Why You Should Re-Read, Not Just Read Books

The Stoics were not only avid readers, but also avid re-readers. In this video, Ryan Holiday explains why we should re-read the books we love or those that have had a big impact on us. For more on how to get more out of your reading, check out http://dailystoic.com/readJoin Daily Stoic’s Read to Lead Challenge: http://dailystoic.com/readSign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow 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.

• 0:17Ryan 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,

• 1:00Ryan Holiday?

  and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring.

• 1:06Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another Weekend episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. As you know, as an author, clearly, I believe in the power of reading. And there's basically no... There's no one who gives advice about life that says you shouldn't read. But what I think isn't said enough is that it's not just about reading, but it's about rereading. Seneca talks about the importance of lingering on the works of the master thinkers, reading not just once, but many times, having a lifelong engagement with the text. And I found that even with Marcus Aurelius. You know, having read Meditations north of 100 times now, I get something new out of it each time. And as Marcus says, "We never step in the same river twice."

• 1:50Ryan Holiday?

  That's what rereading is about. So in today's episode, I'm not going to tell you to read, because you already know that's important. I'm talking to you, the reader. About what you choose to read. And I want to talk about the importance of rereading, what you get out of it, and why the Stoics want you to linger on the works of those master thinkers, not just once, but several times over the course of a life. And I think this is going to be a really important episode. A few years ago, actually, as part of one of the Daily Stoic Challenges, I made a commitment to reread a handful of books each year. I try to think about those books at the beginning of the year. So then when I'm sort of slipping between, like I'm falling out of the rhythm, "Hey, I'm not reading anything great," I go back to something I know is going to work again. And so that's the message of today's episode.

• 2:35Ryan Holiday?

  I think you're going to like it. And if you are looking to improve your reading practice and you want some more practical lessons like this, do check out the Daily Stoic Read to Lead Challenge. It's one of the most important and most popular challenges we've done here at Daily Stoic. It's done great. Thousands of people all over the world have done it. Got nothing but great feedback. So check that out at dailystoic.com/read. And of course, if you're a Daily Stoic Life member, you get it for free. So check it out and do reread. Even if you stop listening right now, do me a favor and pick a book to reread this year.

• 3:13Ryan Holiday?

  I'm in the middle of rereading Seneca's Letters. I first read Seneca's Letters when I was in college. I bought Letters of a Stoic, the Penguin Classics Edition. This would have been 2006, 2007. And I've reread it a bunch of times now. I'm actually in the middle of going through this one. This is a new translation, not a new translation. New translation for me, this is the Loeb edition. And the reason I'm rereading it is that it's been a while since I read it. And I wanted to go back to something that had been so influential to me. There's this great line, it actually appears in Marcus Aurelius's Meditations. He says, "No man steps in the same river twice." And the idea being that although it's the same book, I've changed. The world has changed.

• 3:58Ryan Holiday?

  Even in the 10 years, maybe a little bit, how people see Seneca has changed. And so I'm getting all sorts of new things from it. So you can like, look at my notes here, all these different pages. Like I folded all these pages, it's filled with writing. You wouldn't think it would be filled with writing and observations, given that I've already read it, given that I've written books about Seneca. But I'm getting something new out of it, and that's really the importance of rereading. And Seneca himself, he talks about this in one of the early letters, which I was just rereading. He talks about how he's suspicious of people who read only very widely, who sort of flit from book to book. He's saying that you actually have to sort of dwell on a number of master thinkers, and

• 4:40Ryan Holiday?

  that the more times you read them, the deeper you go into the material, the more that sort of gets absorbed into your system, and the more... Ideally, this is the whole point of reading in philosophy, is to turn words into works. So if you're just accumulating as much words, as many words as possible, you're not doing it. It's about training, it's about muscle memory, it's about absorbing it into your soul.

• 5:06Ryan Holiday?

  Each year, I set out with a list of four or five books that I'm going to reread in that year. Sometimes they're novels, sometimes, like this year, one of them is to reread some of Seneca's letters. I set out to reread books that I think I've either drifted a little bit away from, that I think I might have a different take from, maybe I was just so fond of, I have such fond memories of, I want to sort of reengage with. The idea is I'm actively seeking out books on a regular basis to reread, to sort of step in that river again, and see how much it's changed, and see how much I've changed. This is Fahrenheit 451, you know, this is my copy, I bought this in high school, I had to read it for class. And then about three or four years ago, I was like, I haven't read that book in a while,

• 5:49Ryan Holiday?

  I wonder, you know, I'm gonna reread it. And it's like, when I'd read it the first time, I interpreted it as this idea of a book about censorship, about how government censors and keeps information from the people. But I realized that I totally missed the point when I'd read it, when I was in ninth or 10th grade. Actually, Fahrenheit 451 is about how we censor ourselves. He talks about how that censorship came from the bottom up. It was people not wanting to offend other people, or be offended by other people, that led to the book burnings. So I kind of had an idea, this totalitarian Nazi-esque system, and it's the opposite of that, it's much closer to where we are now, with this sort of political correctness that we see. And so you realize that even if you took something from a book, you might have gotten the totally opposite meaning, or maybe...

• 6:34Ryan Holiday?

  Maybe what you thought then was right, but now you've changed or now things have changed. So the more you interact with material, the more interpretations you're gonna get out of it. One of my other favorite books is Steven Pressfield's War of Art. My copy of this book is, you know, 10, 12, 13 years old now. And it's filled with all sorts of different notations and, you know, things that I took from it. Because when I read it at 19, you know, I didn't know anything. I hadn't written anything. It's actually a book I try to reread as I'm starting out with each new creative process. It's like a kick in the pants. It's inspirational. I'm trying to take it to a higher level with each book. So, you know, I have books that I reread each time. One of the other books I reread, I read Tolstoy's Calendar of Wisdom every year.

• 7:18Ryan Holiday?

  I'm on my, I think, two and a half years in. And I'm hoping to, you know, have 100 more reads of that book, right? Each time I read it and I notice things that I missed the first time or I notice things that I feel differently about the second time, the more you engage with the material, the more you will come away with.

• 7:41Ryan Holiday?

  Epictetus is like, the philosophers were not content with mere learning, but you have to add practice and training. Too easily, we forget what we learn and it just sort of goes in one ear and out the other. And so what rereading is really about is about taking our understanding of the ideas to the next level. So I've probably read Meditations 100 times. I've probably personally typed out almost every passage in that book at one time or another. I've done it by hand. I've done it for social media quotes. I've done it for passages in my own writing. I'm just constantly interacting with this material. And the things that I took from Marcus Aurelius's Meditations when I was 19 is different than what I took from it when I was 29. And hopefully, it will be very different

• 8:26Ryan Holiday?

  than what I take from it when I'm 39, if I'm lucky to live that long. The text stays the same, but we change, right? And so I just find something very satisfying. And even when I am rereading the same version of an old text, even noticing what I marked before, noticing what I didn't mark before, how I could have missed things. Sometimes I even sort of get glimpses or feelings of like, what mood I was in when I must have read it the first time, what I was eating, like from the food that I spilled in it. It's just this deeper relationship to the material that's really, really important.

• 9:05Ryan Holiday?

  In the ancient world, you gotta realize, they didn't have access to unlimited amounts of books. They didn't have audible subscriptions. They didn't have script. They didn't have a library they could go to check out books. So they were forced to have a much deeper relationship with the material. These books were precious items. They didn't take for granted. They didn't read a few pages and then move on. They didn't speed read through them. They dove deep into the text. They memorized them. In meditations, you see even all the kinds of quotes that Marcus Aurelius is pulling, likely from memory, from his deep reading of other material that he's poured over himself. And so, don't be content to just read something once,

• 9:48Ryan Holiday?

  but read it over and over and over again. You fully have to absorb the material. You've got to become one with it. It's got to become one with you. And then you have to change and go out and experience things, and then come back to the material and engage in that process over and over again. By the way, if you are looking to take your reading to the next level, this thing we're talking about here, this sort of active rereading strategy, is something we talk a lot about in our reading course. You can check it out. It's the Read to Lead course from Daily Stoic. Harry Truman said that not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers. You have to be. I think reading should be an active practice. It's a skill you have to be getting good at. You have to invest in. You have to train yourself in. And so you've got some of our best strategies there, inspired by the Stoics, inspired by my practices,

• 10:33Ryan Holiday?

  inspired by some of the experts we talked about. You can check that out at dailystoic.com/read.