This Is What You Need To Get Better At | Count Your Blessings

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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. Each day, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, illustrated with stories from history, current events, and literature to help you be better at what you do. And at the beginning of the week, we try to do a deeper dive, setting a kind of Stoic intention for the week, something to meditate on, something to think on, something to leave you with, to journal about, whatever it is you happen to be doing. So let's get into it.

• 0:43Ryan Holiday?

  This is what you need to get better at. Marcus Aurelius was not some weak, flabby philosopher. He was active, he was athletic, he rode horses and hunted. He trained in the fighting arts at the gymnasium. He was proud of these accomplishments and almost certainly found the discipline they demanded to be a metaphor for life. And yet, in the pages of Meditations, we find him chiding himself over his dedication to these very hobbies. "A better wrestler?" he asked rhetorically, "but not a better citizen? A better person? A better resource in tight places? A better forgiver of faults?" He was noticing how much energy and effort he was putting into his physical improvement,

• 1:25Ryan Holiday?

  and how disproportionate it seemed to his personal development. Many of us are guilty of this. Who among us works as hard at improving as a parent as they do as a professional? We track our appearance in the mirror, but monitor our morals much less. There are a lot of talented people out there, lots of great wrestlers, lots of great accumulators of wealth, lots of beautiful faces. But the Stoics remind us that our choices make us beautiful too. The choice to be kind, the choice to work in an industry that improves rather than destroys the world, the choice to open the door for someone, not just literally for a stranger, but also to open the door to help others succeed in your profession.

• 2:08Ryan Holiday?

  When the Stoics talk about the virtue of justice, they don't just mean what happened in a court of law. They were talking about what Marcus Aurelius was talking about, actively working to be a better citizen, a better person, a better resource, a better forgiver of faults. This is what the new book Right Thing Right Now is about. It's about this key Stoic virtue, the one that is so often overlooked in favor of courage, right? Courage is calling, and temperance, discipline is destiny. It takes work to be a good person, perhaps more work than it does to be a great, that is, successful or famous person. But it's the most important work you can do, and the world depends on us doing it. Who we are going to be depends on it.

• 2:54Ryan Holiday?

  There's actually a chapter in Right Thing Right Now, maybe I'll put it as an excerpt at some point before the book comes out, but it's called Good, Not Great. It's based on this very story from Marcus Aurelius. I open with a story that I love so much about Walker Percy. He's struggling as a medical student, and he writes to his uncle for advice. His uncle says, "My whole theory about life is that glory and accomplishment are of far less importance than the creation of character and the individual good life." And I think that's what Marcus Aurelius was trying to remind himself of meditation. That's what the whole book is about. I hope when you hear that it's a book about justice, you don't think, I mean, you know, it's a book about this should be the law, or this

• 3:36Ryan Holiday?

  should be the public cause. That's not what the Stoics were talking about when they talked about justice. And they were talking about it thousands of years ago, so their specific thoughts on that are less important. But they do have so much to teach us about how to be what Marcus Aurelius is talking about, a better citizen, a better person, a better forgiver of fault, better resource, a better friend, right? That's what the book is a celebration of. And it would mean a lot to me if you pre-ordered it. You can grab signed, numbered first editions right now, cheaper than they are on Amazon, at dailystoic.com/justice. You can even get signed pages from the original manuscript. You may even get a signed manuscript page from many of the drafts of that very chapter that I was just riffing on, because I did it the first time.

• 4:17Ryan Holiday?

  First draft, the second draft, when it got designed, first past pages, second past pages, even the audiobook, right? I've been tweaking and refining and tightening that story now for several years. And I'm excited to bring you the book. I can't wait for you to preorder it. The book's out in June, but the earlier you preorder it, the more it supports the authors and what we're doing here at Daily Stoic. So it means so much. DailyStoic.com/justice. I appreciate it. And I hope you like the story and I hope you are working and not just being a better wrestler, but also being a better person.

• 4:54Ryan Holiday?

  Count your blessings. This is from this week's entry in the Daily Stoic Journal, 366 Days of Writing and Reflection on the Art of Living by yours truly and my wonderful collaborator, Stephen Hanselman, who I also worked on the Daily Stoic with. This week's entry begins with the following meditation. "It's easy to complain about things missing in our lives and so much harder to appreciate what we already have. Seneca reminded us that everything we need to be happy is right in front of us, while the luxuries we might be missing could themselves come at a great cost, the cost of what we already have. Marcus agreed and reminded himself to count those blessings present in our lives and try to imagine what it would be like to not have

• 5:39Ryan Holiday?

  them and how much we'd miss them. So take a minute and list some of your blessings this week. Take a conscious note of what you are fortunate to have and enjoy. So you can see clearly, as Epictetus put it, where they come from and feel a sense of gratitude for that." The first quote is from Marcus Aurelius's Meditations 727. He says, "Don't set your mind on things you don't possess as if they were yours, but count the blessings you actually possess and think about how much you would desire them if they weren't already yours. But watch yourself that you don't value these things to the point of being troubled that if you should lose them." That was a really helpful exercise for me about envy. You know, you can look at all the things that other people have that you'd want to have,

• 6:22Ryan Holiday?

  but it gives you a whole nother perspective if you take a minute and think about all the things that you have that other people would be jealous of. And it is funny how often we lust or crave things that other people not only don't like, but they would lust or crave for our life. And that should give you some sense that this is all crazy. This is all some freakish evolutionary drive that's made us miserable. Focus on what you have, be grateful for that instead of craving what you don't have. But of course, don't be so obsessed and grateful for the things you have that you would miss them if you lost them. This is from Seneca's Moral Letters. "The founder of the universe who assigned to us the laws of life provided that we should live well, but not in luxury. Everything needed for our well-being is right before us, whereas what luxury requires

• 7:06Ryan Holiday?

  is gathered by many miseries and anxieties. Let us use this gift of nature and count it among the greatest things." Seneca is a bit of a hypocrite here. He's a very, very rich man, famously has something like 300 tables that he uses for entertaining. But the point is, he knew even richer people, and he knew people who were not as rich, but craved what he had. He said marble and gold are forms of slavery, that the people who live under them are slaves. He said that these things are won at the cost of life. And so when we're not counting our blessings, what we are doing is by definition is chasing other people's blessings, or more blessings, or other blessings. And this is preventing us from being satisfied with what we have right now in front of us.

• 7:50Ryan Holiday?

  And then we have a quote from Epictetus's Discourses 1:6. He says, "It is easy to praise providence for anything that may happen if you have two qualities: a complete view of what has actually happened in each instance, and a sense of gratitude. Without gratitude, what is the point of seeing? And without seeing, what is the object of gratitude?" And look, it's not just gratitude about possessions. It's not just focusing on material items, but it's also just grateful that you were born here, to these parents, to this or that. Grateful for your set of experiences because they made you who you were. And that it's impossible, for instance, to have had different parents, or be born to a different nationality, or to have had this or that,

• 8:34Ryan Holiday?

  and it not change the whole course of your life, right? You can't just pick and choose. You have no line item veto over the things that happened to you in life. So in that sense, you have to be grateful for the whole of it, because all of it made you who you were. All of it shaped who you are and will become. And so this sense of gratitude for everything, for the stuff we have, as well as the stuff we haven't had, as well as the experiences we've had. And as the different experiences that were out of reach or didn't happen to us, or the things we thought we wanted, but we didn't get, right? Gratitude for all of it. Gratitude for what it is, because it made you who you were, and it couldn't have been any differently. The Stoics would say, this is what fate chose for you. This is how it worked out.

• 9:19Ryan Holiday?

  There's no reason to feel anything but gratitude for this. And that's what Amor Fati is really about. I spent a lot of time journaling about this this week. I hope you do as well. Enjoy, focus on gratitude. Enjoy what you have, instead of lusting over the things you don't have. Keep working on it. I'll talk to you soon.