Your Standards Are For You | You’re a Product of Your Training

One of the things that separates us from other people—indeed that has been responsible for our success—is our ability to be strict and self-disciplined. Where other people are fine making excuses or taking shortcuts, we are not. Where other people wing it or do what’s easiest, taking the path of least resistance, we don’t. That’s really the essence of Stoicism and why those of us who have committed to doing the hard work have been able to get so much out of it.---And in today's Daily Stoic excerpt reading, Ryan discusses how and why the work that we do and the intention that we put into it defines who we are.✉️ 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.📱 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 Daily Stoic Podcast. On Friday, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from The Daily Stoic, my book, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance in the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful collaborator, translator, and literary agent Stephen Hanselman. So today, we'll give you a quick meditation from the Stoics with some analysis from me, and then we'll send you out into the world to turn these words into works.

• 0:42Ryan Holiday?

  One of the things that separates us from other people, indeed that has been responsible for our success, is our ability to be strict and self-disciplined. Where other people are fine making excuses or taking shortcuts, we are not. Where other people wing it or do what's easiest, taking the path of least resistance, we don't. That's really the essence of Stoicism, and why those of us who've committed to doing the hard work have been able to get so much out of it. But it can be a problem when people like us come into positions of leadership or become fathers and mothers. Suddenly, it's not just our own behavior we're regulating. We're now responsible for other people as well. It's tempting to try to hold them

• 1:25Ryan Holiday?

  to the very same standards we hold ourselves to. But this is not only unfair. They didn't sign up for that. It's often counterproductive. It burns people out. It sets you up for disappointment, or worse, disillusionment. This observation from Marcus Aurelius's most thoughtful biography by Ernest Renan explains the right way to do it. He said, "The consequence of austere philosophy might have produced stiffness and severity. But here it was that the rare goodness of the nature of Marcus Aurelius shone out in all its brilliancy. His severity was confined only to himself." That's exactly the key. Your standards are for you. This philosophy...

• 2:10Ryan Holiday?

  Is about your self-improvement. It's about being strict with yourself and forgiving of other people. That's not only a kind way to be, it's the only effective way to be. It's the only defense to being constantly upset and let down.

• 2:36Ryan Holiday?

  You're a product of your training. This is today's entry in The Daily Stoic, March 31st. "Chasing what can't be done is madness, but the base person is unable to do anything else." Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 5:17. And let me grab you another translation of that one, too.

• 3:03Ryan Holiday?

  Let's do Gregory Hayes. What does Gregory Hayes have to say today on 5:17? This is one of my favorite little passages. And sometimes what I like to do is pull up more than one. He says, "It is crazy to want what is impossible and impossible for the wicked not to do so." And then turning to Robin Waterfield, which I also love. He said, "To pursue impossibilities is madness, and it's impossible for bad men not to behave like that." And then his little translation, or his little note there is he said, "Marcus is again commenting on something one of his acquaintances has done that is unknowable to us." Interesting. So, I love that.

• 3:48Ryan Holiday?

  I love both those translations. I love Steve's in The Daily Stoic, the best, of course. But here's the, here's what I riffed on in the book. I said, "A dog that's allowed to chase cars will chase cars. A child who's never given any boundaries will become spoiled. An investor without discipline is not an investor, he's a gambler. And a mind that isn't in control of itself, that doesn't understand its power to regulate itself, will be jerked around by external choices, by external events, and unquestioned impulses. And that can't be how you'd like tomorrow to go. So you must be aware of that. You must put in place training and habits now to replace ignorance and ill-discipline. Only then will you begin to behave and act differently.

• 4:32Ryan Holiday?

  Only then will you stop seeking the impossible and the short-sighted and the unnecessary."

• 4:39Ryan Holiday?

  The dictum from Herakles is that character is fate. Sort of who we are, who we've become, what the work we've done, right? On ourselves, what this thing that we are determines who will be, what we'll do. It's predictive and deterministic. And I think the idea, the tragic part is like, we've seen this, I won't get too into specifics, but let's just say we've seen this play out politically over the last couple of years. People tell themselves that it'll be different once this person gets elected, or that they hope they'll be able to control themselves. They hope the office will make them, you know, more this way or that way. They hope the checks and balances will, they hope, they hope they'll learn their lesson this time. But that's not how it goes.

• 5:24Ryan Holiday?

  We're a product of our training, we're a product of the standards we hold ourselves to, we're a product of our character. And when one is deficient, or in the illusion I'm making here, woefully deficient in those areas, the results are pretty easy to predict. Especially when the future, what the future holds is the inevitable difficulties, tests, challenges, temptations, corruptions, right? Of course, it was never gonna go any other way. It was only gonna go the way that it went. You see this in sports, of course, right? Hey, maybe Antonio Brown will be different this time.

• 6:07Ryan Holiday?

  No, Antonio Brown is Antonio Brown. And I say this as someone who was quite pleased a couple of years ago to hear that he was reading my books. But of course, the books didn't really make a difference, you know? Of course, the people weighing in, trying to get through to a Kanye West, or an Elizabeth Holmes, or whomever, it's never gonna get through. They're always gonna go down that path. It's who they are, right? It's tragic, it's sad, I wish it was otherwise. I wish people were more malleable than they were, but they're not. And that's why now, early on, before the concrete is set, before the paint is dry, you gotta do that work, you gotta do that training, you gotta set those standards. Because they ultimately determine who we're gonna be.

• 6:54Ryan Holiday?

  You're not just magically going to reinvent yourself. You're not just magically, you know, people go, oh, when the moment arises, I'll step up to it, right? And that's not how it is, right? As they say in sports and in the military, we fall back to the level of our training. We don't rise to the occasion. We fall back to the level of our training. To me, that's really what Stoicism is. It's training. We're training to become what we need to become who we need to be. If we don't do that work, well, we're going to cause a lot more work for ourselves, a lot more problems for ourselves in the future.