This Is What It Takes To Lead | The Enemy of Happiness

As Truman also said, not all readers are leaders, but there is nothing better to start you on the path to leadership than reading great books. 📚 Check out The Painted Porch for your next book: https://www.thepaintedporch.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?

  Years before he became president, Harry Truman owned a clothing store that doubled as a local hangout. A kid named Albert Ridge would often head there after his shift at the neighborhood grocery store. For the rest of his life, Ridge would tell the story of the time that Truman gave him a list of 10 books to read. It included books like Plutarch's Lives, Caesar's Commentaries, and Benjamin Franklin's autobiography. Al Truman had said, "You'll find a good deal in there about how to make use of every minute of your day and a lot of horse sense about people." It's reminiscent of one of the formative scenes in Marcus Aurelius's life. As a young man, he was given a copy of the Lectures of Epictetus. He would read through it again and again on his way to becoming one of the great kings of history.

• 1:41Ryan Holiday?

  He would thank his teacher, Risticus, for changing his life with that single recommendation. Albert Ridge's life was also changed by the books he was recommended. He learned a lot about people and how to make the most of his time, just as Truman had promised. He started going to law school at night and then went on to be a United States Circuit Judge under President Kennedy. From the neighborhood grocery store to the US federal court, from a promising young boy to the head of the Roman Empire, from a farm in Missouri to the presidency of the United States, that's the power of reading. As Truman also said, "Not all readers are leaders, but there is nothing better to start you on the path to leadership than reading great books."

• 2:33Ryan Holiday?

  The Enemy of Happiness. This is from today's entry in the Daily Stout. "It's quite impossible to unite happiness with a yearning for that which we don't have. Happiness has all that it wants and resembles the well-fed. There wouldn't be hunger or thirst." That's Epictetus's Discourses 324. "I'll be happy when I graduate," we tell ourselves. "I'll be happy when I get this promotion, when this diet pays off, when I have the money that my parents never had." "Conditional happiness is what psychologists call this kind of thinking. Like the horizon, you could walk for miles and miles and miles and never reach it. You'll never get any closer."

• 3:18Ryan Holiday?

  "Eagerly anticipating some future event, passionately imagining something you desire, looking forward to some happy scenario, as pleasurable as these activities might seem, they ruin your chances at happiness here and now." So locate that yearning for more, for better, for someday, and see it for what it is, the enemy of your contentment. Choose it or your happiness. As Epictetus says, the two are not compatible." That's a heavy one, I think. The idea that yearning is the enemy of happiness.

• 3:59Ryan Holiday?

  Sometimes I'll talk to really successful people who have like a lot of money and be like, "What are you doing? Like, why don't you just relax?" Or whatever. I always find it fascinating when you hear that they have a number. So maybe they have a million dollars, but their number is $10 million. Or maybe they have $10 million, or their number is $100 million. They've told themselves that when they get X, then they'll be okay, then they'll be good. From a different Zeno, there's this Zeno's paradox, the idea of like, if you're like walking from here to the other side of the room, and you go halfway there, and then halfway there, and then halfway there, and then halfway there, you'll never actually arrive, right?

• 4:43Ryan Holiday?

  Because it's always half, there's always more, there's always some half left of the distance. But I think that's kind of what yearning is. We tell ourselves, "Oh, when I get this, when I get this, when I get this." But we never get there, either because...

• 4:58Ryan Holiday?

  It's not actually something that a person can possess, or because we moved the goalposts. Like, oh, all I want to do is win a championship. And then you do it, and then you're, oh, all I want to do is win back to back championships to prove it wasn't a fluke. And it's like, oh, but now I want to win it on a different team to prove that it wasn't a fluke there either. Whatever it is, right? We move the goalposts. That's the tricky thing about yearning is it never gets there. I think it's still this is the key, but there's a quote I love from Stefan Zweig, the novelist. And he says, "In the history of conquerors, no conqueror has ever been surfated by conquests." Alexander the Great said, "Aren't we going to conquer the world together?"

• 5:43Ryan Holiday?

  And his men said, "No, we want to go home." And the truth was, he always would have found something new, something beyond it, always would have kept pushing. And the result of that was, he not only lost his life, but I think he lost a lot of happiness as well. So contentment, and I've read a study many years ago that said, like, young people associate happiness with accomplishment, older people with contentment. I think they've learned something along the way. It's a hard one lesson, I'm sure. Even if we can't fully internalize it or understand it or accept it now, we can try to approximate it. We can try to incorporate some of it. We can fake it till we make it, which is that we don't need anything. We can be happy now.

• 6:28Ryan Holiday?

  That doesn't mean that we don't keep trying. Of course, we keep trying. Of course, we keep doing. But we try to do those things from a place of fullness, from a place of, that'll be a nice extra, as opposed to a place of yearning, that I'll be happy if this, once this, after that. It doesn't happen, man. It's a myth. It's a shimmer. It's a mirage. You'll get there, and you will realize it was a figment of your imagination, or worse, your mind will fool you so much, you won't even realize you're there. It just feel like, ah, I just got to go a little bit further, a little bit further, a little bit further. And you never arrive, and at the cost comes your life and your happiness.

• 7:10Ryan Holiday?

  But for people who don't want to do things, this is not a particularly important or tricky subject. For those of us who are ambitious, those of us who are driven, those of us who are talented, it's something we really have to wrestle with. So I'm wishing you the best. You're enough as you are. Yearning is the enemy of your happiness. Remember that. Be safe, be well, everyone. We'll talk soon. 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.

• 7:55Ryan Holiday?

  I just wanted to say, thank you.