Today, You Have Two Choices | You're a Product of Your Training

It’s a simple choice, but not easy.📕 You can grab copies of What You’re Made For signed by George Raveling and Ryan Holiday at The Painted Porch | 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.

• 0:57Ryan Holiday?

  Today, you have two choices. He's been doing it for decades. It's helped him make it to 88. 88 years old in a world that tried to break him, that discriminated against him, that made him an orphan, that threw every obstacle it could in his way. But here he is, every morning, putting his two feet on the ground next to the bed and saying, "Okay, George, you have two options today, and only two. You can be happy, or you can be very happy." As my dear friend George Raveling elaborates in his book, What You're Made For, he starts with a simple, but powerful choice each morning. He says, "It's a reminder to myself

• 1:40Ryan Holiday?

  that I have the power to set the tone for my day, to choose the attitude and mindset that I'll bring to whatever challenges come my way." It's a simple choice, but obviously not an easy one. There's a very good chance today that you'll come across people who are incredibly frustrating, just as Marcus really has warned us about 2,000 years ago. The people we'll deal with today, he reminds us, can be meddling and ungrateful and arrogant and dishonest and jealous and surly. We might face criticism, warranted or not, from people who just don't get it. There will be delays and disruptions, frustrating inconveniences. People will let you down, situations will bother you, life will be unfair.

• 2:22Ryan Holiday?

  But if everything that can possibly go wrong does, even if circumstances seem impossibly dark, you have to fight against the instinct to give up control over how these events affect your mood. "You can bind up my leg," Epictetus would say. Indeed, his leg really was bound and broken, but not even Zeus has the power to break my freedom of choice. No one and nothing can steal the control you have over your happiness. And that's why George starts his day with the most important decision to make, the decision to be in a good mood. And so should you. And I'm excited today. I'm in a good mood because George's book is out.

• 3:07Ryan Holiday?

  I helped bring it into the world. I feel very lucky and fortunate to have done that. And George just sent me a text, so I'm smiling about that as well. "What You're Made For," I think is an awesome book. I'm super proud of it. I know George is really proud of it. And I'd love for you to read it. We got a bunch of copies over in the painted porch. I'll sign the copy if you want. You can grab those. I'll link to it here. And grab the audiobook also if you're interested in it. I mean, how many books do you think Michael Jordan writes the foreword to? He made an exception for George. He's the best. I think you'll like it. Make a good choice today.

• 3:51Ryan Holiday?

  You're a product of your training. This is today's entry in the Daily Stoic, March 31st. "Chasing what can't be done is madness, but the base person is unable to do anything else." Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 5:17. And let me grab you- Another translation of that one, too. Let's do Gregory Hayes. What does Gregory Hayes have to say today on 517? This is one of my favorite little passages and sometimes what I like to do is pull up more than one. He says, "It is crazy to want what is impossible and impossible for the wicked not to do so."

• 4:34Ryan Holiday?

  And then turning to Robin Waterfield, which I also love. He said, "To pursue impossibilities is madness and it's impossible for bad men not to behave like that." And then his little note there is he said, "Marcus is again commenting on something one of his acquaintances has done that is unknowable to us." Interesting. So I love both those translations. I love Steve's in The Daily Stoic, best of course. Here's what I riffed on in the book. I said, "A dog that's allowed to chase cars will chase cars. A child who's never given any boundaries will become spoiled. An investor without discipline is not an investor. He's a gambler.

• 5:15Ryan Holiday?

  And a mind that isn't in control of itself, that doesn't understand its power to regulate itself will be jerked around by external events and unquestioned impulses. And that can't be how you'd like tomorrow to go. So you must be aware of that. You must put in place training and habits now to replace ignorance and ill-discipline. Only then will you begin to behave and act differently. Only then will you stop seeking the impossible and the short-sighted and the unnecessary." The dictum from Herakles is that character is fate, sort of who we are, who we've become, what the work we've done, right, on ourselves, what this thing that we are determines who will be, what we'll do. It's predictive and deterministic.

• 6:00Ryan Holiday?

  And I think the tragic part is like, we've seen this, I won't get too into specifics, but let's say, let's just say we've seen this play out politically over the last couple of years. People tell themselves that it'll be different once this person gets elected, or that they hope they'll be able to control themselves. They hope the office will make them, you know, more this way or that way. They hope the checks and balances will, they hope they'll learn their lesson this time. But that's not how it goes. We're a product of our training. We're a product of the standards we hold ourselves to. We're a product of our character. And when one is deficient, or in the illusion I'm making here, woefully deficient in those areas, the results are pretty easy to predict.

• 6:43Ryan Holiday?

  Especially when the future, what the future holds is the inevitable difficulties, tests, challenges, temptations, corruptions, right? Of course, it was never gonna go any other way. It was only gonna go the way that it went. You see this in sports, of course, right? Hey, maybe Antonio Brown will be different this time. No, Antonio Brown is Antonio Brown. And I say this as someone who was quite pleased a couple of years ago to hear that he was reading my books. But of course, the books didn't really make a difference, you know? Of course, the people trying to get through to a Kanye West or an Elizabeth Holmes or whomever, it's never gonna get through. They're always gonna go down that path. It's who they are, right?

• 7:28Ryan Holiday?

  It's tragic, it's sad, I wish it was otherwise. I wish people were more malleable than they were, but they're not. And that's why now, early on, before the concrete is set, before the paint is dry, you gotta do that work, you gotta do that training, you gotta set those standards. Because they ultimately determine who we're gonna be. You're not just magically gonna reinvent yourself. You're not just magically, you know, people go, oh, when the moment arises, I'll step up to it, right? And that's not how it is, right? As they say in sports and in the military, we fall back to the level of our training. We don't rise to the occasion, we fall back to the level of our training. To me, that's really what Stoicism is, it's training.

• 8:10Ryan Holiday?

  We're training to become what we need to become who we need to be. Because if we don't do that work, well, we're gonna cause a lot more work for ourselves, a lot more problems for ourselves in the future.

• 8:30Ryan Holiday?

  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. I just wanted to say thank you.