This Is A Timeless Temptation | A New Way To Pray

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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?

  This is A Timeless Temptation. Samika tells us the story of a pretentious but lazy Roman. He wanted to be able to impress his educated friends, so instead of reading for hundreds of hours, instead of getting a tutor or a teacher, he purchased a set of well-read slaves, one new Homer by heart, another new Hesiod. He had a slave for Sappho, another for Pindar, one for each of the ancient Greek poets that an upper-class Roman was supposed to know inside and out. And the man thought he was getting away with it, having them feed him lines at dinner parties, on hand whenever he needed to look something up, until a friend suggested that he take some wrestling lessons.

• 1:40Ryan Holiday?

  "But I am weak and frail," the man replied. "Don't say that," his friend teased. "Consider how many perfectly healthy slaves you have." Who hasn't been tempted to find a shortcut in life to look for tricks and cheat codes? Whether it's outsourcing your reading to AI summaries, listening to podcasts on 2X speed, or seeking out some guru who can supposedly download everything into your brain, everyone tries to find a way to bypass some amount of the incredible effort that wisdom requires.

• 2:17Ryan Holiday?

  But alas, from Seneca's time to ours, wisdom can really only be earned one way. And that is to say slowly, painfully, patiently. "No man is able to borrow or buy a sound mind," Seneca said. "Wisdom cannot be delegated. It cannot be given to you either. There is no app that will make you wise, no technology that can walk the path for you, no graduate school program that can make you educated. The path to wisdom isn't just rocky. It's guarded by bridge trolls and beset by obstacles. There are dead ends. There are pits of despair. There are staggering peaks and terrifying wonders. There is so much ground to cover.

• 2:59Ryan Holiday?

  You will meet unfriendly people and unpleasant ideas along the way. Are you tough enough to handle that? Are you prepared for a long journey? Or do you want everything to be nice, neat, and easy? Even if you are naturally gifted, even if you've already graduated from the best schools, wisdom is not yours. No, Seneca says, much toil remains. And to achieve this wisdom, you must lavish all your waking hours, all your efforts, if you wish the result to be accomplished." Wisdom Takes Work. There is no way around it. And that is the title of the new book, the fourth and final in the Virtue series. It is not a book of wisdom.

• 3:39Ryan Holiday?

  It is a book about the work, the methodology that wisdom requires. It's about how to get wisdom. It is about the process, the habits, the mindset you need if you want to be able to achieve wisdom. It is not a book that will make you wise, but it will help you become wiser if you do that work. And I'm really excited about it. It's out October 21st, but if you preorder it now, there's a bunch of awesome preorder bonuses, including some bonus chapters that were cut from the book, the playlist, like all the music that I listened to as I was writing it, a bunch of other awesome stuff. You can get signed, numbered first editions. Also, there's a slot to have dinner with me, where we can talk about some of the ideas in the book.

• 4:22Ryan Holiday?

  And if you want one of the signed manuscript pages from the book that I Produced as I was writing it, there's not very many of them in the world, but we've got those for people who preorder a couple of copies. All that's available on the landing page, dailystoic.com/wisdom. I hope to see you at the dinner. I hope you like the book. It would mean so much to me if you could preorder it. It's the most important and helpful thing you can do to support an author. It's how publishers decide how many copies to print, whether it appears in the bestseller list or not, what, how many copies bookstores order. All that comes from the preorder numbers. So if you could preorder, it would mean so much to me. dailystoic.com/wisdom. I don't care what format, who you get it from, but this would be a huge help. So do that if you could. And I can't wait for you to hear the book.

• 5:17Ryan Holiday?

  A new way to pray. We often pray for things we desire and in the process, excuse ourselves from the equation. We're hoping that the heavens will magically gift us with the outcome we want, whether it's for a promotion or a speedy recovery of a loved one. The Stoics would urge you to stop doing this. Marcus Aurelius reminded himself not to present the gods with a list of demands for pleasures or comforts, but instead ask for help not needing those things. In a sense, then, he was really asking for inner strength. He was, in a sense, asking himself. So think about all the things you want that you're praying or hoping for, and try turning them around like this.

• 6:01Ryan Holiday?

  See what you come up with instead. This is from this week's entry in the Daily Stoic Journal, 366 Days of Writing and Reflection on the Art of Living, by yours truly and my wonderful collaborator, Stephen Hanselman, who I also worked on the Daily Stoic with. "Try praying differently," Marcus writes in Meditations 940. "See what happens. Instead of asking for a way to sleep with her, try asking for a way to stop desiring to sleep with her. Instead of asking for a way to get rid of him, try asking for a way not to crave his demise." A way not to lose my child, try asking for a way to lose my fear of it.

• 6:42Ryan Holiday?

  And then Epictetus in Discourses says, we cry to God Almighty, how can we escape this agony? Don't you have hands? Or could it be that God forgot to give you a pair? Sit and pray your nose doesn't run? Or rather, just wipe your own nose? Stop seeking a scapegoat. And then Epictetus in Discourses 4:1, he says, "But I haven't at any time been hindered in my will nor forced against it. How is that possible? I have bound up my choice to act with the will of God. God wills that I be sick, such is my will. He wills that I should choose something, so do I. He wills that I reach for something or something be given to me. I wish for the same. What God doesn't will, I will not wish for."

• 7:24Ryan Holiday?

  This idea of blowing your own nose, that's a great expression from Epictetus that I love. I think what the Stoics are talking about here is self-sufficiency. I was just reading a great little biography of Musashi, the Samurai swordsman. And I wrote down a line in my commonplace book from him. He says, "Worship the gods and Buddha, but do not rely on them." Right? He didn't want to go into a sword fight hoping that Buddha would bless him. He trained for it to make that irrelevant, right? He wanted to rely on his sword and his actions. Remember, the Stoics talk about what's in our control, what's not in our control. I think what the Stoics are talking about is don't pray for things that are not in your control, that are not up to you.

• 8:06Ryan Holiday?

  Don't make yourself dependent on getting lucky, on being blessed, on your dreams coming true, on everything going right. Focus on having a plan that, as the Stoics say, is indifferent to all that. There's another great line from Epictetus where he says, you know, a student's like, "How should I do this?" He says, "You're asking me to show you what to do." And he says, "Wouldn't it be better to ask to be adaptable to all circumstances?" And so this is really where we're trying to get a place where there isn't anything we pray for. I take some pride. Every year, my wife will go, what do you want for your birthday? And I go, I don't, nothing. I don't want anything. There's nothing I need. There's nothing I want. It's not because I'm a billionaire. It's that I spent more

• 8:49Ryan Holiday?

  time just getting the things that I did need, the tools I need for my life, or my happiness. And then, for the most part, being indifferent to all the other things, not needing to wait for my birthday, or Christmas, or a check to come in to be able to afford this thing. It's better to not want it in the first place. And I think this is true for all the kinds of luck, or cool experiences, things that we think we want or need. No. Either get it for yourself if it's possible, or write it off. I think that's what that third quote, the final quote from Epictetus, he's saying is like, look, I'll just align my likes with

• 9:31Ryan Holiday?

  what happens. If God wants me to have it, or the gods want me to have it, or the logos, or whatever, Stoics obviously had complicated, somewhat contradictory views on religion. What will be, will be. What I get, is what I get. I won't throw a fit. That's where we're trying to get as Stoics, trying to get to this place of self-sufficiency, where we blow our own nose, where we're good, whatever happens. And I wish that for you. It's not easy. It doesn't just happen. You gotta work for it. But that's what we're doing here with these meditations. And I hope this helps, and I'll talk to you soon.

• 10:09Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. I just wanted to say, we so appreciate it. We love serving you. It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple of years we've been doing it. It's an honor. Please, spread the word. Tell people about it. And this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say, thank you.