Pod Insights The Daily Stoic | Wondery+ The Stoic Way To Survive 2026 About this episode You do not control the year ahead. You do control how you meet it. In this episode https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nV9mLzyDrK8, Ryan walks through the Stoic framework for becoming better in the year ahead built around courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom.
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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? How can we be better in 2026? How can we do better and be better? How can we be more virtuous in 2026? That's what I want to talk about tonight. How we can try to do and be better in the year ahead, because that's what the philosophy is really about. That's what it's for. The idea from the Stoics is that it will be a chance to practice those key virtues: courage, discipline, and justice, and wisdom. So we should start with courage. Now, physical courage, we're pretty familiar with. Courage to run into a burning building, onto a battlefield, to risk life and limb. You might need physical courage in 2026. Hopefully not, right?
1:27 Ryan Holiday? Even if that's your job, I hope it's a really boring year and you don't have to do it. But you will definitely need moral courage in 2026. Every day demands moral courage. Actually, Seneca says, "Sometimes even to live is an act of courage," to just keep going, to keep trying, to show up, to be yourself in a world of conformity and saneness. These are the things that we're talking about when we're talking about moral courage, right? The courage to speak up, the courage to speak out, the courage to bet on yourself, to think differently, to blow the whistle, the courage to be creative, the courage to get in front of a crowd and talk to people. I will tell you, I did not become a writer because I like to talk to large groups of people.
2:12 Ryan Holiday? That's pretty much the opposite of what I like and why I became a writer in the first place, is I thought I wouldn't have to do anything like this. So moral courage is that, right? It's getting out of your comfort zone and doing hard things. Although, in most cases, you're not actually gonna die doing those acts of moral courage. It can feel just as scary and as dangerous. There's a story I love about Ulysses S. Grant. In the Civil War, he's learned this lesson, but he's still terrified, as I think any normal person would be. He's in Missouri and he's sent against a Confederate army led by Colonel Thomas Harris. And Grant is terrified.
2:55 Ryan Holiday? He says that if he had any moral courage at all, he would have turned around and retreated. He was too scared even to quit, and he just kept going. The countryside was cleared out for miles. There wasn't a sound. There wasn't a single living thing, as if this terrible battle was about to break out, as if he was marching steadily towards his doom. And then he got to the place where Harris was supposed to be. And you know what Grant found? He found that Harris had already retreated. And he said, "It occurred to me in this moment that Harris had been as much afraid of me as I had been of him." And he said, "I'd never thought about it from this perspective before."
3:37 Ryan Holiday? But he said, "It was a lesson I never forgot afterwards." Everyone is scared. Things aren't as scary as they seem. These are the lessons that we learn, putting ourselves out there again and again. Everyone is nervous. Like, the person that is interviewing you for the job, they were not looking forward to that meeting either. Not only are they nervous, but you know what they're doing? They're desperate to fill that position. And you going in there scared isn't making it seem like you're the solution. To that problem. Everyone is scared. Things aren't as scary as they seem. And that's what courage really is.
4:19 Ryan Holiday? And it's, again, a practice, a thing we have to do. It's not a virtue if you're not overcoming that initial feeling of trepidation or anxiety. This idea of courage as an action, I think, leads pretty naturally to the next virtue, which would be the virtue of discipline. Do you know how Seneca brought in each New Year? He rang in each New Year, he said, as a lover of cold baths. He would celebrate the New Year by throwing himself in the Virgo Aqueduct. He would take a cold plunge in the canal. He said, "Just as I might make a resolution to do some reading or write a speech," he says, "I want to start the year off with a cold plunge." Now, why would he do this?
5:02 Ryan Holiday? Sure, there are supposedly some health benefits to cold plunges. Actually, I did one this morning. I did a sauna on Lake Washington, and then I jumped into the lake. Forty-five degrees in the water. It was quite cold. As I said, they claim that, you know, this is good for your circulation. They claim that cold plunges are good for boosting your immune system, reducing inflammation, for all sorts of wonderful things. Maybe. Could be horseshit. I don't know.
5:33 Ryan Holiday? I don't really care. To me, the benefit is in that it's hard and unpleasant, and I really don't want to do it. That's the benefit. The benefit is in doing the thing and then how you feel after, right? Seneca says, "We treat the body rigorously so that it is not disobedient to the mind." That's the muscle that it's helping, the part of you that doesn't want to crank the knob in the shower towards cold, right? The muscle that says, "I do hard, unpleasant things, and I have the power over myself to make myself do it." That's the benefit of the cold plunge. In 2025, I decided I would run the original Greek marathon from Marathon to Athens.
6:17 Ryan Holiday? It's roughly 26 miles. I did 27 because I got lost. But I was by myself and I am pretty sure from the video suffering from heat stroke. I arrived in the Olympic Stadium in the middle of Athens. I had to wait in line to buy a ticket and then I got in and I promptly threw up all over the stadium. Just representing America as a global ambassador, you know? But it was really hard, right? As you can imagine, it was extremely hard. I hit a wall in the middle of it, I hit another wall towards the end of it. As I said, I got terribly lost. It was really hard. But I not only have experience with that exact position, like when you feel like you
7:00 Ryan Holiday? can't go any further and you're not sure why you would and no one is making you. Do you have, in that Kipling poem, you know, "Nothing left but the will that says, 'Hold on,'" right? That part, you want to have that, where you hit the wall and you go, "I'm gonna keep going even though I really, really, really don't want to." I experienced it there in that marathon, I've experienced it in writing, I've experienced building businesses, I've experienced it in my marriage, I've experienced it as a parent. You get to that place where you don't think you have anything left, but you do. So pick something for this year, that's a big stretch, that maybe you'll be able to do, maybe you won't. Training for it will be good, right? That will stretch your capacity.
7:44 Ryan Holiday? Getting there and then not making it, and then the regret and the guilt that you feel when you go, "Oh yeah, it's always hard. It didn't feel any better when I stopped either." That's what we're learning when we do these hard things. This is what the New Year, New You Challenge that Daily Stoic does every year is built around, right? They're called challenges for a reason. It's not 21 days of Stoic affirmations, 21 days of Stoic nice, pleasant, fun things to do. They're challenges, they're supposed to be challenging, they're supposed to be uncomfortable, they're supposed to be painful, they're supposed to be weird, they're supposed to get you out of your comfort zone. Because that's where all the growth is, on the other side of doing those hard things.
8:28 Ryan Holiday? And that's what I want you to cultivate in the year ahead. And I would say not just like the hard things day to day, that is that day to day discipline, but I'd also say it's good to pick something ambitious and big that's challenging for 2026. Something that like, at the end of the year, 10 years in the future, when you think back... To 2026, you'll be like, "That's the year I climbed that mountain. That's the year I set that mile time. That's the year I lifted that heavy thing. That's the year me and my friends did X, Y, or Z." Now that leads us to the third virtue, which would be the virtue of justice.
9:08 Ryan Holiday? I do think it's interesting like how selfish most of our resolutions are, right? "I want to lose weight. I want to run a race. I want to stop eating this. I want to clean out the garage. I want to find a new job. I want to start dating again." Whatever it is, right? Our resolutions, our goals for the year, they're always about us. They're about what we're gonna do. Now, this might sound a little bit like Stoicism, right? Focus on what you control, focus on what you're gonna do, and that's true. But if you're only thinking about you, or a philosophy that only has you think about you, that's also kind of a recipe for being an asshole. And as I've said before, Stoicism is not there to help you be a better sociopath.
9:51 Ryan Holiday? On the contrary, it's designed to make you better, more caring, more empathetic, a better contributor to the thing that Marx was talks about 80 times in Meditations, which is the common good. Stoics believed that we were made for each other. That was our purpose here on this planet. Marx was says that the fruit of the good life is good character and acts for the common good.
10:29 Ryan Holiday? One of my heroes is this guy, Thomas Clarkson. Now, maybe a few of you know who he is. It's a shame that not every person in this room does. He should be one of the most famous people Thomas Clarkson in 1785 enters an essay competition at Oxford where he's a student. And the question is basically like, should a human be able to buy and sell other human beings? Now, this might seem like a settled question, but it was not in 1785. And in fact, Clarkson, hoping to stand out in the essay competition, takes the contrarian view that no, you shouldn't be able to own another human being. And he's surprised when he wins.
11:11 Ryan Holiday? He wins the competition, he accepts his prize, and as he's heading off to London to start his life, he's walking his horse between Oxford and London, a thought occurs to him. He says, what if I'm right? Not just what if this was an interesting homework assignment, an interesting intellectual question, but what if, what if it's true? Then the second bolt of lightning hits him. Well, if it's true, someone should do something about it. And then the third bolt of lightning, if someone should do something about it, maybe that someone should be me. Here's the crazy thing, he did. Maybe the oldest institution in the history of humanity goes away in Thomas Clarkson's lifetime because of Thomas Clarkson's work.
11:54 Ryan Holiday? He convenes 12 other forward-thinking people at a print shop in London. They start a little movement. And that abolitionist movement first ends the slave trade in the British Empire, and along the way, it creates the first consumer boycott, some of the first petitions, some of the first activist marketing. And in the campaign that he creates, the allies that he develops, the research that he does, some of those famous drawings, have you ever seen that famous drawing of what the inside of a slave ship looks like? All these hundreds of years later, that came from research that Thomas Clarkson did. Part of the reason slavery was allowed to exist is that people didn't want to think
12:38 Ryan Holiday? about what it actually meant and looked like. And so much of his campaign was about awareness. He unearthed the terrible human toll, not just on... People who are being bought and sold, but also the consequences for the people buying and selling them. For the terrible toll it took on the economy, for the terrible toll it took on the sailors who were impressed into working onto the ships. Just what a horrible, horrible economic industry it was. And as a result, first, the slave trade is abolished. He starts small, then slavery itself. He, within his life, leads millions of people to freedom. He literally changes the world, right? He changes the world in a way that Marcus Aurelius, the most powerful man in the world,
13:23 Ryan Holiday? whose life is influenced by the writings of a slave, is not able to do, right? What are you gonna do this year? That's not about you, that's about having impact for other people. Those are the accomplishments that when the other things fade away, when time passes, you're going to be most proud of. There's actually a line in one of my favorite novels, "The Unbearable Lightness of Being." And the woman, she says, "It's much more important to dig a half-buried crow out of the ground than to write a petition to the president." Right? You can shout into the void. You can try to solve these enormous, intractable, impossible problems. Or you can do something kind and decent
14:06 Ryan Holiday? right in the sphere, in the place that you live. We don't control most of what's happening in the world, unfortunately. But we control our own actions. Last virtue, we're almost done. I don't think it's possible to become wise in 2026. I don't think wisdom is something you can achieve in a year. But you can get wiser, right? Wisdom is not a thing you possess. It is a thing you are moving closer to. It's kind of like the horizon, right? You're taking steps towards it, but you never actually arrive. But you can look back and see how far that you have come. To me, wisdom is a byproduct, doing the right things the right way. Over and over again.
14:49 Ryan Holiday? Actually, I think the founding story of Stoicism is, in a way, illustrative of this. Zeno's a merchant in the Mediterranean. He's traveling from port to port. At some point, he stops at the temple of Apollo, and he asks the oracle, "What is the secret to the good life?" She tells him, "You will begin to become wise, and you start to have conversations with the dead." And he doesn't know what this means until he suffers a shipwreck, ends up in Athens penniless, and he hears a bookseller reading aloud something from Socrates. And there, he realizes, "Oh, that's what talking to the dead is. That's what reading is." And he resolves to become a philosopher. So he asks the bookseller, "Where can I find a teacher?" And there, walking by, is a man named Kritis, a cynic philosopher, who becomes Zeno's mentor.
15:34 Ryan Holiday? Kritis' nickname in Athens was "The Door Opener", because that's what great teachers do. They open doors. And so, one of the first lessons that Kritis gives Zeno is actually about courage. Zeno is self-conscious. He has a little bit of imposter syndrome. He's always thinking about what other people are thinking about him. So Kritis gives him a big, heavy pot of lentils and asks him to carry it through the marketplace. And at the busiest place in the Agora, Kritis jumps out and whacks Zeno with his staff, shattering the pot and covering him in lentils. And Zeno is mortified, and he goes to run off. And Kritis stops him, and he goes, "My boy, why are you running away? Nothing terrible has befallen you." Trying to get him to not be so self-conscious. In a way, I think this captures so many of those sort of basic traits
16:19 Ryan Holiday? that go into the acquisition of wisdom. Travel, asking great questions, right? "What's the secret to the good life?" Reading, talking with the dead. That's what philosophy is. Teachers and mentors. And then, of course, a kind of fearlessness. "You are not going to learn. You will not become wise if you are a sensitive little snowflake, doesn't want to hurt anyone else's feelings or have your own feelings be hurt." That will help you understand. Truman's line was, "The only thing new in the world is the history you don't know." So, how are we studying the past? How are we talking with the dead to help understand this moment that we're in? But our information diet... is essential. And also, I think too many of us are violating Zeno's rule of two ears and one mouth for a reason.
17:04 Ryan Holiday? We think that social media is about what we're throwing out in the world as opposed to what we can take from it. How do we cultivate and improve our information diet? That should be the goal. What are the things you're going to stop following? The things you're going to stop listening to? The sources you're going to turn off? And what are you going to turn in? Because as they say, garbage in, garbage out.
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