This Is How To Capture The Magic | Ask Daily Stoic

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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. While on Thursdays, we not only read the daily meditation, but we answer some questions from listeners and fellow Stoics who are trying to apply this philosophy just as you are. Some of these come from my talks. Some of these come from Zoom sessions that we do with Daily Stoic Life members or as part of the challenges. Some of them are from interactions I have on the street when there happened to be someone there recording. But thank you for listening, and we hope this is of use to you.

• 0:45Ryan Holiday?

  This is How to Capture the Magic.

• 0:49Ryan Holiday?

  It should be the easiest book in the world to read. It's only, depending on the translation, a couple hundred pages, which are made up of short passages, making it easy to read in small increments. It's written in a straightforward and accessible style without any complex philosophical jargon. Unlike most books, there's no pretense, no performance, no intent to impress an audience. It's filled with topics that are universal and relevant, like dealing with tough times, being nice to people, waking up and getting to work even when you'd rather stay under the warm blankets. And yet, so many people struggle with and get frustrated by Marcus Aurelius's meditations. And they have ever since it was first discovered after the emperor's death nearly 2,000 years ago.

• 1:35Ryan Holiday?

  Just as we can imagine the first reader of meditations trying to make sense of the private thoughts of this great man, today, people have questions about where to start and what to take from it. What translation should I get? Should I read it cover to cover? Is it better to approach it in bite-sized pieces? Do you read it once or multiple times? Where did Marcus write it? Why did he write it? Did Marcus mean to come off so dark or dour? Is it important to know about Marcus's circumstances? Who he was writing for? What he meant? Do you need to know the core principles of Stoicism to fully appreciate meditations? We've been working hard here at Daily Stoic for the last decade to try to make Marcus Aurelius accessible and practical for people. We even publish our own edition of meditations.

• 2:18Ryan Holiday?

  But we've also spent hundreds and thousands of hours, not just with his writings, but also with the best experts and translators and students of Stoicism to help make sense of what he meant and what he can do for us. Getting to the bottom of Meditations is the work of a lifetime. And as Marcus would say of any great work of art, you get something new each time you go to it. Well, that's why we've been putting together what I think is the perfect companion for reading and understanding Marcus Aurelius's Meditations. It's this new Daily Stoic Meditations Guide. Like a book club or an annotated version of your favorite book, it's designed to be your personal roadmap through the nuances, subtleties, and complexities of Marcus Aurelius and Meditations. Whether you've yet to journey through the pages or you're intimately familiar with them,

• 3:04Ryan Holiday?

  this awesome course will enhance your reading experience, deepen your understanding, and show you how to apply the same Stoic principles and exercises that Marcus Aurelius used to improve his life to improve your own. And I think you're really gonna like it. I'm super proud of this. This is a course, you take it at your own pace. There's a bunch of video messages from me. We've got recommended articles, videos, podcast episodes. We've got journaling and reflection prompts. It's not spark notes or a summary. There's no substitute for reading meditations. It's not a shortcut, but it's a guide that will help enhance your understanding, help you really get everything you should get out of it, and hopefully guide you not just to read it once, but time after time after time. So again, whether you've never opened Meditations or your copy is filled with notes and annotations,

• 3:48Ryan Holiday?

  the Daily Stoic Meditations Guide is here to support and enrich your reading experience. And we're gonna keep adding to it. It's gonna get better and better. It's not gonna launch for a couple more days, but you can grab it now and be the first to get in there. I'm really excited for you to check it out. Go to dailystoic.com/meditationsguide, and I'll link to that in today's show notes. And also, I would say, if you haven't read Meditations, do grab our edition. We sell it in the Daily Stoic store, the Gregory Hayes Edition, but I added some awesome graphics to it. There's a biography of Marcus in there. It's leather, so it'll hold the test of time well, and I'll link to that in today's show notes as well.

• 4:38Speaker 01

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another Thursday episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Right around the fall of 2019, Stillness is the Key was coming out, and I was just formulating and going out to sell what would become the Four Virtues series. That's Courage is Calling, Discipline is Destiny, and now Right Thing Right Now, which you can preorder at dailystoic.com/justice. But I gave my first talk back in October of 2019 in Minnesota at the Hutton House, where I was talking about the ideas in stillness and what I was thinking about at that time. And I'm going to bring you some of that Q and A now. You

• 5:22Speaker 01

  can listen. I was invited to give a talk to a company called Studio E. I thought it was a great conversation, and I'll bring you that now. So here's me answering some Stillness is the Key related questions. And don't forget to preorder Right Thing Right Now, Good Values, Good Character, Good Deeds at dailystoic.com/justice.

• 5:50Speaker 02

  Hi.

• 5:51Speaker 01

  Hi.

• 5:52Speaker 02

  So, speaking of young people, I'm curious about, you mentioned a toddler in your life. So, how do you find that stillness when you have small children around you, regular basis, asking for a friend?

• 6:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, I have a three-year-old and a four-month-old, so it's a bit nuts at home. But what I try to think about is that it just sort of is what it is. I think a lot of the stillness comes from expecting it to be a different way, you know, expect, it's like, it's not that the house is messy that's causing you anxiety, it's that you think it should be clean, right? Or that you think other people's house is clean, right? And so somehow you're a failure because yours is not, right? Or it's that you told yourself we're going to get there at two.

• 6:44Ryan Holiday?

  Now it's causing you distress and anxiety that they fell asleep at 1:59 as you were pulling up. It's going, okay, you know, so now we're gonna, now I'm gonna sit here in the car for the next hour. It's not so bad, right? It's deciding, I think what I try to work on myself, I'm not great at it, it's like, I don't actually need to be anywhere, I don't need to do anything, I just need to do this, whatever it is. And so I think what kids are a good reminder of, if you let them be, is that sort of letting go and going with the flow and not needing things to be this way or that way, not comparing yourself to this or that. And just, I was reading a book and someone was telling me, the author was talking about how,

• 7:28Ryan Holiday?

  when he had his son, someone sent him an email and said, "Welcome to the world of unavoidable reality." And that's not so bad if you decide to submit to it. The problem is if you decide that the unavoidable reality is something that you can challenge or change, and then so you're sort of impotently fighting against this thing. And I think sort of giving up that need for control is a big part of it for me.

• 7:53Speaker 03

  You know that notion that the phoenix rises from the ashes?

• 7:57Ryan Holiday?

  Mm-hmm.

• 7:59Speaker 03

  Seems like when you're in that, when you're in that space, is when you don't have the presence of mind to be still and to take advantage of that in an empowering way.

• 8:09Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 8:10Speaker 03

  So I'm wondering if this is the kind of thing, you can fake it until you make it, or what your thoughts are about that?

• 8:14Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I do think about that. My first book in the series, that this book is a sort of part of a trilogy for, it's this idea of the obstacle is the way, right? And what the sort of premise is, when you look back at your life, all the really difficult, painful, unpleasant things you went through, you can see in retrospect were taking you to wherever you were gonna end up, right? You see like, the breakup that you went through was obviously for the best, the failure that you had was teaching you something, and in retrospect you wouldn't change them, right? But in the moment, you were so convinced that you could change them and you should change them, and that you must fight against them, you must resist them, and that was the source of a lot of that unhappiness and that misery.

• 8:56Ryan Holiday?

  And so, I mean, look, it doesn't magically take the pain of it away, but I try to zoom out and go, how am I gonna think about this in the future, right? And if I'm gonna be happy about it in the future, or if I'm at least gonna be resigned to it in the future, or not angry about it in the future. Why can't I just skip this part? Right? Like, why do I? If I know that at the end of the day, this isn't going to matter that much to me, and that I was taking it too seriously, or I was too upset about it in the moment, maybe that helps take 20% of the edge off. It doesn't magically make you feel better, but it can soften some of that. So that's one of the things I think about.

• 9:38Speaker 04

  Hey, Ryan.

• 9:38Ryan Holiday?

  Hi.

• 9:39Speaker 04

  First-time caller, longtime listener. I can only imagine how much criticism Kennedy would have suffered, spending 13 days being, still finding a solution to the Cuban Missile Crisis. In our current day and media environment, is that even possible? Is that solution simply unplugging, not letting anybody penetrate your space?

• 10:07Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 10:08Speaker 04

  Just not caring what people say?

• 10:11Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I think it's about deciding what forms of information you're going to let influence your decisions or your thinking. Like, I can't imagine it's healthy for anyone to watch five hours of cable news per day, but the idea that the President of the United States is watching that much? You know, it's like, I don't even think that people on Fox and Friends think people should be watching Fox and Friends. The idea that the most powerful person in the world is watching it is really alarming, right? I'm not talking about this politically. I'm just talking about like, if you're really, if a lot is weighing on your decisions, what you should probably not be thinking about is the minutia, the breaking, the tiny things. You should be thinking really big picture. And I think that's what Kennedy managed to so successfully do.

• 10:54Ryan Holiday?

  Look, he was in an election cycle. He'd made a bunch of mistakes early on. But the military was sort of unanimous about its opinion. Both houses of Congress were pretty unanimous that he should listen to the military. But what Kennedy was able to do was really zoom out. What Kennedy was thinking about in the missile crisis was not the interaction with Khrushchev a few months earlier. He's not thinking about how this is going to affect the elections in a couple of months. He was thinking about a book he'd read called The Guns of August, about the outbreak of World War I. And what he was thinking, what he said to himself is, "Nobody is gonna write that book about what I'm doing right now." So here you have a guy who's obviously breaking news from the,

• 11:39Ryan Holiday?

  breaking reports and fresh from the field intelligence from the CIA and from the military. He's obviously looking at all this information, but he's primarily looking at it from a lens of like, "What happened 50 years ago? And what mistakes did those people make? And how am I rooting my decisions now in the lessons learned from that crisis?" And so I think it's about sort of zooming out and making sure that you're focused on the information that really matters, that has some level of historical significance or truth that stood the test of time, not whatever the latest tweet or the latest opinion from the latest person. So I think, yeah, look,

• 12:24Ryan Holiday?

  certainly if this happened today, it probably wouldn't happen over 13 days. But hopefully whoever is weighing crises like this is slowing down and really thinking about what matters and not just thinking about how many retweets this is gonna get.