This Is Why You Do It | Be Ruthless To The Things That Don't Matter

Marcus Aurelius was an all-powerful emperor. No one else was interrogating him, no one else was subjecting him to these hard questions. He knew that if he didn’t do it, no one would.📓 Pick up a signed edition of The Daily Stoic Journal: 366 Days of Writing and Reflection on The Art of Living: https://store.dailystoic.com/Protect your Daily Stoic Journal from the wear and tear of everyday use with the Leather Cover: https://store.dailystoic.com/📕 The Daily Stoic eBook is on sale for $2.99! Grab yours now at dailystoic.com/discount📚 Check out The Daily Stoic Boxed Set here which includes The Daily Stoic and The Daily Stoic Journal: https://store.dailystoic.com/The Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge is 3 weeks of ALL-NEW, actionable challenges, presented in an email per day, built around the best, most timeless wisdom in Stoic philosophy, to help you create a better life, and a new you in 2025. Why 3 weeks? Because it takes human beings 21 days to build new habits and skills, to create the muscle memory of making beautiful choices each and every day. Head over to dailystoic.com/challenge today to sign up.🎙️ 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.

• 0:03Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Friday, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from The Daily Stoic, my book, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful collaborator, translator, and literary agent, Stephen Hanselman. So today, we'll give you a quick meditation from the Stoics with some analysis from me, and then we'll send you out into the world to turn these words into works.

• 0:44Ryan Holiday?

  "This is why you do it. They lived in disorienting times. They faced change. They faced criticism. Many of them lived under tyrants. They lived through wars and chaos and dysfunction. So how did the Stoics stay sane through all of this? How did Seneca not lose his mind under Nero? How did Marx-Realist not become Nero when anointed with the same power? The answer is, as for most things, hard work. The Stoics worked hard to maintain their perspective, to shake off the misinformation and the noise, to find the truth, to maintain control over the greatest empire themselves. To see what is in front of one's nose needs

• 1:27Ryan Holiday?

  a constant struggle, Orwell wrote of living through totalitarianism and authoritarianism. But there was a habit that most of the Stoics had that Orwell also recommended. One thing that helps towards it, he said, was to keep a diary, or at any rate, to keep some kind of record of one's opinions about important events. Otherwise, he said, when some particularly absurd belief is exploded by events, one may simply forget that one ever held it."

• 1:55Ryan Holiday?

  In meditations, we see Marcus Aurelius trying to hold himself accountable on the pages of his journal. In Seneca's letters, we see him and Lucilius trying to make sense of the deranged world they lived in. And every day, tens of thousands of people all over the world use the daily and weekly prompts in the Daily Stoic Journal to find their bearings and to center themselves. "What am I doing with my soul?" Marcus Aurelius writes in meditations. And then he says that he and you need to interrogate yourself to find what inhabits your so-called mind and what kind of soul you have. He says, "Is it a child's soul, an adolescent's, a tyrant's soul, the soul of a predator, or its prey?" Marcus Aurelius was an all-powerful emperor.

• 2:40Ryan Holiday?

  No one else was interrogating him. No one else was subjecting him to these hard questions. He knew that if he didn't do it, no one would. Well, today, no one else is concerned with your soul, and it's no one else's business. So if you don't interrogate yourself about it, if you're not examining your own mind, who will? If you're not using the pages of your journal to get to self-awareness, to get to clarity, how will you ever stand a chance of seeing what's in front of your nose? You have to do it every day. And look, I have here, actually, it's under my computer, I'll lift it up. I have the Daily Stoic Journal, and I have my one-line-a-day journal.

• 3:24Ryan Holiday?

  I'm doing my journaling practice every night before bed. Sometimes I do it in the morning also. Look, a new year is a great time to build a journaling habit if you don't have one. That's what the Daily Stoic Journal is all about. There's a weekly Stoic meditation, then there's prompts for each day, a question, it asks you a question to think about in the morning and at night that prompts you to sort of do this Stoic practice. And I think you might like it. I have this cool leather cover that we make at the Daily Stoic store. It says, "Make time." The front, it's a reminder, we gotta make time. For this essential practice, we've got to make time to interrogate ourselves, see who we are, see how we're doing. And you can grab all this at store.dailystoic.com.

• 4:07Ryan Holiday?

  I'll link to it in today's show notes. And then just a reminder that the Daily Stoic ebook is $2.99 on Amazon right now as an ebook in the US, I think in the UK also. So you can grab that, I think, at dailystoic.com/discount. Anyways, get journaling. And as Orwell says, we've got to see what's in front of us. 2025 is going to be a crazy year, and I'm going to be leaning on my journals. And I assume you'll get some benefit out of them, too.

• 4:38Ryan Holiday?

  Hello, welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Today, we are reading the January 3rd entry in the Daily Stoic book. I am holding a cloth bound edition. I don't know where, well, I know where this one came from. This came because it's got a Target sticker on the front. I guess they were briefly available in Target. Maybe they still are. We've got the leather bound edition. And oh, the ebook edition is discounted right now. I will link to that in today's show notes. I believe the Daily Stoic ebook is like $2.99 for the first week or so of the year, which is really exciting. And grab that on Amazon or iBooks or wherever you get your ebooks. You can pair it well with the journal. But

• 5:18Ryan Holiday?

  anyways, here we are. Be ruthless to the things that don't matter. Today's quote is from Seneca on the brevity of life. How many have laid waste to your life when you weren't aware of what you were losing? How much was wasted in pointless grief, foolish joy, greedy desire, and social amusement? How little of your time was left to you? You will realize that you are dying before your time. One of the hardest things to do in life is say no to invitations, to requests, to obligations, to the stuff that everyone else is doing. Even harder is saying no to certain time-consuming emotions,

• 6:00Ryan Holiday?

  danger, excitement, distraction, obsession, lust. None of these impulses feel like a big deal by itself, but run amok, they become a commitment like anything else. And if you're not careful, these are precisely the impositions that will overwhelm and consume your life. Do you ever wonder how you can get some of your time back? How you can feel less busy? Start by learning the power of no, as in no, thank you, or no, I'm not going to get caught up in that, or no, I just can't right now. It may hurt some feelings. It may turn some people off. It may take some hard work, but the more you say no to the things that don't matter, the more you can say yes to the things that do.

• 6:44Ryan Holiday?

  And this will let you enjoy your life, the life that you want. I told this story before, but I have two pictures of my kids right here to the right of my desk. One's very cute. It's my boy, he's wearing an elf costume. We're mowing the lawn together. And then above it's my youngest. He's basically a baby. They've got their handprints on it. Beautiful little pictures of your kids. Everyone has those in their office, I imagine. And then in the middle is this sign sent to me by the sports psychologist, Dr. Jonathan Fader. And it's Oliver Sacks in his office, talking on the phone like I do many times. But behind him is a giant sign that just says, "No!" exclamation point. It was a reminder, Dr. Fader told me, to have pitch discipline. He works with a lot of sports teams. He's saying, you know, what pitches are you going to swing at?

• 7:29Ryan Holiday?

  What balls are you going to let fly right by? And I have to the right of it, two things signed by one of my favorite presidents, Harry Truman. And the first one is from July 7, 1969, after he'd left office. It says, "Independence, Missouri." And it says, "Dear Mr. Hartuin, thank you for the campaign material. I appreciate your thoughtfulness, and will turn it over to the library for a collection of items of this kind." And he says, "I regret that I cannot comply with your request as it has long been my policy not to respond to questions. I receive so many requests similar to yours that I could not begin to keep up with all of them. I know you will understand. Sincerely yours..."

• 8:10Ryan Holiday?

  Harry Truman. Now, obviously, a secretary typed that up because it was part of a longstanding policy and all Truman had to do was scribble a signature. And I know it was part of a longstanding policy because I have an earlier memo from when Truman was president. This is just a little chunk of a tiny memo that was been cut out. It's like a little scrap of paper from, you know, secretary back in those days. And it says, since the president will be out of office when this celebration will be held, how do you think we ought to answer it? Should we say that because of many similar requests, the president must ask to be excused? And then underneath it, in Harry's writing, it says, the proper response is underlined.

• 8:52Ryan Holiday?

  He underlined, because of many similar requests, the president must ask to be excused. And then it's signed H S T. Got to say no. It's hard, but you got to say no. And I was just in DC myself, actually, at the White House. I told you why I was there, but it was funny. After I gave my talk, I went across the street. I ate at Old Ebbets with my speaking agent. And I was just telling him, man, look, I was too busy last year. I appreciate all the work that you got for me. I've loved every audience that I got to talk to, but I want to do less in 2025. And I said, how can we do this? Like, do we need to raise my fee? Will that, you know, make some of the requests go away? I need you to pre-filter some of them.

• 9:37Ryan Holiday?

  I was like, I am not saying no enough, and it's hard for me to say no. So how can we get better at this? And he said, because some of my other clients do this, he said, going forward, we'll send you the offers and then you can reply and say, tell me why I shouldn't do this. And not in the way that we sometimes mean that, like, the opposite of how we mean that. He was saying, like, ask them for reasons not to do it. And he said, they're more than happy to provide. They will argue against their financial interests and help give me reasons not to. And they do it sometimes. They go, hey, you know, this is going to be a really busy period. Are you sure you want to sign up for this? Or, hey, you know, this fee is lower.

• 10:19Ryan Holiday?

  Then you normally accept and it's far travel. I think you should, you know, pass on this and hope maybe you get something closer to home. That's maybe less, but will take less time. Or they go, you know, I just don't think this is the right thing for you to be associated. They do give me reasons, but you know, ultimately it's a business. And so we're the idea of like defaulting to know and coming up with reasons arguing why we shouldn't do it as opposed to the sometimes more seductive of why we should do it. That's what I'm working on in 2025. So that's just a little glimpse into my life and how I am getting better at this. Not perfect. We all struggle with it, but that is where we are. So anyways, I hope you are doing great. Hope the new year is off to a good start.

• 11:03Ryan Holiday?

  Don't think it's too late to sign up for the Daily Stoic New Year New Challenge. We're just letting a few more people in. You can play catch up a little bit. That's at dailystoic.com/challenge. And then of course, don't forget you can get the Daily Stoic as an ebook right now for $2.99 anywhere you get your ebooks and I'll link to that in today's show notes. Be well, everyone.

• 11:27Ryan 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, dailystoic.com/email.