This Is How To Own Everything | You’re a Product of Your Training

Ryan talks about the vital importance of stillness and presence, and reads The Daily Stoic’s entry of the day. Try Surfshark risk-free with a 30-day money-back guarantee. Get Surfshark VPN at surfshark.deals/STOIC. Enter promo code STOIC for 83 % off and three extra months free. As a member of Daily Stoic Life, you get all our current and future courses, 100+ additional Daily Stoic email meditations, 4 live Q&As with bestselling author Ryan Holiday (and guests), and 10% off your next purchase from the Daily Stoic Store. Sign up at https://dailystoic.com/life/Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/emailFollow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and 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.

• 0:06Ryan Holiday?

  Bienvenidos a otro episodio del Podcast Daily Stoic. El jueves hacemos doble trabajo, no solo leyendo nuestra meditación diaria, sino también leyendo un pasaje del libro "El Daily Stoic: 366 Meditaciones sobre la Wisdom, Perseverancia y la Art of Living", que escribí con mi maravillosa coautora y colaborador, Stephen Hanselman. Así que hoy os daremos una rápida meditación de uno de los estoicos, de Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, luego mi análisis y luego os enviaremos a todos al mundo para que hagáis lo mejor posible para convertir estas palabras en obras.

• 0:44Ryan Holiday?

  Esto es cómo poseer todo. John Graves tenía una gran tierra. Como Cato el Hijo, trabajó la propiedad, cultivó, ganó dinero con ella. Pero una vez se burló de que los propietarios de la propiedad tenían que tener cuidado. "El niño pequeño", dijo, "caminando por las montañas y jugando en los ríos, puede poseerlo bajo ti". Porque mientras estás ocupado preocupándote, estresándote, solucionando un problema después del otro, ellos en realidad lo están experimentando. Son los únicos que realmente viven en ello. Lo que Graves estaba hablando era el poder de estar presente. ¿Recuerdas la historia que nos contó de Seneca caminando por sus estates un día y de repente darse cuenta de cuánto tiempo había pasado? Los árboles eran viejos, la casa estaba ensangrentada.

• 1:27Ryan Holiday?

  Era algo que todos podemos relacionar. Había estado tan ocupado que no lo había notado. Y podemos contrastar esto con algunas de las maravillosas observaciones de Marcus Aurelius sobre la maíz y los olivos y los caballos en su tierra. Se quedó en su estado lo suficiente para realmente ver, para realmente experimentar. Incluso si vendía la propiedad, siempre poseía esos recuerdos, esa conexión con la tierra. Como el emperador, controlaba tanto, pero es gracioso pensar que un niño o un artista hambriento podría ser su equivalente solo mirando y notando y siendo presente. Cuando hablamos de quietud, eso es lo que realmente estamos hablando, parar, realmente ver, realmente poseer. Si estás viajando a 1,000 millas por hora, si ves todo como un problema para ser solucionado, ¿qué clase de vida es eso?

• 2:10Ryan Holiday?

  And especially in a world where time once past can never be recovered, where everything is so fleeting, it's a terrible shame to waste. Forget what your books and budgets say. Forget what's on the deed. If you really want to own something, own this moment in front of you. Own what you're doing. Be present. Be here now. Be still. My book Stillness is the Key is built around that idea of stillness, which appears in meditations like almost a dozen times. But we also see it in Buddhism and we see it in Hinduism and we see it in Christianity. The ability to slow down, to be present, to be here now is so important. I think it's more important than ever. And I don't just think it's important for the purposes of inner peace.

• 2:52Ryan Holiday?

  You can't do great work unless you can get to that place. And all my writing, all my thinking, all my happiness, it comes from there. And so I wish you much stillness today. If you haven't checked out the book, I think you'll like it. It debuted at number one on the New York Times list. Stillness is the key. You can get it anywhere books are sold. And I think sitting down with the book, of course, is a great way to get some stillness.

• 3:16Ryan Holiday?

  You're a product of your training. And I'm reading to you today from The Daily Stoic, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, by yours truly and my co-author and translator, Stephen Hanselman. You can get signed copies, by the way, in the Daily Stoic store. Over a million copies of The Daily Stoic in print now. It's been just such a lovely experience to watch it. Spend more than 250 weeks, consecutive weeks on the bestsellers. It's just an awesome experience, but I hope you check it out. We have a premium leather edition at store.dailystoic.com as well. But let's get on with today's reading. Chasing what can't be done is madness, but the base person is unable to do anything else.

• 4:00Ryan Holiday?

  Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 5:17. And let me grab you another translation of that one, too. Let's do Gregory Hayes. What does Gregory Hayes have to say today on 5:17? This is one of my favorite little passages. And sometimes what I like to do is pull up more than one. He says, "It is crazy to want what is impossible and impossible for the wicked not to do so."

• 4:30Ryan Holiday?

  And then turning to Robin Waterfeld, which I also love. He said, "To pursue impossibilities is madness, and it's impossible for bad men not to behave like that." And then his little translation, or his little note there is, he said, "Marcus is again commenting on something one of his acquaintances has done that is unknowable to us." Interesting. So, I love that. I love both those translations. I love Steve's and the Daily Stoic, the best, of course. But here's the, here's what I riffed on in the book. I said, "A dog that's allowed to chase cars will chase cars. A child who's never given any boundaries will become spoiled. An investor without discipline is not an investor. He's a gambler.

• 5:15Ryan Holiday?

  And a mind that isn't in control of itself, that doesn't understand its power to regulate itself, will be jerked around by external events and unquestioned impulses. And that can't be how you'd like tomorrow to go. So you must be aware of that. You must put in place training and habits now to replace ignorance and ill-discipline. Only then will you begin to behave and act differently. Only then will you stop seeking the impossible and the short-sighted and the unnecessary." The dictum from Herakles is that character is fate. Sort of who we are, who we've become, what the work we've done, right, on ourselves. What this thing that we are determines who we'll be, what we'll do. It's predictive and deterministic.

• 6:00Ryan Holiday?

  And I think the idea, the tragic part is like, we've seen this, I won't get too into specifics, but let's say, let's just say we've seen this play out politically over the last couple of years. People tell themselves that it'll be different once this person gets elected, or that they hope they'll be able to control themselves. They hope the office will make them, you know, more this way or that way. They hope the checks and balances will, they hope, they hope they'll learn their lesson this time. But that's not how it goes. We're a product of our training. We're a product of the standards we hold ourselves to. We're a product of our character. And when one is deficient, or in the illusion I'm making here, woefully deficient in those areas,

• 6:43Ryan Holiday?

  the results are pretty easy to predict. Especially when the future, what the future holds is the inevitable difficulties, tests, challenges, temptations, corruptions, right? Of course, it was never gonna go any other way. It was only gonna go the way that it went. You see this in sports, of course, right? Hey, maybe Antonio Brown will be different this time. No, Antonio Brown is Antonio Brown. And I say this as someone who was quite pleased a couple of years ago to hear that he was reading my books. But of course, the books didn't really make a difference. You know, of course, the people weighing in, trying to get through to Kanye West,

• 7:25Ryan Holiday?

  or Elizabeth Holmes, or whomever, it's never gonna get through. They're always gonna go down that path. It's who they are, right? It's tragic, it's sad, I wish it was otherwise. I wish people were more malleable than they were, but they're not. And that's why now, early on, before the concrete is set, before the paint is dry, you gotta do that work, you gotta do that training, you gotta set those standards. Because they ultimately determine who we're gonna be. You're not just magically gonna reinvent yourself. You're not just magically, you know, people go, oh, when the moment arises, I'll step up to it, right? And that's not how it is, right? As they say in sports and in the military, we fall back to the level of our training.

• 8:10Ryan Holiday?

  We don't rise to the occasion, we fall back to the level of our training. To me, that's really what Stoicism is, it's training. We're training to become what we need to become who we need to be. Because if we don't do that work, well, we're gonna cause a lot more work for ourselves, a lot more problems for ourselves in the future.

• 8:33Ryan Holiday?

  You know, the Stoics in real life met at what was called the stoia, the stoia po kiloe, the painted porch in ancient Athens. Obviously, we can't all get together in one place because this community is like hundreds of thousands of people and we couldn't fit in one space. But we have made a special digital version of the stoia. We're calling it Daily Stoic Life. It's an awesome community. You could talk about like today's episode, you could talk about the emails, ask questions. That's one of my favorite parts is interacting with all these people who are using Stoicism to be better in their actual, real lives. You get more Daily Stoic meditations over the weekend, just for the Daily Stoic Life members, quarterly Q and As with me, cloth-bound edition of our Best of meditations, plus a whole bunch of other stuff, including discounts.

• 9:17Ryan Holiday?

  And this is the best part, all our Daily Stoic courses and challenges totally for free, hundreds of dollars of value every single year, including our New Year, New You challenge. We'd love to have you join us. There's a two-week trial totally for free. Check it out at DailyStoicLife.com.