The Only Experience Worth Chasing | These Stoic Quotes Will Improve Your Life

There’s a lot of things to try to do in your life. You should feel the ecstasy of falling in love. You should try to catch the sunrise on one coast, and the sunset on another on the same day. You should feel the pride of *mastery* in your chosen line. You should experience the joy of raising children. The thrill of victory. The agony of defeat. Plenty of people who were not Stoics have chased these accomplishments and known them. It’s part of what makes life livable, fun, and wonderful. But meaningful? No, the meaning has to come from something more, something deeper.---And Ryan presents some of his favorite Stoic quotes read from the Daily Stoic Page-A-Day Desk Calendar.📗 Check out Tyler Cowan's Average is Over.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, 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.

• 0:02Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. On Tuesdays, we take a closer look at these Stoic ideas, how we can apply them in our actual lives. Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy.

• 0:26Ryan Holiday?

  The only experience worth chasing. There's a lot of things to try to do in your life. You should feel the ecstasy of falling in love. You should try to catch the sunrise on one coast and the sunset on another in the same day. You should feel the pride of mastery in your chosen line. You should experience the joy of raising children, the thrill of victory, the agony of defeat. Plenty of people who are not Stoics have chased these accomplishments and known them. It's part of what makes life livable, fun, and wonderful, but meaningful? No, the meaning has to come from something more, something deeper. Matthew Arnold, the Victorian poet and the biographer of Marcus Aurelius, would write quite beautifully

• 1:10Ryan Holiday?

  of the tragedy of a busy adventurous life that was missing something. As the poem goes, "And see all the sights from pole to pole, and glance, and nod, and bustle by, and never once possess our soul before we die." Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Epictetus, Cato, all the Stoics knew the wonderful but fleeting pleasures we were just talking about. They saw the world. They achieved much professionally, but most impressively, they possessed themselves. They were able to retreat, as Marcus said, "into their own souls." They knew themselves. They commanded the greatest empire, as Seneca said, "by controlling themselves." If you could only achieve this latter achievement,

• 1:54Ryan Holiday?

  it would be preferable to the former. And certainly, the former without the latter is an empty place. But guess what? If you do the work, you can have both.

• 2:12Ryan Holiday?

  One of the most interesting parts of Seneca's letters is he's writing to his friend Lucilius, and they clearly have this exchange going where they give each other quote. And the Seneca will go, "Ah, I forgot to give you your quote today," or "Before I wrap up, let me give you your quote for today." And he addresses this at one point, he says, "You know, one way to get to wisdom is to find a quote, an idea, something that gets you better each day. So something that fortifies you against poverty, that makes you stronger, that makes you more virtuous." And that's what this exchange between him and Lucilius is. It's about that idea, they're bouncing quotes back and forth in the way that today we might text each other, or send an email, or you might put it on the whiteboard at work. I'm Ryan Holiday, I've written these bestselling books about Stoic philosophy. I've been lucky enough to speak about it to the NBA, and the NFL, sitting senators, special forces leaders.

• 2:57Ryan Holiday?

  But part of my own Stoic practice is really similar to what Seneca is doing, which is I pick one quote from the Stoics each day, and I try to kick it around, I meditate on it, I think about it, even if it's only for a few minutes, and then I go about my day. And actually, one of the ways I do that is with the daily Stoic calendar, which is one quote every day. It's actually the quote that's also in the daily Stoic. In the book itself, we have the meditation, but what I like about the tear-away calendar is it's just one quick quote every day, straight from the source, from Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Masonius Rufus, and I just try to kick the day off with that. So I'll give you today's quote. Epictetus says, "Don't seek for everything to happen as you wish it would, but rather wish that everything happens as it actually will, and then your life will be serene."

• 3:42Ryan Holiday?

  This is from the Incredian, book eight. I think what he's saying is that like, if you need the world to be a certain way, if you want the weather to be a certain way, if you want other people to be a certain way, if you want the market to do this and not this, basically, you're handing over your happiness, your security, to random fate, to what other people say and do and think, which the Stoics would say is a recipe for disaster. You are assumptions, expectations are a recipe for disappointment, for frustration. So if instead, you go around the world saying yes to how they are, accepting how they are, working with them as they are, responding to Them as they are, then you're not being disappointed or let down or screwed over.

• 4:22Ryan Holiday?

  Right. If I can go through today thinking less about how I want things to be and more about how I want them to be as they are. I'm going to have a better, more successful and happier day. It's funny, as I write, as I get here to write each morning, I pull off the day of the calendar and they all kind of blur together. But sometimes I'll have forgotten to do it for a few days or I'll have been distracted. I won't have been writing. And actually today's quote really fits with that. Marcus, this is meditation six, one, he says, when forced, as it seems by circumstances into utter confusion, get a hold of yourself quickly. Don't be locked out of the rhythm any more than necessary. You'll be able to keep the beat if you are constantly returning to it.

• 5:01Ryan Holiday?

  You know, a book is a long, hard slog. I've been working on this book now for more than a year. I've been on this series now for three or four years. And so I'm working on it every single day, but there are periods where I got knocked out of my rhythm. The resistance took over. I got distracted. I had, you know, a bunch of responsibilities with the launch of the book. The point is not to be perfect every day, but to kind of have this rhythm that you come back to. And I think this is true in writing, but it's certainly true about Stoicism in general. You have the rhythm, you come back to it, right? You get jarred unavoidably by circumstances, you get knocked off, you fall short. You're not what you needed to be or should be in that day. What matters is how quickly you come back to it. It doesn't matter that I didn't do a good enough job writing yesterday or last week. What matters is, did I show up today and do a good enough job?

• 5:46Ryan Holiday?

  Did I show up and put in the hours today? And if I can come back to that rhythm quickly enough, I can get momentum in the street going and I won't even remember this period where I fell off. This quote from Marcus Aurelius is one of my absolute favorites. He says, "You have the power to hold no opinion about a thing and not let it upset your mind." The idea of it for the Stoics is that we don't have to have an opinion about everything. And in fact, it's these opinions that we have about what other people do, about what other people think, about how things are. This is what upsets us. It's these opinions, these impotent judgments about things that are not up to us. This is the source of our distress and frustration and anger. And so by choosing not to have an opinion, not reading into the tone of someone's email, not questioning whether this is good. Bad for the economy, just accepting it as it is.

• 6:31Ryan Holiday?

  This is the path to peace. Today's quote from Seneca is actually one of my favorites because it's part of why I have the system of meditating on a quote, journaling, doing the same things every day. He says, "Life without design is erratic." You have to have structure. William James says, "No one is to be pitied." And the person who doesn't have any habits, who doesn't have systems, they're, they're making their decision every day about what they eat, what time they wake up, what time they go to bed, you know, what they say, what they don't say, how they work, how they don't work. You can't do that. You have to have systems, you have to have structure. And I think even for Seneca and Lucilius, the exchange they're having, is it a form of design, a structure where they are actively pursuing and exploring wisdom together? You have to have systems, relationships, you have to design things that make you better.

• 7:15Ryan Holiday?

  Otherwise, it's erratic and crazy and unpredictable. This one from Zeno today is a great reminder. "Better to trip with the feet than with the tongue." Right? Cato famously said that he only speaks when he's confident that what he's about to say is not better left unsaid. My mentor, Robert Greene, one of the laws of power, always say less than necessary. You can't unsay what has been said. So as I check this out in the morning, I stop myself and go, yeah, do I need to send that email? Do I need to put out that tweet? Do I need to stick my head into this? Oh, fine about that? No, I don't. I can keep silent. I can focus on what's in my control. I can focus on what I need to do. Always say less than necessary. Better to trip with the feet than with the tongue. This one's great. Mark Serele says, "The straightforward and good person should be like a smelly goat in the room.

• 7:59Ryan Holiday?

  You know when they are with you." Right? He, he actually says in, in the Hayes translations, he doesn't like people who say, "Let me be straight with you. I'm going to be honest with you." He says, "What you're, the implication there is that you're not normally straight. You're not normally honest." But he says, "No, it should be like a smell you can't escape. It should be a part of you. People should sense that when they're around you, you're an honest, forthcoming, forthright person. You don't pull your punches. You don't say one thing and mean another. You say what you mean. You are who you are. And if people don't like it, that's their problem. What you control is whether you're the honest, straightforward, smelly goat in the room." This one from Epictetus is basically the core of Stoic philosophy. It's basic, heard it a million times, but it's worth remembering this morning and every morning.

• 8:44Ryan Holiday?

  It isn't things that disturb us, it's our judgment about them. This is our opinions are the problem. Things are objective, they are what they are, right? It's our opinion that says, no, that's bad, that's unfair, that's so and so's fault. It's impossible to recover from. These are opinions, these are projections, these are things we are making up about things. And so when you realize that you can stand back, you can be objective, you don't have to have an opinion or a judgment about this thing. It's a really helpful reminder today for me as I go through the day to remember, these things aren't upsetting us. My wife says this to me sometimes, someone can't frustrate you, right? That's you, your opinions are responsible, not them. You step back and realize that it helps give you clarity and strength throughout the day. This is one of my all time favorite quotes from Empertius.

• 9:26Ryan Holiday?

  It says, "It's impossible to learn that which you think you already know." This is why I have it tattooed on my arm. Ego is the enemy. If you think you know everything, you're right in the sense that it becomes impossible for you to learn anything else. You cannot learn that which you think you already know by being humble, by focusing on what you don't know. Think about the Socratic method, Socrates goes around asking questions, not making assertions. The less you think you know, the more it's possible for you to learn.