It Can’t All Be Wedding Cake | The Best Books You Can Read

Fortune doesn’t care about our plans and preferences. No, Seneca reminds us, she behaves as she pleases. 📚 Books mentioned: Plutarch’s Lives by Plutarch https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/classics4?_pos=1&_sid=1ede008b1&_ss=rMastery by Robert Greene https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/selfhelp15?_pos=1&_sid=4f1aac8d8&_ss=rMeditations by Marcus Aurelius https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/meditationsRiver of Doubt by Candice Millard https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/river-of-doubt-theodore-roosevelts-darkest-journey?_pos=1&_sid=70d413c3f&_ss=rThe Odyssey by Homer https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/odyssey?_pos=1&_sid=55559eefb&_ss=rMan’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/philosophy14?_pos=1&_sid=0dc8b2ea1&_ss=rThe Tiger by John Vaillant https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/nonfiction17?_pos=1&_sid=a42206503&_ss=r 🎁 This holiday season, give the gift of Daily Stoic Premium | https://dailystoic.supercast.com/gifts/new 🎥 Watch the video episodes on The Daily Stoic YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos: https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos 🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast/?hl=en: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast ✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail 🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/ https://store.dailystoic.com/ 📱 Follow us: Instagram https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/, Twitter https://twitter.com/dailystoic, YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic, TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@daily_stoic?lang=en, and Facebook https://www.facebook.com/dailystoic See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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?

  It can't all be wedding cake. You didn't think it was all going to go perfectly, did you? That life was sunshine and kittens? That it would all be an upward climb, an unbroken string of successes and achievements? That as long as you put the work in, everything would work out? Fortune doesn't care about our plans and preferences. No, Seneca reminds us she behaves as she pleases. There are tough moments. There is heartbreak. There is betrayal. Things break. Luck turns. Even when things seem to be going our way for a period of time, Seneca warns us not to misinterpret this kindness, because fortune has given as well as taken away.

• 1:37Ryan Holiday?

  The next turn of fortune's wheel might be a bad one. And this shouldn't surprise us, and it shouldn't make us despair. It has to be this way. Just as there is no world without shameless people, to borrow a reminder Marx realist gives himself in meditations, "There is no life in which some rain does not fall." So tell yourself that. That's what this moment is. This was bound to happen. It was unavoidable that this would happen. This is my number coming up. Could have never avoided it. All we can do is accept it, process it, and focus, as always, on responding well.

• 2:24Ryan Holiday?

  I'm Ryan Holiday. I'm a New York Times bestselling author, which basically means I'm a professional reader. That's what authors do. They read a lot. So I've read thousands of books over the course of my life, and here are five or six of my absolute favorites. This book here, Plutarch's Lives, is a favorite of Napoleon, is a favorite of Alexander Hamilton's, Abraham Lincoln, Elon Musk. Many of the most famous and interesting people in the world were inspired by the pages of Plutarch, because Plutarch is probably the greatest biographer who ever lived. He wasn't obsessed with facts and figures getting everything exactly right. He wanted to get to the essence of what made the great Greeks and Romans

• 3:06Ryan Holiday?

  great: Julius Caesar, Demosthenes, Cicero, Cato, Lysander, Themistocles. The greatest people who ever lived were profiled by Plutarch. And Plutarch knew power himself. He wasn't just a writer. He was a governor. He was a priest. He was an active politician and advisor to emperors and kings. He knew what he was talking about. If you haven't read Plutarch's Lives, you are missing out. This is a book by my mentors. I was actually a research assistant. I said I was a professional reader. I was a research assistant on this book by the great Robert Greene. This is mastery, one of my favorite Robert Greene books. What does it take to be truly great at something? What does it mean to find your life's task? And what does it mean to become truly great at that thing? To realize that potential?

• 3:51Ryan Holiday?

  And Robert Greene is someone who has achieved mastery at what he does. He's one of the great writers of our time. If you haven't read The 48 Laws of Power, you absolutely should. Again, another favorite with powerful and important people. But this, to me, is one of the most thoughtful and inspiring of Robert Greene's books. He says, you know, each of us has the potential to be a master. Each of us has a life's task. The problem is, most of us ignore that call. Most of us don't put in the work. We don't find the master to apprentice under. I was lucky enough to do that under Robert Greene. This is one of my all-time favorite books. If you haven't read it, you will not be as great as you are capable of being. This book here is a historical Anomaly. It should not exist. We are lucky that it exists. It is a freak of nature and history that it survives to us.

• 4:36Ryan Holiday?

  Private thoughts of the most powerful man in the world, sitting down every night and writing to himself, not about how to be more successful, not about how to conquer armies in distant lands, how to achieve fame and influence, although he did all those things. No, in this book, Marcus Aurelius says he is fighting to be the person that philosophy tried to make him. He's trying to keep his temper in check, trying to manage his fear and his anxiety, trying to come to terms with his mortality, with his limitations, trying to be decent, trying to be kind, trying not to despair, trying not to give up hope, even though he faced disaster after disaster, floods and famines and plagues and betrayals.

• 5:21Ryan Holiday?

  Marcus Aurelius has a hard life, and yet you see in the pages of Meditations him trying to be a good man, trying not to be stained purple by the robe of the emperor. This is my favorite passage from it. I have it inscribed here in the back. It says, "Concentrate on what you have to do. Fix your eyes on it. Remind yourself that your task is to be a good human being. Remind yourself of what nature demands of people. Then do it," he says, "without hesitation." He says, "Speak the truth as you see it, but with kindness, with humility, and without hypocrisy." If you haven't read Marcus Aurelius's Meditations, you are missing out. It is incredible. And this is the leather bound edition that we make at Daily Stoic. I wrote the foreword to it, and it is my favorite translation.

• 6:03Ryan Holiday?

  By the way, do you know who brings this book with them on one of the most incredible journeys of their life? Theodore Roosevelt explores the River of Doubt in the Amazon, one of the longest rivers then unnavigable. And he does it, and he brings a copy of Meditations and Epictetus with him. He nearly dies. This is an unbelievable and gripping narrative nonfiction book. It's one of my all time favorites. When I walk people around my bookstore, the Paint and Porch, I must always place this in their hand. The only time I don't give this book to people is when I ask them if they've read River of Doubt, and I find out they already have. This is an Incredible book, a gripping narrative that everyone should read. It's about the post-presidential years of Theodore Roosevelt.

• 6:46Ryan Holiday?

  He navigates this previously unexplored river down through Brazil in the Amazon. He nearly dies. It takes nearly everything out of him. It is an incredible, fascinating, haunting, exciting book. One of the greatest narrative nonfiction books ever written. And if you haven't read it, you should. This is one of the oldest stories we have. It is one of the most retold and remixed and reimagined stories in history. It is unto itself, and it has been like the Bible. The means through which generation after generation has taught its people its most valuable lessons. It's both a gripping story of adventure. It is a tragic, deeply sad story.

• 7:30Ryan Holiday?

  It is inspiring. It is exciting. It is filled with moral wisdom. I am talking, of course, about The Odyssey. I've read this many times, as you must. It is not a story you read once. It's a story you must read many times. Every adaptation, every retelling adds a new wrinkle to it. The story of The Odyssey stays the same, but we bring different things to it. I've read this to my children. I've traveled to Greece and Ithaca to see the places where some of this may or may not have actually happened. And if you haven't read The Odyssey, you not only do not understand what Homer is actually doing in The Odyssey, but you don't understand most of the literature that follows after it.

• 8:10Ryan Holiday?

  Because the metaphors and images and ideas in The Odyssey resound through almost every work of literature and story that happens since. This is the great story of the hero, but the tragic hero. Odysseus is both the hero and the cautionary tale of The Odyssey. And if you haven't read it, you're missing out. Imagine the darkest place that a human being can go. Imagine someone who loses their entire family, who has not just their loved ones ripped from them, but their professional work, the manuscript they have been working on their entire professional life is taken. And they are subjected To torture, to deprivation, to forced labor,

• 8:52Ryan Holiday?

  to unimaginable horrors and suffering. Imagine all that being subjected to a person and they come out of it not only not bitter, not only not angry, not only not broken, but they produce from it one of the most inspiring and beautiful meditations on the purpose and meaning of life ever produced. I am talking, of course, about Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning. His definition of happiness, his definition of meaning, it's not all sunshine and kittens. Someone who survived three Nazi death camps is not going to think that way. No, for Viktor Frankl, meaning comes from suffering. It comes from pain. It comes from accepting that we are not in control in life, but we are in control,

• 9:36Ryan Holiday?

  he says, as the Stoics do, how we respond to what life deals us. We have the ability to derive meaning, to derive purpose, to rise above our circumstances and our conditions. This is one of the most beautiful and inspiring books you will ever read. There's a reason it has sold millions and millions of copies, why it has inspired people in all sorts of trying and difficult situations of various levels of privilege and position. It doesn't matter who you are, it doesn't matter what you're going through. Man's Search for Meaning is a book that will help you and guide you and inspire you. You will leave this book feeling better about yourself and better about the world, even if the world and your world and you are falling to pieces. Read this, you must.

• 10:21Ryan Holiday?

  The Tiger, this is one of my all time favorite narrative nonfiction books, too. I've recommended this to thousands of people over the years. It's one of those books where truth is stranger than fiction, where if you had made this up, you would say, eh, let's dial it back a little bit. I almost don't believe it happened, but it did happen. John is one of the great writers of our time. I interviewed him on the Daily Stoic Podcast. Read this book, you must.