This is the Critical Difference | There is Philosophy in Everything

Ryan talks about how parents can shape the fate of their kids, about how everything we do for others comes back to us, and reads The Daily Stoic’s entry of the day. 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?

  Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Thursdays, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from the book The Daily Stoic, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful co-author and collaborator, Stephen Hanselman. And so today, we'll give you a quick meditation from one of the Stoics, from Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, then some analysis from me. And then we send you out into the world to do your best to turn these words into works.

• 0:44Ryan Holiday?

  This is the critical difference. Marcus Aurelius and Nero had remarkably similar early lives. Both were not obvious selections for the throne. Both were told early that supreme power was in their future. Both lost their fathers young. Both were given Stoic teachers, Rusticus to Marcus and Seneca to Nero. Both were tutored in philosophy. So why did Marcus turn out to be Marcus and Nero to be Nero? Well, was one brilliant and just, the other vicious and unhinged? In my discussion with the author and historian Barry Strauss on the Daily Stoic Podcast, one possible explanation emerged. It was their mothers that made the difference. Marcus's mother, he writes in Book One of Meditations,

• 1:29Ryan Holiday?

  was generous, unable to even conceive of doing wrong, and lived simply not in the least like the rich. Nero's mother, on the other hand, was calculating and ambitious, uncaring and cruel. Marcus had another critical influence. His beloved stepfather, Antoninus, who treated him like a son and modeled daily what good leadership looked like. In the end, no amount of talent or training or tutoring was enough to outweigh that critical deficit for Nero. It's just a reminder, parenting matters. If you have kids, the most important role philosophy can play in all of your lives is in guiding the example that you set for them, and the principles you embody, and the standards you hold yourself to.

• 2:11Ryan Holiday?

  This is the area in which you can have true multi-generational impact. Which is a bittersweet truth for Marcus. He benefited from the positive influence of parents and role models who were guided by philosophy when he was young. But as an adult, his own failings as a father with his son Commodus would undo almost all the good he himself did as emperor. Not is the critical difference between being a good person, a good leader, and being a good parent. It's having positive influences early and being a positive influence early and always. The thing I'm most proud of doing that that I like doing the most each day is I do a similar email and podcast called Daily Dad. You can sign up for the email at dailiedad.com.

• 2:56Ryan Holiday?

  We have a Stoic parenting challenge there. We have a parent-to-be challenge. If you want to check that out, if you're thinking about becoming a parent or you know you're going to become a parent soon. And then I am currently hard at work on a Daily Dad book, which I hope to be a companion to The Daily Stoic and Robert Greene's Daily Laws and the other daily books I've recommended here before. So I'd love to have you sign up. You can go to dailiedad.com to find the podcast or to sign up for the email and I hope you check it out. There is philosophy in everything. And I'm reading to you today from The Daily Stoic, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living by yours truly, my co-author and translator, Stephen Hanselman.

• 3:39Ryan Holiday?

  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. Eat like a human being, drink like a human being, dress up, marry, have children, get politically active, suffer abuse, bear with a headstrong brother, father, son, neighbor, or companion. Show us these things so we can see that you have truly learned from the philosophers. That's Epictetus's Discourses 321.

• 4:20Ryan Holiday?

  Plutarch, a Roman biographer, as well as an admirer of the Stoics, and sometimes critic of the Stoics, and as it happens, his grandson or his nephew, we're not quite sure, becomes one of Marcus Aurelius's philosophy teachers. But anyways, the point is that he didn't begin his study of the greats of Roman literature until late in life. But as he recounts in his biography of Demosthenes, he was surprised at how quickly it all came to him. He wrote, "It wasn't so much the words that brought me into full understanding of events as that somehow I had a personal experience of the events that allowed me to follow closely the meaning of the words." And this is what Epictetus means about the study of philosophy, too. Study, yes, but live your life as well.

• 5:04Ryan Holiday?

  It's the only way you'll ever actually understand what any of it means. And more important, it's only from your actions and choices over time that it will be possible to see whether you took any of the teachings to heart. Be aware of that today when you're going to work, going on a date, deciding whom to vote for, calling your parents in the evening, waving to your neighbor as you walk to your door, tipping the delivery man, saying goodnight to someone you love. All of this is philosophy. All of it is experience that brings meaning to the words. I've talked about this a couple of times, but as an example of this in my own life, obviously, I've read Marcus Aurelius many, many times. But in the pandemic, it just hit me in this different way.

• 5:48Ryan Holiday?

  I realized, well, pandemic and having kids, there's two examples. But the pandemic, you know, realizing, oh, he was writing this during the plague, and that this was a lens, a filter, affecting the mood and style and tone and directing even what he was thinking about. And then, so as we've gone through COVID, I just came to understand Marcus in this whole other way. My experiences, as Plutarch was saying, my personal experience of events allowed me to follow closely the meaning of the words. Or rather, it helped me understand the words at a deeper, more profound level.

• 6:26Ryan Holiday?

  When I had Robin Waterfield on the podcast when we were talking about meditation, he has this great new translation annotated edition of Marcus Aurelius, which you should check out. We carried in the painted porch and I did like a three hour interview with him for the podcast. But as I was reading it, I just, I never, I obviously I knew Marcus Aurelius as a father, but only once I had kids, I came to understand some of the things that Marcus was writing about as a father more deeply, that there was, that it was there, hidden in plain sight. This is that idea. We don't step in the same room twice. You come back to the book, you experience something different, it hits you different, you're, you're looking at it from a different angle, your experiences are informing what's going on. So realizing that Marcus was talking about having children so often and his relationship

• 7:09Ryan Holiday?

  with his children, it just, I got something different out of the book. And then of course, COVID and parenting, you know, when you're just worried that something could happen to your kids, as many things did happen to Marcus Aurelius' kids, I just got something out of it at a deeper level. But that's not really what today's episode is about, or today's entry is about. In fact, it's kind of about the opposite. It's that words are important, of course, but philosophy is something you do, not something you say, right? Obviously, I've written a lot about the Stoic principles of, let's say, justice or generosity, right? That, that's me communicating about philosophy. But, and I was just posting

• 7:51Ryan Holiday?

  about this on Instagram, I had this, a couple of weeks ago, I had this idea, I was like, I was seeing what was happening in Ukraine. And I said, like, how can I make a difference? How could I contribute? What should I contribute? What's my obligation to contribute? And I had this idea, I had someone on my team, I was like, you know, those big stack of books, like in the corner of the office, all the international translations? Go through and give me all the Ukrainian and Russian editions I had. And then I texted my agent and I said, hey, can you like run through a calculation and tell me what the, the total revenues from me selling rights to Russia and Ukraine have been over the last 10 years? And he did that. And then I took a photo in front of the store and I just said, look, I feel

• 8:34Ryan Holiday?

  overwhelmed by this. I'm seeing the images on the news. I don't know what to do about it. But what I am going to do is donate my royalties from these two territories to the people who are being affected by what's happening right now. And I'm not saying this to brag, like, oh, look at this nice thing I did. But what happened from doing that, about a week later, I got a call from Tim Ferriss. And Tim said, hey, I loved your post. And I said, what are you talking about? The thing you posted on Instagram, you know, a week had gone by. Oh, he was like, I meant the Ukraine thing. And what had happened is that Tim had been thinking about what he could do about it. And he'd seen my post and he decided to do it. And then Neil Strauss saw that Tim had posted it and Robert Greene saw that I had put.

• 9:18Ryan Holiday?

  And all of a sudden, all these authors decided to do the same thing. Right? And I don't know what that adds up to, but it's a lot of money donated to this thing. And it came from me feeling, coming from the seed of what the Stoics say, which is our job is to try to make the little bit of difference within what's our control. Right? I don't know Vladimir Putin, I can't tell him to stop doing this. Right? Like, I can't go over there and fight. I'm not in a position to make policy decisions, but I can try to do a little bit within my own sphere. I can try to put my money where my mouth is, literally. And I can try to apply the philosophy, follow the philosophy. And then as it happens, that creates a snowball effect that helps other people.

• 10:03Ryan Holiday?

  And, you know, hopefully, and I've heard from a bunch of other authors that are doing the same now. But the point is, that's what Stoicism is. Not like me, I'm the Stoic, because look at what I did. But what I'm saying is that Stoicism is not writing about the things, thinking about the things. Stoicism is taking action on the things. It's putting the words into practice. As Epictetus says, don't talk about the philosophy, embody it. That's trickier for me as a writer about Stoicism. That's literally my job. I do talk about it, but I also have to try to be about it, as do you. So I hope as you listen to Daily Stoic, as you read the Daily Stoic, as you participate in this universe of stuff, as a fellow traveler on this path, I hope you understand

• 10:47Ryan Holiday?

  that it's not just about the inner work on yourself. It's not just about being a little tougher, a little more resilient, focusing on what you control mentally. It's also what you do. How do you apply these ideas in the real world? Which I tried to do here. I call on you to do the same thing. You can check it out on Instagram. The charity I donated to, I donated to one that's being put on by Flexport. They're like a logistics company. They're donating, they're handling logistics of getting a whole bunch of items to refugees and around Ukraine. And then I also donated to a Ukrainian charity called Comeback Alive, which you can Google both of those and find them out. But maybe this isn't the cause for you. Maybe it's not what speaks to you, but what can you do?

• 11:27Ryan Holiday?

  Where can you not just talk about this stoic idea of justice, but where can you actually be about it? That's what we're talking about, and I hope that inspires you a little bit as well.

• 11:38Ryan Holiday?

  Thanks so much for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. If you don't know this, you can get these delivered to you via email every day. Check it out at dailystoic.com/email.