We Don’t See The Full Picture | We Reap What We Sow

History is a lie. It is written by the victors, as the saying goes. Which means the picture it produces is inherently biased by a particular point of view. It’s also biased towards the things we know about, by our common knowledge.✉️ 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 Facebook See 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 another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Thursdays, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from the book The Daily Stoic, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful co-author and collaborator, Stephen Hanselman. And so today, we'll give you a quick meditation from one of the Stoics, from Epictetus, Marcus really, and Seneca, then some analysis from me, and then we send you out into the world to do your best to turn these words into works.

• 0:48Ryan Holiday?

  We don't see the full picture.

• 0:53Ryan Holiday?

  History is a lie. It is written by the victors, as the saying goes, which means the picture it produces is inherently biased by a particular point of view. It's also biased towards the things we know about by our common knowledge. But what about all those events that occurred in darkness without any witnesses? One of the most insidious biases that these events produce is that the history that gets reflected back to us is through the prejudices of its time. That is why, for instance, we really only hear about male Stoics. Men controlled the levers of power in the ancient world and didn't particularly care about what was happening inside the brains or the hearts of women. The written record appears as if there were few Stoic women, when in actuality, there were many.

• 1:37Ryan Holiday?

  They just didn't get written about. Even Seneca notes this. In a letter of consolation to his mother, he reminds her of the story of her sister, who had been married to one of Rome's powerful proconsus. While on a sea voyage, she lost her beloved husband, he writes, whom she had married as a maiden, yet she bore simultaneously the burdens of grief and fear. And though shipwrecked, she rode out the storms and brought his body safely ashore. Oh, how many noble deeds of women, he said, are lost in obscurity. Not all are lost. We just have to look harder to find them. Marcus Aurelius' beautiful eulogy to his mother at the beginning of Meditations is one. The story of Portia Cato, Cato's daughter, is another.

• 2:21Ryan Holiday?

  I tell it in The Lives of the Stoics. And we've interviewed plenty of brilliant and inspiring Stoic women as part of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Three-time Olympic gymnast Dominique Daws, the groundbreaking pro racer Danica Patrick, the actress, producer, and writer Karen Duffy, and a bunch of others. It's also why we made the decision to tell the incredible story of Epictetus from a female perspective in The Girl Who Would Be Free. This was my way of making Stoicism more broadly accessible and of making a nod to the many female Stoics that Musonius Rufus surely had, but whose names no one had bothered to write down. History doesn't fully capture the noble deeds of so many groups,

• 3:02Ryan Holiday?

  not just of women, but of the poor, of the indigenous, of different people. People who are brave, people who did their best, who lived full and interesting lives that dominant groups simply ignored. This isn't just an injustice to them, it's a crime to us, the students of history, because we miss their perspective. We miss, as Seneca pointed out, their inspiring, virtuous examples. Anyways, that's why I wrote The Girl Who Would Be Free, why I made Epictetus from a man to a woman. Musonius Rufus does have female students. Epictetus is just really the only one that we know about, male or female. And so I thought it was a fun choice. I'd just heard from so many people who said, you know, I read The Boy Who Would Be King,

• 3:46Ryan Holiday?

  and my daughter, you know, wondered, would you do a queen version? And I wanted to do Marcus Aurelius as Marcus Aurelius, because that story is incredible as it is. And I wanted to do Epictetus differently. It's just how I felt. It's been amazing to hear from so many thousands of people that have loved the book. I hope you can check it out, which you can, at dailystoic.com/girl. Or you can pick up The Girl Who Would Be Free on Amazon, on Audible, at The Painted Porch. I would love for you to read the book. Check it out. And of course, as always, I will try to do my best to show as many different perspectives and point of views and stories as I can in this podcast, in these emails, in my books, so everyone can see themselves across those pages and in those words. And I hope you appreciate that.

• 4:36Ryan Holiday?

  We reap what we sow. This is the October 27th entry in The Daily Stoic. 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 and also get a signed, personalized copy from me in the Daily Stoic store at store.dailystoic.com.

• 5:15Ryan Holiday?

  Crimes often return to their teachers. This is from Seneca's play Theestes, which is a dark, disturbing play, to put it mildly, but a fascinating read. It's ironic that Seneca would have one of his characters utter this line, because, as we know, for many years, Seneca served as a tutor and mentor to the Emperor Nero. And while there is a lot of evidence that Seneca was in fact a positive moral influence on this deranged young man, even at the time, some of Seneca's contemporaries found it strange that a philosopher would serve as the right-hand man to such an evil person. They called him the tyrant teacher. And just as Shakespeare taught in Macbeth, "Bloody instructions which, being

• 5:58Ryan Holiday?

  taught, return to plague the inventor." Seneca's collaboration with Nero ultimately ends with the student murdering the teacher. And it's something to think about when you consider whom you work with and whom to do business with in life. If you show a client how to do something unethical or illegal, might they return the favor to an unsuspecting you later? If you provide a bad example to your employees, to your associates, to your children, might they betray you or hurt you down the road? What goes around, comes around, is the saying, or karma, the notion we have imported from the East, teaches us a similar idea. Seneca paid the price for his instructions to Nero, and as has been true throughout the

• 6:42Ryan Holiday?

  ages, his hypocrisy, avoidable or not, was costly. And so too will yours be.

• 6:50Ryan Holiday?

  There's a great tweet that came out March 12th, 2019, that I think of often. It says, "Me sowing. Ha ha, fuck. Yes." And it says, "Me reaping. Well, this fucking sucks. What the fuck." And then there is, of course, the other famous tweet that says, "Well, well, well, if it isn't the consequences of my own actions." As the expression now goes, right? Fuck around and find out. That's what happened to Seneca, right? Seneca rolled the dice, thought he could feed the monster, thought he could constrain Nero. He was exactly like a lot of the figures that I talked about in my podcast episode with,

• 7:34Ryan Holiday?

  with Tim Miller, the right-wing political operative who saw so many people convince themselves, he said, these sort of minor savior complexes, that they were very important. They were important enough, they could constrain Trump, or get something out of him, that it would be good for them in the short term. It always comes back to bite us, right? The consequences of our actions come back to us. Crimes return to their teachers. You reap what you sow. And this was the biggest mistake of Seneca's life. It's a mistake I've made in my life. I thought I was different. I thought I could make it work. I thought I was making a bargain that would work out, and it didn't.

• 8:19Ryan Holiday?

  It never does. So, we learn from the Stoics, not just what they tell us, what they teach us, what they write about, but the mistakes that they made in their life, right? Marcus Aurelius, his example, shows us, hopefully, something about being a better parent. Seneca teaches us, you know, who to work for, who not to work for, how to detangle ourselves from clearly toxic, unchangeable situations. Seneca never, unfortunately, speaks about this explicitly or explicitly enough. He just sort of hints at it at his plays. But we can learn plenty from this example, and it's why I put it in The Daily Stoic. And it's just a reminder, crimes return to their teachers.

• 9:11Ryan Holiday?

  You know, the Stoics in real life met at what was called the Stoa, the Stoa Pochyle, the Painted Porch in ancient Athens. Obviously, we can't all get together in one place because this community is like hundreds of thousands of people and we couldn't fit in one space. But we have made a special digital version of the Stoa. We're calling it Daily Stoic Life. It's an awesome community. You could talk about, like today's episode, you could talk about the emails, ask questions. That's one of my favorite parts is interacting with all these people who are using Stoicism to be better in their actual, real lives. You get more Daily Stoic Meditations over the weekend, just for the Daily Stoic Life members, quarterly Q and As with me, cloth-bound edition of our Best of Meditations, plus a whole bunch of other stuff, including discounts.

• 9:54Ryan Holiday?

  And this is the best part, all our Daily Stoic Courses and Challenges, totally for free, hundreds of dollars of value every single year, including our New Year, New You Challenge. We'd love to have you join us. There's a two-week trial, totally for free. Check it out at dailystoiclife.com.