Pod Insights The Daily Stoic Premium (🔓) This Is The Most Common Obstacle | How Can We Balance Confidence and Humility? About this episode The annoying coworker, the unreasonable client, the demanding coach, the selfish teammate, the family member who pushes all your buttons—these are constant opportunities to practice virtue. Ask DS: What is the purpose of our ego? How can we find a balance between confidence and humility? + More! 📕 Get a signed, numbered first-edition of the 10th anniversary edition of The Obstacle Is the Way by Ryan Holiday at dailystoic.com/obstacle🎟 Ryan Holiday is going on tour! Grab tickets for London, Rotterdam, Dublin, Vancouver, and Toronto at ryanholiday.net/tour✉️ 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
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:02 Ryan 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. Well, 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.
0:43 Ryan Holiday? This is our most common obstacle. It's a famous Marcus Aurelius quote, and it's "The basis of which the obstacle is the way is built. The impediment to action advances action," he writes, "What stands in the way becomes the way." This powerful quote has inspired millions of people over thousands of years to do impressive things. Entrepreneurs pivoting during downturns to build thriving businesses, athletes turning injuries into remarkable comebacks, artists transforming hardship into their finest work, leaders moving their country forward. But do you know what Marcus Aurelius was really talking about when he wrote those words? It wasn't some grand story-worthy feat that
1:23 Ryan Holiday? we imagine. It was something far more ordinary: dealing with people. In a sense, goes the full passage, according to the Gregory Hayes translation. "People are our proper occupation. Our job is to do them good and put up with them. Our actions may be impeded by them, but there can be no impeding our intentions or dispositions, because we can accommodate and adapt. The mind adapts and converts to its own purposes the obstacle to our acting. The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way."
1:59 Ryan Holiday? Marcus Aurelius could have been talking about his stepbrother. He could have been talking about an egotistical politician, a favor seeker, a rival who tried to kill him, his challenges with his son, his wife, a rude person on the street. Think about it, how often are your biggest challenges, not tasks themselves, but the colleagues and bosses and clients and vendors and strangers you have to interact with along the way? How often is your happiness derailed not by lack of success or comforts, but by other people's actions, their opinions, or what you perceive about them? How often do pressures from coaches and fans and media weigh heavier than the actual performance? The annoying coworker, the unreasonable client, the demanding coach, the selfish teammate, the family member who pushes all your buttons?
2:42 Ryan Holiday? These are constant opportunities to practice virtue, courage by standing firm in your principles, justice by treating others fairly, temperance by controlling your emotions, and wisdom by understanding and adapting to others. People are endless. There are endless amounts of people and thus endless opportunities to practice virtue. So when others impede or disrupt your efforts today, remember that they're not causing you problems, they're offering you opportunities and making good on them and being good to people is our proper occupation. And it's this idea, this, I think, fuller understanding of what Marcus means when he says "the obstacles away," is one of the things I wanted to talk about in the new edition
3:24 Ryan Holiday? of "The Obstacles Away: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph." You can grab a limited number of signed numbered first editions. The only place you can get them is from the Daily Stoic store. The book's going to be out everywhere October 1st, but if you want a signed numbered first edition, just go to dailystoic.com/Obstacle. We've got some signed manuscript pages. If you got one of those on the previous books, as I was marking up, even through the audiobook, I was keeping these pages from the making of the book. And if you want to grab those, you can get them, they have got my handwritten notes on them. And look, if you've been following the podcast for a while, you've never read anything from me, well, I think this is a good place to start. It's my bestselling book, and now I think it's better than ever.
4:06 Ryan Holiday? Grab that at dailystoic.com/Obstacle. The 10th anniversary edition is coming out October 1st. Grab them while supplies last.
4:25 Ryan Holiday? Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I don't get out to Vancouver as much as I would like to. It's a lovely city, a great city for running. I love running along the water there. You watch those sea planes land. I have a bunch of fond memories of Vancouver. The last time I was there was back in May. I was giving a talk to this group called the Elevate Collective.
4:51 Ryan Holiday? And look, most of the time when I talk to groups, they're not open to the public. This is like a expensive, private mastermind that I wouldn't even be able to be at had I not been asked to speak. So that's kind of like normally the audiences that I speak to. They're usually private groups or private conferences, but I'm going to go back to Vancouver in November. I'm actually flying from Dublin to Vancouver because I'm doing talks first in London, then Rotterdam, Dublin, then Vancouver, and then Toronto. And those are open to the public. They're big theaters. It's gonna be awesome, like the ones I did in Australia. If you want to come, if you want to ask me questions like I do in these Q and As, if you want to be the person asking the questions, well, come out and see me and grab tickets at ryanholiday.net/tour.
5:37 Ryan Holiday? Those will sell out. I didn't want to get the dates wrong off the top of my head. So go to ryanholiday.net/tour. And then thanks to everyone at the Elevate Collective Mastermind. It was lovely. It was a bunch of entrepreneurs in a bunch of different industries. They built big businesses and were interested in the way that, not how they solve business obstacles, but the way that they were getting in their own way, that the idea that we're our own biggest obstacles, our limiting beliefs, our bad habits, our lack of knowledge about things. It's about, you know, the ways we self sabotage. And then also how even when we succeed, sometimes that doesn't feel enough. It's where that obstacle to one of the most important goals, which is our happiness, our contentment, our feeling of enoughness.
6:23 Ryan Holiday? So it was awesome to speak to the Elevate Collective Mastermind. Thanks for having me. I went for a great run along the water there, as I was saying, although it was pouring rain. Someone called it out. They were like, I saw you running in the rain. But that's what I love to do when I travel. I run or swim, get outside, and I'm excited to be in these cities. But most of all, I'm excited to see you and answer questions like you're going to hear now. So let's get into it.
6:42 Speaker 01 Hi.
6:43 Ryan Holiday? Hi.
6:43 Speaker 01 This is a pretty easy question. It's one I've asked myself a lot, but my ego never seems to get the right answer. But why do we have an ego? What is the purpose?
7:00 Ryan Holiday? Yeah, look, I think egotistical people tend to accomplish a lot. Does it always last? Does it always work out for them? You know, I mentioned Elon Musk earlier. I think his insatiable need for attention and drama and power and achievement, I mean, in some respects, good for the world. Is it so great for him and his family? Probably not, you know? So we can see why the ego to conquer or always do more is always driving people. We can see how, you know, it can compel us to heights, which maybe have a... or fame, which could probably have an evolutionary impact, I think. But how does it work for the individual, I think, is a different question, right?
7:45 Ryan Holiday? So it's powerful fuel. It's just very volatile or toxic fuel. You could say the same thing about anger, right? It's fueling us, wanting to prove people wrong or shove it in people's faces. It can compel us to do things. But does it... does it work so great on the engine that it's powering? You know, usually not. Does that make sense?
8:10 Speaker 01 Yeah, it does. It's funny, because it's like a paradox. It's like, you... if you get to a place of a certain level of enlightenment where you are aware that the ego is something to be managing and resisting and not giving into, and it is a life relationship, you do start to wonder, why do I have this thing that I'm supposed to be getting away from?
8:37 Ryan Holiday? Yes.
8:38 Speaker 01 Which I guess is why I always come back to this question, you know? But I do understand what you're saying in the sort of humanitiescape. It's gotten us really far. We've been able to achieve so many things because of it. But I do still wonder, like, why?
8:54 Speaker 02 Oh, hello. No, I just... I obviously have a lot of context to a lot of the questions that are coming up right now, because I've talked to you a lot. I'm gonna say something, and you might not agree. I'm gonna just try. Ego's not a bad thing. Ego's not evil. Ego is just a thing. You can use it in a lot of ways that are actually really helpful. I can guarantee a lot of you here in the early days when you were starting your businesses, you had nobody you thought you could do it. So you had to have a little sense of that. So thank your ego a little bit, but you also have to be aware of it and go, well, what's driving this decision? So I think what I see from a lot of you and a lot of times is that when we have a rough week, it's like, I want to cry. Some of you will cry.
9:37 Speaker 02 Some of you will get so upset and so down on yourself because your ego is going, you suck. You're not doing the thing that we said we were gonna do. It's just numbers. That means nothing about your identity. So your ego can serve you and it can do a disservice. So it's discerning what it's doing for you and when it's coming to play in a positive way. Was I right at all on that?
10:00 Ryan Holiday? Yeah, look, I would certainly agree that a lot of us, especially early on, ego is the main thing that's driving us. We just want to be someone. We want to, we want to be seen. We want, the problem is that is fine when you're 20 years old and you have no one depending on you and no one's really expecting much of you. The problem is if you're lucky enough to succeed, if that ego gets you to a place where you, now that's, that's a really dangerous precedent you've thought, set, or it's a really dangerous thing to be powered by. And I think you want to replace it with something, because I guess where I, what I think about, especially when it comes to ego is like, by definition, what we're doing is not about us, right?
10:43 Ryan Holiday? We're selling something to other people. So it's, it's about them. So if you're doing this for you, if you're the artist who's still stuck in some teenage version of like, I'm gonna make them understand, you're speaking only about yourself when the best art is, makes somebody else feel something. The best businesses are about delivering tons and tons of value to other people. It's not a monument to the creator or the inventor. And so ego, I think, can maybe get you out of your shell a little bit. It can, it can get you going, but ultimately, to be really great at something, it's so much less about you, especially when you start to develop a team around you, it's then definitely not about you.
11:28 Ryan Holiday? And, and to, I think you want to get to a place where you replace that with something else.
11:34 Speaker 03 Hey Ryan, thanks for being here.
11:36 Ryan Holiday? Of course.
11:36 Speaker 03 Big fan, been reading your books for quite some time like Mike has here. You mentioned earlier that you sent in, you know, your five-year piece of work to your editor, and he got it back to you with all these notes, and you kind of took offense to that a little bit, right? How do you balance your, obviously you're a very successful artist, how do you balance your ego, confidence, hubris, humility, being able to take that constructive criticism,
12:15 Speaker 03 adhere to what the notes are, and also know that what you're trying to get across and present? How do you, how do you sort of morph those two to be able to say, okay, I hear the feedback from my editors, I'm gonna, I'm gonna take that into consideration, apply that feedback, but also at the same, same time, you're you for a reason, right? And we're all successful content creators in here. So how do you sort of balance that, that hubris, humility, and your own confidence?
12:46 Ryan Holiday? I had a thing with one of my editors a few years ago, and I realized at the core of why we were not getting along was that, one, I was not doing a good enough job articulating what I was trying to do. And so I said, okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna really define this thing. I'm gonna say, here's what I want this book to look like, here's what I want it to do, here's what I'm trying to get at in my writing, here's where I want it to go, right? Because I was getting notes that were trying to take me in a very different direction. And if we could define our roles, my job is to write the book that I want to write, and their job is to help me do that. Now, it turned out to be a philosophical difference,
13:30 Ryan Holiday? because even after I very clearly articulated the only book that I was interested in writing and what I was intending to deliver, it kept giving me the notes to take it in another direction, right? And so I realized, okay, we have We have fundamentally different understandings of our jobs here. And so I got a different editor because I was determining the vision, but there was a conflict of visions. And so what I realized is on previous books, this is where there'd been problems, is that I wasn't sure of where I was trying to go, and that made it very hard for me to determine what feedback to listen to and what feedback not to listen to.
14:10 Ryan Holiday? And so I was sensitive to the totality of it, instead of being able to go, number one is good, number two is incorrect, number three is good, number four is incorrect, right? And so when you have a clear sense of where you're trying to go and what you're trying to do, then integrating feedback and then understanding where ego is at play is very easy to do. When you're not clear of what you're doing, you're at the mercy of bad advice, and I think you're probably going to be sensitive to good advice also, or good feedback also. Like, we tend to go, hey, what should I do? We'll just ask someone this, instead of going, hey, I'm deciding between these two options,
14:52 Ryan Holiday? and where I'm trying to end up in life is here, which one would you take in this scenario? And so the clearer we can be about our goals or where we're trying to go, then it makes it possible. And then understanding also, on the other side, when you're giving feedback or advice to other people, not thinking about what you want to hear in this situation, or where you would want to end up, but where they're trying to go is what you have to get at first. The other, there's a rule in writing that I think about all the time, though, that's helped me sort of be less sensitive. They go, when somebody tells you what's wrong, they're almost always right, but when they tell you how to fix it, they're almost always wrong. So they're not wrong about their opinion.
15:37 Ryan Holiday? If they're saying, chapter two is boring, or they're saying, I think the movie is too long, or they're saying, like, the website was confusing, you know.
15:46 Ryan Holiday? They're not wrong. They're a potential customer and they're looking at the thing and it's not working for them. But if they knew how to fix it, they would probably be in your shoes. And they don't. But so it's more like they're giving you the signal that something's not doing what you want it to do. And then you, as the person who knows what it's trying to do, has to then adjust or calibrate based on this information. So that's kind of how I approach it. Is I go, okay, so I'm seeing a lot of notes on this section. I may not actually look super closely at this section as a whole. I might just take another stab at it, as opposed to getting bogged down in seemingly contradictory or insufficient solutions.
16:33 Ryan 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.
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