Perfect Is Not The Goal | No One Has A Gun To Your Head

“In martial arts, the black belt is the highest level of the master. In religion, perhaps it’s the priest or even the saint. You can get a doctorate in philosophy, but that’s not really what the Stoics admired.”Ryan explains that the highest goal is not to be perfect but just to improve, and reads The Daily Stoic’s entry of the day, on today’s Daily Stoic Podcast. Sign 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.

• 0:05Ryan 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.

• 0:41Ryan Holiday?

  Perfect is not the goal. In martial arts, the black belt is the highest level of the master. In religion, perhaps it's the priest or even the saint. You can get a doctorate in philosophy, but that's not really what the Stoics admired. To them, the highest level that one could attain was the sage. Did Epictetus get there? Perhaps, according to us, he did. But Epictetus was far too humble to ever claim that himself. Yet while he did say perfection was impossible, he still believed that perfection was something to which we could be making progress. And that's what we're trying to do here. We're trying to get better. We quoted Longfellow a while back. "But to act that each tomorrow find us farther than today."

• 1:26Ryan Holiday?

  That's the goal, to make improvements, to push ourselves. Seneca said the goal was to inquire one thing a day, a quote, an idea, an insight, a story, something that fortifies you against poverty, against death, against adversity. He didn't say that one thing makes you perfect. He said that one thing makes you better. So we read this email, we crack open the Stoics, or The Daily Stoic. We can listen to that podcast. We can ask that question of a mentor or an advisor. We can get feedback from a friend. We're not trying to be perfect. We are trying to get better.

• 2:03Ryan Holiday?

  No one has a gun to your head. Nothing is noble if it's done unwillingly or under compulsion. Every noble deed is voluntary. That's Seneca's Moral Letters 66. This is from today's entry in the Daily Stoic 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, featuring new translations of Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius, written by me, Ryan Holiday, and my partner in crime, Steve Hanselman. You can get this book anywhere books are sold. You can even get a leather bound edition, the premium edition, at store.dailystoic.com. Let's look at today's meditation. You don't have to do the right thing.

• 2:47Ryan Holiday?

  You always have the option of being selfish, rude, awful, short sighted, pedantic, evil, or stupid. In fact, sometimes there are incentives to break bad. Certainly not every criminal gets taught. But how does this line of thinking usually work out for people? What is their life like? You don't have to do the right thing, just as you don't have to do your duty. But you get to, and don't you want to? If you haven't read or maybe watched the movie of East of Eden, this is what Steinbach is saying. He zooms in on this word, I think it's timshul from the Bible. We think of the commandments, he's saying, as commandments, right?

• 3:27Ryan Holiday?

  Thou shall not, thou must not, thou cannot, right? But he's saying, actually, that's a mistranslation. The word is timshul or mayest, meaning that you have a choice to honor your mother or father, to love thy neighbor, right? To not commit adultery, so on and so forth. That these are choices. And in fact, if they weren't choices, there'd be nothing particularly impressive about them, right? Being good under compulsion, being good with a gun to your head, what does that mean, right? Nothing.

• 4:07Ryan Holiday?

  So it's that it is a choice that makes it meaningful. So what will you choose? That's the question. There's that great Chris Rock joke about, you know, I don't treat my kids well, not do drugs, et cetera, because I want to be a role model. Is I do those things because it's the right thing. Right? You're not doing it to impress people. You're not doing it for the reward, as we talked about last week. You're not doing it for the third thing, as Marcus really has talked about. I try to be good because it's the best way to live. I try to choose the right thing. There's a famous story of the choice of Hercules, which I talk about in Lives of the Stoics. I'm also going to talk about in the new book, the new book series on the four virtues. But it's the choice.

• 4:52Ryan Holiday?

  The choice is everything. It's that you mayest, that you have the option not to do it, that you can be a bad person, that a lot of people are bad, that a lot of people are selfish and short sighted and rude, awful, pedantic, stupid. It's that you can get away with it. That makes choosing the right thing all the more majestic and rare and special. So that's your question today. What are you going to choose? You're going to choose to be who you're capable of becoming. You're going to fight to be the person philosophy wants you to be, as Marcus says. You're going to see what you can get away with. That's your call.

• 5:31Ryan Holiday?

  And if you want to get better, I do recommend our Stoicism 101 course, Ancient Philosophy for Your Actual Life. Check that out at DailyStoic.com/101. And if you sign up for Daily Stoic Life at DailyStoicLife.com, you get that course and all our Daily Stoic challenges and courses for free, plus a lot of other awesome stuff. Check that out. DailyStoic.com/101.