Pod Insights The Daily Stoic | Wondery+ The 12 Things You Need To Know About Stoicism About this episode Most of what people know about Stoicism is totally wrong. They might recognize names like Marcus Aurelius or Epictetus, or they assume the whole philosophy is about being stoic in the modern sense, cold, emotionless, shut down, resigned. But that picture couldn’t be more off.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:04 Ryan Holiday? Welcome to the Weekend Edition of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Sundays, we take a deeper dive into these ancient topics with excerpts from the Stoic texts, audiobooks that we like here or recommend here at Daily Stoic, and other long-form wisdom that you can chew on on this relaxing weekend. We hope this helps shape your understanding of this philosophy, and most importantly, that you're able to apply it to your actual life. Thank you for listening.
0:43 Ryan Holiday? Most of what people know about Stoicism is totally wrong. Maybe they know a couple of the names. They've heard Marcus Aurelius, or they've heard Epictetus, or they think that Stoicism is about being cold and emotionless and apathetic and resigned. This could not be further from the truth. Stoicism is a philosophy that literally changed the world, that made some of the greatest men and women in history. It's not about acceptance. It's a philosophy about resilience, about self-empowerment, about being in command of yourself, as the Stoics would say. And Stoicism was popular not just with Marcus Aurelius, the Emperor of Rome, but also Epictetus, who lived through three decades of slavery. So what we're going to talk about in today's episode is what Stoicism actually is and
1:26 Ryan Holiday? what the Stoics have figured out over 2,500 years of teachings, and what this ancient wisdom can help us with here in modern life.
1:38 Ryan Holiday? There's a bullshit stereotype that Stoicism is emotionlessness. That's not it at all. The Stoics aren't emotionless, but they did try to be less emotional in high-stakes situations because they were leaders, because they knew that emotions could be misleading, they knew that emotions could make us do things that we later regret, right? So it's not that they're trying to be emotionless, but they are trying to be less emotional when it matters. Seneca writes three beautiful essays on grief. If he was emotionless, he would have just said, "Don't feel anything. This is nothing." That's not what he does at all. But he is trying to work someone through these overwhelming emotions that are torturing them, that they can't seem to get over. He's trying to help them understand what they feel, trying to help them process those
2:20 Ryan Holiday? emotions, so they can move on and live their life and feel good emotions again, instead of just despair and anger and grief and hopelessness. So don't believe this stereotype at all. The Stoics were people who got married. The Stoics were people who loved their kids. The Stoics were people who made beautiful works of art, who loved to enjoy works of art, who experienced the beauty of nature and all the richness of the human experience. They just tried not to be overwhelmed by destructive emotions, which we all know are a problem for all of us.
2:51 Ryan Holiday? There's only one rule to life, the great novelist Kurt Vonnegut said. He said, "God damn it, you gotta be kind." One of my favorite quotes from Seneca, one of the Stoics, he says, "Every human being you meet is an opportunity for kindness." I've been writing this Stoic book about justice, and I think when we think justice, we think the legal system, we think laws, right? We think social justice, and all of this is incredibly important, of course. But to me, the virtue of justice is embodied there in kindness, like how we treat other people. Do you hold a door open for someone? Do you pay for the groceries of the person in front of you because they can't afford it, right? How nice are you to a stranger? How do you speak to the people who work for you?
3:32 Ryan Holiday? The kindness that we treat people with is, I think, in some ways, a precursor to the justice that we live by or that society is set upon, right? The great injustices of society are, to say that they're based on kindness would be a massive understatement, but profoundly, they're based on not seeing the other person as a person or someone worthy of being treated well. And I think that's what Kurt Vonnegut was saying, said, "The only rule there is, is god damn it, you've gotta be kind."
4:07 Ryan Holiday? This doesn't have to upset you. This doesn't have to get to you. You don't have to turn this into something. That's what the Stoics want you to know. Now, look, sometimes people hear that and they think, "Oh, I'm just supposed to accept injustices. I'm just supposed to accept all the terrible things that are happening in the world." No, there is a difference between tolerating an injustice and letting it get inside your head, scream with your equilibrium, distract you, make you bitter, make you hopeless, make you despair. The point is, you take the information, you see what it means, and then you say, "Hey, I'm not gonna let this ruin me. I'm not gonna let this make me worse. I may well have to get to work solving this. I may well have to find out more information about this.
4:52 Ryan Holiday? I may have to dedicate my life to eradicating this thing. But what I don't have to let it do is make me worse, is ruin my day, is make me a jerk to the people around me. I don't have to let this distract me. And in fact, by letting it make me angry, by letting it get inside my head, what it's actually doing is making me less effective at doing anything about it."
5:23 Ryan Holiday? You know, the greatest empire is command of oneself. So people always want more and more and more. And really, wealth, self-control is understanding, like, what's enough for me? What am I good with? What do I actually need? And so fascinating, on the one hand, you have a Stoic like Marcus Aurelius, who's the most powerful man in the world. Then you have this other Stoic, Epictetus, who Marcus Aurelius admires. Epictetus is a slave. And who is actually most in command of themselves? Who's in command of their desires, their emotions, their fears? So it doesn't matter how much you have or how little you have. Stoicism is this sense of, "Here's what I need, here's who I am, here's what's important to me." I'm following the Joneses. Exactly. And social media, a world of social media where you're constantly bombarded with what everyone else is doing, you lose track of what you're trying to do,
6:07 Ryan Holiday? what's important to you, what's possible for you.
6:17 Ryan Holiday? In one of his letters, Seneca says that we treat the body rigorously so that it would not be disobedient to the mind. And I think about that when I'm jumping in the shower, jumping in a cold pool, whether I'm pushing myself while I'm running or lifting weights, is like, I'm reminding the body who's in charge. This idea that we treat the body rigorously, that that's what the physical practice is. It's a reminder of who's in charge. It's the mind asserting itself over the body. We tend to think of philosophers as these sort of soft people, but actually, the mental practice, the mental resilience, being in charge of yourself, is the ultimate muscle that you want to cultivate, and it's the thing that every great athlete has to have.
7:04 Ryan Holiday? Acceptance is a word that we struggle with because it seems defeatist, it seems resigned. But the Stoics, Epictetus, say we have to learn how to practice the art of acquiescence. Accepting the things that happen to us is actually the first step in being able to respond to them, to turn them into something. There's a powerful Stoic concept called amor fati, a love of fate. Embracing, accepting the things that have happened to you, the situations you find yourself in, not because you're resigned, not because you're passive, but because it's the first step in turning it into something great. It's the first step in making something.
7:41 Ryan Holiday? I think one of the reasons we have trouble with motivation is that we know, deep down, that this thing we're doing, it doesn't really matter. It's not important. That's why Marcus Rilis's question is so imperative. He says, "Ask yourself, is this essential?" He says, "Because most of what we do and say and think is not essential. It's getting us further from where we want to go. It's something that society made up for us. It's just what everyone else is doing. It's piddly busy work." You know, he says, "Are you really afraid of death because you won't be able to do this thing anymore?" Right? He's saying that we waste our time with frivolous, unimportant, meaningless things. So he says, "When you ask yourself, is this essential, you end up eliminating the inessential." And then he says, "You get this double benefit of doing the essential things better."
8:24 Ryan Holiday? But I would say that the real benefit is that if we only have a finite amount of motivation, if getting up the motivation, if maintaining motivation is this difficult task, well, then we want to save it for the precious few things that really matter, right? What's the main thing for you? You eliminate the things that are not the main thing, and then that marshals more resources, more energy, more motivation for the things that are the main. If everything is this battle between the higher self and the lower self, right? If you're exhausting that resource battling for things that don't matter, that you don't actually care about, that you could say no to, right? You're going to have to have so much more motivation than someone who has winnowed down
9:05 Ryan Holiday? their frame of reference, their to-do list, only to the things that truly matter, that truly are essential.
9:17 Ryan Holiday? They didn't have to make that comment. They didn't have to be a jerk. They didn't have to point that out. They could have done nothing, but they didn't. And so now we have a choice. How are we going to respond, right? We don't control other people. That's the idea in Stoicism, but we control how we respond. Epictetus said that when you find yourself offended, when you get upset, realize that you are complicit in taking the offense. Marx really said, remember, you don't have to turn this into something. Life is hard. People aren't perfect. They don't understand how things are going to be felt or perceived by other people. They're going to keep doing this for as long as they exist. But we have to decide, are we going to go around being offended all the time?
9:58 Ryan Holiday? Being hurt all the time? Feeling slighted all the time? Getting worked up all the time? We have control over that, and we can decide not to waste our time getting offended, getting upset. We can focus on what we control, which is who we are in response to the things people do and say to us.
10:21 Ryan Holiday? It's not that life is short, Seneca says, it's that we make it short by acting as if we have forever, by putting things off until tomorrow, by doing things that we shouldn't do. He says, "It's insane. We protect our money, we protect our property, and then we are foolish with the one thing that can't be replaced, the one thing they're not making any more of." He says, "Don't spend your time on anything that's not giving you a return." And of course, he doesn't mean that financially. He means, "How are you going to spend this limited amount of time that you have here on earth? How are you going to protect that valuable resource? How are you going to make good choices, courageous choices, disciplined
11:04 Ryan Holiday? choices?" Memento mori. "Death isn't this thing that's at the end," Seneca says. "It's happening now. The time that passes belongs to death, so how will you spend your life?"
11:19 Ryan Holiday? A big part of success is positive visualization. If you can't see it happening, it's unlikely that it's going to happen. If you don't see yourself on the medal stand, if you don't see the shot going in, if you don't see yourself connecting with the ball, it's not going to happen. If you don't believe it's possible, it can't happen. But the Stoics would pair this positive visualization with a kind of negative visualization. The term for this is premeditatio malorum, premeditation of evils. Basically, understanding that things are unpredictable, that because things can go wrong, they invariably will go wrong, and how are you going to respond to that? Are you prepared to respond to it? Do you have a backup plan? Are you going to be rattled by the stuff that happens? Seneca says that the unexpected blow lands heaviest. One of the Bill Walsh things I love is, he would
12:01 Ryan Holiday? script the first several plays in a game, so that whatever happened, however the game went, at the beginning, however, the unexpected, unpredictable parts of a game, he knew what he was going to do. He had his plan locked that couldn't be affected by circumstance. So the idea is, stuff is going to go wrong. Life is unpredictable. But you have to imagine for that. You have to prepare for that. Seneca says that the only inexcusable thing for a leader, but I think also for an athlete, to say is, "Oh, I didn't think that would happen." You have to think it could happen, and you have to have a plan for what you're going to do if that happens.
12:41 Ryan Holiday? The first job of the philosopher, the first, the hardest, the most important exercise in all of Stoicism is really, really simple. It's simple, but it's not easy. It's the dichotomy of control. "There are some things that are up to us," Epictetus says, "and some things that are not up to us." It's our choices, our decisions, our opinions, our actions that are up to us. Other people's actions, other people's opinions about our actions. How those actions are received, or whether or not they succeed, it's not up to us. So if you're thinking about trying to be more stoic, it's not the cold plunges, it's not enduring intense and difficult adversity, although, again, that's part of it. It starts with something really simple, which is separating things that are in your control
13:24 Ryan Holiday? from the things that are outside your control and caring about and acting on the things in the first category.
13:35 Ryan Holiday? When adversity happens in life, when things are difficult, when you run into obstacles, which is going to happen, there is no escape from it. You have to be able to see it, the Stoics say, as a good thing, that life is pairing you with a strong sparring partner. And the purpose of a sparring partner is to help you level up, to get better, to practice and cultivate the very skills that you'll need in the map, in the ring, when shit gets real. So the idea is not to run away from adversity or difficulty or obstacles, but to embrace them. Marx and Rila says that "the impediment to action advances action." What stands in the way becomes the way. He says, "You know, what you throw on top of a fire becomes fuel for the fire." So don't think about the fact that it's hard, that it's difficult, that it's not going your way, that this thing happened and you wish it hadn't happened.
14:20 Ryan Holiday? No, it's good that it happened, because you're going to use it. It's going to make you better. It's teaching you something. And if you have this attitude, you are unstoppable, because all the things that are happening are making you better, making you stronger, preparing you, teaching you, warning you. And that's what you want.
14:39 Ryan Holiday? A single book changed my life. I was 19 years old and someone recommended Marcus Aurelius's Meditations. And this book, The Private Thoughts of the Emperor of Rome, hit me. 19 years old and I was never the same. It put me on the journey that I am still on today. It's something that's made me not just smarter, but more balanced, more able to bounce back from difficulty and failures. It's given me wisdom. It's given me courage. It's given me a sense of ethics and principles and so much more. And that's what the Stoics have been doing for people for thousands of years. And if you are interested in taking your study of Stoicism a little bit further, or ideally to the next level, I would love to have you join us in Stoicism 101,
15:21 Ryan Holiday? Ancient Philosophy for Your Actual Life. We do it every year around this time. It's a 14-day deep dive into the Stoics, into Stoic philosophy, what it can teach you, how to apply it, who the Stoics were, what they have to offer us. And my favorite part of it is the office hours we do, where you get to ask me your most pressing questions about Stoic philosophy, along with thousands of Stoics all over the world. I'd love to have you join us. You can sign up right now at dailystoic.com/101.
15:52 Ryan Holiday? Every day, I send out one Stoic-inspired email to hundreds of thousands of people all over the world. If you want more Stoic wisdom in your inbox, you can sign up at dailystoic.com/email. It's totally free. You can unsubscribe at any time. We'd love to have you. dailystoic.com/email.
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