This Is How You Become Well-Read | Plato's View

As Marcus would say, we can't be satisfied with merely "getting the gist" of what we read. "Read attentively," he advised. Read deeply. Aim for quality, not quantity. The Daily Stoic is $1.99 as an ebook for a limited time only. Grab it here now!📘 Grab the hardcover edition of The Daily Stoic here: https://store.dailystoic.com/📔 Pick up your own leather bound signed edition of The Daily Stoic! Check it out at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast🎥 Watch top moments from The Daily Stoic Podcast on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast✉️ 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 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.

• 0:05Ryan 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 is how you become well-read. In Meditations, Marcus Aurelius quotes dozens and dozens of other writers and philosophers. Sometimes he attributes these quotes, sometimes he doesn't. Since he wrote most of Meditations in a battlefield tent, he likely didn't have the reference books beside him while quoting Socrates and Epictetus or Homer. No, what he was doing is drawing purely from memory, because he'd read those authors so many times, they'd become a part of him. This bit of remarkable recall, it demonstrates the ancient approach to being well-read, a phrase that has lost its original meaning, according to the philosopher Mortimer Adler.

• 1:38Ryan Holiday?

  Today, we consider someone well-read if they've consumed a lot of books. But the ancients valued those who truly knew their material, readers who dove deeply into the classic texts until they genuinely understood and had absorbed them. "A person who has read widely," Mortimer says of the modern reader, "but not well, deserves to be pitied rather than praised." And the 17th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes made a similar observation: "If I read as many books as other men do," he said, "I would be as dull-witted as they are." And this is why reading and rereading a carefully chosen set of authors is so powerful. Their insights become embedded in your mind. As we've said before, the Stoics aren't something you have read.

• 2:21Ryan Holiday?

  They have to be something you are reading again and again and again. As Marcus Aurelius would say, "We can't be satisfied with merely getting the gist of them. We have to read attentively," he advised. "Read deeply. Read repeatedly. Aim for quality, not quantity." And that's also how we designed The Daily Stoic 10 years ago. It was the idea of one page a day of the best Stoic wisdom from the Stoics, which has now sold millions of copies in dozens of languages. And really exciting news, the ebook is $1.99 right now anywhere you get your ebooks. The Daily Stoic is 366 pages of the best insights and practices, delivered one per day, from the Stoics. Five minutes in the morning, you connect with the wisest minds who ever lived.

• 3:06Ryan Holiday?

  And maybe you get a little meditation from me on top of that. And you can apply it to your life right now. Some people read it as an ebook, obviously. Some people have hardcovers that have made it through since it came out in 2016. And then a lot of people have upgraded to the premium edition, the leather one we made, which is really awesome. It's a leather-bound edition. We collaborated with this awesome bindery in the UK called Charfleet. It's got a genuine leather cover. It's got illustrations, comes in a box, makes a great gift. It's on premium Munkin cream paper. It's got vinyl in sheets, it's got a ribbon. There's a little letter from the authors, a bunch of other stuff. The idea, though, is, look, anyone can read a lot. The wise read well. If you want to live better, if you want to go beyond the gist of things,

• 3:49Ryan Holiday?

  I hope you go past just skimming the surface. And maybe you give The Daily Stoic a look, maybe give it to someone who might need it, or you just return to the original Stoics. I don't care. I did want to tell you that The Daily Stoic ebook is $1.99 for just a few more days. And if you want a signed hardcover or a signed leather bound, I will link to that in the show notes as well.

• 4:18Speaker 01

  Plato's View. This is the June 2 entry in the Daily Stoic. "How beautifully Plato put it," Marcus Aurelius writes in Meditation 748. "Whenever you want to talk about people, it's best to take a bird's eye view and see everything all at once of gatherings, armies, farms, weddings, and divorces, births, and deaths, noisy courtrooms, or silent spaces, every foreign people, holidays, memorials, markets, all blended together and arranged in a pairing of opposites." And actually, let me give you the Hayes one today, too. If I recall correctly, he renders this quite beautifully. "Plato has it right. If you want to talk about people, you need

• 5:00Speaker 01

  to look down on earth from above. Herds, and armies, farms, and weddings, divorces, births, deaths, noisy courtrooms, desert places, all the foreign peoples, holidays, days of mourning, market days, all mixed together, a harmony of opposites." And there's actually a beautiful dialogue by the poet Lucian, who is Seneca's nephew, I believe, in which the narrator is given the ability to fly and see the world from above. Turning his eyes earthward, he sees how comically small even the richest people, the biggest estates, the entire empires, look from above. All their battles and concerns are made petty in perspective. In ancient times, this exercise was only theoretical.

• 5:44Speaker 01

  The highest that anyone could get was the top of a mountain or a building a few stories tall. But as technology has progressed, humans have been able to actually take that bird's eye view and greater. Edgar Mitchell, an astronaut, was one of the first people to see the earth from outer space. And as he later recounted, "In outer space, you develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles away and say, 'Look at that, you son of a bitch.'" And then I add, many a problem can be solved with the perspective

• 6:27Speaker 01

  of Plato's view. Use it. You know, I just got off a plane. I'm getting on a plane again shortly. And you know, you look out the window and you see it. Sometimes when I fly into Austin, I can actually see where I live. And, you know, 40 acres, suddenly very small. A thousand acres, very small. The Tesla factory, one of the biggest buildings I've ever seen in my life, very small. Skyscrapers, very small people, miniscule. I think what Edgar Mitchell is talking about is this sort of paradox of it. Everything seems very small, but everything also seems very connected. Right. And so wars and international boundaries, these all seem, you know,

• 7:07Speaker 01

  so insignificant, such artificial and petty distinctions. I was recently down in Big Bend National Park and, right? You look over this vast expanse and it humbles you in that sense. And then also you're like, here is the United States. Here is Mexico. Here is the United States. Here is Mexico. You're walking on the one side of the river. And then it's just a, and we don't have to get into some complicated discussion about immigration, but it's just a reminder, it's like how arbitrary. Someone born over here gets this kind of life. Someone born on this side gets this kind of life. And they'll shoot you if you, if you come across the border with this intention. But me splashing around in the water with my kids, that's totally fine. Right. You realize that all these things we take very seriously are not that serious.

• 7:52Speaker 01

  And what matters, I think Marcus is saying, when you take Plato's view is like, our connection to other people, our obligations as human beings, being good, being decent. You know, Alexander the Great's empire looks very enormous and significant and powerful and important up close, but zoom out, it doesn't seem that different than anything else. And the immensity of the damage that he did in creating it suddenly comes into view as well. So Plato's view is about getting perspective and it's, it's a reminder that our technology helps give us that view.

• 8:29Speaker 01

  And that we should appreciate. I know if you ever watched the Daily Stoic videos, sometimes we use drone shots and it's been fun to learn how to fly this drone. But this drone has also expanded my perspective. It's allowed me to see things, even myself, right? From different angles. I never saw what I looked like running from 30 meters above me, right? I haven't seen what the angle of the road that I like to run on looks like that way. And it helps you appreciate things differently. It gives you that bird's eye view. And I think it's really important. I think time lapses can do this too. Of course, just sitting there and looking at it, climbing up to a high spot, looking at the stars can give you this too.

• 9:12Speaker 01

  But the Stoics were trying to humble themselves. They were trying to get perspective. They were trying to remember our obligations and connections to other people. They were trying, as Annie Duke says, to get to the outside of their problems, outside of the insularity of their viewpoint and their urges and their desires and their emotional reactions. And I just think it's so important. And please do avail yourself of that knowledge. It's very powerful and important, as Marcus says, as Plato does, as Lucian does. And I'll leave that with you now to chew on for the rest of the day.

• 9:53Ryan 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.