Nothing Is Possible Without This | A Hard Winter Training

Ryan explains why the virtue of courage is essential no matter what you do, and reads this week’s meditation from The Daily Stoic Journal, on today’s Daily Stoic Podcast. Pre-orders are available for Ryan Holiday’s new book Courage Is Calling: Fortune Favors The Brave - check it out at https://dailystoic.com/preorderBlinkist is the app that gets you fifteen-minute summaries of the best nonfiction books out there. Blinkist lets you get the topline information and the most important points from the most important nonfiction books out there, whether it’s Ryan’s own The Daily Stoic, Yuval Harari’s Sapiens, and more. Go to blinkist.com/stoic, try it free for 7 days, and save 25% off your new subscription, too. 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.

• 0:34Ryan Holiday?

  Nothing is possible without this. As you know, the Stoics revere four virtues: courage, temperance, justice, wisdom. These were extraordinary things, according to Marx realist, the keystones to a good life. In fact, even their name, the cardinal virtues, references their pivotal nature. Cardinal, as we've said, doesn't refer to a religious position, but instead comes from the Latin cardus, meaning hinge. But of course, not all these virtues are created equal. Courage comes first for a reason. As C.S. Lewis would write, "Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point."

• 1:15Ryan Holiday?

  There is no justice, no self-discipline, no wisdom, without courage. And the point is not that the Stoics were courageous, though they were, but rather that there is no Stoicism without courage. How could Cato have chosen to be so transgressively self-disciplined, wearing no fancy clothes, no perfumes, attending no tempting feasts, if he was afraid to be seen as something different? Think of the courage required for Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a translator of Epictetus, to serve at the head of a black regiment for the Union Army in the American Civil War, a righteous and just cause, if there ever was one. You think it wasn't scary for Zeno to found a new philosophical school from nothing? To more or less hang a shingle out

• 1:59Ryan Holiday?

  in the middle of the Agora one morning, out of nowhere, dedicating his life to wisdom, even though it pitted him against considerable resistance and attacks from rival schools? Nothing great in this life is possible without physical and moral courage. You can't be afraid. You have to be brave, and you have to answer the call. Because if you don't, as the famous question poses, who will? Where would we be if nobody stepped up? If everyone took counsel of their fears? Certainly, we would not have Stoicism, nor would we have any of the wonderful accomplishments you are capable of achieving. If only you were brave enough to stand up,

• 2:40Ryan Holiday?

  to sit down, to risk, to speak out, to try. Courage is calling. Answer it. And look, if you've gotten anything out of this podcast over the years, if you enjoy my writing at all, I'd so love for you to consider picking up my new book, Courage is Calling. I'm confident that it's my best to date, and I think the blurbs and early reviews pay testament to that. General James Mattis says that it's a superb book for crafting a purposeful life. Matthew McConaughey called it "an urgent call to arms for each and all of us." And my dear friend George Raveling said, "Courage is calling dresses us with the proper garments of courage, something we need now more than ever."

• 3:23Ryan Holiday?

  If you want a signed copy from me, first edition, if you want, actually, you can get signed copies of the manuscript pages that I used while creating the book. You can do that by going to dailystoic.com/preorder and get all the details for how to preorder a copy of Courage is Calling, Fortune Favors the Bold, my new book, out at the end of September. I do hope you check it out. I appreciate the support. Think you're gonna like this one. Courage is Calling. Go to dailystoic.com/preorder.

• 3:58Ryan Holiday?

  A Hard Winter Training. The art of living has three levels of discipline: study, practice, and hard training. Reading the Stoics or listening to them, that's study. Trying out the lessons and reflecting on them in a journal, to friend, that's practice. What's left, though, is hard training. Epictetus liked to use the analogy of the Roman army's practice of training hard in the off months of winter so that they could be prepared to meet any challenge when they returned to battle in the spring. Seneca would spend time each month exposing himself to tougher-than-usual conditions. He too used the military analogy, pointing to the way that soldiers are... Tassed with hard jobs so they could be

• 4:43Ryan Holiday?

  strong when the enemy eventually came. So what are you doing in your life to push yourself beyond mere study and practice? 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.

• 5:26Ryan Holiday?

  This idea of keeping the thoughts at hand really ties into this week's entry. We've got two quotes from Epictetus and one from Seneca. "We must undergo a hard winter training and not rush into things for which we haven't prepared." That's Epictetus in his Discourses. Here's Seneca in Moral Letters 18. "Here's a lesson to test your mind's mettle. Take part of the week in which you have only the most meager and cheap food, dress scantily in shabby clothes, and ask yourself, 'This is really the worst you feared.' It is when times are good that you should gird yourself for tougher times ahead, for when fortune is kind, the soul can build up defenses against her ravages. So it is that the soldiers practice maneuvers in peacetime, erecting bunkers with no enemies in sight,

• 6:10Ryan Holiday?

  and exhausting themselves under no attack so that when it comes, they won't grow tired." And then finally, Epictetus says, "When a challenge confronts you, remember that God is matching you with a younger sparring partner, as would a physical trainer." Why? Because becoming an Olympian takes sweat. I think that no one has a better challenge than yours. If only you would use it like an athlete would use a younger sparring partner. So a couple of things here. One, I sometimes get this question, should I seek out adversity? If adversity is such a good teacher, should I seek it out? I say, look, for the most part, life is gonna give us most of the training we need. Life's gonna throw most of the adversity we need at us.

• 6:52Ryan Holiday?

  So you don't need to go like getting yourself into trouble so you can know what a prison cell feels like, right? I don't think that's really what it is. As Epictetus is saying, look, instead of bemoaning the adversity when you do feel it, go like, hey, this is good. This is training I needed. I'm gonna use this. So I think about that way. The pandemic, obviously, being a great example of this. The other part is, how are you, though, actively engaged in training that makes you stronger, more mentally tough, more physically tough? So to me, this is where like a strong physical practice comes in. It's also where getting up early, maybe intermittent fasting, maybe cold showers, but mostly working out.

• 7:33Ryan Holiday?

  Because I love working out, but still every time I have to convince myself to do it, right? I love running. It's almost painful not to run, but there's still lots of days when I don't want to do it and still be easier to go slower. I have to push myself every single time. But every time I do it, I get better at pushing myself, right? I usually do some sort of weight training about four days a week as well. And so that is much less fun for me, and I really do have to push myself to do it. And that training, though, the act of pushing myself to do something that I'm uncomfortable with, that's not fun, that challenges me, this doesn't just make me stronger and more

• 8:16Ryan Holiday?

  fit and better at chasing my kids around the house. What it really does is make me better at overriding that impulse, that I don't want to do something because it's hard, or that I'm afraid, or that it's gonna be exhausting. Again, I'm in the middle of a book right now, and you think I don't wake up so many days and I don't feel it, I don't want to do it, it's hard, what if I phone it in today? Is anyone really watching? Anyone know? Well, I've trained for exactly that kind of insidious opponent. I have, as Steven Pressfield talks about, I know the resistance well. I have built up a lot of muscles that make me stronger than the resistance. And that's where this training comes in. And I think that's a metaphor for all forms of adversity, difficulty, resistance,

• 9:00Ryan Holiday?

  weakness in life. And so I hope you have some sort of active practice. Use the adversity, train against it when it's there, but also build some active daily practices or weekly practices in your life as well.