The Little Things Say Everything | Your Actual Needs Are Small

It’s our daily choices—our response to rudeness, our handling of power, how we treat friends, children, the elderly—that reveals the core of who we are.📖 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 Facebook 📢 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.

• 0:56Ryan Holiday?

  "The little things say everything." It wasn't much. Antoninus was helping his father-in-law with some stairs, but Hadrian saw it and it convinced him. This was a man who could be trusted with power. As we said recently, this is probably because Antoninus's kindness echoed one of the founding myths of Rome, where Aeneas carried his weak father from a burning Troy. This is actually just one glimpse into Antoninus's character. We get several more from Marcus Aurelius. "We're told he took pains to make his friends feel at ease, even after he became emperor. We're told of an encounter with a customs officer at some border crossing, where almost certainly Antoninus dealt with a rude person without getting upset."

• 1:41Ryan Holiday?

  It's interesting that we hear about this story involving travel and Antoninus, because unlike other emperors, Antoninus did not travel much. He did this out of consideration, knowing what an expense and ordeal it was for provincial officials to host the imperial processions. We're also told of his consistency to his friends, never getting fed up with them or playing favorites, his dogged determination to treat people as they deserved, his willingness to take care of himself, his ability to feel at ease with people and put them at their ease. We don't know all that much about Antoninus, but what we know tells us a lot. We can tell that his character was good. We can tell that he had empathy.

• 2:24Ryan Holiday?

  We can tell that he cared about the little guy and the weak and the old. Would have been so easy for him to be heartless and cruel. Most emperors were. But then again, if he had been, perhaps he never would have been chosen for the job in the first place. "Take Antoninus as your model always," Marcus Aurelius writes in Book Six of Meditations, and it's easy to understand why. Because in the end, character isn't defined by grand gestures, by the small moments when we think no one is watching. It's our daily choices, our response to rudeness, our handling of power, how we treat our friends, children, the elderly. It's this that reveals the core of who we are.

• 3:17Ryan Holiday?

  "Your actual needs are small." This is the September 29th entry in the Daily Stoic. "Nothing can satisfy greed, but even a small measure satisfies nature. So it is that the poverty of an exile brings no misfortune, for no place of exile is so barren as to not produce ample support for a person." This is Seneca in his Consolation to his mother. "It can be beneficial to reflect on what you used to accept as normal. Consider your first paycheck and how big that seemed, or your first apartment with its own bedroom and bathroom and the ramen you gladly scarfed down in the kitchen.

• 4:00Ryan Holiday?

  Today, as you become more successful, these conditions would hardly feel sufficient. In fact, you probably want even more than what you have right now." Yet just a few years ago, these paltry conditions were not only enough, they felt great. When we become successful, we forget how strong we used to be. We are so used to what we have, we half believe that we'd die without it. Of course, this is just the comfort talking. In the days of world wars, our grandparents and parents made do with rationed gas, butter, and electricity. They were fine, just as you have been fine when you had less. Remember today that you are okay if things suddenly go wrong. Your actual needs are quite small. There is very little that could happen that would truly threaten your survival.

• 4:45Ryan Holiday?

  Think about that and adjust your worries and fears accordingly. There is a passage where I talk about this in Discipline is Destiny, which let me grab real fast. I talk in part one about avoiding the superfluous, right? And I tell the story of Cato the Elder, and he says, nothing is cheap if it is superfluous. He's talking about cultivating a place where you don't have more than you need, and people can't take that from you, right? I say this in the, in the chapter, I say, think about how content you were with less just a few years ago, how much more frugal you were by necessity, how much less you got by on.

• 5:26Ryan Holiday?

  Do you look back at those younger years when you were striving and struggling as somehow lacking? As something you're bitter about? But usually, those were happy days. We almost missed them. Things were simpler then, cleaner. There was more clarity. Most of the luxuries that lay in the future, we did not even know about. We didn't pine for them. We were ignorant of even their possibility. And when you realize this, that the less you desire, the richer you are, the freer you are, the more powerful you are. You have something that can't be taken away from you. So the Stoics want you to realize how little you need for the happy life. To get personal for a second, I think about the job that I dropped out of college for. I've told this story before, but I remember I was offered $30,000. That was my salary.

• 6:12Ryan Holiday?

  And I remember thinking, I may have even said it out loud, and I'm both mortified and find it hilarious. I remember thinking, what am I going to do with all this money? That was so much money to me. As it happens, like, two days after I started, they knocked my salary down because the partner who'd hired me hadn't cleared it with the other partners. And I actually made more like 26 or something. But it was more than enough for me. I think about what I got paid for my first book. It's all so much extra, so much more than I was once happy to have. And that success should make you grateful. It shouldn't make you paranoid, right? If you take it for granted, you're being ungrateful, I guess is what I'm saying.

• 6:55Ryan Holiday?

  And when you realize how little you need, it allows you to feel the true wealth that you have, the true excess that you have. And realize how much fat, how much space is there. You don't need to protect it so tightly. It's house money at this point. That's what the Stoics were trying to think about. I even think about Seneca. Seneca's writing this letter to his mother. He's in exile, but this is the second time this has happened to him. He realized, you know, that he couldn't cling too tightly to any of these things. And I think that gave him a kind of strength. It's what allowed him to comfort her in this difficult moment. So that's what we're talking about here. We're not saying you starve yourself. We're not saying you experience nothing.

• 7:37Ryan Holiday?

  You just realize that it's extra and you don't need it all. Thanks, everyone.

• 7:46Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. I just wanted to say we so appreciate it. We love serving you. It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple of years we've been doing it. It's an honor. Please spread the word. Tell people about it. And this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say thank you.