We Are All Replaceable | This Stoic Virtue Will Change Your Life

The Stoics believed in the concept of "amor fati," or "love of fate." This means accepting and embracing everything that happens, including the fact that we are all replaceable. As Marcus Aurelius wrote, "All things are ephemeral – fame and the famous as well." No matter how great or important we may feel in the moment, time marches on and eventually someone else will fill our place. But this shouldn't be seen as a negative.---Today, Ryan presents highlights of his discussions with top performers in their fields about how practicing the Stoic virtue of discipline has shaped their lives for the better.✉️ 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.

• 0:02Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. On Tuesdays, we take a closer look at these Stoic ideas, how we can apply them in our actual lives. Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy.

• 0:25Ryan Holiday?

  We are all replaceable. The Stoics believed in the concept of amor fati, or love of fate. This means accepting and embracing everything that happens, including the fact that we're all replaceable. As Marcus Aurelius wrote, "All things are ephemeral, fame and the famous as well. No matter how great or important we may feel in the moment, time marches on and eventually someone else will fill our place." But this shouldn't be seen as negative. In fact, it can be a liberating realization. If we understand that our time is limited and we will eventually be replaced, it frees us from the pressure to be perfect or to constantly prove ourselves. Instead, we can focus on making the most of the time we have and doing our best in the present moment. We can work hard, be kind,

• 1:09Ryan Holiday?

  and leave a positive impact on the world, knowing that someone else will eventually continue the work we started. The Stoics taught that we should strive for eudaimonia, or a sense of fulfillment and contentment. By focusing on our own growth and development rather than trying to secure our place in the world, we can find true peace and happiness. So embrace the fact that you're replaceable and use that realization to live your best life. It makes sense, right? But there might be part of that podcast that you just heard that sounded a little off. And that's because it was actually written by a computer with artificial intelligence, who was prompted to write on the subject of replaceability

• 1:53Ryan Holiday?

  while mimicking the style of the Daily Stoic. It struck me that something like ChatGPT, the wildly popular new AI engine, is a good example of the idea that life is changing and that none of us are truly indispensable, even me. Suddenly, a computer can do what I can do, what a human can do. What the Stoics were doing with their own writing for centuries, it's scary and it's unreal, but it's also a reality, not something to run from or deny, but to examine, to figure out, to work with and not against, as we must do with all change, technological, cultural, and environmental that life brings us.

• 2:42Speaker 01

  Discipline is what takes you to that higher level. You can't wish your way there. You can't chant your way there. The only way you get there is through hard work.

• 2:53Speaker 02

  That's the question my coach keeps asking me. Do you want to be fast now? Or do you want to be fast at the next World Cup? It's an interesting balance between being future thinking and looking at the process and understanding where you're going and trusting that you're going somewhere, but also being OK with where you are right now. And that doesn't mean this is going to be the moment forever, but you have to honor that break and that rest and what regeneration happens in your body to be able to actually deliver when you need to be fast. The interesting thing about being a professional athlete is we do have these goals and we have cycles and we have training structure for the entire year. And the goal is to really peak. So we're trying to have kind of like superhuman performance for a few big events a year. And a lot of people think that means that you're just training as hard as you can all the time.

• 3:37Speaker 02

  But really, I would say what differentiates amateur and elite athletes primarily is the recovery time, the ability to make that work count and to allow your body to recover between these hard sessions. So a lot of what we do in the fall is long, easy rides and just preparing your body to be able to take on this load. And it might feel like you're not doing all that you can, but it's critical to performance when the time comes.

• 4:03Ryan Holiday?

  It really sounds like what you're talking about here is temperance, the idea of moderation, which I imagine is extra difficult when you are super committed, super ambitious. I imagine it sucks to not be peaking right now because that means you're having to be OK with not being as good as you'd like to be in the present moment or even for extended periods of time.

• 4:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, optimizing versus maximizing, understanding what things you're doing that make a big difference and doing those things fully and completely, but not maximizing.

• 4:34Ryan Holiday?

  I think for me, like, running or the physical training that I do, part of that is creating the muscle that allows me to go like, "I didn't want to go for a run this morning," and I went. I also don't want to take notes on this boring-ass book that I read, but like, I'm the kind of person that easily and regularly does the things I don't want to do, not just if they're hard, but because they're hard.

• 5:00Speaker 03

  I think it's absolutely a muscle that we have. It's a mental muscle, and I think the research backs this up. If we can train that discipline, that self-control, that ability to sit with that hard thing and navigate it, it helps in other aspects of our life. So in my life, a lot of it is around physical practice. When I was growing up, I was a very competitive runner, and I don't push it that much anymore. But what I make sure that I do is that in addition to, let's say, my easy running, at least once a week, I'm doing something where I'm pushing like the bounds of my physical ability. That could be going to a nearby hill and doing some sprints up and down it. It could be like, you know, I'm gonna go out four miles

• 5:42Speaker 03

  and then turn around and try and run the last four miles like hard home. And I do that not because I'm trying to race. I don't race anymore or get in good shape. It's just because I want to be able to sit with that like situation where part of my mind is screaming at me to say, "Hey, like, you're not training for anything. Like, why don't you just slow down? Why don't you quit? You don't have to do this." Whenever I feel that like anxiety or that fear or that pull, that acts as a signal to me to sit there and be like, "All right, maybe I should move towards this for a little bit."

• 6:16Speaker 04

  Why I'm in this sport and why I keep signing up for these really, really long races is that I want to see what's possible if we just keep chipping away at it. Like, I call it my pain cave, and I'm trying to make it bigger. So I'm hoping that this ceiling or back of my cave can be made bigger if I just keep on going into it and trying to do something a little bit harder or push a little farther than I've ever gone before.

• 6:45Ryan Holiday?

  And how do you know when you're in the cave?

• 6:47Speaker 04

  When you reach that feeling of like it's impossible to go another step, like I'm not sure how I'll keep moving forward. That's when I know I'm like really back in the back corners of the cave.

• 6:59Ryan Holiday?

  So the vast majority or a big chunk of a race, you haven't even gotten to the cave yet. The cave is where you get when you start to butt up against your limits. The first 50 reps don't matter. It's the 51st rep that it's where the muscle is being made. Is that sort of how it is?

• 7:15Speaker 04

  Kind of, but I would say in these running races, sometimes you're shocked by a very early cave appearance. Like just whatever happens with the day or the terrain, for some reason you might hit the cave much, much sooner. Then I don't think that necessarily means you shy away from going in. I think that's when you dive in and keep working the cave in different spots. You know, maybe it's not the distance part of your cave where you're seeing what's possible for a new distance. But maybe it's like the effort or how efficiently you could be pushing up this mountain. And I'm really visual. So when it gets to be that state when I'm running,

• 7:58Speaker 04

  I'll actually picture the cave, holding like a chisel and a hard hat and just like getting to work on making it bigger.

• 8:07Ryan Holiday?

  So the season ends, you get a couple of months off or whatever, and then you're starting to gear up for the next season. What was your feeling about that? Were you excited for a new season to start? Or was there sort of a dread for you that you knew it was going to be very hard and it would be grueling?

• 8:22Speaker 05

  You can have both feelings at the same time. It's kind of like bittersweet.

• 8:25Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 8:25Speaker 05

  You know what's coming. You know what you just went through, the strain it put on your body, mentally, physically, spiritually, your family. It's very, very stressful. Football, people always ask me, they're like, man, do you miss it? And I'm like, hell, no.

• 8:38Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 8:38Speaker 05

  But then part of me goes, hell, yeah. It's like graduating from high school. I don't miss getting my ass kicked, the fight, the monotony of going every single day. It becomes so boring. But football is a fight. It's not fun. The games are fun, but it's not fun. When you're going into your offseason, obviously you try to focus on the good. That is, that's the way I did it. I remember the good times, the positive stuff that I did. And then you take some time off where I didn't do anything for that first month. I wouldn't even touch a football.

• 9:06Ryan Holiday?

  Really?

• 9:07Speaker 05

  That was the beauty of basketball for me. Basketball was my saving grace. Because I would just go play basketball. Because I really, really enjoyed it.

• 9:12Ryan Holiday?

  So you could stay in shape.

• 9:14Speaker 05

  Stay in shape. And I played every single day. And I played competitively. I played, shoot, I even tried out for the Miami Heat one offseason. But I played in the summer pro leagues out there with Magic Johnson, Bo Outlaw, remember Antoine Jamison, like Paul Pierce, like all these pro leagues. But that would be away from me, take my mind off of football. And then, once the summer came, I started gearing up into it. And you started slowly, maturely, getting my mind wrapped around what I want to do. Set some new goals, keep building off of what I did before. You're never satisfied. I think that's how you become truly, truly great. I never rested and said, oh my God, I'm, I was first team all pro last year. It's like, no, I gotta get even better. I had a thousand yards. I need, I need 1,200 yards this year. I need to keep pushing myself.

• 9:52Speaker 01

  You and I are very disciplined guys. If anybody watched us get up in the morning, they would say, wow, I wish I could do that. But they also might say they're crazy to be, you know, lashing themselves like they are. I believe that life operates on two levels. And the higher level is the muse level. The level we were just talking about that the shaman saw.

• 10:08Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 10:09Speaker 01

  The level of your calling, of your work, whatever that is. And the lower level is our material plane.

• 10:15Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 10:15Speaker 01

  And on that lower level is the force that I call resistance with a capital R. That's there to stop us from reaching this higher level, right? If we don't reach this level, we don't do our work, we don't follow our calling, then we get sick and we do bad things and shit happens, right? So what is the purpose of discipline? Discipline is what takes you to that higher level.

• 10:36Ryan Holiday?

  That's right.

• 10:36Speaker 01

  That's why you have to have it. You can't wish your way there. You can't chant your way there. You can't, whatever was that book, The Secret. You can't vibe your way there. Yeah, you can't, the law of attraction is not gonna get, it's bullshit.

• 10:50Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 10:50Speaker 01

  The only way you get there is through hard work. The beings that inhabit this higher level, that we want to associate with, that's the only thing they respect. You know, you've got to punch your ticket and pay the price. So discipline is not a bad thing. You're not crazy to be self-disciplined, because that's what gets you to this higher level. And also gets you to just, just live your life so that when the day is over, you're calm. You're not freaking out as some of us have in the past. That's beautiful. I love it.

• 11:28Speaker 01

  Thank you.