You’re Never Going to Be Perfect | Ask Daily Stoic

The Stoics had high standards. They also understood that perfection was not possible.📚 The Stoic Virtues Series teaches the timeless principles of Courage, Discipline, Justice, and Wisdom through history’s greatest examples. Check out The Four Virtues Boxed Set here: https://dailystoic.com/virtuesboxset🎟️ DAILY STOIC LIVE | Ryan Holiday is coming to a city near you! Grab tickets here | https://www.dailystoiclive.com/🎥 VIDEO EPISODES| Watch the video episodes on The Daily Stoic YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos✉️ FREE STOIC WISDOM | Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

• 0:14Ryan Holiday?

  You're never going to be perfect. We have goals, we have standards, we have what we know we need to do. And then discipline, that key Stoic virtue, determines whether we do it or not. The problem is that some people seem to think that this discipline must be ironclad, and then they beat themselves and they fall short. The Stoics had high standards. They had important jobs. They had a lot they needed to do. They also understood that perfection was not possible. What was possible, Epictetus said, was striving to be better. What mattered, Marx Schreier said, was how quickly you picked yourself up after you were jarred by circumstances. Sometimes we'll fall short. Sometimes we'll have to make an exception.

• 0:58Ryan Holiday?

  Sometimes we'll just plain forget our training and our standards. But it's like that famous line in Steinbach's East of Eden, which has a bunch of Stoic themes. I actually opened the Four Virtues series with a line from that. Adam Trask, in the book, the character, he's been impossibly hard on himself. He's racked with guilt. And he's told by the family servant, Lee, "And now that you know you don't have to be perfect, you can be good." And that's the point. We don't have to be perfect. We just have to choose to be good. We have that choice. We can begin again. We can still fight through it. Good is better than perfect because it's real. Good is better than perfect because it's human. It's the striving, the effort, the genuine desire to do what's right. Good is what we are.

• 1:44Ryan Holiday?

  And good is what we have to keep trying to be every day.

• 1:58Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily So Podcast. We're going to flash forward actually this back in time because it's going to go back to March of 22, where I did a virtual talk for some FBI agents. They were on this Strength and Leadership Retreat and I zoomed in, I gave a little talk and then I answered a couple of questions. And again, it's always interesting to me to see different people and how they relate to stoicism, what they take out of it, what they're thinking about. And again, I think whether I'm talking to school teachers or FBI agents, elected leaders, or I'm talking to school kids, this is one of my absolute favorite things to do.

• 2:41Ryan Holiday?

  So hopefully these questions will resonate with you. I thought it was an honor to talk to this group. Again, March 22 seems like absolutely forever ago, but here we are. Here is that Q and A and I'll, I'll get right into it.

• 2:55Speaker 01

  You talked about, we can't control our outcomes, but we can control our reactions.

• 3:00Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 3:01Speaker 01

  Was, I'm going to talk about that for a couple of minutes.

• 3:04Ryan Holiday?

  To me, that's the definition of stoicism, that we don't control what happens in the world, but we control how we respond to what happens in the world. Right? When I, when I talk to sports teams, I say some version of this is like, look, the only thing you control is how you practice and how you play. Everything else is up to someone else. You don't control what the weather of game day is going to be. You don't control whether you start, you don't control whether the coach hates you. You don't control what the media is saying about you. You don't control if the refs suck, right? You don't control any of it. You control what you do on this play right now, right? You control what you do. So for the stoics, the idea is like, look, I control my emotions. I control my thoughts. I control the actions that I'm going to take within the constraints of, of what's been, you know, sort of presented in front of me, like what the situation is, but that's it.

• 3:49Ryan Holiday?

  And so having this more circumscribed notion of what's up to us and not up to us seems limiting, but it's actually really empowering. If you take for granted that most people spend an inordinate amount of time and energy focused on. What other people are saying, what other people are thinking, right? Whose fault it is, right? What it means, right? What caused it? All of this is rejecting the limited agency in front of you, which is, you know, what am I going to do right now? What am I going to do about it? So to me, that's what Stoicism is. It's this sort of zooming in on what's up to me. And that's where I'm going to focus all my energy and thoughts, because everything else is wasted.

• 4:29Speaker 02

  All day, George. As you were talking about stillness, it occurred, I'm not a particularly religious person, but I go to church pretty much every week and I try to make that a priority for my family. And it occurred to me only recently that that's a space for me, where my mind can contemplate things in a way that I don't do all week long.

• 4:47Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 4:47Speaker 02

  And really try to protect that time. And it never really occurred to me why that is until we were just talking. So that's very much that space for me, so.

• 4:55Ryan Holiday?

  No, I, I, I love that, right? It's a place where it's rude to be on your phone, right? You're not talking, you're just listening. It, it's also, you know, depending on where you go to church, usually a, a building designed to sort of engender that, to, to create a sense of awe and wonder. I mean, how rare that silence is. Uh, and then I think we need to carve out blocks of that, because that's where ideas pop into our head. That's where we get clarity. That's where we calm down. I think we need those experiences if we want to access all parts of, uh, you know, our toolkit.

• 5:29Speaker 02

  So one, one of the other topics we're going to be discussing later today is, the typical conversations with people as leaders often, you know, talk, chat, having conversations, whether we're talking about some performance or.

• 5:42Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 5:43Speaker 02

  On the right, what, how would a stoic approach that? What, what advice would you have or you're studying on those typical conversations?

• 5:50Ryan Holiday?

  Well, what, one of the things I, I've been thinking about that lately is like, you know, you gotta, let's say you gotta let someone go. You have to give someone some unpleasant feedback, whatever it is. I try to remind myself that, um, the only way to get good at that is by practice doing it. So as much as I would rather not be doing it, I just try to remind myself that it's practice, right? So I try to go into it going, okay. I've only fired three people in my life. This is the fourth one, right? So when I have to fire my 10th person 20 years from now, I'll be better for having gone through this. To me, that's kind of what the idea of the obstacle is the way is that these unpleasant, unchosen, undesirable situations are practice

• 6:33Ryan Holiday?

  for harder things down the road, right? So if we can go into it not being like, oh, I can't believe I have to do this. This sucks. This is unfair. This isn't going to be, this isn't going to be fun. I try to go, okay, I need practice calling up, you know, maybe, maybe for me it's my publisher. I have to call and have a frank conversation with my publisher about, you know, something that's not going well. You know, I could shy away from that. I could see if someone else could do it for me. I could pretend I don't need to do it and just see if it magically resolves itself. Or I can go, okay, tomorrow I'm picking up the phone and I'm going to do it. And I'm going to be better for having done it. That's, that's kind of how I think about those things.

• 7:16Speaker 03

  So Ryan, you talked about the importance of personal hobbies.

• 7:20Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 7:20Speaker 03

  And to reflect, I think at least for me, the work-life imbalance creeps up on you.

• 7:26Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 7:28Speaker 03

  Any thoughts on recognizing the signs that we're not taking the time to reflect and how to make sure we do our time out?

• 7:35Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I think those hobbies can kind of be a good canary in the coal mine that, that you're getting imbalance. Like, let's say it's, you know, maybe your activities are physical or maybe you like working in your workshop or you like doing X, Y, or Z. When you haven't been able to do those things because you literally haven't had the time, your work-life balance is probably a bit skewed. Obviously, all of us at different phases in our careers, different, different jobs, different things. You know, the amount of time or whatever is going to be different, but maybe coming up with some non-negotiables like, hey, once a week I need to be able to do X or three times a week I need to be able to do Y. If I'm sacrificing those things, not doing those things,

• 8:17Ryan Holiday?

  it's because I've become in balance and that might seem like I'm being respectful to my career. But in fact, If I want to do this thing for a long time, I have to be able to be almost more disciplined about my discipline. You know, we think about great athletes. We have this vision that they just work all the time. You know, it's Kobe Bryant waking up at four in the morning, or you know Tiger Woods hitting however many practice shots, whatever that is. But in truth, the number one cause of injury, the number one career ender for professional athletes is overtraining. Right? They get burned out or they push themselves too far and they they hurt themselves in a way in which they can't come back. And so, you know, realizing like, hey,

• 9:02Ryan Holiday?

  I don't just want to be good at this this week, but I want to be good at this 15, 20, 30 years from now. It requires pacing yourself and having some self-control in that sense.