like actors in a play. We're not the author, we're not the playwright, but we have to really embrace the role that we're assigned. And this ability to be flexible, to not go, oh, but I only operate at this

• 8:31Ryan Holiday?

  level. I'm a Harvard grad. I could not possibly accept X, Y, or Z. This makes us really fragile because life is Is going to humble us. Life is going to put us in unfamiliar situations. The, the person who can adjust, who can say, yeah, I'll start here. I might work my way back up. I, I might be such a stunning actor in this role that I get promoted or I get noticed, but I'm not going to put on any airs. I'm not going to close myself off to anything. I'm going to embrace this. We like to say that we don't get to choose our parents, that they were given to us by chance. Yet we can truly choose whose children we would like to be. We are fortunate enough that some of the greatest men and women in history have recorded their wisdom and folly in books and journals. Many others have had their lives chronicled by careful biographers,

• 9:15Ryan Holiday?

  from Plutarch to Boswell to Robert Caro. The literature available at your average library amounts to millions of pages and thousands of years of knowledge, insight and experience. Maybe your parents were poor role models or you lacked a great mentor. Yet if we choose to, we can easily access the wisdom of those who came before us, those whom we aspire to be like. We not only owe it to ourselves to seek out this hard-won knowledge, we owe it to the people who took the time to record their experiences, to try to carry on the traditions and follow their examples, to be the promising children of these noble parents. I'm just reading this biography of Ben Franklin right now. And Ben Franklin has this incredible experience where he just never felt like his father's son. He was so different than his dad. And then he goes to England and he visits where his family is from.

• 9:58Ryan Holiday?

  And he learns that his uncle died on the very day that Franklin was born, separated by a couple of years. But his family saw how similar Franklin was to his late uncle. And they came to think that he was the reincarnation of that spirit. The, the idea being like, we get to choose whose spirit we're going to carry. You're not actually related to Seneca. You're not actually related to Marcus Aurelius or any of your heroes, probably, right? Not all of us come from really impressive families. Maybe everyone we're related to is normal. Maybe everyone we are related to is meh. But we can choose whose children we would like to be. We could be the descendants of the Stoics. We can walk in the tradition, the footsteps of these great people. Martin Luther King has no relationship to Gandhi,

• 10:42Ryan Holiday?

  but he is in a way Gandhi's protege, the culmination of what Gandhi pioneered. And we can be that. We can choose whose children we're going to be. And that's what Seneca is saying. And in fact, Seneca's brother embodies this. In Roman times, it was very common for adults to be adopted by other adults. If a family didn't have an heir. This is Marcus Aurelius and Antoninus and Hadrian. Marcus is very similar to Antoninus, not like Hadrian at all. He chooses to embrace the stepfather-ness, right? And Seneca's brother is in the Bible as Gaio. He changes his name when he's adopted by this family and he was a great man. Who are we going to choose to be descended from? Whose example are we going to follow? Whose blood are we going to have running through our veins?

• 11:24Ryan Holiday?

  Not literally, but figuratively, because that's what matters. And it matters what we do with it. It matters if we live up to that example. It matters if we make them proud, not whether they actually know that we exist or not. Not whether they anoint us their legal heirs. What matters is if we act as if. There is no vice which lacks a defense, none that at the outset isn't modest and easily intervened. But after this, the trouble spreads widely. If you allow it to get started, you won't be able to control it when it stops. Every emotion is at first weak. Later, it rouses itself and gathers strength as it moves along. It's easier to slow it down than to supplant it.

• 12:02Ryan Holiday?

  Publilius Cirrus, he was a Roman slave and a Stoic philosopher, he said, rivers are easiest to cross at their source. And I think that's what Seneca means too. The raging waters and deadly currents of a bad habit, ill-discipline, chaos, dysfunction. Somewhere they began as no more than a slight trickle. Somewhere they are a placid lake or a pond, even a bubbling underground spring. What would you rather do? Nearly drown in a dangerous crossing in a few weeks or cross now? Well, it's still easy. It's up to you. I'll give you a somewhat of a personal example. I am not an addict in the sense that I am like in recovery.

• 12:46Ryan Holiday?

  But I find that just about anything I do, I can do compulsively, tend to do compulsively, and can very easily develop an unhealthy relationship with. Ask me like, what did the Stoics say about drinking or drugs? Do you do those things? And I don't. I don't do them exactly because the Stoics forbid them or that I specifically have a problem abusing them. I just know it's a slippery slope for me. It's a road better not gone down by me. So I nip it in the bud. I just sort of have a bright policy. I just, I don't really drink. I don't smoke, don't do drugs. I just don't do it. I keep it away.

• 13:28Ryan Holiday?

  Not doing the things at all, not putting myself in a position where I can abuse or do them to excess has been quite beneficial to me. Another way to think about this would be like, what's the person that really pisses you off? Or what's a subject matter that you find when you talk to your parents about is always a source of conflict or argument? Well, maybe just steer clear of that altogether. And the way again, like a gambling addict doesn't go to Las Vegas. Cross the things early, nip them in the bud early. Notice the warning signs, notice the grumblings, notice the aversions and listen to that. Listen to that voice. Head it off at the pass. Solve it in advance.

• 14:12Ryan Holiday?

  Put yourself in a position where you don't need superhuman willpower, where you don't need strength and perseverance and the inner citadel. You don't need that stuff. That's what I think the Stoics are talking about. If you find something very difficult to achieve yourself, don't imagine that it is impossible for anything possible and proper for another person can be achieved as easily by you. There are two types of people in this world. The first looks at others who have accomplished things and thinks, why them? Why not me? The other looks at those people and thinks, if they can do it, why can't I? One is zero sum and jealous. If you win, I lose. The other is non-zero sum. There's plenty to go around. And it sees the success of others as inspiration.

• 14:57Ryan Holiday?

  So which attitude will propel you onward and upward today? Which will drive you to bitterness and despair? Who will you choose to be? What I like about this sort of distinction. Is the alternative, right? So we often look at what other people have done and we feel this sort of jealousy. We feel this envy. We feel this indictment. And that's a miserable way to live. There's a great line from Joseph Epstein. He says, you know, envy is the only one of the seven deadly sins. It's no fun at all. And I think that's right. So when you look at other people and you see the world as zero sum, like, oh, they got a book deal. Why don't I get a book deal? Oh, this person made money doing this. Why don't I get this? This person is happy. Why? Why do they get to be happy and not me? That implies that there's not enough to go around, but of course there is.

• 15:40Ryan Holiday?

  I think the better way to do it is to see these things as inspiration. Like, look, when you look at things historically, right? When you look at a statue of a great person, you don't go, why do they get a statue and not me? Although famously Caesar weeps at the statue of Alexander. No, the statue is there to inspire you to say, look, look what humans are capable of. And I think what Marcus is saying and why I think this is such a great pick me up is that he's saying that if a person can do it, you can do it. Marcus is, don't be ashamed of needing help. You have a duty to fulfill, just like a soldier on the wall of battle. So what if you are injured and can't climb up without another soldier's help? No one ever said you were born with all the tools you'd need to solve every problem you'd face in life. In fact, as a newborn, you were practically helpless.

• 16:25Ryan Holiday?

  Someone helped you then and you came to understand that you could ask for help. It was how you knew that you were loved. Well, you are still loved. You can ask anyone for help. You don't have to face everything on your own. If you need help, comrade, just ask. The reason I love that quote is that it so pushes back on this sort of Stoic stereotype or caricature of like unfeeling robot, the one that's invulnerable, that never struggles. And also, as I've come to learn in my sort of talks to the military community, that there is this sort of warrior mindset that looks suspiciously on vulnerability, on being vulnerable and asking for help and saying, hey, I'm struggling. Hey, I'm having a hard time. Hey, this isn't working for me. And I think it's really important to realize specifically, Marcus, we're talking to those people,

• 17:10Ryan Holiday?

  but all of us at the same time. When he says like, hey, we're all in this together. We're on the same team. You know, Marcus talks a lot about the common good in meditations, about what we can do for the common good. We also have to realize we're a part of that common good and we can ask for something back from it. If we can't, I mean, what does that say about our friends and family and coworkers, right? Like if, when somebody comes to you, they go, hey, I'm really struggling. I need your advice. Or, hey, like, I don't know if I'm cut out for this. What do you think? Or worse, right? Like I'm thinking of harming myself, really going through rough patch. What do we do? We drop everything. We not only rush to help them, we feel like glad that they trusted us, that they came to us with that thing,

• 17:51Ryan Holiday?

  right? It's beautiful and moving and we not only don't look at them badly for it, we're, we're excited. Thanks for coming to me. I appreciate it. Like, it means so much to me, right? And then for some reason, some strange reason, we think that we're not going to get that same grace from other people. Look, you might not always get it, but I think the vast majority of the time you will. You can't get help you don't ask for. Just like if you pretend to know something, you can't learn it. If you not only don't ask for help, but you pretend you don't need help, you pretend to be struggling less than you are. I mean, you're pushing away help that you could so readily and easily benefit from.

• 18:32Ryan Holiday?

  Every event has two handles, one by which it can be carried and one by which it can't. If your brother does you wrong, don't grab it by his wrongdoing, because this is the handle incapable of lifting it. Instead, use the other, that he is your brother, that you were raised together, and then you will have hold of the handle it carries. The famous journalist William Seabrook suffered from such debilitating alcoholism that in 1933, he committed himself to an insane asylum, which was then the only place to get treatment for addiction. In asylum, he tells the story of the struggle to turn his life around inside the facility. At first, he stuck to his addict way of thinking, and as a result, he was an outsider, constantly getting into trouble and rebelling against the staff. He made almost no progress and was on the verge of being asked to leave. Then one day, this

• 19:16Ryan Holiday?

  very quote from Epictetus about everything having two handles occurred to him. I took hold now by the other handle, he Related and carried on. He actually began to have a good time there. He focused on his recovery with real enthusiasm. "I suddenly found it wonderful, strange and beautiful to be sober," he said. "It was as if a veil, or a scum, or a film had been stripped from all things visual and auditory." "It's an experience shared by many addicts when they finally stop doing things their way "and finally open themselves up to perspectives and wisdoms and lessons of those who have gone before them." "There's no promise that trying things this way will work, of grabbing the different handle." "There's no promise that it will have these momentous results, but why continue lift by the handle that hasn't worked?"

• 19:57Ryan Holiday?

  One of my other favorite quotes from Marcus Aurelius, he talks about being like the animal fighter at the games, "torn up and bloodied and near death, it's begging to go out and fight again." He was saying, "This is like us. We're just trying to do things the same way as we've always done them." And then that ties into that expression about how insanity is trying things the same way over and over again, "expecting different results. We constantly pick things up by the old handle of taking them personally, "of focusing what's not in our control, skepticism, cynicism, whatever it is, right? "We all have these tendencies to look at things a certain way." Maybe that's why you're always fighting with your spouse about a certain issue, "or your own parents about a certain issue, or maybe whenever you get stressed, "this is the behavior that you engage in." That's what I think Seabrook was doing.

• 20:41Ryan Holiday?

  The idea is, well, what if you tried it by a different handle, as I've talked about before? There's more than one handle. There's unlimited amount of handles, stories, options, approaches you can take to things. So why do the one that you've always done? Why do the one especially if it doesn't work? Why not try something new? Look for the generous interpretation. Look for the one that gets you out of your comfort zone. Look for the one that challenges you. Look for the one that makes you open-minded, open-hearted. Look for the one that makes you try something that you're not inclined to do. Look for the one that makes you better. Look for the one- That makes other people better. That's the idea. Fortune doesn't have the long reach, we suppose. She can only lay siege to those who hold her tight.

• 21:24Ryan Holiday?

  So let's step back from her as much as possible. Machiavelli, who supposedly admired Seneca, says in The Prince that fortune is a woman, and it is necessary in order to keep her down, to beat her and struggle with her. Even for the 16th century, it's a pretty horrifying image. But for a ruthless and endlessly ambitious ruler, it was par for the course. But is that the kind of life that we're after? Now compare Machiavelli's view with Seneca's. Not only is he saying that the more you struggle with fortune, the more vulnerable you are to it, but he's also saying that the better path to security is in the impregnable wall of philosophy. Philosophy, he says, helps us tame the mad frenzy of our greed and tamp down the fury of our fears. In sports or war, the metaphor here would be

• 22:08Ryan Holiday?

  the choice between a strategy of endless, exhausting offense and a strategy of resilient, flexible defense. Which will you play? Which kind of person are you? Only you can answer this question, but you would be remiss not to consider the ultimate end of most of the princes in Machiavelli's books, and how few of them died happily in bed, surrounded by their loved ones. I think what we're talking about here is something that Seem Taleb talks about, which is how dependent is your life, your lifestyle, your business? How dependent is it on luck? How dependent is it on things outside your control? You know, are you someone who needs things to always be going well? Do you schedule down to the minute? And then one thing goes wrong, ripples through your day? Or do you cultivate that kind of anti-fragility?

• 22:52Ryan Holiday?

  That kind of resilience, that flexibility that allows you to absorb and bob and weave and change and adjust? I think too many of us don't have enough slack. We are too dependent on fortune. And this is what makes us anxious. This is what makes us nervous. This is what makes us always busy, always doing, always shoring things up. Try to design a life that's got some give to it, that doesn't require you to hold fortune so close, that doesn't require you to watch the market returns every day, that doesn't put you at the mercy of your boss's moods, that doesn't force you to live paycheck to paycheck. Try to create some distance, a buffer, a moat around you that protects you from the whims of fate. Because fate is and always has, as Seneca says,

• 23:36Ryan Holiday?

  doing their own thing, behaving exactly as they please. And you don't want to be on the wrong side of that. You could enjoy this very moment, all the things you are praying to reach by taking the long way around, if you'd stop depriving yourself of them. Ask most people what they're working towards and you'll get an answer. "I'm trying to become insert professional," or they'll tell you they're trying to get appointed to some impressive committee or position to become a millionaire, to get discovered, to become famous, whatever. If you ask them a couple more questions such as, "Why are you doing that?" Or, "What are you hoping it'll be like when you get it?" And you'll find that at the very core of it, people want freedom, they want happiness, they want the respect of their peers. A Stoic looks at this and shakes their head at the immense effort and expense we put into chasing things that are simple and straightforward to acquire.

• 24:21Ryan Holiday?

  It's as if we'd prefer to spend years building a complicated Rube Goldberg machine, instead of just reaching out and picking up what we want. It's like looking all over for your sunglasses and realizing they were on your head the whole time. "Freedom, that's easy, it's in your choices," the Stoics would say. "Happiness, that's easy, it's in your choices," the Stoics would say. Respect your peers, that too is in the choices you make. All of that is in front of you, no need to take the long way to get there. It's actually like a viral email chain, you've probably seen it before, about the fisherman in Thailand or something, and the Western businessman sees him and he says, "Oh, you've got this little boat, what if you got another boat and another boat, you scaled this operation, you could make all this money." And the guy says, "Well, then what?"

• 25:04Ryan Holiday?

  And he's like, "Well, then you could retire and live on a beach somewhere." The guy says, "But that's what I do now." I've experienced my own version of this as an author, it's been funny, I meet these really successful people who do the things that I sometimes wish I could do. They play professional sports, they have huge audiences, or they've made all this money, they have all this stuff, and you catch yourself being a little jealous, and they invite you over to their fancy houses, and you sit there and you go, "Man, wouldn't it be so cool to live this life?" And then I find out the real reason they invited me over is that they want to learn how to write books, right? Like, I'm jealous of their life, they're jealous of my life. I think this is what Marcus is saying, is that you can have what you want right now, and more importantly, the thing that you think will bring you something, peace, contentment,

• 25:49Ryan Holiday?

  happiness, whatever, it's not gonna happen. It's this horizon that you never quite meet, it's always a little bit... Out of you. Marcus is saying that we try to get our stuff the long way, the hard way. At the end of this long war, at the end of this long journey, right? It's after I become rich and successful, after I make it, after I win a Super Bowl, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba. Then I'll feel good. Then I'll be able to spend time with my family. Then I can be at peace, whatever. And you can have that right now. The beautiful and good person neither fights with anyone nor as much as they are able permits others to fight. This is the meaning of getting an education, learning what is your own affair and what is not.

• 26:32Ryan Holiday?

  If a person carries themselves, so where is there any room for fighting? Socrates famously traveled around Athens, approaching the people he disagreed with most and engaging them in long discussions. In these discussions, or whatever record we have of them, there are many examples of his conversation mates getting exasperated, upset and aggravated by as many questions. Indeed, the people of Athens eventually got so upset, they sentenced Socrates to death. But Socrates never seemed to get upset himself. Even when talking about matters of life and death, he always kept his cool. He was much more interested in hearing what the other person had to say than making sure he was heard. And, as so much of us insist upon, he was not worried about winning the argument.

• 27:14Ryan Holiday?

  So the next time you face a political dispute or a personal disagreement, ask yourself, is there any reason to fight about this? Is arguing going to help with anything? Would an educated or wise person really be as quarrelsome as you might initially be inclined to be? Or would they take a breath, relax, and resist the temptation for conflict? Just think of what you could accomplish and how much better you would feel if you could conquer the need to fight and win every tiny little thing. You know, I think about this when I log on to Twitter, which I sort of have to do for work purposes every now and then. And I watch the smartest journalists and, and public figures of our generation just waste the day arguing with each other about nonsense, shouting into the void about this or that, always angry, always sarcastic, always mean.

• 27:59Ryan Holiday?

  And accomplishing what? Accomplishing fucking nothing. The wiser you get, the less you should care. About piddly things that don't matter. One of the signs of getting older for me is that I find myself sucked into arguments less, I get upset less, I get in confrontations less because they don't matter. I think what Epictetus is saying is the wiser you get, the closer you get to mastery and self mastery, the less you should feel inclined to need to prove that to people, the less attracted you should be to talking. You know, Robert Greene says, always say less than necessary. I think that's a sign of wisdom and strength is that you can keep your mouth shut. You can let someone be wrong. If they're wrong, what do you care? And if you're right, being right is sufficient.

• 28:44Ryan Holiday?

  You can say why you're right. You can, you know, maybe explain your reasoning, but it doesn't weigh on your conscience if you don't manage to convince them and you don't stay up at night thinking of all the things you should have said. While it's true that someone can impede our actions, they can't impede our intentions and our attitudes, which have the power of being conditional and adaptable. For the mind adapts and converts any obstacle to its actions into a means of achieving it. That which is an impediment to action is turned to advance action. The obstacle on the path becomes the way. Today, things will happen that will be contrary to your plans. If not today, then certainly tomorrow. And as a result of these obstacles, you will not be able to do what you planned.

• 29:25Ryan Holiday?

  That is not as bad as it seems because your mind is infinitely elastic and adaptable. You have the power to use the Stoic exercise of turning obstacles upside down, which takes one negative circumstance and uses it as an opportunity to practice an unintended virtue or form of excellence. Something prevents you from getting to your destination on time, then this is a chance to practice patience. If an employee makes an expensive mistake, then this is a chance to teach a valuable lesson. If a computer glitch erases your work, then it is a chance to start over with a clean slate. If someone hurts you, it is a chance to practice forgiveness. If something is hard, it is a chance to get stronger. Try this line of thinking and see if there is a situation in which one could not find some virtue to practice or derive some benefit. The truth is, there isn't one.

• 30:09Ryan Holiday?

  Every impediment can advance action in some form or another. I'm not saying that some terrible thing, awful, unfortunate, tragic event that happened is just wonderful. It's that the nature of that event presents within it opportunities to be great. Take the last couple of years. No one would choose this. It's tragic. It's unfortunate. It's been ghastly in the immensity of the destruction with which it has wrought. But I have tried to focus on my family. I have tried to focus on being more community minded. Tried to focus on my stillness. I've tried to focus on improving my work habits. I've tried to focus on being present. I'm trying to adjust my news habits. My marriage is better. I opened this bookstore, right? I have improved in innumerable ways.

• 30:54Ryan Holiday?

  If you said, Ryan, if to give all of that back, but there won't be a pandemic, of course, I would say, yes, of course, there's other ways to do it. But the thing happened and it is a chance to step up, to grow, to change, to practice different virtues. Right? That's what the obstacle is the way means. But second, if you notice the full quote from Marcus, in The Obstacle is the Way, I'm really talking about all forms of obstacles. But Marcus is specifically talking about difficult people. He's saying difficult people are a chance to practice these virtues, that when someone is frustrating, or mean, or stupid, or annoying, or dishonest, or cruel, or aggressive, these are opportunities to call from yourself positive virtues, patience, kindness, forgiveness, creativity, et cetera. You've got to use that situation.

• 31:40Ryan Holiday?

  If you want more wisdom inspired from the Stoics, I send out one Stoic themed email every single morning, totally for free. You can sign up at dailystoic.com/email. No spam. You can unsubscribe at any time. I think it's the best thing that I do. It's a community of hundreds of thousands of Stoics all over the world. We'd love to have you at dailystoic.com/email.