You Can’t Stop Here | No Blame, Just Focus

Marcus Aurelius was not satisfied just getting the gist of Epictetus https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/epictetus-month-2026’ powerful teachings and you shouldn’t be, either. 💡 We designed ourHow To Read Epictetus (A Daily Stoic Guide) http://dailystoic.com/ecourse as a personal field guide —part book club, part masterclass, part daily practice. It’s designed to help you not just read the words of Epictetus, but live them—to turn his timeless wisdom into real change in your own life and the lives of those around you. And if you get the guide before August 26th, you’ll receive a private invitation to an exclusive LIVE Q&A with Ryan Holiday, where he’ll go deep on all things Epictetus, Stoicism, and how to apply these ideas right now, in today’s world. Head todailystoic.com/epictetuscourse http://dailystoic.com/epictetuscourse to learn more and get your book, guide, and bundle today! 🎟️DAILY STOIC LIVE https://www.dailystoiclive.com/| Ryan Holiday is coming to a city near you https://www.dailystoiclive.com/! Grab tickets here https://www.dailystoiclive.com/ | https://www.dailystoiclive.com/ 🎙️AD-FREE https://dailystoic.supercast.com/| 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/ 🎥 VIDEO EPISODES https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos| Watch the video episodes onThe Daily Stoic YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos:https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos ✉️ FREE STOIC WISDOM https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail | Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email athttps://dailystoic.com/dailyemail 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.

• 0:00Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

• 0:15Ryan Holiday?

  You can't stop here. When Junius Rusticus handed the future Emperor of Rome a book, it came with an implication. A true philosopher, a true leader, Rusticus insists, could not be satisfied just getting the gist of something. They had to understand it inside and out. None of the lessons that Marcus Aurelius took from Epictetus, the book that Rusticus gave him in his mid twenties, would have been possible without first listening to this lesson. He not only inhaled the book, he clearly went over it over and over until it seeped into his very soul. That's why Meditations is filled with quotes from Epictetus.

• 0:58Ryan Holiday?

  That's why Marcus Aurelius, the most powerful man in the world, managed to stay sane despite the inherent insanity of his position. Now, maybe you've read Epictetus, maybe you've been meaning to, but chances are you haven't treated it like Marcus did, like Rusticus expected, like Epictetus deserves. In these writings, actually, Epictetus's lectures were recorded by another student, Arian, we have the life experiences of a man who spent 30 years as a slave. We also get his firsthand familiarity with temptation and corruption and vanity, having an owner who worked in Nero's court. What Epictetus learned and went on to teach others was profound and enduring.

• 1:43Ryan Holiday?

  He taught that true freedom comes from recognizing what lies beyond our control and focusing only on what is up to us. He came to see that the most powerful empire is ruling over ourselves in living a life of virtue, even in a world of corruption, darkness, or misfortune. Marcus Aurelius was not satisfied just getting the gist of Epictetus's powerful teachings, and you shouldn't be either. You can see it in Meditations. The same ideas appear again and again on anger, on difficult people, on dealing with death, on doing his duty when nobody is watching. Not because Marcus had mastered them, but because he hadn't. He kept returning to Epictetus because the work was never finished.

• 2:25Ryan Holiday?

  "Revert at once to yourself is the note of a man still trying." And that's what Rusticus had given him. Not a book to finish, but a lifelong practice to return to. Now, Marcus was lucky. He was lucky in many ways as the Emperor of Rome, but he was also lucky that he had Rusticus as his guide to Epictetus.

• 2:49Ryan Holiday?

  And we tried to capture some of that in what we're doing this month for Daily Stoic. We're doing a deep dive into Epictetus. And we built, just like we did Marcus Aurelius month, a few months ago, we built Epictetus Month. It's built around our How to Read Epictetus Guide. All the best wisdom from Epictetus, everything we've learned, hundreds of hours of researching and writing, interviewing experts about Epictetus, distilling, translating his ideas. And I'd love to do this deep dive with you because if the work changed Marcus's life so much, how might it change ours? I know it changed mine. I'm working on this book now about Stockdale. I know how it changed Stockdale's life. And this month, if you buy the How to Read Epictetus Guide,

• 3:34Ryan Holiday?

  you can not only get a copy of Epictetus's writings for just a few bucks, you'll also gain access to our online discussion community, where we're going to go through the book and the digital guide together and talk about all Epictetus's guides. On August 26th, we're doing a deep dive live session about it together. Going to ask me questions, I'm going to ask you a question. This is going to be awesome. We're going to be talking about Epictetus all month. I'd love to have you join us. I'll link to it in today's show notes. And I hope to see you on August 26th as we're talking about Epictetus.

• 4:19Ryan Holiday?

  No blame, just focus. "You must stop blaming God and not blame any person. You must completely control your desire and shift your avoidance to what lies within you, your reasoned choice. You must no longer feel anger, resentment, envy, or regret." Epictetus's Discourses 322. Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for resistance to the brutal apartheid regime in South Africa for 27 years. For 18 of those years, he had a bucket for a toilet, a hard cot in a small cell. And once a year, he was allowed a single visitor for 30 minutes. It was vicious treatment meant to isolate and break down the prisoners. And yet, in spite of that, Mandela became a figure of dignity within the prison.

• 5:04Ryan Holiday?

  Though he was deprived of many things, he still found creative ways to assert his will. As one of his fellow prisoners, Neville Alexander explained to Frontline, "Mandela always made the point, if they say you must walk fast, insist on walking slowly. That was the whole point. We are going to set the terms." He pretended to jump rope and shadow box to stay in shape. He held his head higher than the other prisoners, encouraged them when times were tough, and always retained his sense of self-assurance. That self-assurance is yours to claim as well. No matter what happens today, no matter where you find yourself, shift to what lies within your reasoned choice. Ignore as best you can the emotions that pop up, which would be so easy to distract yourself with. Don't get emotional, get focused.

• 5:48Ryan Holiday?

  What I always find so amazing about the stories of Nelson Mandela, Reuben Hurricane Carter, a Epictetus, a James Stockdale, is not only how they managed to comport themselves, the dignity and poise and resistance and fortitude they underwent in the prison, which was incredible and feat of human survival. But I, as I get older and I've experienced things and I've been slighted or wronged, frustrated, I'm even more impressed with how they behaved after. The forgiveness that they offered, the lack of resentment or bitterness that they carried, the way they brought people together.

• 6:29Ryan Holiday?

  They could have come out of the prison like Bane in Batman, right? It could have been the origin of a villain story, right? But it was the opposite of that. You think even Martin Luther King, you think of the horrible things, you know, when you think of Gandhi, you think of how unjustly they were treated, how people took things from them, years that they would never get back, time with their family they would never get back, broke down their bodies in the way that Epictetus experienced under torture, or Stockdale experienced under torture. You think of John McCain not being able to lift his arm a certain way for the rest of his life. They were deprived of so much, but they, they chose not to see it that way. Hurricane Carter famously doesn't ask for reparations after he leaves prison.

• 7:14Ryan Holiday?

  He doesn't even want to admit that that had been taken from him. He was in control. And I just think of the incredible poise and strength and pride and all the stoic virtues. And I'm putting pride in there deliberately, like their carriage, this is who I am, you cannot break me. I decide. That to me is just the essence of Stoicism. I hope none of us are ever tested in such a way. And I hope Stockdale's the only one who tests Epictetus's theories in the modern world, in the laboratory, so to speak, at that level. But each of us, we have a period in a marriage or we have a bad boss, or maybe is how you think about the pandemic. But we have these periods of our life

• 7:57Ryan Holiday?

  where we were subjected to something that we didn't like. And we could be angry about it. We could sow division afterwards about it. We could get even for it. But instead, we focus on our reasoned choice. We focus on being good and decent. We don't hang on to anger, or resentment, or envy, or regret, as Epictetus says. But we maintain that dignity. We don't perpetuate the same injustices that were perpetuated upon us. And we show, as Marcus Aurelius says, that the best revenge is to not be like that, to be better, to make a better world, where hopefully something like what we just went through doesn't happen again, or at the very least, doesn't happen because of anything that we say or do.