This Answers The Great Unanswered Question | Make Honesty Your Only Policy

Those that don’t, or those that think they can go it alone, almost always fail.📖 Preorder the final book in Ryan Holiday's The Stoic Virtues Series: "Wisdom Takes Work": https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/wisdom-takes-work📓 Pick up a signed edition of The Daily Stoic Journal: 366 Days of Writing and Reflection on The Art of Living: https://store.dailystoic.com/🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast🎥 Watch the video episodes on The Daily Stoic YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos✉️ 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?

  This answers the great unanswered question. It was baffling and horrifying even then. He was one of the worst emperors in the history of Rome, no small feat, considering some of the deranged and incompetent people who ascended to the purple over the centuries. In the early 200s AD, the ancient historian Cassius Dio wrote his Roman History, and he, like us, was fascinated by the great unanswered question: What happened to Commodus? How did the son of a philosopher-king, the son of Marcus Aurelius, bungle things so badly that he was assassinated

• 1:37Ryan Holiday?

  in real life by a gladiator and his statues torn down? Dio's explanation is a good one, and a cautionary tale for all leaders and all of us. "Before Marcus Aurelius died and passed the throne to Commodus, he set up what you might call a board of directors, among whom were numbered the best men in the Senate," Dio writes. "Marcus knew firsthand how hard it was to step into a great man's shoes, the danger of being Caesarified or dyed purple by the cloak of the emperor. He knew he was nothing without Antoninus Rusticus, Herodas Atticus, Fronto, Senna, and Apollonius. And so there he was, on his deathbed, arranging for the best and the brightest

• 2:22Ryan Holiday?

  to similarly advise his son." But their suggestions and counsels Dio writes ruefully Commodus rejected. And this, he believed, was the critical difference between father and son. Marcus had admired how his stepfather Antoninus would yield the floor to experts, and how that humility helped him fulfill his potential. When he was emperor Dio writes of Marcus, he showed no shame or hesitation about resorting to a teacher. Commodus could not do this, and it cost him and the Roman people. Nero, as it happens, is just another verse in the same sad story. A famous statue shows Seneca giving a daily briefing to the emperor.

• 3:05Ryan Holiday?

  You can see in Nero's body language, the slouched posture, his hooded head, a sullen bored expression, that he thinks he already knows everything, that he's decided what he wants to do and what matters, and that sitting across from one of the wisest people to ever live is totally lost on him. Of course Nero failed, spinning off the planet into delusion and paranoia and fantasy. There is a reason that companies have a board of directors, presidents have a cabinet, and even a kitchen cabinet of informal advisors. Athletes and actors have coaches, managers, agents, spouses. And those that don't, those that think they can go it alone, almost always fail.

• 3:46Ryan Holiday?

  In Wisdom Takes Work, which is the new book, you can preorder it now, just a couple days left to do that. Got a bunch of awesome bonuses there, including some extra chapters, manuscript pages, we got signed numbered first editions. You can even have dinner with me. We can talk about this over dinner in our own sort of informal strategy session. But in the book, there are multiple chapters on the art of cultivating these teachers and mentors and advisors, because it is essential to leadership. Wisdom is not a solitary pursuit. It is a collective effort. We need people to help us see where we are blind. We need them to serve as parents to our inner children, a sounding board for our ideas, a check against our impulses.

• 4:29Ryan Holiday?

  They expand our limited experiences and education. They keep us from ending up like Commodus or Nero. Wisdom, it does take work, but that work is not only sitting alone with your books. It's cultivated in conversations, in meetings, in late night phone calls, even in criticism and arguments. One of the heroes of Wisdom Takes Work is Abraham Lincoln, who would not have been able to succeed as president without his team of rivals, a cabinet he deliberately assembled of brilliant individuals who often disagreed with him, whose differing perspectives and differing skills profoundly shaped his agenda and improved his ability to lead. In whatever position of leadership or followership we occupy, we must be able to take counsel

• 5:13Ryan Holiday?

  and suggestion from others, to yield to people with more knowledge and experience, to resort to teachers and mentors and advisors. This is not just the path to wisdom. It is wisdom, and it is work you must do. As I said, just a couple of days left to preorder the new book. It's out on October 21st. Wisdom Takes Work is the fourth and final book in the Stoic Virtue series. I'm so, so proud of it, and I can't wait for you to read it. DailyStoic.com/wisdom. Check it out.

• 5:54Ryan Holiday?

  Make honesty your only policy. That's what we're journaling about in the Daily Stoic Journal. That's where this little meditation comes from. As Emperor Marcus Aurelius did not see the best of humanity, leaders never do. At court, there would have been backbiting, people who sold their friends out when they saw an opportunity to advance themselves, avarice and deceit. He especially didn't like faux attempts at honesty. His point, if you have to say, I'm going to be honest with you here, what you're casually saying is that honesty is an exception for you and not the rule, that you're making a special effort to tell the truth here, because you usually don't. And how sad is that?

• 6:36Ryan Holiday?

  It's time to think about what these little statements say about us and how to make sure that our default policy is honesty and straightforwardness. And then the two quotes we have from Marcus Aurelius's meditations and then from Seneca's moral letters go as follows. How rotten and fraudulent when people say they intend to give it to you straight. What are you up to, friend? It shouldn't need to be your announcement, but be seen readily, as if written on your forehead, heard in the ring of your voice, a flash in your eyes, just as the beloved sees it all in a lover's glance. In short, the straightforward and good person should be like the smelly goat. You know it when they're in the room with you. I love that quote. That's so great. A calculated "give it to you straight" is like a dagger, and there's nothing worse

• 7:22Ryan Holiday?

  than a wolf befriending sheep. We should avoid false friendship at all costs. If you are good, straightforward, and well-meaning, it should show in your eyes and not escape notice. That's from Marcus Aurelius's Meditations 1115. And then Seneca's Moral Letters 109, he says, "It is in keeping with nature to show our friends' affections and to celebrate their advancement, as if it was our very own. For if we don't do this, virtue, which is strengthened only by exercising our perceptions, will no longer endure in us." Look, I think this idea that honesty is your best policy is really important. And obviously, we should cultivate a reputation for candor, for straightforwardness, for not holding back, for not being two-faced. If you have an opinion, you put it out there.

• 8:05Ryan Holiday?

  You don't say one thing in private, another thing in public, right? But I would say, you know, and we had Randall Stutman on the Daily Stoic Podcast and in the Daily Stoic Leadership Challenge, and he did push back on this trend of radical candor, you know, that often it can be an excuse for being a jerk. You know, the Stoics take their original roots from the cynics, you know, Diogenes, who sort of walks the streets of Athens, just saying whatever he thinks. But I don't particularly admire him. I see him as sort of antisocial. So I think what Marcus is saying, cultivate a reputation for straightforwardness, this is in context of the other.

• 8:46Ryan Holiday?

  Stoic virtues. It takes courage to be clear and to voice unpopular opinions and to say what people don't want to hear. But it also takes moderation and an understanding of justice to know what opinions to voice, how to voice them, how not to be a jerk about them. You know, radical candor in Wall Street firms, Randall was saying, is again, often an excuse for asshole bosses to be more of a jerk. And that's not the excuse they need. We want to be both straightforward as well as restrained. And I know that seems a little contradictory, but well, life is complicated and it's about balance. So when we say we want to be the smelly goat in the room, as someone who owns goats, let me tell you, man, goats can stink. I can sometimes smell my neighbor's goats.

• 9:31Ryan Holiday?

  He's like a half mile away. I'll catch a whiff of it in the wind. A male goat, this sort of musk they have, man, it is repulsive. It's disgusting. I don't think that's what Marcus is saying. I think he's being a bit exaggerated. He's just saying that, you know, these, I'm going to be level with you here. Or when we say, I don't mean any offense or no offense intended. You can almost expect that the next words out of this person's mouth are going to be really poorly thought out, not so nice things. And so I think we should take some time here to think about this balance. This is what temperance is really about, right? Just in the way that courage is a midpoint between cowardice and recklessness.

• 10:12Ryan Holiday?

  I'd like to think that honesty is a line somewhere between omission, not saying things and saying too many things or something like to that regard. If you get what I'm saying, it's, it's that, yes, we have to tell the truth, but you don't have to tell someone that you find them repulsive today. You don't have to tell them that you really hate the sound of their voice. Right? There are things you can keep to yourself. And I guess I just wanted to add a little color to this week's meditation. So all things in moderation, including this kind of honesty that we're talking about from Marcus Aurelius, have an identifiable scent that you are an honest person, but don't be a stinky goat.

• 11:00Ryan 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.