Why Do You Wait for This to Get Harder? | Turn Words Into Works

Procrastination isn’t saving you…it’s only adding interest to the bill you’re going to have to pay eventually. 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/ 🎁 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?

  Why do you wait for this to get harder? It's not gonna be easy whenever you do it. It's gonna be uncomfortable. It's not gonna pay off right away. It may even be a little painful. But you know what? Procrastination isn't saving you. It's only adding interest to the bill you're gonna have to pay eventually. As Nathaniel Rateliff sings in his song "Center of Me," it's a trap that we all fall into.

• 1:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, wait. Why do I wait until this shit gets harder? Yeah, wait. I'm with a raven now. So I wait. I'm waiting till this shit gets harder. Oh. In my head.

• 2:00Ryan Holiday?

  We do this to ourselves, putting off until tomorrow what we could do today. We delay conversations we need to have, only making them more painful when we ultimately do have them. We put off eating healthier, making it harder to get started the longer we work. We put off going to the gym or exercising, not thinking about how much more effort that time will cost us. We tell ourselves we'll deal with our phone addiction, but we're too busy to start this week. Maybe after this big project at work, maybe after things settle down a bit, maybe after your parents' visit, maybe after this next birthday, and on and on.

• 2:41Ryan Holiday?

  "How much longer are you going to wait?" Epictetus says, "to demand the best for yourself." Why are you waiting to make that not just longer than it needs to be, but harder to realize? Change isn't easy. It takes work, real deliberate, consistent effort. Taming your temper, being more present at home, getting over your envy, shedding a few pounds, breaking your smartphone addiction, drinking less, reading more. It's not going to happen by accident. But what is getting rid of one bad habit like that worth? What would that freedom feel like? What would you give to add one new positive way of thinking or acting into your daily routine? Well, that's what we all here at Daily Stoic come together to do the first three weeks

• 3:26Ryan Holiday?

  of January. People all over the world, people just like you, struggling and growing, trying to make satisfying progress towards being the person they know they can be. They come together to do the Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge, which is all new here in 2026. Maybe you've been thinking about joining us, but maybe you've put off signing up. Why not kick off 2026 with 21 actionable challenges, presented one per day, built around the best exercises in Stoicism? Help you do what Marcus really strive to do himself, to rise up, to drive out the bad, and take action on becoming the person you know you are capable of being. And this year, we've taken everything we've learned in the seven or eight years we've done this, added all that feedback, all those insights, all those hard-won lessons

• 4:09Ryan Holiday?

  into what I think is the best Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge yet. 2026 is going to be a challenging year. So the idea is let's rise up to meet it and let's do it together. In the 2026 Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge, you're going to build resilience through discomfort. You're going to let go of emotional baggage. You're going to form lasting habits that drive real change. You're going to find gratitude and purpose. It'll help you strengthen your relationships. It'll help you focus on what matters. It'll help you become the person you know you can be. Don't let another year go by and you're still the same person. Get started on doing what you need to do. Don't wait for another year. Join us in the 2026 Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge. It starts on January 1st. I will see you there, but you got to sign up now.

• 4:54Ryan Holiday?

  DailyStoic.com/challenge. And remember, if you are a member of Daily Stoic Life, you get this challenge and all our challenges for free. So I'll see you in there.

• 5:12Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. This is the last of these entries of the year. The last, as we pull from the Daily Stoic Journal, 366 Meditations of Writing and Reflection on the Art of Living. I think ultimately, the most important. It's about turning words into works. Marcus Aurelius spent a great deal of time on his journals. Yet, within these pages, we find him admonishing himself to throw them away, to never read them. Why? Because he didn't want it to be an excuse from the essential tasks at hand. "The art of living will never be found anywhere but in our own efforts to be a good person."

• 5:56Ryan Holiday?

  Never forget that that is the aim of Stoicism and of your own journals. It's not to fill up pages with pretty thoughts, but inspire you to take action, to turn the words, as Seneca said, into works. And in that, we have the perfect place to end the year with the ultimate Stoic prompt. Get active in your own rescue.

• 6:19Ryan Holiday?

  We have two quotes this week from Marcus Aurelius's Meditations, and then one from Seneca's Moral Letters. "Stop wandering about, Marcus says. You aren't likely to read your own notebooks, or ancient histories, or anthologies you've collected to enjoy in your old age. Get busy with life's purpose. Toss aside empty hopes. Get active in your own rescue. If you care for yourself at all, do it while you can." That's Marcus Aurelius 3:14. "You have proof in the extent of your wanderings that you never found the art of living anywhere, not in logic, nor in wealth, nor in fame, or in any indulgence. Nowhere. Where is it then? In doing what human nature demands. And how is a person to do this?

• 7:04Ryan Holiday?

  By having principles be the source of desire and action. What principles? Those to do with good and evil, indeed in the belief that there is no good for a human being except what creates justice, self-control, courage, and freedom. And nothing evil except what destroys these things." That's Marcus Aurelius's Meditations 8:1. And then ultimately, Seneca in Moral Letters 108, he says, "All study of philosophy and reading should be for the purpose of living a happy life. We should seek precepts to help us, noble and courageous words that can become facts. We should learn them in a way that the words become works." And ultimately, look, that's, that's the journey for me,

• 7:49Ryan Holiday?

  ironically, as a writer, is that I write them, that's my job. But if I don't listen to them, if I don't get better at it, then I'm, what am I? I'm not, I'm nothing but a sophist, right? And what are you? If you read about Stoicism, if you listen to this podcast, if you follow the quotes on Instagram or watch the videos, but you're not actually getting better day to day, you're not getting better at those virtues. Courage, self-control, justice, wisdom, right? You're not focused on applying the ideas. Ultimately, that's what matters. As Marcus Aurelius says, "We should waste no more time arguing what a good person is. Be one."

• 8:34Ryan Holiday?

  As Epictetus talks about, "Embody the ideas." Am I as good at that as I want to be? Are you? Right?

• 8:43Ryan Holiday?

  All this stuff is pretty straightforward, pretty simple. You find yourself nodding your head to it. But then when you're tired, when you're frustrated, then when you're trying to do something that's really important to you, when things are really going sideways, well, it's hard to actually stick with them. It's hard to actually apply them, right? But that's the whole point. That's the whole point of the philosophy. Look, I take some solace in the fact that clearly Marcus Aurelius is struggling with that, right? He's saying that even as an old man, right? He's telling himself, you gotta stop wandering about, right? He's saying, you still haven't figured it out. You gotta get active in your rescue now before it's too late, right?

• 9:25Ryan Holiday?

  So I take some solace in the fact that one of the greatest Stoics to ever live is still struggling with that, you know, many decades older than I am. But that time is tick, tick, ticking away. And those opportunities are passing us by. And so the purpose of the Daily Stoic Journal, the purpose of the Daily Stoic Podcast, the purpose of all this content, obviously, yes, it's compelling to me as a writer. I feel a duty to bring the ideas to other people. But ultimately, what I'm really trying to work on is just be a little bit better at them day to day in my own life. How would I grade myself on that? I don't know, not as high as I'd like, but higher than before, right?

• 10:07Ryan Holiday?

  Higher than if the intervention had never happened, which is ultimately, right? How we judge medicine, how we judge anything scientifically. We compare it against a control group. We compare it against a placebo. And I know how I was before, right? I know what I'm capable of if I don't try, if I just sort of go the path of least resistance. If I think about what I could get away with. That's not enough. We have to be better than that. We have to push ourselves. So that's ultimately the whole purpose of Stoicism. That's the thought I want to leave you here with at the end of the year. It's about turning the words into works. What do you have to show for it?

• 10:51Ryan Holiday?

  Right? It's not about pretending. It's not about imitating. It's about action. It's about putting up the numbers, putting up the results, trying to get a little bit better every single day. I don't expect magical transformation from myself or from you. That's not possible. This isn't about epiphany, but it is about repetition and practice, holding yourself accountable. And with that, I bid you adieu to the end of this year. I hope you can look back, reflect here as the year is winding up and see where you could have done better. I hope you can set aside some plans, some goals for the next year. And I hope you can build on the successes that you did have.

• 11:35Ryan Holiday?

  That's what I'm going to try to do. And we'll be right back at this again, because we don't stop. Talk soon.

• 11:47Ryan 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.