BONUS | 11 Stoic Lessons to Reset Your Mind

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

• 0:05Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a Stoic-inspired meditation designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life. Each one of these episodes is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women, help you learn from them, to follow in their example, and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. For more, visit DailyStoic.com.

• 0:56Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. 2026 will be the 10-year anniversary of the Daily Stoic, which is absolutely insane to me. We started doing this thing about a year or so after the Daily Stoic came out, which is that we would discount the ebook going into the first week of the year, just to get people who were maybe interested in trying Stoicism, they wanted another more portable copy or whatever. And so we started back, maybe it was 2017, 2018, we started doing this, and we've done it every year since, including this year. So if you want to get the ebook of the Daily Stoic, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, you can

• 1:39Ryan Holiday?

  grab it right now as an ebook for $2.99 anywhere you get your ebooks in the US. That's at DailyStoic.com/discount. It'll redirect you to the right link. And then, of course, we have the leather-bound edition, where she's got some signed copies in the painted porch. And at store.DailyStoic.com, we've got, obviously, the regular hardcover edition, which I will also sign, if you go to store.DailyStoic.com. But in today's episode, I wanted to bring you some thoughts from the Daily Stoic. Here's some entries. And then, if you want to check out the book, you can. DailyStoic.com/discount. We'll get your signed leather edition at store.DailyStoic.com.

• 2:26Ryan Holiday?

  Every good thing in your life has come from change. Don't fight it, accept it, bend with it, be flexible about it, embrace it, and flow alongside the river.

• 2:37Ryan Holiday?

  For 2,500 years, the Stoics have been putting out wisdom and insights about how to get better. The hard part is knowing where to start. Should you read Epictetus? Should you read Seneca? Should you read Marcus Aurelius? I'm Ryan Holiday, and I feel so blessed that 15 years ago, I randomly got the right translation of Marcus Aurelius at the right time in my life. But a different translation at a different time, the entire scope of my life might have turned out differently. I wouldn't have written these books. I wouldn't have got to speak about Stoicism to the NFL and the NBA, to special forces and sitting senators. I wouldn't be standing here in this bookstore right now. So one of the reasons I wrote The Daily Stoic was the idea that, first off, don't start with one of the Stoics. Start with all of the Stoics. There should be a sampling of the best of Stoic wisdom

• 3:22Ryan Holiday?

  available for everyone. And since that didn't exist, I wanted to make that. And so this book now has sold more than a million copies. It's translated in dozens of languages. I hope you check it out. But in today's video, I wanted to give you a sampling of some of the best Stoic quotes from pages in The Daily Stoic that I think you will get a lot out of. I hope you check out the book. We have a leather edition also you can check out. But here's the book. Enjoy.

• 3:54Ryan Holiday?

  God laid down this law, saying, if you want some good, get it for yourself. Now, what I think this is saying is there's one way to guarantee that you have a good day today. It's that you do good, right? You can always do that. It's always in your control. It doesn't depend on other people. It doesn't depend on things going right. If you want to feel good, do good. It's as simple as that.

• 4:21Ryan Holiday?

  Whatever anyone does or says, my part is to be good. In the same way that an emerald or gold or purple must always claim what anyone else does or says, I must be what I am and show my true colors. The Stoics believed that we all have a purpose, we all have a task, we all have something we were uniquely fitted to do. And I think our job is to not only do that well, but to be good in the world, to be a positive difference maker. Marcus says in Meditations, one of my favorite quotes, he said, "You have to remain the person that philosophy tried to make you. You have to be good. Whatever anyone says or does, whatever other people's jobs are, however well or poor they do with them, your job is to be good and do good."

• 5:09Ryan Holiday?

  This is Epictetus. He says, "You can bind up my leg, but not even Zeus has the power to break my freedom of choice." And this happens to Epictetus. His leg is broken by his slave master. He walks with a limp his whole life. And I think what he's saying is that those things can happen to you. Life can literally break you, can take things from you. But nothing can affect the power you have over your own choices, about your thoughts, about your opinions, about the story you tell yourself about things. And I think he's literally doing that there. He's deciding to tell himself a story that says, yes, he's been deprived of one thing, but he still maintains, even in Roman slavery, which is a horrible institution, even within that, he still has control over so much, his power of choice.

• 5:53Ryan Holiday?

  And you have that power today.

• 5:59Ryan Holiday?

  "Meditate often on the swiftness which all of it exists and is coming into being is swept by us and carried away. Substance," he says, "is like a river's unending flow. It's constantly changing and causes infinite shifting, and so that nothing stands still." I think the Stoics say this over and over again, that the one constant in life is change. You try to keep everything as it is, not only you're acting contrary to nature, what the Stoics say is, is it not right? You are preventing good things from coming into being as well. Borrowing from Herodotus. Cletus Marcus says that we never step in the same river twice. The river is changing and also we are changing, right? Even this book, you read the Daily Stoic one or two or three times. You come back to the entries, you are different, even though the words are exactly the same.

• 6:43Ryan Holiday?

  The world is different. I am different as the person who wrote them. And so we have to remember that everything has changed. All is changed. Life is changed. Every good thing in your life has come from change. Don't fight it, accept it, bend with it, be flexible about it, embrace it and flow alongside the river.

• 7:03Ryan Holiday?

  Silence is a lesson learned from the many sufferings of life. One of my favorite quotes, actually, from Robert Greene is one of the laws of power. He says, "Always say less than necessary. The more you say, the more likely you are to say something foolish." What we learn by messing up, by saying too much, saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, is that we are better to shut up. And that's why Zeno said, "Two ears and one mouth for a reason."

• 7:32Ryan Holiday?

  "Who is invincible?" he said. "The one who cannot be upset by anything outside their reasoned choice." So as we said, the job of the philosopher is to distinguish what's in my control, what's not in my control, and then to tune out all those things. The person who can't be upset by things that are not up to them, that only measure themselves by what is up to them, that person to the Stoics is invincible. And you are invincible in the sense that you are impervious to the things that are happening in the outside world, what other people are saying, what other people are doing, the random bad news that just got tweeted out, the thing that your phone is buzzing about. All that matters is what's up to you, what you're doing, what's in your control. And if you focus on that, you become, in a sense, invincible.

• 8:18Ryan Holiday?

  "That which isn't good for the hive, isn't good for the bee." You know, Marcus really talks in Meditations more than 80 times about the common good. He said, "The fruit of this life is good character and acts for the common good." The Stoics believed that we were all interconnected. There was a kind of mutual interdependence of all of us. We were woven together. We were put here for each other. And to do something- That's good for you at the expense of everyone else is not only not right, it is ultimately a punishment of yourself. The Stoics believed in this connectedness. It guided why they participated in public life. And it should guide you and it should be something to think about today. What isn't good for the hive isn't good for the bee. What isn't good for the whole isn't good for me.

• 9:02Ryan Holiday?

  Don't let your reflection on the sweep of life crush you. Don't think about all the bad things that might happen. Stay focused on the present situation. Ask yourself why it's unbearable and can't be survived. He says, "You will find that it can be." It's a great line from the writer Chuck Palahniuk that I like. He says, "The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at it up close." Sometimes, yeah, we have to zoom way out, see the big picture. But sometimes we have to zoom way in because the big picture is overwhelming and scary. And quite frankly, more than we can bear. Zoom way in, focus on a small piece. You're crossing a tight rope. You don't think about how high up you are. There's a great Hebrew saying about how the world is a narrow bridge. Don't look down, don't be afraid. Zoom in on the next step you have to take.

• 9:51Ryan Holiday?

  Philoctomy calls for simple living, but not for penance. It's quite possible to be simple without being crude. I love this because Seneca was, I think, the most worldly and practical of all the Stoics. He's wealthy, he has nice parties, he has friends. It's important that we don't see Stoicism as like self-flagellation, needless deprivation. The Stoics say if it's there, enjoy it, just don't need it. And in fact, the Stoics sort of are rejection of this cynical idea that nothing matters. Diogenes sort of walks around in a barrel, he's very uncouth. The Stoics are saying, "No, you should be a part of the world. You should figure out how the world works. Just don't be addicted to it, just don't be dependent on it."

• 10:32Ryan Holiday?

  Often injustice lies in what you aren't doing, not only what you are doing. This goes to that famous quote, it's now a sort of a common expression, that the only thing that evil needs to triumph is for good men to do nothing. Right? Yes, other people might be committing the injustice, but if you don't say anything, if you don't try to stop it, if you just go along with it, then you are complicit in it happening.

• 10:59Ryan Holiday?

  So we talked about this before, but Seneca says that one of the ways to get to wisdom is by like finding one thing a day, one thing to chew on each day that makes you better. His exchange of letters with his friend Lucilius, that's what they're doing. And that's also what I tried to build The Daily Stoic around. The idea of one quote from the Stoics, which had never before been in one book together, one thought from the Stoics each day, and then some analysis, a meditation, a prompt from me about how to apply that in your actual life. So that's what The Daily Stoic is. It sold over a million copies. It spent something like 300 weeks on the bestseller list. But my favorite thing about the first week of January is that the publisher discounts it as an ebook. It's as cheap as it'll ever get. That's like a tenth of the retail price.

• 11:41Ryan Holiday?

  That's like 1% of the leather bound edition price. So check it out. And why not start the new year with Daily Stoic in audio, digital, leather bound, hardcover, whatever. But I'm wishing you a very Stoic new year.