Everything Is Changing. Are You? | Stake Your Own Claim

Things falling apart. Traditions crumbling. New technologies. New threats. New trends. Welcome to ancient Rome. Welcome to the past…the present…and the future. Make 2026 the year where you finally bring yourself closer to living your best life. No more waiting. Demand the best for yourself. The Daily Stoic New Year New You https://join.dailystoic.com/nyny26/ challenge begins January 1, 2026. Learn more and sign up today at dailystoic.com/challenge http://dailystoic.com/challenge. Get The Daily Stoic New Year New You https://join.dailystoic.com/nyny26/ & all other Daily Stoic courses for FREE when you join Daily Stoic Life |dailystoic.com/life https://dailystoic.com/life/ 📔 Pick up your own leather bound signed edition ofThe Daily Stoic https://store.dailystoic.com/products/the-daily-stoic-leatherbound-signed-edition! Check it out at the Daily Stoic Store:https://store.dailystoic.com/ https://store.dailystoic.com/products/the-daily-stoic-leatherbound-signed-edition 🎁 This holiday season, give the gift of Daily Stoic Premium | https://dailystoic.supercast.com/gifts/new 👉 Support the podcast and go deeper into Stoicism by subscribing toThe Daily Stoic Premium https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ - unlock ad-free listening, early access, and bonus content:https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ 🎥 Watch the video episodes onThe Daily Stoic YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos:https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos 🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast onInstagram https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast/?hl=en:https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast ✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email athttps://dailystoic.com/dailyemail 🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: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, andFacebook 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?

  Everything is changing. Are you? Things falling apart, traditions crumbling, new technologies, new threats, new trends. Welcome to ancient Rome. Welcome to the past, the present, and the future. It has always been this way, you understand. "Change and flux constantly remakes the world," Marx really wrote in Meditations during an indisputably tumultuous period of history, "just as the incessant progression of time remakes eternity." Things were confusing and difficult, sure, but he understood that things were always changing, always in crisis, always being disrupted, always becoming something new.

• 1:40Ryan Holiday?

  The question then is not, "How do we stop this?" The question is, "How are we going to change and adapt to it?" "We don't need to be scared of change," the Stoics remind us, "because we ourselves are products of change." And if we want to survive and thrive in this moment we're in, we're going to need to keep on changing and evolving. It is the only way. Whether it's AI or economic instability, or conflict, or climate change, whether it's big macro issues or stuff in your personal life, a marriage coming to an end, a baby coming home from the hospital, a new job, the loss of a loved one. 2026 is going to come at you fast, as every year does. It will bring challenges and it will demand changes.

• 2:25Ryan Holiday?

  It will not take no for an answer. You are going to need to change. You are going to need to grow. You're going to need to adjust and adapt and evolve. So why don't you get started on that right now? I start every single year with a bunch of changes, with a bunch of deliberate challenges. That is the Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge, which is 21 days of Stoic-inspired challenges that helps me become better at the start of every year. And 2026 is no different. We've been working hard on this thing for months, and I'm really excited about it. And I hope you will join me and thousands of other Stoics all over the world doing the Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge. It's going to start on January 1st, but you can sign up right now

• 3:11Ryan Holiday?

  and hopefully get ready to tackle a new year before it is here. I'd love to see you in there. You can sign up right now at dailystoic.com/challenge. It's going to be awesome, but it starts here really soon. It's going to start on January 1st. So you've got to sign up before it's too late. Dailystoic.com/challenge. I will see you in there.

• 3:43Ryan Holiday?

  Stake your own claim. This is the December 22nd entry in the Daily Stoic. And our quote today comes to us from Seneca Moral Letters 33. "For it's disgraceful for an old person or one in sight of old age to have only the knowledge carried in their notebooks. Zeno said this, but what do you say? Klianthe said this, what do you say? How long will you be compelled by the claims of another? Take charge and stake your own claim, something posterity will carry in its notebook."

• 4:17Ryan Holiday?

  Musing in his own notebook about the topic of immortality, Emerson complained about how writers dance around a difficult topic by relying on quotes. "I hate quotation," he wrote. "Tell me what you know." And I'm gonna tell you a little backstory about that in a second. Seneca was throwing down the same gauntlet some 20 centuries before. "It's easier to quote to rely on the wise words of others, especially when people you're deferring to are such towering figures. It's harder and more intimidating to venture out on your own to express your own thoughts. But how do you think those wise and true quotes from those towering figures were created in the first place? Your own experiences have value. You have accumulated your own wisdom too.

• 4:58Ryan Holiday?

  Stake or claim, put something down for the ages in words and also in example." So I was maybe like 20, 21 years old. I was writing for the college newspaper and I'd written this review. And I published it and did okay. And then I actually heard from the person I was reviewing in it. They had, they gave me some feedback and I said, hey, could we like get on the phone? I would really, I just want to grow as a writer. Can you give me some feedback? And they're going through it and he was pointing out all the quotes in it. And he gave me that Emerson quotation for the first time. He said, Emerson said something like, "I hate quotation. Tell me what you know." And that lesson has stuck with me in all of my writings. Yes, I talk about the Stoics. My writing is influenced and is in many ways, an attempt to introduce the Stoics to people.

• 5:42Ryan Holiday?

  But one of the passes that I do on my own books as I go through them, after I've written, I write them just, what do I want to say? What's my, you know, what's my supporting arguments? Like, how do I want to illustrate it? And then I go through and I go, where am I over relying on quotes here? Where can I get rid of them? Where am I over arguing things where not telling you what I know, but telling you what someone else knows? Speaking of quotes, there's a rule I heard from Nassim Taleb, where he actually said, "You should only quote people when you disagree with them." The point is make your own arguments on your own merits. But I think this is a really important part of the Stoic practice. If you think about what Meditations was for Marcus, right? It's not him arguing Stoicism to the public. It's him arguing.

• 6:26Ryan Holiday?

  Arguing the Stoics to himself. So he does use quotes from time to time, but he's not really having to think that much about attribution. And he's not really trying to think about publication or the audience at all. He's just thinking about what does he need to hear? What does he know to be true? And what needs to be said? What does he need to be reminded of? And I think it's important that we understand that Stoicism, the study of Stoicism is not a one way street. It's not just downloading the information from the originals, from me, from other people. It's also putting your own spin on it. It's disagreeing with them. It's adding your own view. Stoicism should be better, different, added to as a result of you having studied and learned about it.

• 7:10Ryan Holiday?

  That doesn't mean you're all going to publish bestselling books or articles or videos. It's all going to be well known. But make your own contributions. Put your own spin on it. Feel free to disagree. Feel free to argue. Feel free to push back. Feel free to add. I feel like one of my contributions to Stoicism was the connection between Stoicism and Nietzsche, the idea of amor fati. I brought that in to, also with the help of Robert Greene, but I brought that together. That's a practice of Stoicism that, you know, did not exist before, or an explicit connection that did not fully exist before. In Lives of the Stoics, I put all the Stoics, their biographies in one place. In The Daily Stoic itself, I combined the Stoics

• 7:54Ryan Holiday?

  in a way that they'd never been combined before. And I made arguments that some people disagree with. I made statements that I think are true, but not, again, not everyone agrees with. But they didn't exist before. I put my own spin on it. I put my own stamp on it, which is what you and everyone listening needs to do, not just with words. In fact, with words, least of all, most of all, with our actions, with what we do, with who we are.

• 8:26Ryan 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.