This Was a Reminder | Test Your Impressions

Ryan talks about how nothing in this world is truly certain, and reads this week’s meditation from The Daily Stoic Journal. For a limited time, the ebook edition of Courage Is Calling by Ryan Holiday is only $1.99! We have no idea how long the discount will last, so grab your copy now! Or if you prefer hardcover, you can get those over in the Daily Stoic store, where you can also get signed copies! Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://DailyStoic.com/emailFollow 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. 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.

• 0:35Ryan Holiday?

  This was a reminder. Think about what you experienced back in March 2020. The markets were crashing. Businesses were shutting down. Everything was in flux. Over the next several months, depending on your profession and your location, this uncertainty continued to roil. Maybe you lost your job. Maybe you never got back to your favorite bar before it closed for good. Maybe you never got to say goodbye to your great aunt. These tragic events were a reminder that's something the Stoics speak about constantly, something we often refuse to hear. We possess nothing in this life. Everything is ephemeral. Nothing is truly certain. It's hard for many of us to internalize that message, because most of the time, the world is pretty calm.

• 1:19Ryan Holiday?

  Most of the time, we can make predictions and be confident of the expected outcome. We can work towards things. We can count on things. We can take for granted that people in places we care about will be there tomorrow when we wake up. But this constancy is an illusion. The ownership we feel over things, whether it's our car or our place in the pecking order, it is not real. Fate, as Seneca says, behaves as she pleases, oftentimes reminding us in the process who is really in charge. She reminds us that our stock market portfolio is not really worth anything. It is a series of snapshots that have no bearing on what the picture will be tomorrow or even 10 minutes from now. Nothing can be taken for granted, not relationships, not the status quo, not even the home we own.

• 2:03Ryan Holiday?

  The last couple of years have reminded you of this. It has illustrated the teachings of the Stoics in a vivid and undeniable way, refused to learn from it at great cost. Ignore it at your peril.

• 2:20Ryan Holiday?

  Test your impressions. And 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 co-writer and translator, Stephen Hanselman. I actually do this journal every single day. There's a question in the morning, a question in the afternoon. Then there's these sort of weekly meditations. As Epictetus says, "Every day and night, we keep thoughts like this at hand. Write them, read them aloud, and talk to yourself and others about them." You can check out the Daily Stoic Journal anywhere books are sold. You can also get a signed personalized copy from me in the Daily Stoic store. It's store.dailystoic.com. One of Epictetus's key teachings was all about testing our impressions,

• 3:03Ryan Holiday?

  any experience, perception, or circumstance that was in front of us. And he uses a key verb to emphasize this practice 10 times in discourses and once in the opening of the Incredian. "And the word carries the meaning of the assayer, one who tests fine metals and coins to verify their authenticity." In one of the most memorable uses, Epictetus compares our need to test impressions to what is done with coins and how the skilled merchant can hear a counterfeit coin cast upon a table just as a musician would detect a sour note. So this week, go through the process of assaying everything that comes before you, assuming it all to be counterfeit or misleading until we can prove otherwise. And you know, it's funny, I think I've really first wrapped my head around this idea of

• 3:47Ryan Holiday?

  to assay or the word assay, because at Cerro Gordo, you may have heard my interview with Brent Underwood, who's one of my longtime, I guess he was formerly my intern and great guy who works at Brass Check. He's one of the partners and he's helped build Daily Stoic and someone I talk to on the phone almost every day. And a few years ago, he bought this ghost town in the mountains of Southern California called Cerro Gordo, and he's been trying to sort of turn it into this like resort. And he's lived there for the whole pandemic. But anyways, when I went out and visited, he showed me this building and it's called the Assay Office. So the miners would pull this silver out of the ground in the ore or whatever. And sometimes they don't know, I don't know exactly how it works, but they would take it to this office. And this is where like the guy with a brain, the dispassionate-

• 4:28Ryan Holiday?

  ...observer, the money man, would would test it and let them know like just what they found, how rich it was, how valuable it was, what percentage it was this or that or this. This was like the the filter through which all the rocks pulled out of this mining town were filtered through. And and just because you thought it was valuable, it didn't matter unless the essay office came through and said boom, boom, boom, and stamped it and gave you, you know, another funny little thing is that the brothel was located immediately next door. So you'd find out you'd just become a rich man. And then, of course, you go do your business. But the idea is you have to put everything to the test. And that's what Epictetus is saying. He says, when it comes to money where we feel our clear interest, we have an entire art where the tester uses many means to discover the worth, just as

• 5:13Ryan Holiday?

  we give great attention to judging things that might steer us badly. But when it comes to our own ruling principle, we yawn and doze off, accepting any appearances that flash by without counting the costs. That's from Discourses 120. And then he says in in 2.18, first off, don't let the force of an impression carry you away. Say to it, let me hold you up and let me see who you are and where you are from. Let me put you to the test. And then in Incaritae, and he says, from the very beginning, make it your practice to say to every harsh impression, you are an impression and not at all what you appear to be. Next, examine it and test it by the rules you possess, the first and greatest of which is this, whether it belongs to the things in our control or not in our control, and if the latter, prepare to respond, it is nothing to me.

• 5:58Ryan Holiday?

  So look, if you went and got your rocks tested at Sarah Gordon, and they found out to be worthless stones, you wouldn't be like, but I want them to be what they are. I'm going to continue to pretend, right? You wouldn't spend money that you just found out you don't actually have. So this process of testing one's perceptions and and one's one's facts is is a really essential part of the process. You can't just go through life pretending things are what they are, or taking them at first glance, because there there are so many factors at play, from cognitive biases to your upbringing to just, you know, misleading appearances. You have to put everything to the test. You have to see things as they actually are. And this process of assaying everything that's in front of you is a key

• 6:43Ryan Holiday?

  Stoic exercise, and I hope you can build on this practice this week. Slow down, take a minute, put it to the test, see if it's real or counterfeit, see if it's what everyone else wants you to see. Or, as Marcus Aurelius says, "See what is really there."

• 7:02Ryan 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 at dailystoic.com/email.