Your Effort Today Can Change Tomorrow

If you convince yourself that nothing can be changed, that your actions don’t matter, you’re right—but you’ve also surrendered. Time and time again, one person can—and does—make a difference.🎟 Ryan Holiday is going on tour! Grab tickets for London, Rotterdam, Dublin, Vancouver, and Toronto at ryanholiday.net/tour📕 Grab a signed copy of Right Thing, Right Now by Ryan Holiday | https://store.dailystoic.com/✉️ 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.

• 0:03Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength, insight, and wisdom in everyday life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us, dailystoic.com.

• 0:30Ryan Holiday?

  It's very easy to be jaded. It's very easy to be cynical. The system is, as it was in Rome, hopelessly broken. Corruption, dishonesty, and stupidity are all widespread. The odds are impossible. The problem's enormous. So why care? Why even try? The answer, the Stoics would say, is because you matter, because an individual can make a difference. Imagine if Epictetus had told himself that all was hopeless and that Rome was impossible to change or correct. Not only would his life have been different, but so too would Marcus Aurelius and millions of other Romans. General James Mattis reminds us that cynicism is a form of cowardice. It's also a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we tell ourselves that it's pointless, that we can't make a difference, that we don't matter, we're right.

• 1:14Ryan Holiday?

  But it's worse than that, because someone will step in to fill that void. And it's likely that this person who you will be deferring to is allied with the people and the forces that made you cynical in the first place. A writer recently wrote a piece in The New York Times about his decision to vote in a primary in his state in the deep south, even though his political preferences were not even close to being represented. As it happens, in choosing between the lesser of two evils, the man cast the deciding vote in the election. It was literally decided by one vote. And that is why we can't give up, why we have to believe in our own agency, because one person can and often does make a difference.