This Is The Most Important Virtue | Ask DS

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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Ryan 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. While 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.

• 0:45Ryan Holiday?

  This is the most important virtue. Courage is a pretty obvious choice for being the most important of the four Stoic virtues. It was Aristotle who said that courage was the mother of all the other virtues. In a world that's not virtuous, it's a brave thing to go out there and do what needs to be done. Self-discipline is another obvious choice because, well, you can't do anything without it. And as Aristotle also pointed out, courage that isn't checked by temperance quite easily veers into recklessness. The fact that you can argue either of these virtues convincingly is the most important one is the reason why I, this is Ryan breaking the fourth wall here, sorry. When I announced courage as calling,

• 1:29Ryan Holiday?

  I said that courage was the most important virtue. And then when I did discipline as destiny, I said, discipline was the most important virtue. But with a straight face, though, I can actually say that justice is the most important virtue because without justice, what is the point of any of it? The Stoics were very clear. The whole point of life, the whole point of philosophy was to direct a person towards doing what was right. Courage in pursuit of injustice? Discipline dedicated to an entirely selfish or destructive goal? That's not how Marcus Aurelius or Epictetus or Xeno would have defined the good life. In fact, Marx really says that injustice is a blasphemy against the oldest of the gods.

• 2:12Ryan Holiday?

  So this brings us then to the next virtue in the Stoic Virtue series. This thing I've been working on now since 2019. It's the virtue of justice and a book that celebrates it. It's all about this idea. It's called Right Thing Right Now: Good Values, Good Character, Good Deeds. The last five years I've been working on this series and I've, one of the things I realized while I was writing it is that justice today means something very different than it did in the ancient world. Today, when we think of justice, we think of politics. We think of our rights. We think of the legal system and we love to debate the meaning of justice, what it is, who it's for, how it's accomplished. But that's usually as far as most of us get.

• 2:56Ryan Holiday?

  Justice as a noun, as some abstract notion that happens outside of us, away from our control and influence. But justice actually occurs in each of our lives every single day, not only in the big moments, but the small ones too. How we choose to treat a stranger, how we decide to behave at work, how we respond to a friend going through something. In fact, by the time we sit down for lunch on a given day, the world has presented us dozens of chances to engage with justice, to do the right thing in our lives here and now, and accept responsibility to improve the world around us. Because justice is something that happens within us, not outside us. Justice is a verb, not a noun. It's something we do, not something we get. And this is evident in the lives of the people that we really admire.

• 3:41Ryan Holiday?

  And more importantly, it's visible in their actions. It's visible in the characters that I have lived with these last two years as I've been writing the book, who I've come to deeply respect and be so inspired by. Harry S. Truman, Jimmy Carter, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Sojourner Truth, Florence Nightingale, Marcus Aurelius, Cato the Younger. These are all people I talk about in Right Thing Right Now. Because through role models like that, we learn the transformational power of living by a moral code. And if we learn to stand by our own convictions, not only can we change the world for the better, but we change ourselves in the process and discover a level of fulfillment and meaning that most never know is possible. So look, Right Thing Right Now.

• 4:26Ryan Holiday?

  It launches on June 11, 2024.

• 4:30Ryan Holiday?

  Can't believe it's finally here, or almost here. But the thing is that pre-ordering makes a huge difference for authors and for bookstores. As we're trying to get a book off the ground, this is like how many copies a publisher decides to order. This is all what counts for the bestseller list. This is what the algorithm takes and decides whether to recommend a book or not. So it would mean so much if you could support the book, and I want to make it worth your while. You can get a signed numbered first edition for me if you go to dailystoic.com/justice. I've got a Spotify playlist of all the songs I've listened to when I wrote the book. There's a bunch of bonus chapters, things I wanted to say in the book that I didn't have room for. And then if you want a signed manuscript page for me, that's really cool.

• 5:15Ryan Holiday?

  As I would go through the book, I would save the pages that I was doing notes from, and all the way up through the audiobook. And you can get those. One of my prized possessions is my copy of Gates of Fire. I have the last manuscript page of that book. And we could also have dinner together. We're going to do a philosophically inspired dinner where we talk about justice across the street from the painted porch. So you can grab that now at dailystoic.com/justice. You can preorder Right Thing right now, today. It would mean a lot. Of course, you can get the audiobook, you can get the Kindle, whatever format you want. I'll honor the bonuses, of course, but if you want a signed numbered first edition, the best place to find that, in fact, the only place to find that, is dailystoic.com/justice. I'm so excited about this book. I've been thinking about it and

• 5:59Ryan Holiday?

  living it and wanting to share it with you for so long now, and now that's here. So I hope you like it. Right Thing, Right Now, Good Values, Good Character, Good Deeds. And with that, I bid you good day.

• 6:18Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Thursdays, I try to answer your questions. Well, not specifically your questions, but as you know, I go around the world and I give talks about Stoic philosophy. And then there's usually a little Q and A section, which is one of my favorite things to do. So we grab Q and As from there, or we grab them from the Daily Stoic Challenges, or some of the stuff we do as Day of Stoic Life, and I put that here on the podcast for you. Their questions, hopefully matching with some of your questions. If somebody asks it to me in person, chances are some of you listening might have the same question. And as you know, I've got this little bookstore, The Painted Porch, which is named after the Stoic poet Kele, that's the painted porch in Greece, where Zeno sort of founds Stoicism in the Athenian agora.

• 7:01Ryan Holiday?

  And I did this talk a couple of months back to this group that's mostly retail folks, people from Apple, people from Warby Parker, people from big chains, little chains, big retailers, little retailers, creative directors, heads of merchandising, finance people. Anyways, I was just talking Stoicism, how it pertains to what they do. And I was specifically talking about the challenges that I've gone through opening The Painted Porch in the middle of the pandemic. And then I answered some questions in the end. So that's what I'm going to bring you now. Enjoy. This is me talking about instant gratification technology, the bookstore, and of course, how this all connects to the Stoics. Hope you're having a good week. Talk to you all soon.

• 7:48Speaker 01

  Towards the end of your book, The Obstacle is the Way, you talk about how the peers in your generation of millennials don't seem to have this kind of staying power, persistence, and perseverance. It's something you notice that we don't tend to, you know, sort of see and have this sense of amor fati for the problems that we face. I guess, how do you think about that now? Not even just about future generations and Gen Z, Gen Alpha, but even us in this room. You know, we live in an age of instant gratification that's kind of reinforced by social media. And now we can just type a bunch of things in the chat GPT and it's going to do it for us.

• 8:22Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 8:23Speaker 01

  I wonder, you know, do you have personal feelings or thoughts about what the future looks like now as, you know, we sort of head into really uncharted waters with the technology that we have at our fingertips?

• 8:35Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I don't know. I'm now looking back on The Obstacle is the Way. This is the 10 year anniversary of the book. And I think about what's happened in the last 10 years, you know, the millennial generation has not had it easy in that sense. It does seem like it's been one thing after another. And I guess we're still standing. So that's good.

• 8:55Ryan Holiday?

  I don't know. I don't know. When I study history, I think one of the calming and also terrifying things that happens when you study history is you realize it's sort of always been like this. It's always felt like the world was falling apart. It always felt like things were, you know, proceeding very rapidly, that things were being disrupted. And so I have a calmer... Sometimes I have a deep sense of foreboding about what the future holds because that also is what you get when you study history. But I have this sense that we're not dealing with anything new that would have surprised the Stoics. The specifics of it might, but there's

• 9:36Ryan Holiday?

  new thing, or there's this problem, or that problem, or people behaving that way. That's all very consistent, you know? There are not many parts of, say, the retail business that you guys would be experiencing that would surprise Zeno in the Athenian agora, you know, 2,300 years ago. The core problems, issues, people, good things, bad things, the rushes and the disappointments, that's all there. So I have this sort of calmer sense of those things. And I do hope that we take from these last couple of years more of an

• 10:14Ryan Holiday?

  even keel, more of a sense of confidence of what we're capable of. And we don't get too rattled by, you know, the news of the day or the moment. You know, everyone today is talking about how, you know, AI is going to change everything, but like, three years ago is how crypto was going to change everything. And then before that, it was how, you know, social media was going to change everything. And they did. They changed a lot. And yet, things are also fundamentally the same. And I think that's why I do think there's something about turning to history and focusing on these examples. It turns down the volume on the specifics of whatever problem you're dealing with in the moment.

• 10:55Speaker 01

  Wonderful, and I mean, are you gonna be building any more bookstores? We were with a room full of people here that could probably help you accelerate what you got going.

• 11:03Ryan Holiday?

  I think one bookstore is enough. It was probably crazy enough there. So it's a bookstore on one side and a record store on the other. And the guy who runs the record store, which I rented out to him, he's thinking about leaving. He's trying to convince me that I also need to be in the vinyl record business, which I am trying, trying not to be persuaded by at the current moment. But who knows? Who knows?

• 11:30Speaker 01

  Wonderful. Everybody, Ryan Holiday, thank you so much.