There Are Dreams That Cannot Be | 9 Habits The Stoics Want You To Stop Doing

Marcus Aurelius certainly hoped his reign would be peaceful and prosperous–as the fates had blessed his mentor Antoninus for 23 years. Certainly, he dreamed of growing old with all his children around him. Never would Seneca have asked for exile and loss, for Nero’s descent into cruelty. Epictetus, like every child, would have hoped for a life of fun and lightness. Stockdale, as he left his family for a tour in Vietnam, no doubt envisioned returning home unscathed as soon as it was over. But as the song goes…there are some dreams that cannot be.---And today, Ryan gives you 9 habits that you should stop doing in 2023. You can view the full video here. ✉️ 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?

  There are dreams that cannot be. Marcus Aurelius certainly hoped his reign would be peaceful and prosperous, as the fates had blessed his mentor Antoninus for 23 years. Certainly, he dreamed of growing old with all his children around him. Never would Seneca have asked for exile and loss, for Nero's descent into cruelty. Epictetus, like every child, would have hoped for a life of fun and lightness. Stockdale, as he left his family for a tour of Vietnam, no doubt envisioned returning home unscathed as soon as possible. But as the song goes, "There are some dreams that cannot be." Because fate, the world, it does not care much about what we want.

• 1:10Ryan Holiday?

  It does not care much about our plans. It does not consider us at all. The pandemic, the economy, the affair that broke up your marriage, the car accident that shattered everything. Life happens. Painful stuff happens. In an instant, all our well-laid plans, our hopes, what we deserve, we are informed that it cannot be. There are storms we cannot weather, yet weather them we must. We must practice what the Stoics call the art of acquiescence. After assenting, we try, as Stockdale did, to turn this event into something that, in retrospect, we would not trade. That's all we can do.

• 1:57Ryan Holiday?

  Epictetus once encapsulated all of Stoic philosophy in just two words, "persist and resist," meaning there were some things we had to keep doing, but more importantly, there were things we had to stop doing. Habits, practices, vices that the Stoics say you must stop doing. It's the perfect time to start quitting some destructive habits, get rid of destructive emotions, free yourself from the things that are holding you back. I'm Ryan Holiday. I've written these books about Stoic philosophy. I've been lucky enough to talk about it to the NBA and the NFL, sitting senators and special forces leaders. And what we're going to talk about in today's episode are not things I tell them to do, but things I tell them they must stop doing, that I'm trying to stop doing, and so should you.

• 2:39Ryan Holiday?

  Don't give in to your anxiety this year. You have to stop letting anxiety rule you. In one of the passages in Meditations, Marcus Aurelius says, "Today I escaped anxiety." And he said, "Wait, wait, no, that's not right." He says, "Actually, I discarded it. It was within me." The plane, the airport, that's not responsible for your anxiety. You're responsible for your feelings. You're responsible for the worry that you're projecting at this thing. And it's not helping you. It's not making you better. It's not doing anything about the problem. You're just torturing yourself in anticipation of what might happen or might not happen. I've never been in the thrall of anxiety, traveling somewhere, and then afterwards been like, "I'm so glad I was so anxious about that. It did so much." No, it made people around me upset. It made me upset. It made me miserable.

• 3:21Ryan Holiday?

  It didn't do anything for me, and it's not going to do anything for you this year. You have to stop doing less than your best. There's this great story about Jimmy Carter. He's being interviewed. He wants to get this job when he's a naval officer. And after Carter has talked about how he did in school, all the grades he got, the tests he passed, the things he learned, the interviewer looks at him and goes, "But did you always do your best?" And Carter has to answer him honestly. And he goes, "No, I guess I didn't always do my best." And the man looks at him and he says, "Why not?" And he gets up and he leaves the room. And that question haunts Carter for the rest of his life. Why didn't he always do his best? And as you look back in your own life, on last year and the years before, why didn't you always do your best? Why are you doing things that you don't think deserve?

• 4:03Ryan Holiday?

  Your best. This year, we have to do our best at whatever we're doing. We have to give everything that we have. That is one of the things that we control. We don't control whether we succeed. We don't control whether we win. We don't control whether we get recognized for what we do. But we do control whether we do our best, whether we give everything we have. And as the great Steve Prefontaine quote goes, giving less than your best is to cheat the gift. Not just the gift of your talents, I would say, but also the gift of the time in front of you for life you've been given.

• 4:33Ryan Holiday?

  The Stoics say you have to stop being a slave this year. There's a story I tell in Discipline is Destiny about Richard Feynman. One day, it's like 10 o'clock in the morning. He's out for a walk and he feels this pull, wants to have a drink. He never saw himself as an alcoholic, never had this problem with alcoholism. He was deeply uncomfortable with this drive, this pull to do something. It was coming from a part of him that he didn't control. The Stoics say that's something you have to be really suspicious of. Seneca says slavery isn't just this legal status. He says, everyone's a slave. He says, someone's a slave to their mistress. Somebody's a slave to money. Someone's a slave to power and attention. And he said, those people might be literally free. They might be powerful. They might be important. They're not in control. In Discipline is Destiny, I also tell the story of Eisenhower. He's told by his doctor that is smoking that he'd smoked like four

• 5:18Ryan Holiday?

  packs a day for 40 years. It was hurting his health. I love this. He says, I gave myself an order to stop smoking. And he stopped smoking cold turkey like that. It's going to be harder for some people, easier for some people. But the point is, you've got to give yourself that order. You have to say, who's in charge? This habit, this addiction, this vice that I have, this thing that I want, or am I in charge? Am I the boss or is it the boss? And that's what Feynman was reacting to. That's what Seneca was reacting to. That's what Eisenhower's reacting to. And ultimately, that's what Epictetus is reacting to in the same court as Seneca. He looks around and he goes, I'm a slave, but I'm freer than these people because I'm in control of my habits. I decide what I do and what I don't do. And we have to give ourselves that power this year.

• 6:03Ryan Holiday?

  In one of the beautiful passages in Meditations, Marcus Aurelius reminds himself, everything in life comes from change, good and bad. By trying to keep things the same, not only are you, of course, focused on something that you don't control, but you're preventing yourself from all the wonderful opportunities that exist that could come your way. We live in a time of disruption. We live in a time of institutions that are falling apart. We live in a time of innovation, new institutions that are being created. So you can't fear what's going to come of that. The Stoics would say, all you can focus on this year is embracing those things, adapting yourself to change, rather than fighting it, rather than fearing it, rather than resenting it. Because it's going to happen regardless of how you feel about it. So what you should focus on is what you're going to do about it. Marcus Aurelius talks about justice over and over again in Meditations,

• 6:48Ryan Holiday?

  the things that we have to do. But he reminds himself by saying, and remember, you can commit an injustice by doing nothing also. JFK, in one of his famous speeches, thinks he's quoting Dante. He says, hottest places in hell are for those who remain neutral. Dante never says this. We can imagine that he's probably thinking of his own father, Joseph Kennedy, who famously advocates neutrality and eventually appeasement as he's the US ambassador to Britain as World War II is breaking out. Kennedy reacting to the fact that in one of the great moral moments of history, his father turned a blind eye to what was happening. He didn't care. And so we have to understand that history is going to look back at this moment and judge us for the things that we were morally neutral on as well,

• 7:33Ryan Holiday?

  things that we turned a blind eye towards. Stoicism is focused on what we control as individuals. As individuals, there's not a lot that we control. And yet, and yet, if every individual only focused on what they controlled, we would lose the capacity for what you would call collective action, to be able to come together to solve complex, big societal global issues. You cannot turn a blind eye this year. You must ask yourself, where am I part of the problem? Where can I be part of the solution? How can I focus on and think about the common good? How can I make sure that I'm not committing an injustice by doing nothing, caring little, saying nothing?

• 8:09Ryan Holiday?

  Don't look for the third thing this year. In Meditations, Marcus Rilis says, "Okay, you did something good. Someone benefited from it." That's one. And two, the third thing, he said, is asking to be recognized for it, asking to be thanked for it, asking to be paid in return for it. He says, "No, you have to stop looking for the third thing." We don't control whether people appreciate it. We don't control whether people understand it. We don't control whether it's liked in its own time. We only control what we do. If you want to have more resources, more happiness this year, one of the things you can do is stop looking for credit, attention, recognition, compensation in return, and focus instead on, "Did you do your best? Did you do a really good job? Did you give everything that you had? Do you think you made a positive contribution to the world,

• 8:54Ryan Holiday?

  to humanity, to the common good? If so, then you have been paid back. You have been recognized. You did what your nature demanded. The Stoics would say, "You did your job, and that's enough." You have to stop putting stuff off. One of my favorite quotes from Marcus Rilis, he says, "You could be good today. Instead, you choose tomorrow." Seneca says, "The one thing that all fools have in common is they're always getting ready to start. They're always putting it off a little bit in the future." My friend Stephen Pressfield says, "We don't say, 'I'm never gonna do it.' We say, 'I'm going to do it tomorrow.'" You have to stop putting stuff off this year. You have to do it now, not later, now. You have to quit holding on to stuff. I don't mean physical possessions, although you should stop hanging on to those, too. The Stoics would say that you have to let go, right? It already happened. It's done.

• 9:40Ryan Holiday?

  Grudges aren't helping you. Regrets aren't helping you. There's a great New Year's tradition where people would write down all the things that they're hanging on to, that they regret, that they're mad about. And then on New Year's, they would light it on fire and they'd watch it dissolve into smoke. The Stoics would say that hanging on to stuff, torturing yourself, regretting things, it's not serving you. It's not serving the world. And it's not going to make you who you're capable of being this year. So let's start the new year by letting go of things. You have to quit holding on to things. Seneca says, "It's not that life is short. It's that we waste a lot of it. We put stuff off. We don't do things urgently because we think it's not urgent. We think we have an unlimited amount of time. But we don't. Death stalks us all." I carry this coin in my pocket. It says memento mori. On the back, it has a quote from Marcus Verdi. It says, "You could leave life right now.

• 10:25Ryan Holiday?

  Let that determine what you do and say and think. Let that determine what you don't do this year, what you stop doing this year. Not just that you stop wasting time, but you stop wasting time being a slave to things. That you stop wasting time chasing other people's approval, having opinions about things that don't matter. That you waste time not demanding the best of and for yourself. Right? You have to stop. You have to take this moment seriously because this moment may be all that you have. Let's carry that forward with us the rest of the year.