What If You Weren’t Such a Know It All? | Practice Letting Go

Ryan talks about how to truly cultivate wisdom, and reads this week’s meditation from The Daily Stoic Journal, on today’s Daily Stoic Podcast. The Pod Pro Cover by Eight Sleep is the most advanced solution on the market for thermoregulation. It pairs dynamic cooling and heating with biometric tracking. You can add the Cover to any mattress, and start sleeping as cool as 55°F or as hot as 110°F. Right in time for the holidays, give the gift of better sleep and a present that will keep giving back, everyday of the year. Go to eightsleep.com/dailystoic this Black Friday and Cyber Monday to save on theSign 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.

• 0:04Ryan 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.

• 0:34Ryan Holiday?

  What if you weren't such a know-it-all? You're smart, you went to college, you've read lots of books, you've seen a thing or two, so you know a lot. When people have questions, you have answers. When stuff happens, you've got opinions. When there are problems, you have solutions. And this is great, right? Maybe. Epictetus reminds us that it's impossible to learn that which you think you already know. To the Stoics, particularly Zeno, conceit was the primary impediment to wisdom. Because when you've always got answers, opinions, and ready-made solutions, what you're not doing is learning. What you're not doing is looking at things objectively, clearly, with fresh eyes.

• 1:18Ryan Holiday?

  You're just relying on instinct and preconceived notions. Ego is the enemy for a reason. It blinds us, it distracts us, it puffs us up and prevents us from learning. The less of a know-it-all we are, the more we can actually get out and discover, the more open we'll be, the wiser we'll become. Remember, the key to Socrates's philosophy was his admission of ignorance. It was his desire to ask questions, his willingness to be proven wrong, his interest in having conversations with anyone about anything. He was smart because he was humble, not conceited because he was smart. And this is a skill we have to practice. We have to prevent ego from cutting us off from wisdom.

• 2:04Ryan Holiday?

  Again, ego is the enemy. It's something I believe in enough that I have it tattooed here on my right arm. I was looking at it just as I was reading this. I've got signed copies of ego is the enemy in the Daily Stoic store, and of course, the ego is the enemy challenge coin, which I have sitting on my desk here. And there's even a pendant version. Ego is the enemy. It gets in the way of whatever it is that you want to do, whether you're super successful or struggling to get started. Ego is the enemy. Check it out. Store.dailystoic.com.

• 2:33Ryan Holiday?

  Practice letting go. We suffer when we lose things we love, and we suffer most when we lose people we love. But it is a natural, unavoidable part of life. And the Stoics say that this suffering is increased by our belief that we possess the objects of our love. They are, as we like to say, a part of us. This belief doesn't increase our love or care for them, but rather is a form of clinging that ignores the simple fact that we don't control what will happen, not to our own bodies, let alone to the ones we love. Epictetus taught a powerful exercise that every time you wish a dear child or family member or friend good night, you remember that these things are like a precious breakable

• 3:15Ryan Holiday?

  glass. Remember how dramatically things can change while you sleep. Marcus II struggled to practice this with his own family as he tucked them in at night. And the point wasn't to be morbid, but to create a sense of appreciation and a kind of humility. You cannot take anyone, especially someone you love, for granted. 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,

• 4:00Ryan Holiday?

  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. And then the quotes are from Epictetus and Seneca. Epictetus says, whenever you experience the pangs of losing something, don't treat it like a part of yourself, but as a breakable glass, so that when it falls, you will remember that and won't be troubled. So too, whenever you kiss your child, sibling, or friend, don't layer on top of the experience all the things you might wish, but hold them back and stop them. Just as those who ride behind triumphant generals remind them that they are mortal. The same way, remind yourself that your precious one isn't one of your possessions. It's something given for now, not forever.

• 4:45Ryan Holiday?

  That's Epictetus's Discourses 324. "But the wise person can lose nothing. Such a person has everything stored up for themselves, leaving nothing to fortune. Their own goods are held firm, bound in virtue, which requires nothing from chance, and therefore can't be either increased or diminished." Seneca on the firmness of the wise. We did a Daily Stoic email recently that I wanted to read you, or a chunk of it. Let me pull it up here. It's actually a poem. You wouldn't think of Margaret Atwood, the author of Handmaid's Tale and many other things, as a poet. But she has this beautiful poem called "The Moment", and I think it captures what the Stoics are talking about here.

• 5:29Ryan Holiday?

  And I'll read it because it's only three verses. "The moment when after many years of hard work and a long voyage, you stand in the center of your room, house, half-acre, square mile, island, country, knowing at last how you got there. And you say, 'I own this.' In the same moment, the trees unloose their soft arms from around you. The birds take back their language. The cliffs fissure and collapse. The air moves back from you like a wave. And you can't breathe. 'No,' they whisper, 'you own nothing. You were a visitor, time after time, climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming, 'We never belonged to you. You never found us.'

• 6:11Ryan Holiday?

  It was always the other way around." I just think that's such a beautiful poem. And look, when, there's a part of what Seneca here that stops me. He says, "So that when the glass falls, you will remember that and won't be troubled." Now, I don't think that's quite right. We know that Seneca lost a child and grieved quite deeply. We know that his mother grieved him quite deeply when he was exiled, and he in turn grieved his mother. We know that he and his wife struggled at their parting when they were forced to commit suicide. The idea that the Stoic can just think these things

• 6:52Ryan Holiday?

  and then not be attached to people, I think that's a false ideal, and I don't think that's where you actually want to get, even if you could get there. To me, what Epictetus's exercise, what Marcus is doing, and it's one I practiced almost every day during the pandemic, when, especially in those dark early days, when it seemed very, very serious, not that it wasn't serious, but it seemed so much more uncertain, the seriousness of it. The idea of holding your children close and saying that you don't know what's going to happen through the night is there to make you breathe that moment in, to not rush through

• 7:36Ryan Holiday?

  it, to not try to get it over with, right? So you can go check your email, or watch Netflix, or, you know, have a snack, right? It's to go, no, this is important. I'm not going to rush through this. I'm not going to get past it. I am going to breathe it in because it matters, because it's here now. To me, that this is a breakable glass doesn't mean put it up on the highest shelf, wrap it in bubble wrap, and hope nothing bad ever happens to it. It's to appreciate it while you have it, to realize that you don't have it forever, because none of us do. That's what I take from that exercise. And, you know, that was

• 8:18Ryan Holiday?

  brought home to me even more during a year, almost a year exactly from, you know, March of 2020, when this freak storm hits Texas, and I, you know, everyone tucked their kid in at night, they lost power, and a few families woke up and found that their children or older family members had died in their sleep, had frozen to death in their sleep, had gotten so cold, so unexpectedly.

• 8:47Ryan Holiday?

  You just think about how tragic that is and how that could happen to anyone. And you realize how much worse it would feel if you'd had an argument before bed, if you'd been short before a bed, if you'd said, no, I said only two books and now you want me to read a third one, right? You would regret that. It would be tragic in any circumstance. Again, the idea that you would get to a place where you would not care that it happened, I don't think that's right. Marcus Aurelius loses multiple children. That's insane, unthinkable. And even in meditations, you get the sense that he's still grieving, still working through it.

• 9:32Ryan Holiday?

  So you don't get there, but you do hopefully get to a place where you can minimize the regrets. So you're not sitting there kicking yourself saying, I wish I'd been more patient. I wish I'd been there more, period. I wish I hadn't rushed through things. While I had them, I really loved them. I really connected with them. I wasn't detached from them. I was attached to them. And that's why this tragedy is the least bad version of how it could go. So that's not the saddest way, that's not the happiest way to leave you today, but I do think it's a powerful exercise and worth thinking about. And I'll talk to you soon. Thanks so much for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast.

• 10:16Ryan Holiday?

  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, dailystoic.com/email.