You Must Practice This Ritual This Year | Suspend Your Opinions

Marcus Aurelius was a busy man. He was a smart and able and talented man. So why did he need to spend so many precious hours in his tent, writing by the lamplight, practicing philosophy in his journals? It wasn’t for our benefit. No, he never expected Meditations would see an audience. He was writing for himself, to himself, trying to get better by himself. He was journaling as a means of self-improvement as much as he was of self-expression. In today's Daily Stoic Journal reading, Ryan discusses how we can better ourselves by choosing to reserve our opinions.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more, including the Premium Leather Edition of the Daily Stoic.📱 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.

• 0:02Ryan 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.

• 0:38Ryan Holiday?

  You must practice this ritual this year. Marcus Aurelius was a busy man. He was a smart and able and talented man. So why did he need to spend so many precious hours in his tent, writing by the lamplight, practicing philosophy in his journals? It wasn't for our benefit. No, he never expected meditations would see an audience. He was writing for himself, to himself, trying to get better by himself. He was journaling as a means of self-improvement as much as he was of self-expression. As Tim Ferriss has said of his own daily journaling habit, "I don't journal to be productive. I don't do it to find great ideas or to put down prose I can later publish.

• 1:22Ryan Holiday?

  The pages aren't intended for anyone but me," he says. "I'm trying to figure things out. I'm just caging my monkey mind on paper so that I can get on with my fucking day." It's now been a little over five years since we first published the Daily Stoic Journal, our attempt to create a modern, accessible, and beautiful medium through which to practice Stoicism. Epictetus said that every day we should keep our philosophical aphorisms and exercises at hand so that we could write them, read them aloud, talk to ourselves and others about them. And that was the idea behind the journal. One Stoic prompt for each day to be journaled about, meditated on in the morning and the evening. And thousands and thousands and thousands of people have done that for the last 365 days.

• 2:06Ryan Holiday?

  And it's been awesome to hear what they've gotten out of the process. Because a journal is a place to clarify your thoughts, to find peace and quiet, to calm the negative energy swirling around in your head, to cope with stresses and struggles. It's your loyal companion. It's your sounding board. It's your guide. But whatever form or style of journaling you practice, the point is that you keep practicing. And if you haven't been, well, now is the time to start. Whether you need help ridding yourself of bad habits like complaining or procrastination or a hot temper, or you're looking to get stronger, wiser and braver, the pages of a journal are the perfect place to do that. You'll find your rhythm in what works best for you, but only if you start. Refine as you go.

• 2:51Ryan Holiday?

  Let's start. That's my journal. It sounds a little different because it's got this cool leather cover on it that we just rolled out. It's made of ethically sourced full grain leather from a tannery in Red Wing, Minnesota, that just celebrated their 150th anniversary. It says on the front, "Make time." It's got courage, temperance, justice and wisdom. And it's got Epictetus's quote on the back, the one we just talked about. "Every day and night, keep thoughts like these at hand. Write them, read them aloud, talk to yourself and others about them." I've cycled through five journals now from the Daily Stoic. It's my fifth year doing it. I don't read the Daily Stoic every day. I feel like that'd be weird. But the journal is a prompt. It's blank space and I fill that in each day. I'm thinking about the ideas just as Epictetus said.

• 3:36Ryan Holiday?

  But, you know, I do the journal and then the journal goes away. I like the idea of having some continuity, a slip cover that goes on there. This one's cool. It's got a spot to hold the pen. It's got a, we designed these little pockets on there to put some note cards and some other stuff. It sits on my bedside table. It's awesome. I think it's going to hold up really great. It's designed exclusively to fit the US edition of the Daily Stoic, but we also checked it fits the UK edition. You can check it out. And if you want to get the journal and the cover as a package deal, you can do that at store.dailystoic.com. I'll link to it in today's show notes. This is a great year to start a journaling habit or to pick that journaling habit back up. Check out the new Daily Stoic journal leather cover. I think you're really going to like it.

• 4:27Ryan Holiday?

  Suspend your opinions. Epictetus would teach that opinions were the cause of a troubled mind, opinions about the way we think things should be or need to be. One of the Stoic words for opinion is dogma, and the practice of Stoicism begins with the relentless attempt to suspend this dogmatic way of living, a cessation of the belief that you can force your opinions and expectations onto the world. "We have the power to hold no opinion about a thing and not let it upset our state of mind, for things have no natural power to shape our judgments." It's Marcus Aurelius in Meditations. "Today I escaped from the crush of circumstances, or better put, I threw them out, for the crush wasn't from outside me, but in my own assumptions."

• 5:11Ryan Holiday?

  It's Marcus Aurelius in Meditations. "There are two things that must be rooted out in human beings, arrogant opinion and mistrust. Arrogant opinion expects that there is nothing further needed, and mistrust assumes, under the torrent of circumstances, there can be no happiness." That's Epictetus's Discourses. "Throw out your conceited opinions, for it is impossible for a person to begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows." From Epictetus. This idea of having no opinion is, man, it's so powerful. Epictetus also talks about, you know, can you be content to be seen as clueless or stupid about some things? I mean, but I don't think ignorance is admirable, but I do think that we often sort of track in real time a whole bunch of information we don't need.

• 5:56Ryan Holiday?

  We have too many thoughts or judgments about other people's personal lives. Life is better when you have fewer opinions, because then it just is. You have fewer expectations, so you're not disappointed. You also don't take things for granted. And so I think for the Stoics, it's about getting to a kind of a zen-like place where you just see things as they are, and you don't need them to be different. You don't need them to be otherwise. You didn't expect them to be this way or that way. You just went with the flow of it. I think this is obviously what social media is designed to make us not do, right? Facebook says, "What are you, what's on your mind? What are you thinking about? What's going on in your life?" Twitter says the same thing. Snapchat and Instagram say, "Take a video of this, share it, let other people know. Give your thoughts, react to this."

• 6:41Ryan Holiday?

  Do you ever feel that much better doing that? Or does it just create new problems for you? Now, did anyone like it? Do people agree? Why is this idiot responding in the comments? Why aren't people understanding? Why aren't they appreciating? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, you have the power to have no opinion. That's such a beautiful freeing idea from Marcus Aurelius. And look, he's not saying, "Don't have an opinion about injustice. Don't be involved civically." Of course, that's not what the Stoics think. Their whole lives are a testament to the contrary. But I guess they're just saying, it's like, "Look, if somebody you know is having an affair, that can eat you up inside. It can bother you. Why are they doing this? Why do people do this? Why be disappointed in your fellow humans?" And it's like, "It's none of your business, man. It's not up to you. You're not doing it.

• 7:26Ryan Holiday?

  You know why you're not doing it. So let them do them. They will face the consequences for that. You don't need to get involved." As Marcus Aurelius says, "Leave other people's mistakes to their makers. You've got enough to focus on with you. You've got enough that's in your control that you're not focusing on." And so going through life in a dogmatic way, trying to project and force your opinions on other people, is a miserable way to live. It's also a tyrannical way to live. And so we've got to practice this sort of, I don't want to call it detachment, but it's looking inward instead of outward. And I think that creates a happier life, that creates a better-flowing life. It also gives people the freedom to make their mistakes, to learn their own lessons, to do their own things.

• 8:10Ryan Holiday?

  Something I'm learning about with my kids as well is like, "Look, I can't do all this stuff for them. I gotta, you do you, man. And I'm here if you need me." And I think that's a good way to live. And so let's focus on having fewer opinions today. Let's focus on the things that are up to us. Let's leave the things that are not up to us to the other people, to the makers, to the people they are up to. And I think that'll all help us get along, certainly be happier, and certainly have more tranquility. So just have no opinion. Move on. I don't have an opinion about your opinion. And that's exactly how it should be. All right. Have a good week, everyone.