Turn It Into Something | The Enemy of Happiness

Ryan talks about how you can turn your trials into triumph, about how everything we do for others comes back to us, and reads The Daily Stoic’s entry of the day. We have some exciting news to share with you all — for some reason, The Obstacle is the Way ebook is just $1.99 everywhere you get your ebooks. We’re not sure how long the price drop will last, but if you haven’t already read The Obstacle Is The Way, this is probably the cheapest it will ever be. Or if you’re like us and prefer physical books, we have hardcopies and our premium leather-bound edition available over in the Daily Stoic store, where you can get them signed and personalized. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://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.

• 0:04Ryan Holiday?

  Bienvenidos a otro episodio del Podcast Daily Stoic. El jueves hacemos el doble trabajo, no solo leyendo nuestra meditación diaria, sino también leyendo un pasaje del libro "El Daily Stoic: 366 Meditaciones sobre la Wisdom, Perseverancia y la Art of Living", que escribí con mi maravillosa coautora y colaborador, Stephen Hanselman. Así que hoy os daremos una rápida meditación de uno de los estoicos, de Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, y luego un análisis de mí. Y luego os enviamos al mundo para hacer lo mejor posible para convertir estas palabras en obras.

• 0:40Ryan Holiday?

  "Convertirlo en algo". La vida nos bate, lo hace. Nos damos cuenta de que hemos perdido nuestro trabajo, o alguien que amamos. Nos damos cuenta de que algún orden ha caído contra nosotros, o que un mal review ha sido escrito. Nos caemos y nos dañamos. Llevamos un diagnóstico. Estamos maltratados o atacados. Nos golpean duro. Pero hay una hermosa metáfora en un poema rilke que podemos tomar en el corazón. Él dijo: "Que esta oscuridad sea una torre de sirena, y tú la sirena. Cuando suena lo que te bate, se convierte en tu fuerza. Sigue hacia atrás y hacia atrás, hacia el cambio". En lugar de vernos como las víctimas, podemos cambiar lo que nos pasa.

• 1:22Ryan Holiday?

  Al convertirnos en la sirena, hacemos música de los hits que tomamos. Y eso es lo que los estoicos significaban cuando hablaron de cómo el obstáculo es la manera. Esto es lo que Marcus dijo cuando habló de cómo un fuego convierte todo en calor y brillo. Absorbiendo la energía y la usamos. Estamos atorados, por supuesto, pero hacemos algo de ese atormento, algo que pueda ayudar, o informar, o ser disfrutado por otros. Sería maravilloso, por supuesto, si nunca fuese oscuridad, si nunca nos golpearan. Pero evitar tal destino, saltar del ritmo normal de la vida, es bastante improbable. Porque la existencia humana es un ciclo de luz y oscuridad, nacido de una serie de colisiones cósmicas. La oscuridad y la dificultad no son solo una parte de la vida, son la vida.

• 2:06Ryan Holiday?

  Así que dejemos de tratar de negar lo indeniable, o evitar lo inevitable. En cambio, hagamos trabajo en lo que controlamos, que es cómo respondemos a esas cosas que no podemos. Vamos a ver lo que podemos hacer de ellos.

• 2:23Ryan Holiday?

  Exciting news. I was just told by my publisher that my book, The Obstacle is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph, is $1.99 everywhere you get your eBooks. I'm not sure how long the price drop will last, but now is the cheapest the book will probably ever be. If you haven't read it, if you want to give it as a gift, if you also want a digital copy, whatever. It's pretty awesome. $1.99. You know, this is a book that sold now well over a million copies in 40 languages. It's been used by Super Bowl winning teams, special forces operators, members of Congress, world leaders, and it's less than $2. So if you want to

• 3:04Ryan Holiday?

  get The Obstacle is the Way as an eBook, I think it's only in the US, but check the link here in the show notes, or just go to Amazon, or just go to Amazon, or wherever you get your eBooks. Also, or related news, if you have more than $2, we have a leather-bound edition of The Obstacle is the Way, which you can check out in the Daily Stoic store. Just go to store.dailystoic.com. It's a premium edition. It should last a little bit longer than the hardcover. Go to dailystoic.com/store, and you can also get me to sign your leather-bound edition, or any of your editions of the book. And of course, we have some other cool Obstacle

• 3:45Ryan Holiday?

  is the Way merch. Check it out. The Obstacle is the Way as an eBook is just $1.99 for a very limited time only. Check it out.

• 3:55Ryan Holiday?

  The Enemy of Happiness. And I'm reading to you today from the Daily Stoic, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living by yours truly, my co-author and translator, Stephen Hanselman. You can get signed copies, by the way, in the Daily Stoic store. Over a million copies of the Daily Stoic in print now. It's been just such a lovely experience to watch it. It's been more than 250 weeks, consecutive weeks, on the bestsellers. Just an awesome experience. But I hope you check it out. We have a premium leather edition at store.dailystoic.com as well. But let's get on with today's reading. "It's quite impossible to unite happiness with a yearning for that which we don't have.

• 4:35Ryan Holiday?

  Happiness has all that it wants and resembles the well-fed. There wouldn't be hunger or thirst." That's Epictetus's Discourses 324.

• 4:46Ryan Holiday?

  "I'll be happy when I graduate," we tell ourselves. "I'll be happy when I get this promotion, when this diet pays off, when I have the money that my parents never had." "Conditional happiness" is what psychologists call this kind of thinking. Like the horizon, you could walk for miles and miles and miles and never reach it. You'll never get any closer. Eagerly anticipating some future event, passionately imagining something you desire, looking forward to some happy scenario. As pleasurable as these activities might seem, they ruin your chances at happiness here and now. So locate that yearning for more, for better, for someday, and see it for what it is,

• 5:31Ryan Holiday?

  the enemy of your contentment. Choose it or your happiness. As Epictetus says, "The two are not compatible."

• 5:43Ryan Holiday?

  That's a heavy one, I think. The idea that yearning is the enemy of happiness. Sometimes I'll talk to really successful people who have like a lot of money, and be like, "What are you doing? Like, why don't you just relax?" or whatever. And I always find it fascinating when you hear that they have a number. So maybe they have a million dollars, but their number is $10 million. Or maybe they have $10 million, or their number is $100 million. They've told themselves that when they get X, then they'll be okay, then they'll be good. But they never get there. There's, from a different Zeno, there's this Zeno's paradox,

• 6:27Ryan Holiday?

  the idea of like, if you're like walking from here to the other side of the room, and you go halfway there, and then halfway there, and then halfway there, and then halfway there, you'll never actually arrive, right? Because it's always half, there's always more. There's always some half left of the distance. But I think that's kind of what yearning is. We tell ourselves, "Oh, when I get this, when I get this, when I get this." But we never get there, either because... It's not actually something that a person can possess, or because we moved the goalposts. Like, oh, all I want to do is win a championship. And then you do it, and then you're, oh, all I want to do is win back-to-back championships to prove it wasn't a fluke.

• 7:10Ryan Holiday?

  And it's like, oh, but now I want to win it on a different team to prove that it wasn't a fluke there either. Whatever it is, right? We move the goalposts. That's the tricky thing about yearning, is it never gets there. In, um, is it, I think it's still, this is the key, but there's a quote I love from Stefan Zweig, the novelist. And he says, "In the history of conquerors, no conqueror has ever been surfated by conquests." Alexander the Great said, "Aren't we going to conquer the world together?" And his men said, "No, we want to go home." And the truth was, he always would have found something new, something beyond it,

• 7:56Ryan Holiday?

  always would have kept pushing. And the result of that was, he not only lost his life, but I think he lost a lot of happiness as well. So contentment, and I've read a study many years ago that said, like, young people associate happiness with accomplishment, older people with contentment. I think they've learned something along the way. It's a hard one lesson, I'm sure. But we can, even if we can't fully internalize it, or understand it, or accept it now, we can, we can, we can try to approximate it. We can try to incorporate some of it. We can fake it till we make it, which is that we don't need anything. We can be happy now. That doesn't mean that we don't keep trying.

• 8:40Ryan Holiday?

  Of course, we keep trying. Of course, we keep doing. But we try to do those things from a place of fullness, from a place of, that'll be a nice extra, as opposed to a place of yearning, that I'll be happy if this, once this, after that. It doesn't happen, man. It's a myth. It's a shimmer, it's a mirage. You'll get there, and you will realize it was a figment of your imagination, or worse, your mind will fool you so much, you will, you won't even realize you're there. It just feel like, ah, just got to go a little bit further, a little bit further, a little bit further. And you never arrive, and at the cost comes your life and your happiness.

• 9:23Ryan Holiday?

  But for people who don't want to do things, this is not a particularly important or tricky subject. For those of us who are ambitious, those of us who are driven, those of us who are talented, it's something we really have to wrestle with. So I'm wishing you the best. You're enough as you are. Yearning is the enemy of your happiness. Remember that. And be safe, be well, everyone. We'll talk soon. Thanks so much for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Again, if you don't know this, you can get these delivered to you via email every day. You just go to dailystoic.com/email. So check it out.