There Will Always Be These Kinds of People | Wealth and Freedom are Free

“It’s easy to become disappointed with humanity each time you step into your car. Not even because of how angry and aggressive some drivers are. Or from the amount of litter you see on the side of the road. The slow, clueless drivers who needlessly cause traffic are sufficient.”Ryan explains why you have to prepare yourself for what life throws at you, and reads The Daily Stoic’s entry of the day, on today’s Daily Stoic Podcast. This episode is also brought to you by Public Goods, the one stop shop for sustainable, high quality everyday essentials made from clean ingredients at an affordable price. Everything from coffee to toilet paper & shampoo to pet food. Public Goods is your new everything store, thoughtfully designed for the conscious consumer. Receive $15 off your first Public Goods order with no minimum purchase. Just go to publicgoods.com/STOIC or use code STOIC at checkout.***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.

• 0:04Ryan 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, and some analysis from me. And then we send you out into the world to do your best to turn these words into works.

• 0:42Ryan Holiday?

  There will always be these kinds of people. It's easy to be disappointed with humanity each time you step into your car, not even because of how angry and aggressive some drivers are or the amount of litter you see on the side of the road. The slow, clueless drivers who needlessly cause traffic are sufficient. Who are these people? Who gave them a license? What is their problem? These are the kinds of questions you could say or scream from behind the wheel. That's one option. Or you could try the modern version of a question Marcus Aurelius would ask himself each time he encountered a frustrating or incompetent person. Is a world without bad drivers possible? There are over 1.4 billion cars on the road worldwide.

• 1:25Ryan Holiday?

  Isn't it likely that some of them will be poorly operated? So you've met one. So one of those cars is in front of you right now. Is that really so surprising? A better way to drive to understand these people is to understand that the world is a diverse place. Some of us are good at many things. Some of us are good at a few things. Some of us are wonderful people and terrible drivers. Others are courteous, alert drivers who are complete monsters at work or at home. Others are just bafflingly inept at basically everything, for whom life must be completely overwhelming and difficult. Prepare yourself in advance for the reality of this diversity. Better yet, come to appreciate it. It makes the world interesting.

• 2:07Ryan Holiday?

  And even if it didn't, there's not much we can do about it anyway. There will always be people like this and that. There will always be people to shake your head at. Get used to it.

• 2:20Ryan Holiday?

  Wealth and freedom are free. This is the Daily Stoic entry for March 25th. Freedom isn't secured by filling up on your heart's desire, but by removing your desire. Epictetus Discourses 4.1. There are two ways to be wealthy. To get everything you want or to want everything you have. Which is easier right here and right now? The same goes for freedom. If you chafe and fight and struggle for more, you will never be free. If you could find and focus on the pockets of freedom you already have, well, then you'd be free right here, right now. If we think about what wealth is, right?

• 3:05Ryan Holiday?

  Wealth is having a surplus of something, right? Of love, or wealth, or freedom. It's having more than you need, or more than a person needs. Right? So, one way to get that is to just accept what everyone wants and needs, what the normal sort of baseline standards are, and then go get more than that. Get lots and lots and lots and lots of money, of freedom, of power, of love, whatever. That's one way. And that's the way most of us try to get it. We try to earn more, make more, save more, invest more. The other way, of course, is to look at what those needs are and to question some of those needs. What is it that you actually need? What is it that you actually want? What is enough?

• 3:50Ryan Holiday?

  And if you can find a place where you can reduce some of those needs, you can be wealthier faster than other people, or perhaps you could be wealthy right now. I think one of the things the pandemic has shown for me is that, you know, I thought I needed X. Like, if you told me, hey, all your income from travel and other things is gonna immediately go away. At the beginning of 2020, I would have said, I can't afford that. But of course, I could afford it because life was about to show me what that looked like. And you know, I didn't die. But, but the point is, what it was showing is that when my needs were artificially constrained, it became very clear how little I actually did need.

• 4:33Ryan Holiday?

  That, that I was making myself feel poor, not financially, I'm not, this is actually not really what I'm talking about. I'm just talking about, I felt like I needed to do more, be more, have more, go more. But actually, the, the needs, what I, what I needed for a happy, healthy life was a lot less. And so by adjusting the needs, I feel like actually 2020 was a great year financially, personally. Certainly a tragic and sad and frustrating year in other ways, but you get my point. And so, don't just, just think about the equation as having both sides. And you know, it's funny, we're talking about Epictetus. Epictetus famously talks about how every situation has two handles. So if you think about wealth, are you going to grab the handle of needing more and more and more? That's the heaviest handle.

• 5:18Ryan Holiday?

  Or are you going to grab the handle about needing less and less and less? Because if you tackle the need side of things, then what you already have becomes more. If you're tackling the other side, then you're, what you have is by definition not enough. And it's funny, I've met so many very wealthy, successful people, and they don't see themselves that way. They don't feel that way. And they, they need more and more and more. And sometimes I ask them, it's like, what do you need this money for? What is it that you aren't experiencing that you want to be experiencing? Or, or what is it that you think Warren Buffett is experiencing that, that you or I are not experiencing? You know, I've eaten in the fanciest restaurants, I've, I've flown in first class, I've flown

• 6:02Ryan Holiday?

  in a private jet before, you know, I've, I've been to cool places. It's not that great, it's not that different. It does, it's, it's, it's, we tell ourselves, this is what we need to be happy and successful and good and feel wealthy. But you know, the truth is, a lot of people that have those things, not only don't feel those things, but actually those things have the exact opposite effect that you think they would. So today, let's try to tackle that other end, that other handle. Let's focus on our wants and our needs, and that will by definition raise our wealth.

• 6:35Ryan Holiday?

  Thanks for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Just a reminder, we've got signed copies of all my books in the Daily Stoic store. You can get them personalized, you can get them sent to a friend, whatever you want. We'd love for you to have a copy. I know I love signed copies of some of my favorite books. If you love a signed copy of The Obstacle is the Way, You Go is the Enemy, Stillness is the Key, the leather-bound edition of the Daily Stoic, we have them all in the Daily Stoic store, which you can check out at store.dailystoic.com.