Who Do You Wish To Become? | Turn Words Into Works

The Stoics understood that it was only by changing our actions that we could change who we are. The Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge is 3 weeks of ALL-NEW, actionable challenges, presented in an email per day, built around the best, most timeless wisdom in Stoic philosophy, to help you create a better life, and a new you in 2025. Why 3 weeks? Because it takes human beings 21 days to build new habits and skills, to create the muscle memory of making beautiful choices each and every day. Head over to dailystoic.com/challenge today to sign up.📓 Pick up a signed edition of The Daily Stoic Journal: 366 Days of Writing and Reflection on The Art of Living: 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.

• 0:02Ryan 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.

• 0:42Ryan Holiday?

  Who do you wish to become? This is that time of year that we make resolutions and dream up what possibilities a new year could bring. Maybe this is the year we break six figures in salary, or maybe this is the year that we lose a certain amount of weight or read a certain number of books. But as we know, these kinds of resolutions tend not to stick. Talked to James Clear about this on the podcast recently. You should listen to that episode if you haven't. But he talks a lot about this in Atomic Habits, because we too often focus on achieving things. Instead, he says, we ought to ask ourselves what new identity we want for ourselves, and what are the habits and behaviors and routines

• 1:27Ryan Holiday?

  that we could start to begin showing up as that person? This is what he said.

• 1:33Speaker 01

  And it doesn't matter if it's two minutes, or if it's 20 minutes, or if it's an hour, but I'm going to try to find a way to show up today. And my little phrase is, "Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become."

• 1:45Ryan Holiday?

  The ancients understood that we don't change or grow in one giant leap. It was Aristotle who said that, you know, "We are what we repeatedly do." And this is, I think, something the Stoics would agree with. "Well-being," Zeno said, "is realized by small steps, but it's no small thing." And it's why the Stoics were all about habits and routines, why Marcus Aurelius tried to wake up early, why Seneca was always going on long walks, why Epictetus encouraged his students to write down their thoughts each day and reflect on them at night. It wasn't just about knowing what the right thing was. It was about showing up and doing it, day in and day out, in the little chunks of time that we had.

• 2:28Ryan Holiday?

  The Stoics understood that only by changing what we do, little by little, that we change our life. And that's the idea behind the Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge, to help you show up a little bit in a new way every day for 21 consecutive days to kick off the year. Three weeks of actionable challenges, one email per day, built around what I think is the best wisdom in Stoic philosophy. We do an all-new challenge every year. We come up with a bunch of awesome exercises. It's one of my favorite things to do. I have so many habits in my life that I have picked up as part of it. I know who I

• 3:10Ryan Holiday?

  am right now is a result of challenges that I've done every year for the last seven years. The results are real, man. It can be awesome. And I'd love to see you in it. You can sign up right now at dailystoic.com/challenge. Let's kick off this new year with a framework, with a community, with some mentors. And that's what we built the challenge around. It's gonna be awesome. I want to see you in there. "Progress is not achieved by luck or accident, Epictetus said, but by working on yourself daily." So each day to kick off the year, let's do it with a challenge, and I will see you in there. dailystoic.com/challenge. It starts on January 1st, so stop putting it off. Let's do it.

• 4:03Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. This is the last of these entries of the year, the last, as we pull from the Daily Stoic Journal, 366 Meditations of Writing and Reflection on the Art of Living. I think ultimately, the most important, it's about turning words into works. Marcus Aurelius spent a great deal of time on his journals. Yet, within these pages, we find him admonishing himself to throw them away, to never read them. Why? Because he didn't want it to be an excuse from the essential tasks at hand. "The art of living will never be found anywhere but in our own efforts to be a good person."

• 4:47Ryan Holiday?

  Never forget that that is the aim of Stoicism and of your own journals. It's not to fill up pages with pretty thoughts, but inspire you to take action, to turn the words, as Seneca said, into works. And in that, we have the perfect place to end the year with the ultimate Stoic prompt: Get active in your own rescue. And we have two quotes this week from Marcus Aurelius's Meditations, and then one from Seneca's Moral Letters. "Stop wandering about," Marcus says. "You aren't likely to read your own notebooks, or ancient histories, or anthologies you've collected to enjoy in your old age. Get busy with life's purpose, toss aside empty hopes. Get active in your own rescue.

• 5:31Ryan Holiday?

  If you care for yourself at all, do it while you can." That's Marcus Aurelius 3:14. "You have proof in the extent of your wanderings that you never found the art of living anywhere, not in logic, nor in wealth, nor in fame, or in any indulgence. Nowhere. Where is it then? In doing what human nature demands. And how is a person to do this? By having principles be the source of desire and action. What principles? Those to do with good and evil, indeed in the belief that there is no good for a human being except what creates justice, self-control, courage, and freedom. And nothing evil except what destroys these things."

• 6:15Ryan Holiday?

  That's Marcus Aurelius's Meditations 8:1. And then ultimately, Seneca in Moral Letters 108, he says, "All study of philosophy and reading should be for the purpose of living a happy life. We should seek precepts to help us, noble and courageous words that can become facts. We should learn them in a way that the words become works." And ultimately, look, that's, that's the journey for me, ironically, as a writer, is that I write them, that's my job. But if I don't listen to them, if I don't get better at it, then I'm, what am I? I'm nothing but a sophist, right? And what are you? If you read about Stoicism, if you listen to this podcast, if you follow the quotes on Instagram

• 6:59Ryan Holiday?

  or watch the videos, but you're not actually getting better day to day, you're not getting better at those virtues, courage, self-control, justice, wisdom, right? You're not focused on applying the ideas. Ultimately, that's what matters. As Marcus Aurelius says, we should waste no more time arguing what a good person is, be one. As Epictetus talks about, embody the ideas. Am I as good at that as I want to be? Are you? Right? All this stuff is pretty straightforward, pretty simple. You find yourself nodding your head to it. But then when you're tired, then when you're frustrated, then when you're trying

• 7:43Ryan Holiday?

  to do something that's really important to you, when things are really going sideways, well, it's hard to actually stick with them. It's hard to actually apply them. Right? But that's the whole point. That's the whole point of the philosophy. Look, I take some solace in the fact that clearly Marcus Aurelius is struggling with that, right? He's saying that even as an old man, right? He's telling himself, you gotta stop wandering about, right? He's saying, you still haven't figured it out. You gotta get active in your rescue now before it's too late. Right? So I take some solace in the fact that one of the greatest Stoics to ever live is still struggling with that, you know, many decades older than I

• 8:23Ryan Holiday?

  am. But that time is tick, tick, ticking away. And those opportunities are passing this by. And so the purpose of the Daily Stoic Journal, the purpose of the Daily Stoic Podcast, the purpose of all this content, obviously, yes, it's compelling to me as a writer. I feel a duty to bring the ideas to other people. But ultimately, what I'm really trying to work on is just be a little bit better at them day to day. My own life. How would I grade myself on that? I don't know. Not as, uh, not as high as I'd like, but higher than before. Right. Higher than if the intervention had never happened. Which is ultimately, right? How we judge medicine? How we judge anything scientifically?

• 9:08Ryan Holiday?

  We, we compare it against a control group. You compare it against a placebo. And I know how I was before. Right. I know. What I'm capable of if I don't try. If I just sort of go the path of least resistance. If I think about what I could get away with. That's not enough. We have to be better than that. We have to push ourselves. So that's ultimately the whole purpose of Stoicism. That's the thought I want to leave you here with at the end of the year. It's about turning the words into words. What do you have to show for it? Right? It's not about pretending. It's not about imitating. It's about action. It's about putting up the numbers. Putting up the results.

• 9:53Ryan Holiday?

  Trying to get a little bit better. Every single day. I don't expect magical transformation from myself or from you. That's not possible. This isn't about epiphany. But it is about repetition and practice, holding yourself accountable. And with that, I bid you adieu to the end of this year. I hope you can look back, reflect here as the year is winding up and see where you could have done better. Hope you can set aside some plans, some goals for the next year.

• 10:24Ryan Holiday?

  And I hope you can build on the successes that you did have. That's what I'm going to try to do. And we'll be right back at this again. Cause we don't stop. Talk soon.

• 10:38Ryan 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.