Do Not Miss This Reminder | This Single Word Will Give You Back Your Life

Spring is the most beautiful of the seasons. Suddenly, after a dreary winter, the colors come back. The birds are out. The days last longer. The breeze is light and the air is cool. But as Phillip Larkin’s bittersweet poem reminds us, beneath this turning of the seasons is a kind of darkness. The trees are coming into leafLike something almost being said;The recent buds relax and spread,Their greenness is a kind of griefThe inherent grief is the passage of time. Each season brings new life, yes, but also marks the cessation of life. It’s a painful truth, the poem points out, written in the rings of the tree. Winter is dead and over…and all of us a little more so too. This notion serves as a gentle nudge, reminding us of the preciousness of every moment. It urges us not merely to exist but to truly live, to seize each season and extract its full potential. It’s saying don’t let a new season come and go without springing forward with it—not just meeting it, but making something of it. If you’re up for that, why don’t you spring forward with us and the Daily Stoic Spring Forward Challenge? Interested in Daily Stoic Life? Click here.✉️ 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.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. On Tuesdays, we take a closer look at these Stoic ideas and how we can apply them in our actual lives. Thanks for listening and I hope you enjoy. Don't miss this reminder. Spring is the most beautiful of the seasons. Suddenly after a dreary winter, the colors come back, the birds are out, the days last longer, the breeze is light and the air is cool. But as Phillip Larkin's bittersweet poem reminds us, beneath this turning of seasons is a kind of darkness. As the poem goes, "The trees are coming into

• 0:46Speaker 00

  leaf like something almost being said. The recent buds relax and spread. Their greenness is kind of grief." The inherent message is about the passage of time. Each season brings new life, yes, but also marks the sensation of life. It's a painful truth. "It's a painful truth," the poem says, "that's written in the rings of a tree. Winter is dead and over, and all of us a little more so, too." This notion serves as a gentle nudge, reminding us of the preciousness of every moment. It urges us not merely to exist, but to truly live, to seize each season and extract its full potential, which is what we mean when we say here at Daily Stoic that it's time

• 1:30Speaker 00

  to spring forward. If you did our New Year, New You Challenge, you heard us talking about that back in December. Well, we've got a new one for you. It's called the Daily Stoic Spring Forward Challenge. This is the time of year where we're talking about spring cleaning. It's worth pondering, how often do we organize not just our physical spaces, but our minds, our routines, and our assumptions as well? Even if you just reflect on the last week, how many of those seven days were efficient and as productive as they could have been? Or did you find yourself wasting time over complicating things and falling back on old habits? Are you, like many others, still feeling the lingering effects of winter's inertia? The Daily Stoic Spring Forward Challenge is designed to prompt introspection into those

• 2:14Speaker 00

  aspects of your life to help you scrutinize your choices, your relationships, and your habits, and help propel you towards a life of fulfillment. As Marx really said, "This is what you deserve. You could be good today, but instead you choose tomorrow." So the choice is yours. Are you going to let your New Year's resolutions fade into missed opportunities and continue with the status quo? Or could you invest 10 days into self-improvement, create some runway for some genuine lasting change? Challenge yourself with me and thousands of other Stoics all over the world to spring forward and become the person you inspire to be. And you can sign up right now at dailystoic.com/spring. I'll see you in there. We're going to

• 2:55Speaker 00

  do a bunch of awesome stuff, some Q and A's with me, some great lessons, all kinds of great thinking on how to spring forward, grab this next season, and get the most out of it. And I'd love to see you join us, dailystoic.com/spring. And you can also join Daily Stoic Life if you've been thinking about doing that and get this challenge and all the other challenges we're doing for the rest of the year, plus a bunch of other awesome stuff for free. You can do that at dailystoiclife.com.

• 3:33Speaker 00

  You can't sacrifice your life and your time to meet some arbitrary standard. We should be really clear about what we are willing to do and what we aren't willing to do. Everything you say yes to is saying no to something else.

• 3:50Speaker 00

  It's a pretty simple word, but it's actually one of the hardest ones in the world for people to say. One of the absolute hardest things to do in life is saying no. We don't like doing it. We don't like hurting people's feelings. We like saying yes, because we think yes will allow us to do more. Actually, Seneca, marveling at it, he says, "We're able to say it in some contexts, when people want to take our money, or they want to take our property. But then when it comes to protecting the most important thing in the world, our time, our life..." The one nonrenewable resource there is, Seneca says, it's fascinating and terribly sad how bad we are at saying that magic word, no. I'm Ryan Holiday. I've written a number of books about Stoic philosophy.

• 4:34Speaker 00

  I've spoken about it to everyone from the NBA to the NFL, sitting senators and special forces leaders. I wouldn't have been able to do the things that I have done if I hadn't gotten good at saying no. And you have to get good at saying no. And in today's episode, I'm going to do the best Stoic advice from Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius and Seneca on how to do this very difficult thing, how to say no, how to not care what other people think, and how to focus on what's essential and important. So in my office, I have a couple reminders that help me say no. I have two pictures of my kids here. That's my youngest, that's my oldest. And then in between, I have this picture that the sports psychologist Jonathan Fader sent me.

• 5:19Speaker 00

  He's worked with Giants and a bunch of other football and baseball teams. Anyways, he sent me this picture. That's Oliver Sacks on the phone in his office. There's just a giant picture between, behind Oliver Sacks. It just says capital NO, which is a reminder to say no. That was my first sort of big reminder about saying no. And then I've added, added a few more over the years. So this, this is a memo from the Truman administration. Since the president will be out of office when this celebration will be held, how do you think we should answer it? Should we say that because of many similar requests, the president must ask to be excused? And then Truman underlines it, and he wrote, the proper response is underlined. And then that's Truman's handwriting, HST. So that's a memo from the Truman administration.

• 6:01Speaker 00

  And then this is one from Truman out of office, July 7, 1969, thanking someone who mailed him something. Obviously, his secretary again would have written that out. And then he says, I regret that I cannot comply with your request. It has been long my policy not to respond to questions. I received so many requests similar to yours that I could not begin to keep up with all of them. I know you will understand. And like, look, in the early days, I used to get the Daily Stoic email replies directly to me. I used to post my email address on my website. I would respond to Inquiries that came in on the comments section on social media posts, I would answer my DMs. And I felt good. I'll hear from people. Eight years ago, I asked you this question about whether I should take this job or this job. And I answered and helped them. I loved that. It means a lot to me.

• 6:45Speaker 00

  But I've had to realize that saying yes, answering even just short questions takes away from something, right? Everything you say yes to is saying no to something else. And so I've had to realize that I can't be as accessible or open as I used to be, and I have to say no. And then I have one more actually that someone sent me as a gift. This is in a different part of my office. Here's another Truman one. So Truman isn't just saying no because he's a jerk and he doesn't want to listen or talk to people, right? He still feels obligated to try to help people, which of course I do. This is March 3rd, 1954. It says, Dear Mr. Taylor, your question will be answered in the book I am getting ready to publish as soon as possible. So the point is, if I want to be of the same service that I was before, which I do,

• 7:29Speaker 00

  I've just had to figure out ways to scale that, right? Because if I answer every random question or I say yes to everything that comes my way, what I'm doing, and this is why I have it here, is I'm saying no to these two people, who I've already promised so much of my time to. Or I'm saying no to this, which is my writing, which is not only the thing that is most meaningful to me. Not only is it how I make my actual living, but it's how I can help the most people. So the inability to say no to one random person, I'm also saying no to a lot more people by taking that time and energy away from my writing. So I think it's good to have little reminders of why you have to say no. And look, memento mori is a reminder like that too, right?

• 8:13Speaker 00

  You only have so much time. You only have so much life. If you say yes to everyone and everything, you're going to wake up one day and wonder where all your time went.

• 8:24Speaker 00

  There's a story about Antoninus, who's Marcus Rilus's predecessor, his adopted stepfather, the man that Marcus admires more than any other. All the Roman emperors before Antoninus and after were extensive travelers. They toured the wide expanse of the Roman Empire. They made these big imperial visits, visiting the territories. Events were thrown in their honor. They inspected the troops. For his 20-odd-year reign, Antoninus basically never leaves Rome. Now, why? Does he never leave Rome? Because he's a homebody? Because he was scared to travel? I don't think it's any of that. What they said was, "He knew what it cost for the emperor to travel." Not just what it cost the imperial treasury, but what it cost these little cities and towns, the dignitaries, the troops.

• 9:09Speaker 00

  He knew what it cost to entertain the emperor. He knew what an imposition it was. And so, when we're thinking about what we're saying yes and no to, it's not just, hey, what's going to cost me? What it's going to take out of me? What's going to go into this? It's also, hey, what are the effects of what I'm about to say yes or no to on other people? I have to think about this. If I am agreeing to everything that's coming in, I am likely only going to be doing the fun parts of that, the fulfilling parts about that, even the rewarding parts about this. But other people have to handle the paperwork. Other people have to handle paying the taxes. Other people have to do the coordination. Other people have to make sure I get there, it goes well, all of that, right? So, we can't just think, oh, do I have the bandwidth for this? Is this fun for me? I also don't just think, hey, what do I want to do or not, right? I'd like to stay home.

• 9:53Speaker 00

  I don't want to necessarily go to soccer practices or soccer games. As I think about it in terms of my family, it's not just my preferences, but how does this fit into the larger whole or the larger system? So, as you're thinking about yes or no, I really like this idea of the empathy that Antoninus is practicing there. He's not just thinking about, what is this for me? What am I trying to accomplish? He's also checking it against how the consequences of that yes or no affects other people.

• 10:22Speaker 00

  There is a section in Pressfield's book, The Daily Pressfield, that I really like. He actually dedicated this book to me, which is pretty awesome. He has a whole section in the book called, "You Can't Be a Pro If You Can't Say No." It's only an hour, an ask too far, I don't take a piss without getting paid, no more Mr. Nice Guy, clueless asks. He says, "I turn down all clueless asks." How do I define that term? Anyone who sends me their manuscript unsolicited, anyone who asks me to meet them for lunch, anyone who sends me an email headed, "Hi," or "Hello there," anyone who asks me how to get an agent, anyone who asks me to introduce them to my agent. These are not malicious asks. The writers who send them are not bad people. They're just clueless. He says, "Don't ask a writer how to get an agent. Find out yourself. Do your due diligence. Learn good manners."

• 11:06Speaker 00

  The point is, part of being a pro is figuring stuff out for yourself. It's not imposing on others. And conversely, being a pro, staying a pro, is having good boundaries. Pressfield's point is that the resistance is happy to indulge all the things that could distract you. The resistance wants to say yes to everything. It wants to be a people pleaser, because then it means it doesn't have to do the hard thing, right? My main thing, which is sitting here doing my work, writing the Daily Stoic emails, taking care of my family. The resistance wants to suck you away from your main thing, and it does it by getting you sucked into doing a bunch of things that are not your main thing.

• 11:47Speaker 00

  In the time of Nero, a philosopher goes to the house of a Stoic named Agrippas. And he says, "Hey, I've been asked to attend this party that Nero's throwing on. We all know Nero is awful and corrupt and evil, but I got invited. I know you got invited. I'm wondering whether I should go or not. I'm thinking about it. You know, should I go?" And Agrippas says, "Yes, you should go." And the guy says, "Why? You're not going." And he says, "Yeah, but I didn't even think about going." And he was basically saying that this guy was hemming and hawing about it, meant that he had already screwed up. His point was that the guy was wavering. He'd already sort of compromised his conscience by even thinking of going. To me, Agrippas is also expressing some of the wisdom behind a rule that's become more popular now.

• 12:30Speaker 00

  I know Mark Manson has talked about it, this sort of hell yes or hell no rule. His point is Agrippinus wasn't, ah, do I want to, do I not? He wouldn't even consider doing something like that, that would be so compromising or corruptive. He didn't even think about attending one of Nero's parties to, to put in appearances or to kiss the ring. It was no, not gonna happen. He had a clear line about what he would and wouldn't do. And I think this is important as we think about what we say yes or no to. Life is complicated. I think he's, he's saying this for effect a tad, and so is the hell yes, hell no thing. But the idea is we should be really clear about what we are willing to do and what we aren't willing to do, the things we accept and the things we don't accept.

• 13:15Speaker 00

  We should have a clear sense of our moral compass, also our priorities. So we're not hemming it on, we're not having to ask for advice, not even thinking about it, it's a hard pass, or it's an enthusiastic yes.

• 13:31Speaker 00

  Actually, Ramit Sethi said this to me once. He said, you don't owe anyone a response. And his point was that, you know, just because an unsolicited email comes in, doesn't mean you have to reply to that person. Of course, RSVPs are polite and considerate, but if you feel sort of overwhelmed by all the inbound, you have to understand you can't sacrifice your life and your time to meet some arbitrary standard, some arbitrary sense you have of what being caught up is or isn't. You know, there was a time early in my life when I believed in inbox zero, and that, that plan has had to get abandoned as I've gotten older and more successful because I value other things. So of course, again, I want to reply and, and there are people I, I do get back quickly

• 14:13Speaker 00

  to, but I've had to realize that the preconceived notion I have of what being caught up is, is actually preventing me from getting caught up on what's truly important. Eisenhower has that decision matrix about what's urgent and what's important. And sometimes the things that come in, the inbound inquiries, they feel important, but actually they're just urgent. And as you're tackling them, what you're ignoring is what's actually important, not necessarily urgent.

• 14:40Speaker 00

  Every day, I send out one Stoic-inspired email totally for free to almost a million people all over the world. If you want to take your Stoicism journey to the next level, I would love for you to subscribe. It's totally for free. You can unsubscribe at any time. There's no spam. Just go to dailystoic.com/email. Love to see you there.