This Timeless Adage Will Determine Your Destiny | Respect The Past, But Be Open To The Future

This is not another note about memento mori. It’s about a different immutable, inescapable law of human existence that comes to us from the Stoics through Heraclitus (one of Marcus Aurelius’ favorites): Character is fate.---And in today's excerpt from The Daily Stoic, Ryan explains why the Stoics believed it was so important to honor the past, but not to live in it.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, 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.

• 0:43Ryan Holiday?

  In addition to that old adage about death and taxes, the Stoics believed that there was one other fact of existence that no one could escape from. It comes to us from Heraclitus, one of Marcus Aurelius's favorites, and it's "an immutable reality of life and leadership: character is fate, determines our destiny. Just a quick glimpse around the world," and history confirms this is true. "Liars and cheats eventually destroy themselves; the corrupt overreach; the ignorant make fatal self-inflicted mistakes; the egotistical ignore the warnings that could save them and data that challenges them; the selfish

• 1:25Ryan Holiday?

  end up isolated and alone, even if they're surrounded by riches and fame. The robbers, perverts, killers, and tyrants that Marcus Aurelius wrote about always end up in a hell of their own making. It's a law as true as gravity." Bad character might drive someone into a position of leadership because of their ambition, because of their ruthlessness, or their shamelessness, but eventually, inevitably, this supposed strength is an Achilles' heel when it comes to actually doing the job.

• 1:59Ryan Holiday?

  Who trusts them? Who actually wants to work with them? What kind of culture develops around them? How can they learn? How can they know where the landmines are? If you want to know why things are the way they are right now in business, in politics, everywhere, it's because character is fate. And for too long, we have ignored the predictive, no prophetic, power of character. When you make excuses for liars and cheats and egomaniacs because they agree with you, because they might benefit your business, or your cause, or your stock position, or your political party in the short term, not only do you do so at your own long-term peril, but you are exhibiting bad character yourself.

• 2:44Ryan Holiday?

  And that is what will come back to bite you. That is what is biting us right now on all corners of the planet. Character is fate, always has been, always will be.

• 3:10Ryan Holiday?

  Respect the past, but be open to the future. This is today's entry, August 25th, in the Daily Stoic. "Won't you be walking in your predecessor's footsteps? I surely will use the older path, but if I find a shorter and smoother way, I'll blaze a trail there. The ones who pioneered these paths aren't our masters but our guides. Truth stands open to everyone." And it hasn't been monopolized. That's Seneca's Moral Letters 33. "Traditions are often time-tested best practices for doing something. But remember that today's conservative ideas were once controversial, cutting-edge, and innovative.

• 3:53Ryan Holiday?

  That's why we can't be afraid to experiment with new ideas. In Seneca's case, he might be embracing some new philosophical insight that improves on the writings of Zeno or Cleanthes. In our case, perhaps a breakthrough in psychology improves upon the writing of Seneca or Marcus Aurelius. Or perhaps we have a breakthrough of our own. If these ideas are truer and better, embrace them, use them. You don't need to be a prisoner of a dead old man who stopped learning 2,000 years ago."

• 4:23Ryan Holiday?

  People often ask me, you know, what would the Stoics think about this or that? Would the Stoic go to therapy? Therapy being one I've talked about a lot of times. Of course they would. You have to understand that the Stoics are frozen in time in a way by no fault of their own, right? When I say that Seneca stopped learning 2,000 years ago, it's not his fault. I mean, he died, right? He didn't get to read Darwin. He didn't get to read Montaigne. He didn't, he missed out on the Enlightenment, right? He missed out on the Renaissance. He missed out on the Industrial Revolution. They missed out on everything, right? They missed out on the Declaration of Independence. They, they, they missed out on Lincoln. They missed out on Martin Luther King, right?

• 5:08Ryan Holiday?

  They, they missed out on the suffragettes. They missed, they missed out on sojourner truth. They missed out on people who made massive breakthroughs in how we think about things, right? Like, the Stoics talk about justice in the abstract, and justice is a virtue and ideal. But then we've, we've had innovations as a society as we've gone along as to what justice means, who deserves justice, right? Marx and Rivas talks about how he learns about justice from, from Cato and Helvidius and, and Thrasse. But clearly not enough. He still lived in slave society and did nothing about it, right? He would have benefited from, again, the Declaration of Independence, but he would

• 5:51Ryan Holiday?

  have benefited from the abolitionists, right? He would have benefited from the advancements that happened after. There was a quote I liked from Churchill, again, not a perfect person who was wrong about so many things, but a friend and colleague of Churchill said something about how Churchill venerated tradition but hated convention. So I like this distinction between, you know, the timeless principles or ideals that we try to live by, that we try to orient ourselves around, and then just the kind of practices that are just there that we leave unquestioned. I'll give you a good example at the core of Stoicism, and I've talked about this before.

• 6:34Ryan Holiday?

  Cato the Elder, the great, great grandfather of Cato. Was there when Stoicism was introduced to Rome from Greece. I tell the story in Lives of the Stoics, but he's there and he hears these different philosophers debating philosophical ideas. Maybe he kind of likes Stoicism, but what he heard from the other philosophers, he was like, nope, this is not good. I don't like this new stuff. And he tried to ban them from Rome.

• 6:58Ryan Holiday?

  And you think about the irony that just a generation or two later, his grandson is a well-known philosopher and is known as a philosopher for thousands of years. Cato himself is conservative, has these ideas. He's a protector of the mass maorem, the old ways, but the old ways are not actually one thing. They change, they evolve, they have to. I talk about this in Discipline is Destiny, actually, which you can preorder now at DailyStoic.com/preorder. But there's a quote that Queen Elizabeth favors. It says, it's some Italian novelist who said, "If things are going to stay the same, then things are going to have to change." Right? So yes, we venerate tradition, but we challenge convention.

• 7:43Ryan Holiday?

  And the queen has done this over and over and over again. She's even the Beatles song, the queen, the queen, she changes from day to day. She evolves, she adapts, she inputs new information. And I think this is what Seneca is saying, right? You respect the past, but you're open to the future. You're willing to question the past where it's wrong. You're willing to adjust from what you inherited from the past to make a better future. And where would we be if this never happened? Right? Not in a good place. So the Stoics understand that change is inevitable and in fact, try to be progressive, try to change, try to adjust. And again, I'm using conservative and progressive here, not in the American political sense, but the larger sense. You have to do this.

• 8:28Ryan Holiday?

  Truth is open to all of us. The ones who pioneered your paths are not masters, but guides. Open to that change, accept it, look for new information. All that stuff ultimately supplements and improves upon this wonderful philosophy that we study. That's why I bring in new examples. That's why I try to read academic research. That's why I talk to experts. So I even vet it through my own experience. Do not feel that the Stoics are giving you doctrine or dogma, right? They're giving you principles. Principles matter. Principles should be venerated, but conventions, but the status quo, but the way we've always done things, the mass maiorum, that is to be challenged. It must be challenged. That's where I'll leave you today.

• 9:13Ryan Holiday?

  Think about where Stoicism is incomplete to you, where it should be adjusted, where it can be improved, what new things you're adding to it. Because that is an important, powerful thing to do.