This Is Not For The Weak | Stake Your Own Claim

In Meditations, Marcus Aurelius says that what you throw on top of a fire is fuel for the fire. But anyone who has had a little campfire going knows how easily you can snuff out the flames with a poorly placed log or even a few sticks. Marcus is speaking metaphorically of obstacles, not of an actual campfire…but that metaphor only works with a few assumptions.-And with today's meditation on the day's Daily Journal excerpt, Ryan reminds us stake our own claim with actions. For the last five years, we have been doing what we call the Daily Stoic New Year New You Challenge—a set of 21 actionable challenges, presented one per day, built around the best, most timeless wisdom in Stoic philosophy. 21 challenges designed to set you up to be able to say, whatever happens in 2024 and beyond, this is precisely what I trained for.. Demand more of yourself in 2024. Prepare for whatever is ahead. Head over todailystoic.com/challengeand sign up NOW!✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, 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.

• 0:03Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Friday, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from The Daily Stoic, my book, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful collaborator, translator, and literary agent, Stephen Hanselman. So today, we'll give you a quick meditation from the Stoics with some analysis from me, and then we'll send you out into the world to turn these words into works.

• 0:42Ryan Holiday?

  In meditations, Marcus Aurelius says that what we throw on top of a fire is fuel for the fire. But anyone who has ever had a little campfire going knows how easily you can snuff out flames with a poorly placed log, or even a few sticks. Marcus is speaking metaphorically of obstacles, not an actual campfire. But the metaphor only works with a few assumptions. For one, he's assuming that everything is flammable. Is that really true? Not exactly. But even if we grant that everything will incinerate at some temperature, we're still admitting that things can burn at a wide range of temperatures. So perhaps what Marcus really means is that your fire has to be really hot. It has to be really roaring if

• 1:25Ryan Holiday?

  you want to be able to turn what is thrown into it, as he says, into flames and brightness. If we look at the metaphor Marcus uses right before this fire one, his message is clearer. "A strong stomach digests what it eats," he says. So then, a small, weak fire is not going to be able to handle a big, dry log. So just as a weak stomach isn't going to be able to digest what you put in it, a small, weak fire is not going to be able to handle a big, dry log, let alone something hardier. And it's definitely not going to be able to melt steel or glass. And so it goes for us with obstacles. If we want to be the metaphorical fire that turns everything into fuel, we must be quite strong. We must have real momentum.

• 2:09Ryan Holiday?

  We must be operating at a high and heated level by the very materials that others are able to make use of.

• 2:27Ryan Holiday?

  Stake your own claim. This is the December 22 entry in the Daily Stoic.

• 2:37Ryan Holiday?

  And our quote today comes to us from Seneca Moral Letters 33. "For it's disgraceful for an old person or one in sight of old age to have only the knowledge carried in their notebooks. Zeno said this, but what do you say? Klianthe said this, what do you say? How long will you be compelled by the claims of another? Take charge and stake your own claim, something posterity will carry in its notebook." Using in his own notebook about the topic of immortality, Emerson complained about how writers dance around a difficult topic by relying on quotes. "I hate quotation," he wrote. "Tell me what you know." And I'm gonna tell you a little backstory about that in a second.

• 3:18Ryan Holiday?

  Seneca was throwing down the same gauntlet some 20 centuries before. "It's easier to quote to rely on the wise words of others, especially when people you're deferring to are such towering figures. It's harder and more intimidating to venture out on your own to express your own thoughts. But how do you think those wise and true quotes from those towering figures were created in the first place? Your own experiences have value. You have accumulated your own wisdom too. Stake your claim. Put something down for the ages in words and also in example." So I was maybe like 20, 21 years old. I was writing for the college newspaper and I'd written this review and I published it and did okay. And then I actually heard from

• 4:01Ryan Holiday?

  the person I was reviewing in it. And they were like, I said, you know, they gave me some feedback. And I said, hey, could we like get on the phone? I would really, I just want to grow as a writer. Can you give me some feedback? And they're going through it and he was pointing out all the quotes in it. And he gave me that Emerson quotation for the first time. He said, Emerson said something like, "I hate quotation. Tell me what you know." And that lesson has stuck with me in all of my writings. Yes, I talk about the Stoics. My writing is influenced and is in many ways, an attempt to introduce the Stoics people. But- One of the passes that I do on my own books as I go through them is after I've written, I write them just, what do I want to say? What's my, you know, what's my supporting arguments? Like, how do I want to illustrate it? And then I go through and I go, where

• 4:46Ryan Holiday?

  am I over relying on quotes here? Where can I get rid of them? Where can I, where am I over arguing things where not telling you what I know, but telling you what someone else knows? Speaking of quotes, there's a rule I heard from Nissin Taleb, where he actually said, "You should only quote people when you disagree with them." The point is, make your own arguments on your own merits. But I think this is a really important part of the Stoic practice. If you think about what Meditations was for Marcus, right? It's not him arguing Stoicism to the public, it's him arguing the Stoics to himself. So he does use quotes from time to time, but he's not really having to think that much about attribution. And he's not really trying to think about publication or the audience

• 5:30Ryan Holiday?

  at all. He's just thinking about what does he need to hear? What does he know to be true? And what needs to be said? What does he need to be reminded of? And I think it's important that we understand that Stoicism, the study of Stoicism is not a one-way street. It's not just downloading the information from the originals, from me, from other people. It's also putting your own spin on it. It's disagreeing with them. It's adding your own view. Stoicism should be better, different, added to, as a result of you having studied and learned about it. That doesn't mean you're all going to publish bestselling books, or articles, or videos. It's all going to be well-known. But make your own contributions.

• 6:12Ryan Holiday?

  Put your own spin on it. Feel free to disagree. Feel free to argue. Feel free to push back. Feel free to add. I feel like one of my contributions to Stoicism was the connection between Stoicism and Nietzsche, the idea of amor fati. I brought that in, also with the help of Robert Greene, but I brought that together. And I, that's a practice of Stoicism that, you know, did not exist before, or an explicit connection that did not fully exist before, in life. ...of the Stoics, I put all the Stoics, their biographies in one place. In the Daily Stoic itself, I combined the Stoics in a way that they'd never been combined before. And I made arguments that some people disagree with.

• 6:54Ryan Holiday?

  I made statements that I think are true, but not, again, not everyone agrees with. But they didn't exist before. I put my own spin on it, I put my own stamp on it, which is what you and everyone listening needs to do, not just with words, in fact, with words least of all, most of all, with our actions, with what we do, with who we are. So that's today's message from the Daily Stoic. I hope you enjoy it. Just a reminder, we're getting close to the end of the year. The Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge is almost ready to start. Don't wait till the last minute, don't procrastinate. I'd love for you to sign up now, dailystoic.com/challenge. I'm going to be in there. Thousands of Stoics from all over the world are going to be in there.

• 7:39Ryan Holiday?

  I think this is our best one yet. We've done it for five years now, this is our fifth one. It's going to be awesome. I'd love to see you in there. Sign up, dailystoic.com/challenge. Remember also, if you sign up for Daily Stoic Life at dailystoiclife.com, you get this challenge and all the challenges totally for free. So I'll see you on Jan 1 when we get rolling into this thing. Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it and I'll see you next episode.