There Are Only Hard Decisions

“Wouldn’t it be nice if everything was simple and straightforward? That’s what we’d like to think the job of a leader is. You become president—or emperor—and now that you’re in charge, things can finally be cleaned up. Just bring me the decisions, you think, and I’ll do a much better job than those fools who came before me.”Ryan explains why we have to be prepared to make difficult decisions on today’s Daily Stoic Podcast.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow Daily Stoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicSee 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 the Daily Stoic Podcast where each day we bring you a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength, insight, and wisdom in everyday life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us, dailystoic.com.

• 0:26Ryan Holiday?

  There are only hard decisions. Wouldn't it be nice if everything was simple and straightforward? That's what we'd like to think the job of a leader is. You become president or emperor, and now that you're in charge, things can finally be cleaned up. Just bring me the decisions, you think, and I'll do a much better job than those fools who came before me. Of course, life isn't remotely like that. Observers of the presidency have observed that only the impossible problems make their way to the Oval Office. Everything that's clean and easy, that gets decided much lower down in the chain of command. It's the intractable no-win situations that get escalated to the leader's desk. Certainly,

• 1:07Ryan Holiday?

  that's what Marcus Aurelius dealt with. Wars at foreign borders, a bankrupt treasury, a plague, religious strife, all the fun stuff, all the obvious stuff, other people got to deal with that. Everything else fell on his shoulders. Nobody else was asked to tutor Nero because no one else was up to the task. It fell on Seneca to weigh that awful dilemma, especially as Nero grew older and harder and harder to manage. It might seem like an easy decision to us in retrospect, but that's because the decision was never offered to us. We have never had to actually consider what Rome would have looked like if someone worse had been Nero's advisor. We've never had to face that level of no-win situation.

• 1:47Ryan Holiday?

  The point is, leadership, like life, is often a matter of choosing between the lesser of two evils. It's about making the best of bad situations. It's about being pragmatic and realistic. We can't go through life expecting it to be like Plato's Republic, Marcus Aurelius reminds us. We don't live there. We live in the real world, where there are only hard decisions, where the easy, simple problems get greedily gobbled up by lesser men and women. It's the tough stuff that falls on us. But that's okay. We're ready for it.

• 2:18Ryan Holiday?

  Thanks for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. And if you didn't know, I also have another podcast and daily email. Every day I write something at dailydad.com, which gets delivered to thousands of people all over the world. I record the meditations, just like this one, on the podcast for free. So if you're a parent, if you know a parent, if you're an expecting parent, I think you'd really like it. It's called Daily Dad, but it has nothing to do with gender. I'm a dad, that's why it's called that. We'd love to have you over at dailydad.com. And of course, subscribe to the Daily Dad Podcast.