Why Stoics Put Greatness On Display

When we see greatness, we should memorialize it. We should put it that greatness up on display. On our desk. On the wall. In ink on our skin. On the home screen of our phones. However you decide to honor the people whose example you love, put it somewhere you are guaranteed to see it every day and ask: "am I living by the example they stand for?"→ Put your own greatness on display:Marcus Aurelius Print: https://store.dailystoic.com/products/marcus-aurelius-print Page-A-Day Desk Calendar: https://store.dailystoic.com/products/daily-stoic-page-a-day-desk-calendarAmor Fati Medallion: https://store.dailystoic.com/products/amor-fati-medallion-1Memento Mori Medallion: https://store.dailystoic.com/products/memento-moriHemingway First Draft T-Shirt: https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/hemingway-tee?_pos=2&_sid=a325378b5&_ss=rDance of Death Print: https://store.dailystoic.com/products/arrowLinkedIn Jobs helps you find the candidates you want to talk to, faster. Every week, nearly 40 million job seekers visit LinkedIn? Post your job for free at LinkedIn.com/STOIC. Terms and conditions apply. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemailCheck 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.

• 0:03Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Weekend Edition of The Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these Stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space, when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal, and most importantly,

• 0:47Ryan Holiday?

  to prepare for what the week ahead may bring.

• 0:52Ryan Holiday?

  If you've never been out to my bookstore, The Painted Porch,

• 1:00Ryan Holiday?

  you should. I would love to have you come out anytime. But The Painted Porch is also where I work. I mean, I've had a number of different office spaces over the years. I've worked, I had a house in East Austin that I wrote a lot of my books in. I wrote, "Trust Me, I'm Lying," when I lived in New Orleans. I wrote "A Big Chunk of Obstacle" at the New York Public Library there on Fifth. And anyways, the point is, over the years, I've tried to build a workspace, an environment that is conducive, not just to the work that I want to do, but the person that I want to be. Like, I have a little framed print here that I'll talk about in today's episode, but I'm just looking at it as I talk about this. From Hugh MacLeod, he sent me this great little print.

• 1:44Ryan Holiday?

  And it says, "Like an asshole, I took him, her, it for granted." And I just think about that on a daily basis. I have the Oliver Sacks "No" sign over to the right of my monitor, reminding me to say, "No." I've got a little set of notes here, as Marx realized, talks about, which actually, we did as part of one of the early Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge epithets for the self. What are the, what are the sort of rules or watchwords that I I want to live by have honest, calm, fair, father, brave, generous, still. So anyways, in today's episode, I'm going to walk you through the painted porch, my bookstore, and my office, and the sort of mementos and reminders and strategies

• 2:26Ryan Holiday?

  derived from those things that helped me try to be a little more stoic, to help me try to be better, help me try to do what I need to do and be who I want to be. And we're going to talk about that, why the Stoics put up reminders like this, put up mementos like this, and what maybe you can learn from that as well. So enjoy.

• 2:48Ryan Holiday?

  In one of Seneca's letters, he's talking to his friend Lucilius, and he says that we should be hunting out quotes, or sayings, or ideas from the ancients that we can use as our models, that can be there for us always. In fact, that's what this letter exchanged between the two of them over years and years was. It was them, hey, here's this quote I think you would like, here's this reminder that I thought, here's this thing that I'm thinking about. I'm Ryan Holiday. In today's episode, I want to talk about a really important Stoic practice that's guided me through my 15 years now of studying Stoicism, whether I'm talking to the NFL or the NBA, whether I'm speaking to special forces operators

• 3:30Ryan Holiday?

  or sitting US senators, whether I'm running my bookstore or writing one of my books. I try to have things around me that inspire me, that guide me, that give me clarity about the situations that I'm dealing with. Sometimes that's a quote, sometimes that's a statue, sometimes that's a picture. But the idea is these are reminders put up on display. Marcus Aurelius says, "Nothing is so inspiring as seeing the virtues we admire embodied around us." And so my office, my house, my life, even my body, is a way of displaying these ideas so I can follow them, I can lean on them in whatever situations I happen to find myself. Spring is in the air. It's a time of renewal and growth.

• 4:15Ryan Holiday?

  Going through this right now at Daily Stoic, we're trying to add some people in some key positions to help us continue to do what we do. And the hard part of hiring is finding the people that you want to hire. It's a tight labor market where talent has a lot of control and rightfully so. That's great. It just makes it harder for you as an employer to find those people who will make your team better. And that's where LinkedIn comes in. You can create a free job post in minutes on LinkedIn Jobs to reach your network and beyond, actually the largest professional network, over 800 million people. You add your job and then the purple hashtag hiring frame to your LinkedIn profile. It spreads the word that you're hiring so your network can help you find the right people. And they've got awesome, simple tools that help you screen questions, find the right

• 4:59Ryan Holiday?

  candidates, the right skills to quickly prioritize who you want to interview and then hire. And that's why small businesses, which include shops like Daily Stoic, that's why they rate LinkedIn Jobs number one in delivering quality hires versus leading competitors. LinkedIn Jobs will help you find the candidates you want to talk to faster. And every week, nearly 40 million job seekers visit LinkedIn for precisely this reason. Post your job for free at LinkedIn.com/stoic. That's LinkedIn.com/stoic. Post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply.

• 5:30Ryan Holiday?

  This is one of my favorite Marcus Aurelius quotes. He says, "Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be, be one." The idea for the Stoics is you don't talk about it, you embody it, right? What do you do? Doesn't matter what you read, it doesn't matter what you think, it doesn't matter what you say. What matters are the results. Are you being the person that philosophy wants you to be, as Marcus Aurelius says? This is the Daily Stoic calendar. It's a tearaway. Today is what? Monday. "What makes a person free from hindrance and self-determining? Wealth doesn't, neither does high office, state, or kingdom. Rather, something else must be found in the case of living, is knowledge of how to live." So that's one quote a day that I love. This is Walker Percy, one of my absolute favorite writers.

• 6:13Ryan Holiday?

  I like just having him look over my desk while I'm writing. This is a memento mori reminder. This is a picture of Marcus Aurelius that someone sent me, so I see that from across my desk, which is really good. This is a quote from General Mattis that he sent me. Things were kind of falling apart in the world and I was talking to him about it and he seemed hopeful and I said, "If you seem hopeful after all the dark stuff you've seen, what excuse do I have?" And he just said, "Keep the faith, Ryan. Hold the line." So that's a really important reminder for me. This is a quote I try to live by. I said it, but it's a reminder. Am I being a good steward of Stoicism? So I try to think about that always. This is my large bust

• 6:56Ryan Holiday?

  of the one and only Marcus Aurelius. And then this is a bust of Marcus Aurelius. It's Italian marble. It's from the 1840s. So I try to have these two busts of Marcus Aurelius always to think about. I have a Morfati coin, as Nietzsche says, "That we not only bear what is necessary, but love it."

• 7:18Ryan Holiday?

  This is the Memento Mori coin. I have a bunch of Memento Mori reminders that I'll show you. This is a little one that I have that I wrote to myself. I said, "2020 is a test. Will make you a better person or a worse one?" So that's a reminder. This is a bust of Amelia Earhart. Her motto was, "Always think with your stick forward," about momentum, which I try to think about as I'm struggling as a writer and when I'm struggling with my writing, that it's about for momentum. I just need to make a little progress. I can't lose my ground speed. This is a Buddhist quote. It's got some water on it. "Dow is in the emptiness. Emptiness is in the fast of the mind." That's actually the quote that inspired "Stillness is the key."

• 8:00Ryan Holiday?

  Oh, in here, here I have two that are really important to me. This is a quote from Hemingway. "The first draft of everything is shit." The idea being that first drafts aren't perfect, but what matters is what you build on top of them. What matters is you get to the first draft. You can edit and polish a first draft, but you can't edit and polish something that doesn't exist. And then this is one of my absolute favorites. This is the last page of the original manuscript of Steven Pressfield's Gates of Fire, which I think is the most important. And beautiful page in the whole book, but it has the epitaph of the Spartans who died at Thermopylae. It says, "Go tell the Spartans stranger passing by that here obedient to their

• 8:41Ryan Holiday?

  laws we lie." This is just an important reminder to me about duty and responsibility and sacrifice. So I like having that on the wall. Page 802 of the original manuscript. This is Zeno, the founder of Stoicism. So I have that. I have a Seneca quote here. "Some lack the fickleness to live as they wish and just live as they have begun." This is a bust of Seneca, another bust of Marcus Aurelius, my old philosophy books. Marcus Aurelius again, Marcus Aurelius. So I just like having Marcus around. It's just like the embodiment of, obviously he's not alive. I can't talk to him. Having the image of it is there and it's inspiring and good. This is one of my heroes, William Tecumseh Sherman. So I have this painting of him on the wall.

• 9:20Ryan Holiday?

  Momentum coin again. This is a NYPD challenge coin that someone sent me. The motto, "His fortune favors the bold." This is from the 31st Fighter Wing in Aviano Air Force Base in Italy, who I talked to a few years ago. They have a great motto, "Return with honor." To me, return with honor means like, come back better than you left, right? Don't be degraded by what you do out there. Don't be changed by what happens out there, but come back with the same commitments, the same ideals, the same beliefs that you left with. This is John Fonte, one of my favorite writers. So I like to have writers who's example inspires me around. He's also a

• 10:02Ryan Holiday?

  bit of a cautionary tale. And this is another Momentum. This is a Dance of Death print and the idea is that the arrow is pointed directly at you. The arrow escapes no one. No one escapes the dance that I dance, as the French inscription says. It's supposed to be mounted right at eye level. And then this I just put up, this is the four virtues. So the owl is wisdom. The man dropping water into wine is temperance. The lion is courage. And then those are the scales of justice. Those are the four virtues of Stoicism. Those are the four virtues that I try to live by. I have this here. So everyone that comes into the office, everyone that works for me has a constant reminder of the four virtues. And then there's a little bit of that, you know,

• 10:46Ryan Holiday?

  that thing in locker rooms we're supposed to do. Touch it, as you go. There's a couple here. These are four really cool prints from the artist Joey Roth, whose stuff I love. To me, this is about the difference between talking and doing. It's kind of an embodiment of the Marcus Aurelius, "Don't talk about it, be about it," quote that we talked about earlier. This is the difference between a beginner, a master, and an expert. You know, it's about what you see beneath the surface that matters. This one about sort of the full bullet necessary for success. Inspiration, discipline, success, humility. And then this one is about, you know, well-rounded is great, but obsessed is better, he's saying. And then there's a reminder of stillness.

• 11:30Ryan Holiday?

  This is a quote I love from Walter Mosley. "I'm not saying that you have to be a reader to save your soul in the modern world. I'm saying it helps." And then...

• 11:42Ryan Holiday?

  Kafka. "A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us." I just love that quote. It has both a writer and a reader. Great line from a Margarita Ingle poem. "Books are door-shaped portals carrying me across oceans and centuries, helping me feel less alone." This is one of my favorite Latin expressions. "A book is medicine for the soul." Obviously, I believe this. It's why I chose this profession. And then...

• 12:12Ryan Holiday?

  And then this is the last one that I sort of built the bookstore around, which is that good things happen in bookstores. In fact, Stoicism is founded in a bookstore. So anyways, I just like to have these reminders everywhere. I think about them often. I guess the last three I would give you, I don't just have in my house or in my office or my bookstore, but I literally tattooed on my body. They are, "The obstacle is the way, ego is the enemy, and stillness is the key." If you want to learn more about Stoic philosophy, totally for free, you can sign up for our Daily Stoic email. It's one free email every morning. The best of Stoic wisdom. DailyStoic.com/email.

• 13:05Ryan Holiday?

  Thanks for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Just a reminder, we've got signed copies of all my books in the Daily Stoic store. You can get them personalized, you can get them sent to a friend. The Obstacle is the Way, He Goes the Enemy, Stillness is the Key, the leather-bound edition of the Daily Stoic, we have them all in the Daily Stoic store, which you can check out at store.dailystoic.com.